Storiesonline.net ------- Aftermath by Al Steiner Copyright© 2000 by Al Steiner ------- Description: When Comet Fenwell crashes into the Pacific Ocean one October day, it spells the end for most of humanity. Those that survive find themselves in a greatly changed world filled with different morals and the same old urges. Codes: MF Mf Ff ScFi PostApoc cons reluc violent bi group toys ------- ------- Chapter 1 It was called Comet Fenwell. Named for the eighteen year old English amateur astronomer who first detected it as an out of place smudge of light just past the orbit of Saturn, it was an irregularly shaped chunk of frozen methane, ammonia, and water mixed with a scattering of rock. Preliminary calculations revealed it would pass alarmingly close to the Earth after its spin around the sun, as it headed back towards the deep space beyond Pluto from which it had come. This led to a fever of religious conversions and mass hysteria in those first few days as reputable scientists gleefully went on television to explain just what this mass of ice was capable of doing if it actually struck the planet. Though Fenwell was not a huge comet - it was just a hair over two miles long and just a hair under a mile wide - the velocity at which it was moving was enough to cause a global catastrophe, particularly if it struck the ocean. But after those first tense days things calmed down considerably when, by unanimous agreement of scientists from across the globe, it was announced that while Fenwell would be close, it would still pass more than three thousand miles from the Earth. These same scientists who had stirred up the hysteria in the first place calmed it by explaining that the course they predicted the comet to take was based upon Newtonian laws and was absolute. They assured the people of Earth that there was no guesswork or speculation and no possibility of error. Fenwell would provide perhaps the most spectacular celestial show in recorded history and would then leave them in peace. And so while everyone on the small blue planet settled in to watch the glowing tail of the close encounter that October, none of them realized that their coveted scientific community had made a terrible, lethal miscalculation. It was just a little error, easily attributed to mankind's lack of knowledge about the exact makeup of these strange travelers, but it was enough. Just past the orbit of Mars, solar radiation began to bombard Fenwell with enough energy to vaporize the outer layer of its surface, sending it outward behind it in the spectacular tail that was indicative of such objects. Night after night the tail grew longer and brighter as the amount of radiation striking it increased until finally it trailed across more than ten degrees of the night sky. Fenwell disappeared briefly as it reached the extreme of its orbit and was pulled around the sun, reappearing later on the other side, this time with the tail facing towards the Earth. Night after night, all over the planet, people clustered outside of their homes to see the strangely beautiful show that was being staged for them. As Fenwell grew closer still it became possible to see the tail even during the daylight hours under favorable conditions. When it was just past the orbit of Venus a few scientists began to note that Fenwell was not exactly where they thought it should be. Though the discrepancy was minute, there really was not a lot of margin for error when you were talking about only a three thousand mile difference in orbits. The scientists did not raise any sort of alarm at this time since their calculations still showed the comet passing more than fifteen hundred miles from Earth's atmosphere. Instead, they tried to figure out just where their careful and supposedly ironclad calculations had gone wrong. Why wasn't the comet following the basic principals of Newtonian theory? What had thrown its orbit off? The answer, though they would never know it, was thrust. As the comet slowly turned on its axis while under the influence of the sun's rays, pockets of methane and ammonia would periodically explode, releasing pressure. These explosions were not noticeable by the many peering instruments that kept watch on the comet. They were very small and they always occurred on the sunward side. Individually they did little to move the large chunk of ice. But collectively, day after day, hour after hour, they nudged Fenwell further and further off of its projected course and closer and closer to a lethal intersection with Earth. Two days before the pass-by, the scientists began to become seriously alarmed by what they were seeing. Their calculations now showed that Fenwell would pass less than five hundred miles from the surface of the earth. That was almost close enough to skip through the thin layer of upper atmosphere! And still they had no idea why the point of passage continued to grow closer. On the surface of the comet itself pockets continued to intermittently ignite and by twenty-four hours prior to closest approach it became apparent to anyone with the ability to perform the equations that, barring a miracle, a collision was inevitable. The scientific communities of the various nations on Earth all informed their various governments of the coming impact. Inquiries were made in each case as to whether anything could be done to either destroy the comet or nudge it to a safer course. In every case the answer was a firm no. Fenwell was simply too large and moving too fast. So while the various government leaders and wealthy insiders of Earth tried to make a mad dash to whatever underground place of safety they had access to, it was decided that there was nothing to be gained by informing the general public of what was to come. There really was no place for them to hide even if it was possible to get them all there. Had there been even a little more time, the secret undoubtedly would have leaked. A secret as horrible and as far-reaching as this one could not have been kept. But there was not more time. On October 12 - a Thursday in the western hemisphere - Comet Fenwell, moving at approximately 100,000 mph, impacted the Pacific Ocean 600 miles off the coast of Oregon. Its trip through the atmosphere took a mere eight seconds to complete, during which time friction heated its surface to nearly thirty thousand degrees Fahrenheit. This superheated mass slammed through the water and buried itself in the very mantle of the earth. The release of energy that resulted was so powerful that the entire world's stock of thermonuclear weapons being detonated at once would have seemed a child's firecracker in comparison. Rock and sludge from the sea bottom was exploded outward before falling back to earth hundreds, even thousands of miles away. An actual hole, more than a hundred miles in diameter, appeared for nearly twelve hours in the Pacific Ocean as the tremendous heat boiled billions of tons of seawater into steam sending thick, gray clouds into the atmosphere. As more water rushed in to fill this void, it too was boiled away to vapor. Aside from this hole in the ocean, the impact sent huge tidal waves outward, tidal waves unlike anything ever seen before. The first set was more than two hundred feet high and moved at nearly the speed of sound. They would keep moving until they struck something. The first catastrophic effect to be felt by the inhabitants of the earth came from the shockwaves of the mantle impact. They traveled outward along the planetary crust, circling the globe in less than twenty minutes and releasing the pent-up energy from every fault line they crossed. Everywhere along the surface of the planet, earthquakes erupted on a scale hardly even imagined. In nearly every country, buildings and bridges crashed to the ground, underground fuel storage tanks exploded, dams burst. Those that died quickly in this initial disaster were perhaps the lucky ones. At impact+45 minutes the west coast of the United States became the first to be struck by the tidal wave. It rolled in at a height of two hundred feet and moving at 684 mph. As it crossed the continental shelf it doubled in size and when it reached the actual coastline, it reared up to nearly a half mile in height. The coastal cities and all their inhabitants - those that had lived through the earthquakes - were obliterated in an instant as the massive wave destroyed everything in its path for nearly one hundred miles inland. The great metropolitan areas of Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, home to nearly a thirty million, were erased from the landscape in the blink of an eye, leaving nothing but a clogged mess of debris and shattered bodies near the wave crest. The breaking of this great wave atop them similarly destroyed the cities further inland - Portland, Seattle, Vancouver. In the great central valley of California, where water was already rapidly rising due to the smashed Shasta, Oroville, and Folsom dams, water rushed up the Sacramento and San Joaquin River channels, funneling into a destructive force that swept away the cities of Sacramento, Stockton, Bakersfield, Fresno, and the many other small farming communities that dotted the landscape. Some of the most fertile land on Earth quickly became an inland sea upon which the bodies of millions of humans and livestock bobbed and floated. The west coast of the United States was only the first to be struck. Eventually, every sea coast area in the world would be hit in a similar manner several times as the great waves traveled back and forth across the oceans of the world, bounding and rebounding like ripples in a bathtub. Most of the major metropolitan areas of the planet were located either on or within a hundred miles of a coastline. The earthquakes and the tidal waves alone killed off a sizable fraction of the planetary population. But the death and destruction, as horrific as it was, did not stop there. If it had, perhaps civilization could have been rebuilt eventually. After all, many of the inland cities, though heavily damaged by the earthquakes and dealing with out of control flooding in some cases, were still standing when the waves finally equalized. Unfortunately for the human race, the greatest catastrophe was still forming over the impact site and spreading across the globe. From the hole made by the comet in the Pacific Ocean, immense clouds of seawater continued to boil away into the atmosphere. In all, before the seawater finally closed the hole by quenching the tremendous heat, more than five percent of the total volume of water on Earth was vaporized and sent aloft. These clouds quickly spread out and covered the globe like thick blanket, dumping rain virtually everywhere and blocking out the sun. The rain promised to continue for months, killing all crops, flooding every low-lying area, and disrupting the planetary food chain in ways that would guarantee the extinction of all but the very strongest species. ------- Sierra Nevada Mountains - 40 miles northeast of Auburn, California Impact+5 days Brett Adams trudged slowly along through the thick mud on the top of the ridge. With each step he took his hunting boots plunged four inches into the syrupy muck the ground had become, forcing him to pull upward to take the next. His camouflage hunting clothes were saturated and covered with mud and pine needles. He had not been dry since the rain started and he was on the verge of hypothermia. He was tired beyond belief. Every muscle, every joint throbbed like a rotten tooth. He was weak from hunger, having eaten nothing in the last five days but a chocolate bar and some trail mix. He had no idea where he was going or why he was even bothering to continue on. He constantly shifted the Remington .30-06 rifle on his back from one shoulder to the other, thinking quite often of simply sitting down, putting the barrel in his mouth, and pulling the trigger. Why shouldn't he? Everything that he cared about was gone now. Why was he bothering to keep propelling himself forward? But somehow he did keep going, his survival instinct a little too sharply honed to allow him to simply give up. Brett, at thirty-five years of age, had lived through five years as a street cop and four years as a helicopter cop. Before that he had flown Apache attack helicopters in Desert Storm, striking targets deep behind Iraqi lines while anti-aircraft gunners tried their damnedest to bring him down. He had once been in a gunfight on the streets of Stockton during his rookie year with the San Joaquin County Sheriff's Department. He had once had the engine of his helicopter die on him, forcing him into an auto-rotational landing. His mindset was geared to keep him alive as long as possible, under whatever conditions or situations he encountered. Though he was racked with grief, cold and miserable, and quite probably going to die within the next twenty-four hours no matter what, he kept going. He lifted one foot and placed it in front of the other. He did it again. He kept moving through the purgatory that he found himself in, wondering why he couldn't have been with his family when the end came. The rain had slacked off some in the past six hours. Of course, when you were talking about this sort of rain, slacked-off was a very relative term. It was now only slightly worse than a torrential downpour of the sort that was normally only seen at the height of a severe thunderstorm. Visibility was now almost a hundred yards or so. The wind had died down to something like a moderate gale, no longer packing the power to sweep him completely off his feet, no longer blowing pine cones and tree branches through the air like deadly missiles. During the first twenty-four hours of this biblical-like event, the rain had been so thick it had been difficult to breathe at times. Lightening strikes had flashed and exploded all around the mountaintop like an artillery barrage. Trees had toppled in the hurricane force winds and then been washed downhill by the mud like toothpicks. It had been a mudslide that had taken Carl, his best friend. Carl was a San Joaquin Sheriff's deputy, just like Brett. They had met six years ago, when Brett had still been working uniformed patrol. Carl had been like a brother to him, closer in fact than Brett's own brother had ever been. Their wives socialized together, their children attended the same schools. The night before the impact, he and Carl had driven up to nearby Castle Point in Carl's Toyota Four-Runner to set up camp for their annual deer-hunting trip. They had been happy, full of life, contemplating bagging a nice trophy to take home to their families. That first night of the trip they had stayed up late, often staring at the night sky, which had been overly bright with the beautiful, gossamer tail of the approaching comet. They drank beer and cooked their simple meal before retiring to their tents for the night. At 6:00 AM the next morning, they had set off into the woods to make their kills. That now seemed a different lifetime. Had that really only been five days ago? After the earthquake, and after the barrage of flaming rocks and mud had fallen throughout the forest, setting it ablaze in many spots, they had immediately started back towards camp, concerned not so much for their own safety as for the safety of their wives and children back in Stockton. They had intuited that the comet had struck the earth at that point but they had been completely clueless about just what the ramifications of that were. Global catastrophe is on a scale that mere humans can hardly fathom. As they huffed and puffed their way through the woods, dodging fires here and there, hearing the impacts of rocks slamming into trees, they saw the clouds to the west of them for the first time. A thick, black, angry front was swelling into the sky, moving rapidly towards them. By the time they made it to camp, the wind and the lightening had started, toppling trees and igniting more fires. They dove into the Toyota, not bothering to pack up camp, terrified at the fates of their loved ones, and started to head back to Auburn, which would in turn lead them back to Interstate 80. The road they were on curved slightly upward from Castle Point before twisting and turning its way down to the foothills below. From the summit of this peak was a clear line of sight out over the Sacramento Valley. Usually it was one of the most impressive views that Brett could imagine. This time it was a glimpse through the gates of hell itself. When they first topped the rise they were able to see the city of Sacramento and its suburbs some fifty to sixty miles away. Already they were able to see huge areas of flooding caused by the breaking of Folsom Dam and the release of nearly a million acre feet of stored water. This first glimpse of isolated devastation was horrible but it did not destroy all of their hopes like what happened next. From the southwest, in the direction of the San Francisco Bay area, a huge wall of water appeared. It moved forward at what seemed a slow rate from their vantage point in the mountains but it advanced steadily. It swallowed up everything in its path, burying the valley and turning it into a brown, muddy sea. They watched in horrified fascination as the city disappeared and the water reached the fringes of the foothills twenty miles below them. Any illusions they might have had about the possible survival of their families disappeared at that moment. Though Stockton was forty miles south of Sacramento and well out of their line of sight, it was in the same valley and at the same elevation. It had been slightly under an hour since the earthquake had occurred. That was nowhere near enough time for Julie and Summer, Brett's wife and daughter, or Sandy and Kevin, Carl's wife and son, to get to ground high enough to save them. Nor was there any way any human could have lived through what they had just witnessed. Soon after this, while they were still staring at what had once been the home of more than a million people, the clouds overtook them. The sun was blotted from the sky, making the early afternoon daylight fade to an inky twilight. And then the rain began. It did not gradually develop from a drizzle to a downpour like a normal rainstorm, it simply started. One moment it was dry and the next it was raining harder than either man had thought possible. Visibility dropped to less than ten feet and the dirt road quickly turned to an impassable sludge of running mud. As they'd sat there, trying to cope with the loss of their families, wondering what to do next, the Four-Runner began to move on its own, propelled along by a river of mud pouring down the hillside above them. They picked up speed and finally fetched up against a stand of trees, at which point the mud began to pile up against the driver's side. Brett made it out, climbing through the passenger side window and up a small rise to safety. He didn't stop to help Carl out of the car, not out of fear, but because he hadn't thought it necessary. The situation had seemed under control at that point. It was a decision that would haunt him later. When Carl was halfway out, a huge glut of mud suddenly buried the truck like a breaking wave, knocking the trees it had been resting against flat. The entire mess had continued down the hill and over the edge of a ridge, landing in a creek bed that was already raging with brown runoff. Tons more mud quickly landed atop it, burying Carl and the Four-Runner for all time. Brett had not even bothered trying to rescue his friend. It would have been beyond futile. That first night, while the rain continued to fall and the wind continued to blast and the lightening continued to explode against the ground every ten to fifteen seconds, he had huddled against the base of a tree on the upside of a ridge. This had put him at high risk for a lightening strike but kept him safe from being buried alive by a mudslide. Though he was even then seriously considering ending it all with his Remington, he had no wish to endure the same hellish death that Carl had. Since then he had been walking north, inching along through the mud, keeping as close to areas of thick vegetation as he could to avoid the rivers of mud that continually washed down from the mountains. Despite these precautions he had almost been swept away several times when slides passed over a spot where he had just been. As the lightening strikes grew fewer and farther between, he worked his way onto higher and higher ground, staying out of potential flooding. He lived off of nothing more than the two candy bars and the small bag of trail mix he had in his shirt pocket and his body began to grow weaker and weaker. At night, with the thick cloud cover blotting out the moon and all the stars, the blackness was absolute, broken only occasionally by the odd flash of lightening. During the day it never got brighter than early dusk or late dawn as the clouds blotted out most of the sunlight. He sensed that, survival instinct or not, the end was near for him. Either hypothermia or starvation would soon cart him away to join his family and the billions of others that had undoubtedly died with them. This was not a particularly unpleasant thought. He almost welcomed the coming oblivion. Now, five days after the end of the world, running on the very last reserves of strength he had, he sat down on the leeward side of a pine tree and ate the last of his trail mix. It was unsatisfying and unfulfilling but it was all he had. Would it be safe to end it now? Could he concede that further survival in this terrible new world was an impossibility? The sound of a gunshot startled him out of his suicidal thoughts before he could bring them to a conclusion. It was not terribly loud but with the damping effect on sound that the wind and the rain inflicted, he knew that it had to be close. He looked around him, trying to gauge just where it had come from. He wasn't sure, and what real difference did it make anyway? So someone was nearby, shooting at something? What of it? Granted, it triggered his cop's instincts, but he wasn't a cop anymore, was he? There really wasn't any such thing as a cop anymore. Another shot rang out, a sharp crack void of any echo. This time he was able to tell where it had come from. It had issued from just over the ridge above him - a ridge topped with a stand of old growth pines that had so far managed to survive all that the comet had thrown at them. Two more shots quickly followed and then a prolonged burst of what could only be an M-16 rifle on full automatic. He knew that sound from his basic training days in the army. It was very distinctive. Another, shorter burst followed this and then, faintly though clearly, came a blood curdling scream of anguish. It was the scream that got him moving. That had been a woman! Though he was weak and on the verge of ending his life, though he was no longer a cop in a suddenly lawless world, he could not deny the cries of a woman in trouble. What the hell was going on over there? He pulled himself to his feet and unshouldered his Remington, checking to make sure the safety was off. It was. Next he checked the .40 caliber pistol strapped to his waist. It was his duty weapon, issued to him by the Sheriff's department to carry at work. He had packed this pistol through five years of service on the streets and through four years as the pilot of the northern San Joaquin valley's primary law enforcement helicopter. On hunting trips he carried it both for self-protection and to finish off any deer that might have managed to live through the initial rifle round. It was a weapon he was much more comfortable with at close range than the bulky rifle. It was seated neatly in its nylon holster. He gave it a pat and then put the rifle at port-arms position. He began to move up the hill. He moved tree to tree, rock to rock, keeping a close eye before him and to his flanks as he moved. He saw nothing unusual and heard no further gunfire although he did hear a few more faint screams and once a barked male voice telling someone to "shut the fuck up, bitch." As he got closer to the top of the ridge he dropped down to his belly and began to inch his way forward, crawling along the ground as he had been taught in the army. He wedged himself against the base of a tree on the summit of the hill and let his head edge slowly to the side. What he saw down there made him forget his hunger and his fatigue. About sixty yards down the hill, resting against an outcropping of large rocks, was a camping trailer. It was about thirty feet long and sitting upright, almost perfectly level, with only a small mound of mud pushing against the uphill side. That it had come from the public camping area two hundred feet up the next hill was obvious. Also obvious was the fact that it had been swept down there when that portion of the hillside had given in to the erosion of constant rain bombardment. Just beyond the trailer was the telltale swatch of bare, torn-up hillside that bespoke of a recent mudslide. But how had this single trailer been separated out and spared? Looking at the path it had made in its journey it appeared it had somehow become aligned forward during its trip down the hill and had managed to roll out of the flood of mud, where gravity then propelled it downward until it encountered the rocks. But the trailer itself, despite its almost miraculous existence in the first place, did not hold Ken's attention for more than a second. In front of the trailer was a group of four men and two women. The men had M-16s in their hands and sidearms attached to their muddy clothing. They had long hair and beards and looked, to Brett anyway, like methamphetamine snorting biker types. He had seen such people many, many times in his career and had taken many of them to jail for various offenses. They could be very dangerous even when living in a society ruled by civilized law. Now that the factor of civilization was removed from the equation they had become infinitely more dangerous, as was evidenced by what he was seeing below him. He wondered where they had come by automatic weapons? It wasn't like fully automatic M-16s could be found just lying around. The bikers were training these weapons on a group of two women and a young boy that were cowering in fear before the trailer. The oldest of the women looked to be in her late-thirties. The youngest looked to be a teenager. The resemblance in the facial features of the two told him they were mother and daughter. The boy, who had his arms protectively around the younger woman, was about fourteen and obviously a son. The father of this particular family was no longer in the picture. This was apparent by the fact that he was lying lifelessly at the foot of the trailer, a pistol next to him, his body riddled with bullets and covered with blood. That must have been the bursts of M-16 fire. "I'll give you anything you want," the mother of the group pleaded with the men. "I'll do whatever you want. Just let my kids go. I'll... I'll go with you." This struck the bikers, and even their women, who were unarmed and lagging in the rear, as deliciously funny. They laughed for the better part of thirty seconds before one of the men said, "Oh, you're both coming with us, mama. We might get around to doing somethin' with you after we're done with this little sweet piece." He jerked the barrel of his rifle towards the teenager. "I'm gonna tear me a piece off a that shit right now!" one of the other men declared. "Look at that shit. I bet she got some nice titties!" "No," the first one to have spoken said after a moment's reflection. "I get her first. Y'all can have sloppy seconds. Let's all take a quick piece of her and then we'll see what kinda goodies they got in that trailer for us." "No!" screamed the woman, trying to get up. She was forced to sit back down again by four rifles swinging towards her. "Take it easy, baby," the apparent leader of the group warned mildly. "We wouldn't want to have to kill you before we had our fill now, would we?" "You can't do this!" the teenaged girl cried hysterically. "You just can't do this!" The leader chuckled a little. "We can do anything we want now, sweet piece. The law done blew up with the comet. Ain't you figured that out yet?" "What about the little shit?" one of the other bikers asked, pointing at the young boy. "Think we oughtta just kill him now? He ain't good for nothin', is he?" While the boy in question trembled in fear and his terrified mother and sister moaned in terror, the leader seemed to consider this question very carefully. Finally he answered, "Let's keep him for now and take him back to camp. Zipper and Turbo like to slam little dudes once in a while, don't they? Reminds 'em of when they was in Folsom." "I guess you're right." "I can think of a few uses for him too," said one of the women with a lascivious grin. "Shut the fuck up, bitch," the leader said, casting an evil glare at her until she dropped her gaze. He then turned back to the teenage girl. "You ever give a blowjob before, sweet piece?" Brett watched all of this, unseen from his perch up the hill from them, his mind whirring as he tried to think of what he could do. He certainly had no desire to stand by and watch a young girl get raped by a gang of bikers in front of her mother and brother, but he had nothing more than a hunting rifle and a pistol and they had automatic weapons. He hardly had a chance against that, did he? But on the other hand, he had just been willing to take his own life a few moments ago. So when you came right down to it, what difference did it make if these biker assholes were the ones to kill him? Wouldn't dying in a firefight to save a helpless family be preferable to blowing his own brains out? What could be nobler than that? Though he was not particularly worried about the state of his own skin, Brett nevertheless was not reckless in his attack. Being shot in the first volley would not help the family down there. Utilizing his army training and his experience as a cop, he waited, watching the developments below in search of the best possible time to make his move. It came a few moments later. "Hold this, Ricky," the leader said, handing his M-16 to the biker next to him. Ricky took it from him and slung it over the opposite shoulder from his own. "And keep those two in their places," he added next, unholstering a semi-automatic pistol and walking towards the terrified teenage girl. Beside him, Ricky advanced a few paces and kept his rifle trained on the mother and the son. The leader stopped right in front of the girl, towering over her. "You're gonna do exactly what I say, ain't ya, sweet piece?" he asked, pointing the pistol at her head. Before she could answer the mother spoke up. "Just do it, Chrissie," she told her daughter. "Just do it and it'll be over soon. Try to stay alive, honey. Just try to stay alive." The leader glanced over at the mother and grinned, nodding his head a little. "That's right, Chrissie," he said, unbuttoning his pants and letting them drop. His small cock was already hard. "You just do what I say and we'll get along real good. You might live long enough to starve to death. Now suck my cock, bitch. And make it a good one." As a trembling Chrissie leaned forward to do what she had been told, and as her weeping mother buried her face in her hands, unable to watch the degradation of her daughter, Brett saw his opportunity. Everyone was distracted by the goings on with Chrissie. Though none of them had dropped their weapons, except the leader of course, it couldn't possibly get any better than this. He brought the rifle to his shoulder and peered through the telescopic sight. He aimed at the head of Ricky, the biker closest to the mother and son. He was the most dangerous at the moment since he was packing two automatic weapons. Brett's scope was designed to sight in on deer more than three hundred yards away. From a mere sixty yards, Ricky's head, in partial profile and mostly facing forward, filled the entire field of view. He centered the crosshairs just above his right ear. Though the wind was blowing at nearly forty miles an hour it was not a particular concern at this range. It wouldn't throw the bullet off by more than a quarter inch or so. He took a deep breath, whispered a silent prayer for the lives of the family he was trying to save, and then smoothly squeezed the trigger. The rifle bucked against his shoulder and the sound of the shot rolled across the landscape like thunder. In the scope, Brett saw Ricky's head explode into a spray of blood, brain, and skull fragments. Before his body even hit the muddy ground Brett was working the bolt on the rifle. The ejected shell casing shot out to his right and he slammed another round into the chamber. A quick glance down into the clearing showed exactly what he had hoped to see. Ricky was down and the other three bikers were still trying to process exactly what had just happened. They were all standing still, looking up towards him, trying to identify the direction from which the shot had come. The two behind Ricky, those that still had rifles in their hands, were not even aiming at the spot. He quickly sighted on the farther of the two men, centering the crosshairs on the middle of his chest. As soon as they were steady, perhaps four seconds after the first shot was fired, he pulled the trigger again. The gun bucked and the second biker suddenly had a hole in his muddy shirt. He looked almost comically surprised at this for a moment and then he fell to the ground. The second shot got the bikers moving. The leader and the one remaining man with the rifle, finally realizing they were in mortal danger, both dove to the ground and began firing up at him. The leader only had his pistol and his shots were nothing to be concerned about from sixty yards, but the other biker was firing short, controlled bursts from the M-16. Bullets began to slam into the mud and the trees around him, sending little sprays of water, bark, and dirt flying through the air. Brett knew instantly, by the way the man was firing his weapon, that he had military experience. A novice would not have shot a rifle that way. He slid down the hill about ten feet and crawled quickly to the left, hoping to catch them on the right flank before it occurred to them to turn their attention back to the family they were tormenting. Above him bullets continued to whiz by in groups of three and four, smacking the trees or flying off into space. He found another tree that overlooked the ground below and inched on his belly up to it, his body coursing with adrenaline, the rifle dragging behind him. When he reached his new position he poked his head out a little and trained the barrel of his rifle down over the scene, looking first and foremost for the biker with the M-16. He saw him immediately. He was in a crouch, moving right to left towards a stand of trees that would provide him with relative cover. Yes, Brett thought, this man, despite the fact that he had not reacted to the first shot, knew what he was doing. Intending to snap off a shot at him before he reached the tree line, Brett took a quick glance at the rest of the players before he did so, just to make sure that they were all where he thought they were. The two women that had come with the bikers were nowhere to be seen, apparently smart enough to run off into the woods once the shooting started. The leader of the group was crouched behind a rock, having taken the time to pull his pants back up into the combat position. He was reloading his pistol with a fresh magazine he had pulled from his pocket. The young boy was cowering where he had last been, as was the young girl. But the mother, that was another story. "Oh shit," Brett muttered, seeing what she was doing, knowing he was helpless to prevent it. She had decided to take a little initiative in the gun battle by creeping forward and pulling one of the M-16s from Ricky's body. Crouching next to the former biker and obviously having never fired a rifle in her life, she socked the weapon into her shoulder and took aim at the leader just as he made a sprint towards the tree line where the other biker had gone. She pulled the trigger and unleashed the entire clip at him. It took about four seconds to fire all thirty rounds. The barrel of the gun jerked upward in her arms and at least twenty of the rounds flew harmlessly into the air above. But the first five or six rounds cut the leader's legs out from beneath him as he ran. He dropped sprawling to the ground, his pistol flying out before him, his body landing facedown in the mud and sliding about ten feet. This immediately drew the fire of the biker with the M-16. He stopped in his tracks and trained his weapon on the woman, firing a three-round burst directly into her chest. The rifle dropped from her hands and she clutched her chest, falling forward over the body of Ricky. "Momma!" screamed her kids simultaneously, their voices filled with fresh horror. The biker ignored them. So did Brett. He only had a second or two before his target started running for the tree line again. He sighted in on him until his torso was the only thing in the crosshairs. With a smooth tug of the trigger, the bullet was fired through his body, a good portion of his internal organs spraying out behind him with the exiting projectile. The M-16 clattered to the mud and a moment later, he joined it, dropping face down. Brett did not take any time to celebrate his victory or marvel over the fact that he was still alive. He quickly shouldered the rifle and stood up. Moving as fast as possible in the thick mud, drawing his .40 caliber as he went, he ran down the hill. As he went past the man with the military experience, the one who had shot the mother, he put a single bullet into the top of his head, turning it into pulp and insuring that the man would pose no further threat. He did the same for the second biker he had shot, the one who had taken a round in the chest at the beginning of the battle. Ricky, he didn't bother with. Ricky's head had exploded from the .30 caliber round, unequivocally ending his days of posing a threat to anyone. Besides, the mother of the two children was still lying over the top of him. The leader of the group was still very much alive. His legs were both virtually useless, the knees shot out by the rounds from the M-16, but he crawled relentlessly forward, dragging himself through the mud towards his .45 pistol that was lying about five feet in front of him. Brett did not put a bullet in his head. Instead he ran up behind him and put his hunting boot between his shoulder blades, pushing his head down into the mud. "Don't move, motherfucker," he said, "or I'll stick this gun up your ass and pull the trigger." The leader stopped instantly, his hands still outstretched. "I oughtta do that anyway, you piece of shit," Brett told him, pushing a little with his foot. "You like to rape little girls, do you? How'd you like a nice piece of lead up your ass?" The biker said nothing. He only whimpered pathetically. "Roll over," Brett said, stepping back a few feet. "Keep your hands in sight at all times." He did as he was told, his face miserable with fear. Brett was glad to see it. "If you so much as twitch, I'm gonna gut shoot you and let you lay here until you die, do you understand?" "Yeah," the man breathed, looking up at him with terror. His face recognized something in Brett's, something he had undoubtedly seen many times before. "You a cop?" "I'm worse than a cop," Brett told him. "I'm a cop with no fuckin' internal affairs division or Supreme Court to tell me what not to do. Do you dig it?" The biker nodded, not saying anything. "Good," Brett said. He stepped back a few feet, keeping his pistol leveled on the biker and diverting half of his attention to the tree line where the two women had disappeared. There was really no telling whether they had been armed with concealed handguns or not and there was really no telling just where they had gone. He looked over at the two kids he had rescued. They had pulled their mother off of Ricky and were cradling her in their arms, sobbing over her. Even from twenty feet away, Brett could see that she was still alive but fading fast. He walked over and picked up the pistol the biker had been trying for. It was a Colt .45, one of the newer models of a timeless firearm. Its surface was caked with mud. We wiped a little of it away, unplugging the barrel. On the grip were the initials: EDCSD followed by a serial number. Brett, as a California law enforcement officer, knew that meant the weapon had once belonged to the El Dorado County Sheriff's Department. Strange. He stuck it in his belt and walked over to the family after a quick warning to the biker of what horrible fate awaited him if he moved. The two kids were still cradling their mother, telling her that she was going to be all right even though it was plainly obvious, even to them, that she wasn't. Blood was running freely from her mouth and her skin was pale, almost gray. Her breath was ragged in her mouth. But still she was awake and alert, her eyes locking onto him as he approached. "Thank you," she croaked at him as he kneeled next to her. "You... saved my... my kids." "And you probably saved me," he lied, not wanting her to die thinking that she'd done something stupid. "You're pretty mean with a machine gun." A faint smile followed by a ragged breath. "You're not... not going to just... take over where they left off... are you?" "No, ma'am," he assured her. "I'm not like them." She nodded a little, becoming weaker by the moment. "Take... take... take care of them... for me. Please?" "Momma," the girl insisted bravely. "You're gonna be all right! He doesn't have to take care of us. Right, mister?" Before Brett could answer, the woman answered for him. "I'm dying, baby," she said. "It's a new... a new reality now. Your job is to... to live." "Momma!" the boy said miserably. "You can't die!" "Can't help it," she said. "I'm all used up. I'll be with your daddy in a minute." She looked at Brett again. "What's your name?" "Brett," he told her. "My name is Brett." "Take care of them, Brett," she said weakly. "Please? They'll die without... without someone to help them." And they'll die with someone to help them, he did not say. "I promise," he told her instead, having only the vaguest idea at that moment of what he was getting himself into. "Thank you," she croaked. She told her children that she loved them and a moment later, her breathing stopped. She died with a faint smile on her face. ------- While the two kids cried over their fallen parents, Brett picked up the M-16 the woman had fired and looked at it. It was a standard military issue rifle, no different than the ones that he had fired in basic training so many years before. Engraved on the metal just below the action were the same initials he had noted on the .45: EDCSD. He popped out the empty magazine and stuck it in his pocket, having to struggle to get it to fit. He then patted down Ricky's pockets, searching for another. He found two of them, one in each rear pocket, both fully loaded with jacketed rounds. He made a quick check to make sure the action and the barrel were clear of mud. There was a little bit in there but nothing to be concerned with. This version of the M-16 had been designed, after all, with conditions like this - mud, water, and rain - in mind. He slammed one of the magazines into the weapon and jacked the first round into the chamber. He then fiddled with the selector, turning it to the setting for semi-automatic fire. That done, he pocketed the other full clip and walked over to where the single surviving biker was still laying in a pool of his own blood. The biker looked up at him in fear as he approached. "You know that you're gonna die, right?" Brett asked him, pointing the rifle down at his body. "I mean, even if I just left you alone here, there's no way you could last for very long in this new world of ours without being able to walk. Even if your buddies came and got you, even if they hauled your sorry ass back to camp, I seriously doubt they're gonna waste any precious food feeding a cripple, right?" The biker said nothing, only trembled there, his face a mask of pain. "So if you concede that you're gonna die here," Brett went on, "the only question remaining is whether it's gonna be an easy death or a hard one." He pointed the barrel of the M-16 at the biker's forehead. "A head shot would be pretty quick," he said reflectively. "One second you're alive, the next second you're dead. I don't imagine that you even feel pain, it happens that fast. But a shot to the groin on the other hand..." He let the barrel drop about eight inches, until it was pointing at the man's crotch. "Now that would be a miserable way to go. It could take hours, days even. You'd just lie there in pain while you slowly bled out onto the ground. Hell, I bet scavengers would start eating you before you were even dead. After all, they gotta be just as hungry as we are." Brett saw that his speech was having the desired effect. The biker began to shudder uncontrollably. His face became a mask of horror as he contemplated the thought of coyotes or mountain lions, insane with starvation, making a meal of him while he was still conscious. "What do you want?" he asked Brett in a halting voice. "Information," Brett said simply. "It seems I have a couple of people to watch after for a while and I'd kinda like to know just what I'm up against out here. Now I'm gonna ask you some questions and you're going to answer them truthfully and without hesitation. If you lie to me, I'll know it. I've talked to a thousand pukebags just like you in my lifetime and if there's one thing I know how to do is tell when a piece of shit like yourself is handing me a line of crap. Besides, you're about to die anyway, right? What would be the point of lying to me? If we get through this interview without a lie, I'll put a bullet in your head and end things quickly for you. If you do tell me a lie however..." he jabbed a little at the man's crotch with the rifle, making him jump, "... it's semi-automatic castration. Get it?" "Yeah," he breathed. "How many of you are there at this camp you mentioned?" Brett asked. "About thirty or so," the biker replied without hesitation. "How many men, how many women?" "Mostly men. We got six bitches that were girlfriends and wives we managed to pick up after the comet. We got three more we snatched from other guys up here. Campers and hunters, you know. We keep them in one of the tents." "I see," Brett said, not bothering to ask why they were keeping these women in tents. "And what became of the guys these women were with before you snatched them?" He hesitated for a moment. Brett jabbed at his crotch with the rifle again. "No lies now," he said. "Remember the penalty." "We killed them," the biker said, almost defiantly. "We killed them and took their supplies." Brett simply stared at him for a moment, enraged at what he heard though not particularly surprised. As a cop he had always instinctively known that he and his colleagues were the only things standing between civilization and the sort of savagery that this man represented. Now he had proof. He took a deep breath, calming himself, resisting the urge to end the interrogation right then by means of a bullet. "And just where is this camp in relation to this spot we're in now?" he asked when he felt he had regained control. "About half a mile that way." The biker raised a hand and pointed off to the east. "We grabbed some Arctic tents from a sporting goods store in Placerville before we headed up here. They stand up pretty well to the wind and the rain. Especially since we put 'em in a grove of big-ass trees." About half a mile to the east, Brett thought reflectively. That was higher ground up there, more trees and less mud. Was a half a mile close enough for his fellow bikers to have heard the gunshots from the recent battle? Were they even now on their way here to see what had happened, or would they have to wait until the two women who had fled made their way back? He didn't know, could not guess just how far sound was capable of traveling in these horrid weather conditions. But common sense told him to assume that they had heard. They wouldn't have much time. "Where did you get these guns?" Brett asked next. "They belonged to the El Dorado Sheriff's Department, didn't they?" "Yeah," the man said, again hesitating. "So how did you get your hands on them?" The biker took a deep breath. "From the arsenal at the ED-triple C," he said, using the local slang term for the El Dorado County Correctional Center. This was a county jail facility where inmates sentenced to less than a year were housed. "All of us in our group were inmates there when the comet hit. The guards let us out when they realized what was goin' on. They said they didn't want us to drown like rats." "That was awfully decent of them," Brett said, feeling a fresh rage creeping through his body. "And you repaid them by..." "We killed most of them," the biker reluctantly admitted. "There was only eight of them and there was almost fifty of us. Some of the guys didn't get in on it and they went their own way. But me and my guys... well... we knew we had to have guns if we was gonna live and we knew there was a shitload in the armory there. You can't blame us for that, can you? It's survival of the fuckin' fittest out here now. How could we just walk away and leave all them guns behind?" "I'm real tempted," Brett said through clenched teeth, "to gut-shoot you and leave you here to die slowly. I'm real tempted." The biker said nothing, simply looked upward in fear. "But I'm a man of my word," Brett said next. "I don't have much in this new world, but I can still keep my fucking word. Even to a sub-human piece of shit like you. Good-bye asshole. I sincerely hope there's a hell so you can rot there." He backed up a few feet and pointed the barrel of the rifle at the biker's head. The biker closed his eyes, awaiting his oblivion. It came a moment later when Brett squeezed the trigger, unleashing a single shot that punched a hole in his forehead and blew his brains out the back of his head. His days of raping teenage girls were over. ------- The two kids, still sitting by the bodies of their parents and sobbing, looked up at the sound of the rifle shot, jerked back to the reality they now found themselves in. They looked at Brett fearfully as he walked over to them, the Remington and the M-16 both slung over his shoulders. "Are you... are you gonna... hurt us?" the girl, Chrissie, asked softly, her eyes cast downward. It was hard for Brett to tell for sure but it looked like, under all the dirt and mud that covered her, she might be pretty. Her eyes, though haunted by what they had seen, were a pale blue, the color the sky had once been before the comet. Her hair, which was mostly tucked under a filthy brown hat, was light blonde in color. The shape of her body was impossible to guess at under the bulky clothing she wore, but it seemed she was neither overly chubby nor overly thin. "No," Brett said, kneeling down next to them, these two kids he had suddenly been put in charge of. "I'm not gonna hurt you. Whose trailer is this? Are there any supplies we can carry in it?" "You killed that man," she said, ignoring his question. "You shot him." "I killed all of them," he told her. "They would have killed you and your brother just like they did your parents if I hadn't. Does it bother you that I did that?" She thought about that, sniffing a few times while she mulled it over. "No," she finally said. "I'm glad you did it. I'm glad they're dead. Thank you." "Anytime," he assured her. "Anytime. Now, we need to get moving out of here real quick-like. Is this your trailer here?" "We found it the day after the rain started," she told him. "Our camper got washed down a hill. It almost killed us all but we got out before it went over a cliff. We started walking and we came across this one. The owners didn't seem to be here so Daddy broke into it. We've been staying in it ever since. Why do we have to leave it? It's shelter." "Because it's a magnet for people like this," he said, indicating the sprawled bodies of the bikers. "Why do you think they attacked you in the first place? This place just screams out for any passing dirtbags to pillage it. And my guess is that there are a lot of desperate dirtbags out here. That's in addition to the thirty or so other bikers that are part of the group that these ones came from. If they're not on the way here now, they sure as hell will be soon." "We'll stay here," the boy, speaking for the first time, said defiantly. "Leave us a couple of those guns and we'll fight them off. This trailer is ours. No one is going to force us away from here." Brett looked at him pointedly for a moment. Like his sister, it was difficult to make out his features very well, so dirty was he and so bulky was his clothing. He had light brown hair, the same color as that on the head of his dead father. "What's your name, kid?" he asked. "Jason," was the reply. "How old are you, Jason?" "Fourteen," he said toughly. "Well Jason, I'm thirty-five. I've spent time in the army. I'm a combat veteran of the Persian Gulf War. I've been a cop for the last eight years. With all of that experience at fighting and shooting, even I would not try to defend this fixed, highly visible target from a group of bikers armed with automatic weapons. It's suicide." "We'll manage," he said. "No one's asking you to stay here. I just want a couple of those guns." "Jason," his sister broke in. "I think we should..." "Shut up, Chrissie," he said angrily. "I know what I'm doing." "No you don't," Brett told him. "If you stay here, you're going to be killed, probably within the hour. I promised your mother that I would take care of you. You need to come with me." "I don't think she meant that we should..." "Look goddammit," Brett jumped in, taking a step closer. "I'm sorry about your parents, I really am. I lost my entire family to this comet as well as my best friend. You'll forgive me if I seem less than compassionate with you - its not really my nature - but we don't have time to sit here while you posture and whine at me about this fucking trailer. We need to get moving as soon as possible and I'm not going to allow you to stay here, with or without guns. I'll drag your ass out of here forcefully if that's necessary. So let's drop this worthless discussion about staying or going. We're going. Do you understand?" "You don't even know us," Jason cried, holding his ground. "Why do you care what happens to us?" Brett had to admit the little shit had huevos. "What else do I have to care about?" he asked in reply. "Twenty minutes ago I was all alone and about to blow my brains out, to give up. Now, a couple of people need help and I'm the only one around who can give it. I can't turn my back on you now. I couldn't do it even if I hadn't promised your mother that I would look after you. We're all probably going to die anyway, and soon, but if there's a chance for you two to live for a while, I'm it. Okay?" Reluctantly, Jason nodded, his tough expression fading a little. "Good," Brett said. "And if you want to live, you're gonna have to let me make the decisions here and you're gonna have to do what I say, when I say it. Little boys aren't going to be able to cut it. You need to be a man. All right?" "All right," he mumbled, taken, as Brett had known he would be, by the challenge to "be a man." "Good enough. Now, what kind of supplies do you have in that trailer?" ------- As it turned out, the trailer was a virtual treasure-trove. Whoever it had belonged to before the apocalypse, they had stocked it with enough canned food and dry goods to last for a while. There were nearly a hundred cans of Chef Boy-R-D pastas, Campbell's soups, various vegetables and fruits, and even pie filling. There were bags of rice, beans, flour, sugar, coffee, and powdered milk. There were vitamin pills and aspirin and Tylenol. There was even - glory of glories - two bottles of Jack Daniels and a half a case of Budweiser. "There is a god," Brett said, seeing all of the supplies. The two kids both had backpacks which Brett directed them to fill with as much of the canned and vital dry goods as they could fit in there. He dumped out another backpack, which had belonged to their father, and began to fill it as well. Even with all three filled to capacity, there were still numerous supplies left over. Brett would have liked to haul them out of the trailer and bury them somewhere for a rainy day (no pun intended) but he felt the time slipping away from them. Any moment a group of armed bikers could come bursting out of the forest. He rolled up the sleeping bags that were in the trailer, noting with satisfaction that they were the waterproof kind, and tied one to each backpack. Into his he carefully slipped six of the beers and both of the bottles of JD. Strictly for medicinal purposes, he told himself with a grin. "Okay, let's get out of the trailer," he said, once they were ready. "One last thing to do before we go." After they stepped outside, packs firmly upon their backs, Brett went and collected two of the rifles and pistols. He searched each body for ammunition, finding a total of six magazines of M-16 rounds and eight of .45 rounds. He shoved all of it into his backpack along with the cans. "Do you guys know how to use guns?" he asked them. They both shook their heads. "Our dad doesn't... uh didn't believe in guns," Chrissie said sadly. Brett raised his eyebrows a bit and looked at the .38 pistol that was lying next to his body. Chrissie followed his gaze over there. "It wasn't his," she explained. "He found it in the trailer. When the men came he pointed it at them but they just laughed. He fired at them a few times when they kept coming and they..." She couldn't continue. "It's okay, honey," he said soothingly. "Your dad was obviously a very brave man. He tried his best. But in any case, you guys need to take these." He handed each of them an M-16, after removing the chambered rounds. They took them very doubtfully. "I don't know how to fire this," Jason said. "I've never shot a gun in my life." "Me either," Chrissie echoed. "I'll teach you everything you need to know about them later," he said. "I was always in favor of gun control before. There were simply too many goddamn weapons out on the streets. If you had asked me last week, I would have said melt down every last one of them, including mine. But now, this is the kind of world where you're gonna have to learn how to shoot if you wanna stay alive. For now, just lug em. Sling 'em over your shoulders like I have." They did as he asked. "And take these too," he said, handing each of them one of the holstered .45 pistols. "Run the holster through your belt." When they were all armed up and ready to go the kids took one more look at their dead parents, tears falling from their eyes. Chrissie had asked Brett if they could bury them before they went but he vetoed that idea. There simply wasn't enough time. And so they left them there, lying beside the dead bikers. "Goodbye, Momma, goodbye, Daddy," Chrissie said as they walked away. Jason looked over his shoulder once, but offered no words of parting. Both of them were sobbing as the campsite faded from view behind them. ------- Two hours later they were nearly a mile north of the camper, having trudged mostly uphill to where the woods were thicker and the problem of landslides was not as severe. Brett had a full stomach for the first time since the impact. After leading his new charges out of the zone of immediate danger he had stopped for ten minutes and inhaled a can of cold ravioli. That greasy, tinny tasting concoction of pasta, processed meat, tomato sauce, and imitation cheese had already been written into the log of his brain as the finest meal he had ever consumed. He had eaten every last scrap, even going so far as to run his finger over the inside of the can to gather up the stray sauce. Now, with food in his belly and working its way into his malnourished bloodstream, he felt himself a new man, full of energy, ready to take on the world and everything in it. "Can we take a rest for a few minutes?" Chrissie asked as the reached the top of the latest hill. They were in an area of dense forest and underbrush. Many of the trees had been knocked down by the wind but most were still standing, towering above them and rocking gently back and forth. Brett was in the lead, taking the point on their journey, his M-16 locked and loaded and held out before him. He stopped and looked at them, seeing that they were on the verge of exhaustion. Though they were younger than him and had been better fed over the ensuing week, they probably were not accustomed to lugging fifty pounds of gear uphill through the mud. "Sure," he told them, pointing to a fallen log that was half buried in the mud. "Let's take ten. I could use a breather myself." Chrissie and Jason unshouldered their packs and set them down in the least muddy place they could find. They set their unloaded rifles down next to them and then planted their weary bodies on the log. Brett, after setting down his own pack, grabbed a seat on another fallen log a few feet away. He kept his rifle cradled in his lap. Chrissie put her hands in the small of her back and pushed her hips forward, stretching out her spine. There was an audible pop as she reached the limits of her stretch. She grimaced a little and then took her baseball cap from her head, freeing her blonde hair. It was damp and spotted with mud, the bangs and the ends knotted in stringy lumps from the lack of recent care. She ran her fingers through it a few times before bunching it back up and replacing the hat. Her face, though dirty and rapidly acquiring the thousand-yard stare of combat fatigue, was pretty and had an undercurrent of innocence about it. It was a face that boys had probably pined after not too long before, that they had dreamed of kissing. They had not talked a lot on their journey so far, the effort of movement making idle conversation a waste of precious energy. Now that they were at rest however, Brett made an effort to get to know his new friends. "Where are you two from?" he asked, directing the question at no one in particular, but looking more towards Chrissie. It was she who answered him. "Berkeley," she said softly. "Dad was a professor at the university." Brett nodded. "And what brought you up here? Wasn't it a school day when the comet hit?" "We come up here every year at the beginning of hunting season," she told him. "Mom was a wildlife photographer. When the hunters started filling the woods, all of the deer would go into the national forest to get away from them. That was when she got her best shots." She sniffed a little at the memory. "Yeah," Brett said, feeling a pang of sadness of his own. "I came up here for the start of hunting season every year too, although I was always one of the ones chasing the deer into the national forest. It's kind of funny, isn't it? How we're alive now just because of an annual tradition?" "Yeah," she said bitterly. "Real funny." "Were you both in high school there?" he asked next, trying to ease the subject to a less painful track. "I was a junior," Chrissie said. "Jason was a freshman. I was gonna study medicine when I got to college. UC Davis has a top-rated medical school. I guess that's not really gonna happen now, huh?" "I guess not," he said. "What is going to happen to us, Brett?" she asked next. "Is there anyplace we can go, anything we can do? There had to be someplace safe, doesn't there?" He sighed, wishing she had not asked that. It was a question he hadn't even wanted to ask himself. "I think civilization on planet Earth is pretty much over," he told her. "Over?" Jason said. "How can it be over?" "Most of the major cities are probably gone along with all of the people in them. For those that were anywhere near the coast, that's a given. For those that were inland... well, people build cities near rivers so they have a water supply and a means of transporting goods. They build them on low, flat ground. Those rivers are all swelling up to ten, twenty times their normal size because of all this rain. Those that weren't swamped in the initial strike when their dams broke are now probably underwater from torrential flooding. Without those cities, there is no structure to base society on. A lot of people probably survived the impact - I imagine there are groups like us all over the place - but they're scattered all over and soon, they're going to start starving. There will be no crops, no food production or transportation, no organization of any kind. Everything has collapsed to rubble." "So are we all going to die then?" Chrissie asked. "Are we going to starve to death when we run out of food?" "Millions of people will," he said after a moment's consideration. "But that doesn't mean we have to be among them. Are you familiar with the theories of Darwinism?" She scoffed. "Are you kidding? My dad's a college professor at Berkeley. I've heard about Darwin since I was in kindergarten." This got a laugh out of Brett, the first he'd had since flaming rocks and mud had started to fall from the sky. "I see your point," he said. "Anyway, we're living in a Darwinian system now. There is no law. There is no civility. There are no hospitals or schools or jobs. There is only survival of the fittest. I think that the human race can survive this little episode. Eventually these clouds are going to clear away and we'll be able to grow food again. We'll be able to rebuild a society and start feeling safe again. But the ones that are left to do that are going to be the ones who can live through the next year or so. In order to live through the next year, we have to be strong enough and smart enough to keep ourselves alive in a world that wants us dead." "And how do we do that?" Jason wanted to know. "It's simple," Brett said. "Food is life. We have to find a way to keep eating even though there is no more food being grown or produced. As you can see from the little stock you found in that trailer, there is food in cans to be had. The trick will be finding it and keeping others from taking it away from us." "And how are we going to do that?" Jason asked next. Brett offered him a cynical smile. "As soon as I figure that out," he said. "You'll be the first to know." ------- They continued to work their way northward throughout the rest of the day, stopping every hour or so to rest and regain their strength. They saw no one although several times they came across the remains of tents, trailers, and SUVs. In each case they made a search for usable supplies and in each case they found someone had been there before them, stripping away anything that was even remotely useful. These findings served to confirm Brett's belief that there were other survivors all around them. As they went north, heading towards the Auburn Ravine section of the mountains, they continued to climb higher and higher in elevation. The mudslides ceased to be much of a danger as the foliage grew thicker but the temperature also dropped, chilling them in their wet clothes. Through it all, the clouds overhead remained thick enough to block out the majority of the sunlight and the rain continued to fall in a steady downpour. Just before dark Brett found them a place to camp for the night. On the leeward side of a rocky hill he was able to build a lean-to of sorts out of thick branches from a fallen pine tree. Once it was complete it was almost undetectable as a man-made object unless you happened to be standing right next to it and the inside was relatively free of dripping water. Brett directed the two kids to store their backpacks and their guns against the rock and to spread their sleeping bags out in a line. They shared a family sized can of chicken noodle soup for dinner, taking turns using the spoon attachment on Brett's Swiss Army knife to ladle the cold broth into their mouths. Afterward, Brett took the empty can and set it where the rain was falling, holding onto it with one hand to keep it from blowing away. Less than five minutes later, the can was full of clear, sweet water that had been boiled upward from the heat of the comet five days before. They passed this around, rehydrating themselves until it was empty. Brett then refilled it six more times and poured the contents into their canteens. "How do you know so much about, you know, surviving? Building shelters and all that?" Chrissie asked him as he poured the last canful into a canteen. They were all three sitting under the shelter of the lean-to, looking out at the forbidding and rapidly darkening landscape. Brett shrugged, tossing the can to the side and fishing into his sleeping bag. After a moment, he pulled out one of the bottles of Jack Daniels. "I grew up in Sacramento," he said, breaking the seal and twisting the cap off. "My dad used to take me camping and hunting a lot when I was a kid. Usually right up in this neck of the woods. He taught me a lot of stuff, like the lean-to for instance, in case I was ever lost in a snowstorm or something. A lot of the other stuff I learned from the survival school I had to go to in the army." "Survival school?" He nodded, taking a large swig out of the JD. He wasn't much of a hard alcohol drinker and the liquid burned like fire as it went down his throat, bringing tears to his eyes. But at the same time he felt warmth spreading through him for the first time in forever. The fact that it was false warmth, that it was actually making him more prone to hypothermia, seemed a trivial matter. "Aviator's survival training," he said when his pallet was clear. "It was designed to teach us how to survive if we were ever shot down behind enemy lines. They taught us all about evasion techniques and living off the land and then they dropped us into the woods by ourselves and made us do it while people tried to find us. It was pretty intense training. They called it hell on earth back then." He scoffed a little, taking another swig. "They obviously had no idea what hell on earth really meant." "You flew airplanes in the army?" she asked, hugging herself with her arms to combat the cold. "The army doesn't have any airplanes," he told her, taking one more swig. He could feel it going to his head now, making him buzz pleasantly. "They only have helicopters. I started off flying the Kiowa; that's a little Bell Jet Ranger like the police departments fly. Its job is to seek out targets for the combat choppers. I did a little time in the Blackhawks too; those are the transport choppers. Finally, they gave me the job I really wanted. My last two years I flew the Apache. It's an attack helicopter that goes after enemy armor. That's what I flew in the Gulf War." He shook his head a little, remembering who he was talking to. "Christ, you two were in kindergarten during the Gulf War, weren't you?" "I was in first grade," Chrissie said seriously, as if that made a difference. Brett laughed. "God, I'm getting old. Now I know how my dad used to feel when he talked about Vietnam." "How many ragheads did you kill?" asked Jason, speaking for the first time since dinner. "In the war I mean?" Brett looked at him, seeing something like life in his face for once. "I didn't kill people in the war," he said. "I killed tanks and armored vehicles and radar sites. I did it from three and four miles away, or actually, my gunner did." "But there were people in those tanks," Jason pointed out. "Not as far as I could see," Brett answered, offering the justification he had used back then. "It's real easy to kill someone when you don't have to see them. I got in a gunfight once as a cop but I didn't hit anyone. When I shot those bikers today, that was the first time I ever killed anyone at close range. I didn't like it much. I didn't hesitate to do it, but I didn't like it." "They deserved it though," Chrissie said. "They killed our parents." "Yes," Brett agreed, taking yet another swig of whiskey, "they did. That makes it justifiable. That makes it a little easier on my conscience. But that doesn't make it enjoyable. Not at all. Try to remember that as we go on here. There may come a time when you kids have to kill someone with those guns I gave you. Don't hesitate if it's necessary, but don't be surprised when you feel guilty about it later." While they contemplated that thought, Brett screwed the cap back on the JD and stashed it next to his backpack. Though the temptation was to drink until he passed out, he refused to give in to it. He had people to take care of now. A hangover the next morning would not be a good way to do that. "We'd better hit the sack," he said. "Let's try to get to the edge of the canyon tomorrow so we can get a look at what we're dealing with. Auburn and Colfax are across the canyon. If there's any sort of civility left in the world, maybe we'll find it there. And if the bridge across the canyon is still intact, maybe we'll be able to get there." "Do you really think there might be?" Chrissie asked hopefully, no doubt thinking about warm hotel rooms and pancake breakfasts in the diner. "No," he said simply, having made a vow not to lie to them, "but it's worth a look, isn't it?" On that note, they began to get ready for bed. Brett set his rifle down alongside his sleeping bag and then unstrapped the .40 caliber pistol from his belt, laying it next to it. Before he got any further in his ritual, he noted with alarm that the kids were fully intending to climb into their sleeping bags as they were. "Whoa," he said, holding up a hand in the rapidly encroaching darkness. "You aren't going to get in your sleeping bags while you're wearing those clothes, are you?" They looked at him in confusion for a moment. "What?" Jason finally asked. "What else would we do?" Chrissie contributed. "Strip," he said simply. "Strip?" they said simultaneously. "Everything off," he confirmed. "If you climb in there like that, you're going to get the inside of your sleeping bags all wet and muddy. Pretty soon they'll mildew. Not only that, but you'll be a lot warmer if you're not wet." They looked at each other and then at him for a moment, both clearly embarrassed at the very thought. "Chrissie," he said, rolling his eyes a little, "you go first. Go out and pee if you need to and then take your clothes off and climb in your sleeping bag. Jason and I will turn the other way while you do it. Trust me on this, you'll be a lot happier if you're dry in there." Only after several more minutes of cajoling and convincing did she agree to do as he said. She hiked out into the rain and out of sight for a moment to relieve her bladder and then came back to the lean-to, a sheepish look on her face. Jason and Brett, as promised, turned their heads away from her. From behind them came the sound of a belt buckle being undone and then clothing being pushed forcefully down. Brett, looking out at the dim landscape outside, didn't see a thing. But listening to the young girl undress behind him, he became aware of her for the first time as something other than someone that he was trying to look after. He found himself wondering what just what her breasts looked like. Would they be nice and firm? Would they be small? Did they have pert little nipples? What would her pubic hair look like? Would it be blond, like her hair? Knock it off! he told himself before these thoughts spun completely out of control. She's a sixteen-year-old girl! Half your age! You used to arrest people for doing what you were just thinking about! You shot four men who were thinking about doing it less than eight hours ago! He managed to drive the thoughts underground but they didn't bury themselves very deep. When he took off his own clothes a few minutes later, while Chrissie was snuggled in her sleeping bag, dutifully turning her head to the side, his penis was a turgid mass of flesh, sticking out before him. It remained in that state until long after he drifted off to sleep. ------- Breakfast the next morning consisted of a can of Vienna sausages followed up by a can of syrupy orange slices. It wasn't exactly bacon and eggs but it kept their stomachs from growling too noticeably. Before heading off for the day's hike through the muddy woods, Brett spent a few hours making the two kids familiar with the M-16 rifles they were carrying. He instructed them in assembly and disassembly, making them do both several times until they got the hang of it. He showed them how to load the weapon, how to eject unfired rounds from the chamber, and how to clear the action if it became jammed. He had them dry fire at various objects, getting them used to the sights and the feel of the weapon. Unfortunately, the most important part of the lesson, shooting the damn thing, could not be accomplished very well without seriously depleting their ammunition supply. He allowed them to fire three rounds apiece at the culmination of the lesson, setting up an empty can on a stump twenty yards away and challenging them to hit it. To his surprise, Chrissie potted it neatly through the center on her first shot. "You're a quick learner," he said, impressed. She smiled sweetly, glowing in his praise and clearly quite proud of herself as she went to go pick the can back up and replace it. Her next two shots were also on the mark. Jason turned out to be a quick study as well. He missed by about eight inches or so on his first shot but was able to knock the can down on both of his successive tries. In all, Brett considered the lesson to be time well spent and the ammo expended an acceptable loss. If nothing else it got them accustomed to the kick and the noise of their rifles and built their confidence up about their abilities to hit something. It wasn't the same as shooting at a human being that was shooting back, and they were certainly a long way from being properly trained in safety, combat techniques, and a thousand other things, but it was better than nothing. At least they could return fire in a fight and reload their weapons. If they didn't panic that was - something that remained to be seen. "Okay," he said, picking up his backpack and his own rifle and donning them. "You've earned the right to load your weapons. Keep them locked, loaded, and on single fire whenever we're on the move from here on out. Remember, if someone starts shooting at us, the first thing you want to do is get down on the ground. Make yourself as small a target as possible. Understand?" They both told him that they understood. "And please," he admonished, giving them one final piece of instruction, "don't accidentally shoot me, all right?" They both promised that they would not do that. "Let's move out then before some curious person comes to see what all the shooting was about." They moved out, Brett, as always, taking the point, his apprentices in a triangular formation behind him, their weapons gripped like his. Brett had come on his hunting trip with an expensive, hand-help GPS receiver that was capable of fixing his position within ten meters of any given spot on the earth. It was touted as the most reliable and sturdiest device of its kind, even coming with a lifetime guarantee. Apparently however, its designers had not considered the fact that thick, comet-produced clouds would block all of the satellite signals it used to orient itself. He had thrown it away as useless, excess baggage shortly after Carl's untimely demise. Now he relied on his backup navigation device - a trusty army surplus store compass that his dad had taught him to use long before the world had even heard of a global positioning system. He checked it every few minutes to make sure they were continuing to head in a generally northward direction. He was glad he had been in the habit of carrying the compass in his hunting clothes. Without it he might very well have ended up leading them around in circles since the clouds, in addition to blocking the GPS signals, covered every other navigational reference available. It was impossible to even tell where the sun was in the sky. Several times as they picked their way forward, moving over mudfalls, around downed trees, and crossing over swollen creeks, Brett looked back to see either Chrissie or Jason weeping softly. It was understandable. Their parents were less than a day dead and they were heading off to an unknown fate with a total stranger. It would have made him weep on occasion as well. He offered a few words of comfort to them during their breaks but otherwise left them alone. Their grief was something they were just going to have to work through themselves. It was about an hour after lunch when they first heard the roar coming from the direction of the canyon. It was a low, bass rumble, similar to thunder, that grew louder and louder the closer they came to it. By the time they reached the rim of the canyon it was so loud that they could barely hear each other. The Auburn Ravine was a deep cut across the Sierra Nevada mountains and its foothills that had been formed by the north fork of the American River. From where they stood on the rim, the bottom of the canyon was about five hundred feet below them, down a steep cliff. Ordinarily the river at the canyon bottom was a mere trickle during the autumn months, slow enough and shallow enough to walk across. Now, it was not so much a river as a raging torrent of floodwaters draining down from higher in the mountains. The entire bottom third of the ravine was filled, wall to wall, with turbulent brown water rushing at high speed towards the Sacramento Valley and the sea that had formed there. Thousands of uprooted pine and sequoia trees were propelled along in this flood, bashing into each other and sometimes smashing against the rock walls hard enough to snap them like twigs. "We can't get across that!" Chrissie yelled over the roar, her eyes staring in fearful awe. "No," he agreed. "I never thought that we would. But maybe there's still a bridge intact. There was one at Auburn and one at Garden Hill a little further up the hill. Both are high enough above the bottom of the canyon so the floodwaters can't reach them. If they survived the earthquake then there's a good chance they're still intact." "Which one should we head for?" Jason wanted to know. "The Auburn bridge is closer," he answered, having already thought this through, "but the Garden Hill one is newer. They only built it a few years ago. It's probably a lot more likely to still be there. Garden Hill is also a lot more likely to be intact itself. It's on high ground and there are no rivers running through it." "Will there be people there, you think?" "It's possible," he allowed. "Garden Hill was mostly a bedroom community for people who worked in Sacramento but liked to say they lived in the mountains. It was kind of a ritzy place. I don't know how welcoming they'd be to strangers, but it's worth a look anyway." "How far?" Chrissie asked. "I don't know exactly because I don't know exactly where we are. All my maps got buried with my friend. But I think we're probably about twenty miles southwest of it, give or take a few." "How long will that take?" "A week or so at this pace," he told them. "We should have enough rations to last us until then." "And if there's nothing there?" "Then we come up with a plan B," he said. They seemed to accept this. "C'mon," he said, waving them away from the canyon. "Let's backtrack a little until we can hear again. I don't like being deaf." They trudged back the way they had come until the roar of the water in the canyon was nothing more than white noise. They then began to parallel the rim of the ravine. ------- As dark approached Brett taught the kids how to build the lean-to shelter, instructing them in everything from how to pick out the proper spot to how to pick out the right branches to use. The end result of their efforts was fairly respectable. It didn't leak very much, mostly due to it's positioning rather than its construction and, most important of all, it was extremely difficult to see as anything other than a naturally occurring deadfall against some rocks. Jason, after eating his portion of dinner, went directly to bed, obviously quite exhausted from his second day of lugging a pack. He had them turn their heads while he stripped off his wet clothing and then he climbed into his thick, arctic sleeping bag. He placed his coveted rifle next to it, positioning it exactly as Brett had the night before. He gave them a quick "good-night" and less than five minutes later he was snoring away. Brett stayed up a little longer, watching the night conquer the landscape and drinking one of the cans of beer he had taken from the trailer. Chrissie, though she looked, if anything, even more tired than her brother, stayed up with him. She sat beside him near the edge of the shelter, her legs crossed Indian-fashion. "Can I have one of those?" she asked timidly after watching him take a few swigs. He looked over at her pointedly, giving her a parental stare. "Oh come on," she said, rolling her pretty blue eyes at him. "It's not like I haven't drank a beer before. I'm sixteen for God's sake." "I'm sure you're a woman of the world," he said sarcastically. Nevertheless, he reached into his supply and pulled out a can for her. Who was he to dictate what she could and couldn't do? He wasn't her father. Besides, what was the harm? If she lived long enough to develop a drinking problem that would be a blessing, wouldn't it? "Thanks," she said, taking the can from his hand. Their fingers touched for an instant as the transfer was made and Brett was jolted a little by the contact. Even that brief, innocent touch of fingertip to fingertip seemed to stir something within him. He fought the sensation down, forcing it to the back of his mind. They drank in silence for a few minutes, not looking at each other, only staring out towards the distant roar of the canyon, watching the rain. It was a companionable silence, not the least bit awkward. "It's funny," Chrissie said at last, after having drunk most of her warm beer, "how overwhelming all of this is, isn't it?" He looked at her, seeing that she had taken her hat off, letting her blond hair spill free. "What do you mean?" "I mean everything that we've lost," she said. "It's not just my parents that are gone, it's everything. My whole life, all of my plans, everything I liked to do. I won't ever go to school and see my friends again. They're probably all dead. I won't get to go to the junior prom this year. I had a bitchin' dress all picked out and everything. I even had an idea that Tommy Morgan was going to ask me to it." She shook her head a little. "Just a week ago, that was the most important thing in my life. That was all I thought about, that and the cheerleading routines we were working on. And look at me now. I'm up on a mountain with half the world destroyed, carrying a gun and wondering if I'm even going to be alive next week, worrying that some biker gang will kidnap me and rape me like that last ones tried to do." "You've been forced to grow up a little faster than what you were meant to," Brett said, reaching over and brushing a lock of her hair out of her eyes. "But you're doing a great job of it so far. Jason too. Most adults would have gone insane after what you've been through this last week, seeing your life destroyed, seeing your parents killed right in front of you, but you've hung in there. You should be proud of yourself." "Thanks," she said, sniffing a little. "Thanks for everything you've done for us. I'm so glad you found us and helped us. You make me feel safe." "Well, let's hope I'm not just creating an illusion for you. I'm trying to teach you guys to be able to carry on yourselves if anything happens to me. Remember what I said about this new world." "It's a Darwinian world now," she dutifully repeated. "And don't you go talking like that. We're not gonna let anything happen to you." He didn't bother pointing out the fallacy of her words. He could see that she realized it without being told. "Tell me about your family?" Chrissie asked him suddenly, changing the subject. He sighed, draining the last of his Budweiser. "I'd rather not," he told her. "It hasn't been long enough yet." "Talking about it helps," she said, scooting a little closer to him. "Really, it does." Another sigh. Chrissie, despite her age, was very insightful into matters of the heart it seemed. "My wife's name was Julie," he said quietly, not looking at her as he spoke. "She was a nurse at St. Joseph's Hospital in Stockton. She worked in the emergency room there. I met her about five years ago, just before they assigned me to the helicopter. I was working a day shift patrol car and I went to the hospital to go take an assault report from someone that had been taken there. Julie was the charge nurse. We started talking while I waited for the victim to come back from X-ray. After that, I made a point of always looking for her whenever I went to that hospital. It wasn't too long before we were dating." "A nurse huh?" she said. "Was she pretty?" "She was very pretty," he replied, able to see her face before him as clearly as if she were standing there. "And more important than that, she was able to relate to me, to what I did for a living. Cops have a really high divorce rate because our spouses usually have a hard time understanding the pressures we go through. But Julie was a nurse in a busy emergency room. She dealt with a lot of the same people that I did. We got along real well together. Maybe we weren't storybook soulmates or anything like that, but I loved her an awful lot." He wiped at a tear that was running down his face. "We had one daughter," he went on after a moment. "She was two years old, would've been three in about two more months." "What was her name?" "Summer." "I like that name," Chrissie said. "I didn't at first," he said, a few more tears running down. "I wanted a more traditional name like Susan or Cindy or Michelle. But Julie liked Summer and she laid down the law with me. Women really are the rulers of the planet you know? So Summer she was and of course the name grew on me really fast until I couldn't even imagine her being named anything else. She was really a daddy's girl. I used to take her to the park every one of my days off when the weather was nice. I used to take her on the back of my bike when I went for rides. She used to tug on my shirt and giggle when we went down hills." He sniffed a little, wiping more tears from his face. "Julie was probably at work when the comet hit. St. Joseph's was right smack in the middle of downtown Stockton, more than forty miles from any high ground. Summer would have been at my parent's house in Lodi. They watched her on the days we were both at work or when I was on my hunting trips. Their house wasn't any closer to high ground. Carl and I saw the water come rushing into the valley from Castle Point. If there's a God up there, he's got a rather twisted sense of humor, having us be up there at that exact moment." Chrissie leaned over and put her arms around him, hugging him to her, resting her head on his shoulder. Instinctively, his arms came up in return, rubbing and patting her back. Though it was an innocent hug of comfort they shared, there was no denying that an undercurrent of sexuality was there as well. Brett felt the press of her breasts against his chest through their wet clothing. He felt her warm breath on his neck. Despite the haunting images of his wife and daughter he had just invoked, or perhaps because of them, his penis stiffened within his pants and he felt a wave of powerful lust for the teenage girl sweeping over him. He tried to fight this feeling down again but this time the battle was futile. Though his wife was less than a week dead, his daughter with her, though Chrissie was half his age, he was forced to admit to himself that he wanted her. He wanted to take her in his arms and make wild, passionate love to her. With that admission came a vow that he would never act upon these feelings. Despite the recent events that had pushed her maturity to a premature evolution, she was still a child. If he were to take advantage of her just because he could, wouldn't that put him in the same category as the men he had shot the previous day? Wouldn't he be abandoning his morality just because there was no penalty for doing so? He would not do that. He would not. As they broke apart from their embrace, Brett could see plainly, even in the rapidly diminishing light, that Chrissie had been as affected by it as he had. A blush had crept across her face and neck, raising goose bumps. Her eyes were shining at him in wanting and arousal. He knew that if he leaned in and kissed her at that moment, she would not pull away from him. He successfully resisted the urge and they returned to their previous positions next to each other. They talked of inconsequential things for a few more minutes, until the light was completely gone from the landscape, and then they went to bed. Like the night before, Brett was able to hear, though not actually see her undressing. He did not have to turn away from her this time though. The absence of any light made that an unnecessary precaution. He stared right at the spot, only two feet away, where the rustling of clothing and the jingling of a belt buckle were audible. He heard the whisper of wet cloth against her legs as she pulled off her pants. He heard her shiver a little as the pulled off her heavy shirt, her undershirt, and her bra. He discovered that he could smell her. It was a wet, musky odor of girlish sweat, very far from unpleasant. He wanted to reach out and put his hands on her body, to touch her, to feel her flesh against his hands. But he didn't. When she was safely in her sleeping bag he excused himself, claiming he had to take one last leak before turning in. Moving entirely by feel, he walked thirty feet away from the shelter, out into the driving rain and the wind. He unbuttoned his pants and pulled his rigid cock free, grasping it in his right hand. As he stroked himself he thought of Chrissie; of the feel of her breasts against his chest, of the way they would feel bare against his hands, of the way she had smelled just before climbing into her sleeping bag, of how it would feel to slide into her tight warmth. The orgasm that resulted came quickly and with a power he was unaccustomed to. His knees became wobbly and he fell to them, spurting his seed upon the wet ground. By the time he stumbled his way back into the shelter, Chrissie was sound asleep, her breathing deep and regular. Feeling more than a little ashamed of himself now that he had relieved the pressure, he stripped off his own clothes and set them to the side. He climbed into the relative warmth of his arctic sleeping bag and made himself as comfortable as possible on the rocky ground. Though he was exhausted, it was a long time before his troubled mind allowed him to sleep. ------- They made almost five miles the next day, moving steadily uphill and keeping the roar of the canyon at a low rumble to their left. Though they saw no other human beings as they trekked over rises and through gullies, they saw plenty of signs that others were nearby. They saw old food containers, a few lean-to structures such as the ones they slept in, even the remains of a failed campfire once. Brett suspected that others were leaving them alone because of the firepower they were packing. Having the entire group carrying military assault weapons like they knew how to use them was a great deterrent to anyone who spotted them and thought about trying to take their supplies. That was all fine and dandy to prevent direct assaults upon them, but what about an ambush? Most of the people stuck up here had probably been hunters. That meant that most of them were probably carrying hunting rifles. Would it occur to someone to try and take them out from cover, such as the way he had taken Ricky and the others out? If a person was hungry and desperate enough, it just might seem a good gamble. And people would be hungry and desperate. As they had moved along Brett had seen precious little that could be used as food. They had seen plenty of dead and rotting animals along their way but not many living ones. Not even squirrels or raccoons, perhaps the most abundant pre-comet life forms in the mountains besides bugs, showed their furry faces, let alone deer or bears. If he and his group had not secured canned food from the trailer, they would be starving now as well. He could think of no way to counter this perceived threat of ambush other than to keep a sharp eye out for anyone tracking them or following them. Such a person would more than likely shadow them for a while, waiting for the best opportunity to strike. Brett knew that if the attack were to happen, he would be the first one shot, probably through the head during one of their breaks. It would be quite obvious to anyone plotting against them that he was the leader of the group and the most dangerous one with his rifle. He did not mention any of these fears to Chrissie or to Jason, not seeing any advantage in it, but he did obsessively check their rear and their flanks as they hiked. The fact that he saw nothing did not make him feel any better. As they went, he continued to instruct the two kids on basic combat techniques applicable to small unit action in a wooded environment. He made them learn hand signals, various voice commands, and the difference between cover and concealment. He explained about covering fire, shooting and moving, and flanking maneuvers. Most important of all, he explained to them how to make a fighting retreat. "We're not trying to hold any ground here, you understand?" he said. "Our objective is to stay alive. In any fight situation, if we can get the hell out of where we're at, then that's what we'll do." As had been the case with their firearms instruction, he realized that he was not exactly giving them a complete knowledge base. Nor was there any real way to have them practice the techniques since he figured that staying in one place for any length of time was just too dangerous. But, as had been the case with teaching them how to use the M-16s, it was better than nothing. Perhaps, if push came to shove, the things he had taught them would save them and keep them from panicking. You had to take any advantage that you could get in this new world. They made camp that night a little earlier than usual, while the meager light that penetrated the cloud cover was still in the earliest stages of its long fade to black. Again, Brett had the kids pick out the spot and construct the lean-to. He was gratified to see that they required little instruction from him during this second attempt. While they were working on it he walked around the perimeter, checking out every conceivable vantage point that an enemy (which, in his mind, consisted of anyone who wasn't them) might use to spy on them and plot an attack from. He found nothing amiss. As he had done the previous night, Jason went directly to bed after dinner. Brett wished him pleasant dreams and told him, in a man to man voice, to keep his weapon close by, just in case. Jason very seriously assured him that he would do just that. Brett had realized as the day had gone by that Jason was developing an attitude very much like hero worship towards him. He tried to do everything as Brett did it - the way he walked, the way he talked, the way he carried and stored his rifle. This attention sometimes made Brett feel proud but mostly just scared him. He was no hero. He was simply a man trying to survive. Again, Chrissie stayed up with Brett after her brother had gone to sleep, staring out of the shelter at the approaching darkness and listening to the water roaring through the canyon. Their conversation was not nearly as somber as it had been the night before. They stayed away from the subjects of dead family members and friends, of the dead world they now lived in, and talked instead of neutral things. "So it sounds like you were one of the high school elite," Brett told her as he sipped from his can of beer. "You were a cheerleader, honor roll student, I bet you were homecoming queen too, weren't you?" "I was not the homecoming queen," she giggled, slapping playfully at his arm. "No?" "No," she confirmed. "I was runner-up." "Ahh, so you were a loser then, were you?" They had a laugh about that for a moment and Chrissie took a few sips out of her own beer. "What about you?" she asked him, edging a little closer to him. "Were you a preppie back in high school? Were you in the happening clique?" "No," he told her, noting her lateral motion but doing nothing to discourage it. "I was actually part of the stoners." "The stoners?" she said, disbelieving. "But you're a cop." He shrugged a little. "You'd be surprised how many cops and nurses and paramedics and firemen came from the stoner clique in school. I stopped smoking it when I graduated and that's why the department didn't reject me when they did the background check, but I probably smoked a pound or two in my glory days. I went through the majority of my junior and senior year in the freakin' stratosphere. My grades were barely high enough to let me graduate. If I hadn't of tested so high on the ASVAB the army wouldn't have even accepted me into flight training when I signed up. I almost ended up a grunt instead of a pilot." She looked at him in wonder, her blue eyes shining. "It's hard to imagine you as a stoner," she said. "You're so serious now." "I'm serious because survival depends on it. Catch me sometimes when we're not in the middle of a global catastrophe and you'll notice a startling difference." They shared another few moments of companionable silence, during which Chrissie took the opportunity to inch even closer to him, until her left hip and leg were in contact with his. Without stopping to think much about the ramifications of his actions, Brett put his arm around her shoulders, pulling her against him. She cooed a little and snuggled into him, her head resting on his shoulder. "This feels nice," she said softly. "It does, doesn't it?" he replied, feeling pleasant chills surging through him as he felt her closeness. The chills were accompanied by a strong sensation of guilt. What, his mind demanded, did he think he was doing? Why was he putting his arm around the girl he had vowed not to touch the night before? Why? Almost before he realized it was happening, he was kissing her. She turned her face up to his, offering an expression of surrender as old as the kiss itself, and he responded to it, touching his lips to hers. Their kisses were gentle at first, light pecks of affection. But gradually they became deeper, more passionate. They lingered sweetly and he allowed the tip of his tongue to poke out and touch hers. At this first contact of tongues she twisted in his arms, turning her body into his. Her arms came up around his neck, pulling him tight against her. Once again he felt her breasts pressing against his chest through their shirts. He pulled his mouth from hers in fear and guilt, breaking the kiss but not letting go of her with his arms. He saw desire in her eyes, wanting. "We can't do this," he whispered, feeling himself trembling in her arms, feeling his erection building in his pants, feeling his resolve already slipping. "We can," she whispered back, sliding her hands up and down on his back. "It's all right. I like it when you kiss me. I want you to kiss me." He shook his head weakly. "You're just sixteen," he said. "I'm more than twice your age." "So what?" she said. "I'm a woman and you're a man. We don't have anyone else. What's wrong with what we're doing? Who does it hurt?" "It hurts you," he told her. "I'd be taking advantage of you." "I don't feel like I'm being taken advantage of," she said, giving him another soft kiss on the mouth. "I feel like I want to do it some more." "Chrissie..." he started. "It's not like I haven't done this before," she said next. "I know what I'm doing and I'm old enough to know who I want to do it with. Now kiss me. Please?" He opened his mouth to give her a firm "no" but she covered it with hers, sliding her tongue back between his lips. It was only a second before he became lost in her embrace, his resolve not just slipping but free-falling to a nasty death. He pulled her tightly against him and kissed her back, swirling his tongue against hers, sucking it gently into his own mouth. They kissed for more than five minutes, both of them rapidly heating up as their passion built and then he let his lips slide down to her neck. He began to kiss the soft flesh there, nipping at it with his teeth, giving it gentle sucks and licks, unmindful of the occasional speckles of mud that he encountered. She purred in his arms, her arms dropping down to his lower back. "Why don't we get in our sleeping bags now?" she panted in his ear as his own hands slid beneath the back of her shirt, feeling her bare skin. He had one last moment of doubt that was abruptly squashed when she began to unbutton her shirt. The white T-shirt that she wore beneath it rode up a little, baring the skin of her midriff and exposing her belly button to him. Though he still felt it was wrong, though he still felt he was taking advantage of her, the sight of her pale, smooth stomach in the fading light decided him. He wanted her as bad as he had ever wanted anyone before, even Julie. He wanted her and she was willing to give herself to him, so he would have her. He watched her undress for him, not making any move to take off his own clothing just yet. Underneath her T-shirt she wore a simple black sports bra. It molded to her breasts, accenting the fact that her nipples were hard beneath it. She gave him a nervous smile, clearly unaccustomed to a man watching her disrobe, and then she pulled it over her head, baring her breasts. They were as close to divine as a set of breasts could be. About the size of grapefruits, they sagged not an inch, standing up firmly and proudly as only the mammaries of teenage girls can do. They were capped with pink aureoles that were barely darker than the surrounding flesh itself. The nipples were small but rigid, just begging for his mouth to suckle them. "You're beautiful, Chrissie," he told her, letting his hand reach out to run over her right breast. She took in a sharp intake of hair as his palm crossed the nipple. "Thank you," she said, blushing, breathing quickly. After kicking off her muddy boots and her filthy cotton socks, she lay on her back and began to unbuckle her pants. She snapped the button open and pushed the zipper down, revealing the front of her panties beneath. They had once been white but seven days of constant exposure to mud and water had turned them a dirty brown. Brett didn't mind. He grabbed the waistband of the pants and pulled, bringing the pants and the panties down in one motion until she was able to kick them off. She now was completely naked before him, lying on her back; her beautiful cheerleader's legs lightly spread. Her pubic hair was only a light covering of blonde fuzz, just a half shade darker than that on her head. He could see that her vaginal lips were swollen with arousal. The odor that he had noted the night before struck him again, only more powerfully and with a heavier tint of sexual musk. "Come on," Chrissie breathed, lust in her eyes as she looked at him looking at her. "It's your turn. Take your clothes off." He did just that. While he removed his boots, socks, and shirt, Chrissie unzipped her sleeping bag all the way and crawled inside of it. When he pushed his pants and underwear down, freeing his straining cock from its confines, she leaned up on one arm, her eyes locked onto it. She reached out with one hand and grasped it, feeling its girth, sliding her palm up and down lightly on it. It felt so good that Brett just held in place, letting her masturbate him. "Come to bed," she said, patting his sleeping bag, which she had pulled next to hers after flipping it over to make sure the zippers were both on the same side. He nodded, taking a quick look at Jason, her brother's presence occurring to him for the first time since they kissed. He was still sound asleep, snoring softly, completely oblivious to what was going on right next to him. That was good, Brett thought as he unzipped his bag and climbed inside. They let their two sleeping bags overlap each other, in effect creating one big sleeping bag. Brett pulled her to him, feeling her naked breasts against him, feeling her soft legs touching his. He slid his hand up and down her back as their mouths came back together and their tongues found each other once more. As the kiss deepened, Brett slid his hand down to her butt, touching it, feeling the firmness of her cheeks. Her hand reached out to find his cock again and she began sliding it up and down softly. He kissed his way down her neck to the hollow of her throat, spending a moment there before continuing his journey downward. His face rubbed over the swelling of her breasts and he let his tongue reach out and lick between them before he kissed his way to the nipple of the nearer one. He took it between his lips, tonguing it gently and then suckling it. Chrissie moaned softly from above him, continuing to caress his cock, her free hand on the back of his neck, encouraging him. After several minutes of attention to the left breast, he switched to the right, pulling himself a little further atop her. She rolled over onto her back to allow him freer access. He took advantage of this position by letting his hand slide over the front of her thighs. Though her calves were somewhat scratchy due to the lack of shaving, her thighs were baby smooth and very feminine. He stroked them with his fingertips, moving from the knees to the upper thighs and gradually forcing his hands in between them. She spread her legs for him as she felt his hand traveling towards her center and soon he was touching the junction between her inner thighs and her crotch. He let his fingers slowly explore her. They moved through kinky pubic hair and across soft, velvety outer lips before finding the warm wetness of her inner lips. She moaned again as he touched her there and then again as he slowly slipped his middle finger inside of her. Her sex was saturated with her musky juices and very tight. He could feel her muscles clenching at him strongly, gripping his finger. He added one more finger and began to slowly push and pull, sliding them in and out, up and down. He let his thumb lightly touch her erect clitoris and she jumped, squealing a little. "Shhhh," he whispered, bringing his head back up to her face and kissing her lips. "Wouldn't want your brother to wake up now, would we?" "Sorry," she whispered back, in a voice that was not quite steady. Their lips came back together as he continued to move his fingers in and out of her. After several minutes she loosened up slightly and her hips began to rise and fall in a gentle rhythm. He kept up the manipulation of her clitoris with his thumb and soon she was panting against him, her hands clawing at his back. "Mmmmm, ohhhhhhh, ohhhh God," she groaned into his mouth. Her thighs tightened against his hands and her pelvis rose forcefully upward. He kept her mouth covered with his own until her spasms died away. "Oh my God," she whispered excitedly to him, kissing his cheeks and his face. "I've never felt anything like that before." "You've never come?" he whispered back, slowly freeing his dripping hand from her sex. He began to stroke her stomach. "Well, yes, I have, but never like that. I've never had anyone make me come before. I've always... well... you know?" "Played with yourself?" he asked, sucking gently on her bottom lip. "Yeah," she breathed. "Sometimes I would. But you did it with your hand. And it felt so much better than the ones from my hand. My God." "Are you ready for another one?" he asked her. "A real one." "Yes, oh yes." He rolled his body upward, positioning himself atop of her. He had to do it entirely by feel since, while they'd been warming up for the main event, the light had abandoned the sky for the night, leaving them blind. This made Brett a little apprehensive since he could no longer look over to make sure that Jason was still asleep, but not apprehensive enough to stop. Her arms came up around him again and her legs opened up, allowing him to fall between them. He took his erection in his hand and rubbed it slowly through her wetness, lubricating it for the coming festivity in a most pleasurable way. Below him he could feel Chrissie trembling. "Are you okay?" he asked her, giving her a gentle kiss on the lips. "We can stop you know. It might even be better if we did. What if I get you pregnant?" "No," she said immediately. "I don't want to stop. And if I'm still around in two months to worry about being pregnant, I'll gladly accept the consequences. Do it to me, Brett. Do it to me." He did it to her. He put the head of his cock between her soft lips and pushed forward slowly. Despite the abundance of natural lubrication he had to force his way inside of her, she was that tight. It took a while to accomplish but soon his entire length was gripped within the snugness of her clenching sheath. He felt her sparse pubic hair mingling with his. He felt his balls resting against her butt. "Ohhh," she cooed in his ear. "Sooo big. So good." He knew that he wasn't really particularly big, just average, but he didn't bother correcting this notion at the moment. He began to move within her, keeping it slow so as to avoid waking up Jason (assuming he was still asleep). Very quickly the going became easier as her body adjusted to having him inside of her. Soon he was moving in a delightful friction, a tight, slippery channel that seemed custom designed for his pleasure. Though Julie, his wife, had been an expert at making love to him, Chrissie had the tightness and the allure of youth in her corner. Though she was clearly without much experience, and though she couldn't hold a candle to Julie's techniques at movement and gripping, he had to admit to himself that the actual sensation of intercourse with her was better than anything he had ever felt before. He could revel in the pleasure of her body for hours. The factor of Jason kept him from driving into her as he truly wanted to do. Instead, he kept it slow, using gentle, steady strokes designed not to make much noise or rustle the sleeping bags. It was a tender, almost hesitant act, though no less passionate than an unrestrained one. When Chrissie began to buck up and down with her second orgasm, Brett once again covered her mouth with his, sucking her tongue to keep her from moaning aloud as the waves of pleasure overtook her. The uncontrolled spasms of her tightness against him as she came pushed him over the edge of his own control. He felt the inevitability of his own orgasm building in his groin, moving up and down his spine. His hips began to move faster, driving with more power and now creating the noise that he did not wish to create. But he could not help himself. To not thrust potently in her body was impossible. This time it was Chrissie who kept him from moaning with her own mouth. She brought her legs up around his back, pulling him even harder against her. The spasms began and soon he was unloading thick jets of sperm into her body, plastering her cervix and overfilling her to the point that it ran out onto the fabric beneath them. Slowly the last vestiges of orgasm departed, the strokes slowed to a halt, and their breathing began to return to normal. They lay against each other, kissing softly, their bodies bathed in a sheen of sweat that quickly gave them chills. The entire lean-to, despite the ventilation from the openings on the side, reeked of sexual musk. Chrissie reached up and pulled the sleeping bag tighter around them. For the longest time they simply held each other, enjoying the sharing of their body heat, his wilting penis still nestled within her sopping opening. Finally Chrissie broke the silence. "I think the inside of my sleeping bag got wet," she said quietly to him. This gave them the giggles, the sound of which they covered by putting their lips to each other's necks. "Are you sorry for what we did?" Chrissie asked him when their laughter dried up. He didn't answer her right away, he only laid there atop her for a moment, trying to examine just how he felt about what had happened. "I don't know," he told her at last. "Ask me in the morning." "Okay," she said softly. "But in the meantime, can you hold me for awhile?" "Sure." He pulled himself off of her, rolling onto his back and she laid her head on his chest. His arms came around her, crossing protectively over her back. Within minutes, both of them were asleep. ------- Chapter 2 Brett awoke, as always, to the sound of rain and wind outside the lean-to. That was nothing unusual. What was different however was the fact that instead of shivering alone in his sleeping bag, he had a warm body lying atop him. Chrissie's head was snuggled into his chest, her blonde hair cascading over his shoulder. Her right arm was clinging to his upper torso. His own hands were still wrapped protectively around her back, his fingertips against her smooth skin. He groaned miserably as he remembered the events of the previous night. What had he done? He had violated a sixteen-year-old girl! That was statutory rape. Rape! A week ago he could have been thrown in prison for doing such a thing, and he would have deserved it. Brett, though a cop, had not been a fanatic on the subject of many of the laws that he had enforced. Some of them he had recklessly violated himself. He had been known to drive his car considerably faster than what was legal on a regular basis. He had been known to drink a beer while behind the wheel. He had routinely fudged deductions on his income taxes. He had taken home batteries, flashlights, map books, and several other useful items from the department supply room. But when it came to sex crimes against minors, he had always been a firm believer in the law that declared those under the age of eighteen to be hands-off. It was a good law, designed to protect young girls from people like... well people like himself. And now what had he done? He had slept with Chrissie. Just because the threat that the law represented had been removed he had done something that he believed, that he knew was wrong. What kind of man did that make him? Was he any better than the bikers he had shot? He opened his eyes slowly, noting that it was just past dawn. The meager light that marked the daylight hours was just starting to show itself, allowing him to see Chrissie's blond head on his chest and the slanted roof of the lean-to above him. Chrissie, feeling him stir a little, opened her own eyes and looked up at him. "Hi," she said meekly, offering him an embarrassed smile. "Hi," he returned, finding it difficult to look her in the eye. "That was the best I've slept since... well... you know." Brett did not admit to her that it was the best the he had slept as well. He let his arms fall to his side, releasing her from his embrace. "We'd better pull our sleeping bags apart," he said. "Jason will be up soon and I wouldn't want him to see us like this." She didn't move for a moment. "Brett?" she said, her face troubled. "Are you okay? You're not... mad at me, are you?" "No," he told her, shaking his head. "I'm not mad at you. I'm mad at myself." "You don't have to be upset," she told him. "What we did was..." "Wrong," he interjected. "What we did was wrong and I should have known better. Come on, let's get separated." Reluctantly she raised herself off of him allowing him a tantalizing and tempting glimpse of her breasts dangling beneath her for a moment. He did his best to ignore the sight and to try not to think about how those breasts had tasted and felt the night before. As he slid out from underneath her, trying to work his way fully into his own sleeping bag, he looked over the top of her, checking on Jason, expecting to see him still snoring away. Jason, a typical fourteen-year-old boy, was always the first to bed at night and the last to rise in the morning. But this time, as luck would have it, he was not. He was leaning on one elbow, looking at the two of them. Brett froze in place, a jolt of adrenaline surging through his body as he realized that he had been caught. Could this morning possibly get any worse? Would Jason pick up his rifle that he had been so recently taught to use and shoot the man that had raped his sister? That was certainly in the realm of possibilities, wasn't it? Chrissie, noting Brett's sudden halt in movement, looked over her shoulder to see what he was looking at. She too froze in place, so surprised that it took her a few moments to realize that her breasts were exposed to Jason's eyes. When she did realize this she slowly reached down and pulled the sleeping bag tighter against her chest. How long did the moment last? Brett was not sure. It seemed an eternity that the three of them all stared at each other. Brett tried to read Jason's face and found it impossible. There was no expression to be read. It was as if he was looking at a baseball card or a pinecone. "Morning," Jason finally said, his tone strangely normal. "Uh... good morning," Brett answered slowly. Chrissie said nothing. "Did you guys sleep good?" he said next. "I know I did. I think I'm starting to get used to sleeping on rocks." "Really?" Brett asked, feeling a little like he was in the Twilight Zone. What was happening here? Wasn't Jason upset? "Yep," he said, nodding. "Would you guys mind turning around so I can get dressed? I gotta pee." "Uh... sure," replied Brett. "Yeah... okay," echoed Chrissie. Both of them dutifully rolled over to the other side, hastily moving as far apart as they could in the process. Brett had a sudden worry that this was how Jason was going to kill him; by having him turn his back to him. He listened for the clacking of a gun being picked up. It didn't come, only the sound of Jason's clothes jingling. "Man," Jason told them as he dressed, "I really hate putting these wet clothes on in the morning. Talk about cold." Neither Brett nor Chrissie had any sort of answer to offer him. It took him the better part of five minutes to get fully dressed. "Okay, I'm done," he said. They both turned to look at him again. He was carefully threading his belt through the pistol holster, positioning it neatly on his right hip at exactly the angle that Brett always did. He gave it a pat and then picked up his rifle. "I'll set out the cans from dinner last night so they can fill," he said as he wormed his way out the side. "We're starting to get low on water in the canteens again." "Uh... sure. Good idea," Brett told him, staring after him as he disappeared in the rain. He then turned to Chrissie. "Did that just happen?" "That was kind of weird, wasn't it?" she agreed. "I mean, we were totally busted. There's no way he didn't see us." "It was like he didn't even care," Brett said, shaking his head in wonder. Chrissie shrugged a little. "Well," she suggested, after a moment's thought on the matter, "maybe he doesn't." "What?" "Well, think about it. Why should he care? I'm his older sister, not his girlfriend or his daughter or anything. My dad or my mom probably wouldn't have liked finding us very much, but Jason is younger than I am." Brett rubbed his temples a little, massaging at a tension headache. "Too much to think about right now," he mumbled, sitting up and grabbing for his own clothes. "Brett," Chrissie said softly, putting her hand on his bare shoulder. He looked over at her, knowing what she was going to say, desperately wanting to avoid it. "What about us?" she asked. "Don't you think we should talk about it?" "There's nothing to talk about," he said firmly. "I shouldn't have done that. I took advantage of you last night and it was wrong." "I don't feel like you took advantage of me," she said. "I wanted it as much as you did." "That's beside the point." "No it's not!" she insisted. "Don't you like me, Brett?" "Yes, Chrissie," he sighed. "I like you a lot. I like you too much. You're a very beautiful, very smart girl and I am very attracted to you. That's what the problem is. You're too young to be having sex with a thirty-five year old man." "Says who?" she asked him. "Says me! What I did goes against everything I believe in." "Everything you believe in is gone now," she said quietly. "You told us that yourself. It's a completely different world now with completely different rules. We could die at any time. Isn't it more likely that we're going to be dead in a month than that we're still alive?" "Chrissie," he said, "I hardly think..." "Isn't it?" she interrupted forcefully. "Yes," he admitted. "I suppose it is." "Then why shouldn't we enjoy a little affection while we're still alive?" she asked him. "Who is it harming? It's not harming me. No one is going to come and put you in jail for it. Why shouldn't we do it?" "Why shouldn't we go and kill people who have food if we need it?" he countered. "Why shouldn't I have raped you at gunpoint the other day instead of protecting you? We can't just go changing our morality because there's no one to enforce it anymore. Don't you see that? That's what those bikers are doing. They are what happens when people just start doing whatever they feel like doing." "You're not like those bikers Brett," she told him, almost angrily. "You're nothing like them. And having sex with me when I wanted it and you wanted it is not the same as raping someone and killing their parents. Can't you see that?" "It's not the same," he said, "but it's a step in that direction. Don't you see?" She had no answer for him. Before they could continue the discussion any further, they heard the sound of Jason returning. "Why don't you turn around so I can get dressed?" he asked. "I want to try and put some miles behind us today." With a disappointed look she rolled over to the other side, turning her back to him. ------- The town of Foresthill had once occupied about two square miles of real estate alongside of a simple two-lane road that ran from Auburn up into the high Sierra. It had once had a thriving population of six hundred, a mix of blue-collar types that worked in the nearby lumber mill and wealthy yuppies who commuted sixty miles to Sacramento to work. But that had been before the comet. Now, three quarters of the business section and half of the old residential section had been washed away by mudslides moving down the mountain. After wiping out the main part of Foresthill the mud had continued downward, eventually burying the Todd Valley section - where the majority of the yuppies had lived in tract houses on subdivided land - more than thirty feet deep. Now all that was left were a few crumbling old farmhouses, a bait shop, a useless gas station, and a church. The population had been reduced to a mere 83 people who were taking shelter in the church and living off of the canned foods that they had managed to scavenge together. Most of these survivors were women and very small children. Since the comet had struck during the late morning hours on a workday, the majority of the men had been at work and the majority of the school-age kids had been in school. Those that had been at jobs in Sacramento had suffered the fate that everyone else in the valley had. Those that had been at the mill, which was virtually the only employer in town, had been trapped in the building when it had collapsed in the earthquake and then buried for all time when the first of the mudslides had swept through an hour later. Those that had been in school had been thirty miles away in Auburn, since Foresthill did not have a school of its own, and their fates were unknown. Still, a few men were in the group. Some had taken the day off on that fateful morning. A few had worked somewhere in town that hadn't been touched; such as the gas station or the bait shop. The pastor of the church was among them, his place of employment spared; miraculously he liked to think. And of course there was more than one that had been simply "between jobs", as they would have put it. In all, of the 83 surviving residents of Foresthill, there were 49 women, 20 young children, and 14 men. That was before the convicts came to town. They were twenty-seven strong, including six women, and they had been camped on the outskirts of the town for two days, performing a careful reconnaissance of the area through binoculars and rifles scopes that had been taken from the El Dorado Sheriff's Department. They had noted that everyone in Foresthill seemed to be staying in the church, a sturdy wooden building near the center of the remaining township. The security measures that the townspeople employed were a joke but the leader of the convicts, a man named Stuart Covington, who had, once upon a long time ago, been a United States Marine Corps infantryman, thought it best to be sure of what they were dealing with before they moved in. It was discovered that the Foresthill residents posted guards armed with rifles and pistols on the outside of the church - always men - but that they did not send out patrols of the surrounding area. Nor did they have anybody posted in a high place to keep an eye out on the approaches. It was a rare event indeed for anyone to leave the church at all. "What do you think Stu?" asked Mark Wisington, Stu's former cellmate in the EDCCC and his unofficial second in command of the motley group. Stu, who was staring at the church building through binoculars, answered without taking them from his eyes. "It should be pretty easy," he said. "Take down the guards out front and pin the rest of them inside. I wanna capture the women if we can get them to come out peacefully, but if they won't, we'll have to shoot some of those tear gas rounds in." "If we play it right," Mark opined, "they'll come out." "Exactly." He lowered the binoculars and edged backwards a little. "We'll move on them in one hour. You take half of the group around the back, I'll take the other half from here. My group should be able to close to within fifty yards or so before we're spotted if we use that gas station building for cover. You'll be able to get even closer if you use the trees. Keep low and keep your guys quiet." "What about our bitches?" "We'll have Turbo hang back and keep an eye on them. They won't be any trouble." Mark nodded, putting his own set of glasses to his eyes and taking a quick look. The guard out front was about forty years old. He was dressed in a black rain slicker and was smoking a cigarette. He had an old bolt-action rifle slung over his back. He was not even walking around. He was seated in a damn chair. "I hope they still have some of those cigarettes when we take them," Mark said wistfully. "Yeah," Stu agreed. "The one fuckin thing we didn't think to grab when we blew town." "Still no M-16s spotted with the guards?" "Nope. Just those old hunting rifles. I don't think they even have that many of those. Some fuckin frontier town this turned out to be. It would seem that if our friend is still on the loose somewhere, he isn't here. I never thought he would be once I saw their security. A man smart enough to take out four of our guys and walk away without a scratch would be a little smarter than this." "I hope we find him someday," Mark said, lowering his glasses again. "I really hope we do. I got a little payback I'd like to give him for Joker." "Be careful what you wish for," Stu told him. "You just might get it. But for what its worth, I hope we find him too. He's dangerous. A man like that will be able to organize others. Organization is our enemy." "It's a small world now. We'll find him eventually. And when we do, I wanna kill him slow." Stu said nothing in reply to this. He had his own thoughts and feelings on the subject of their friend, the man who had ambushed four of their number while they'd been making a raid and had deprived them of both weapons and needed supplies. He did not hate the man. He feared and respected him. If he ever had the chance he would take him out as quickly as possible from as far away as possible. "I'm gonna gather up my group and start filling them in on the plan," Mark said after a moment. "We'll be ready to move when you give the word." "Right," Stu answered. "We're gonna party hard tonight." ------- Right on schedule, the two groups, divided into ten apiece, made their move. Most of them carried M-16s - they had scored sixteen of the weapons from the EDCCC originally but had lost three to their friend - and those that didn't carried scoped rifles or shotguns. They managed to box in the church building and close with it before the guards in the front and back spotted them. When they were spotted, the reaction by the guards was simply to stand and stare. No alarm was raised, no warning shots were offered. This sealed the fate of the townspeople. Stu took the honor of firing the first shot. He sighted on the front guard from forty yards and squeezed off a single round, striking him in the chest. The guard crumpled to the ground and Stu waved his men forward. From the back of the building Mark, who was much closer to his guard, took him out with a pistol shot to the head. This group did not have to move forward. They were already optimally positioned to cover the rear. Stu's group spread out and found cover across the street from the church, their weapons trained on the doors and windows. When a man stuck his head out the front door to see what the shooting had been about he promptly had a bullet put through it by an M-16 round. The man dropped in a heap and that was when the screaming began inside; a chorus of feminine wails intermixed with the cries of children. The battle did not last very long at all. From the top window of the church, two muzzleflashes erupted as two of the townspeople tried, ineffectively, to drive away their invaders. A brief but intense barrage of automatic weapons fire at the window answered this attempt at defense. The glass exploded, tinkling to the ground below, and a series of holes appeared in the wooden frame of the building. No more shots were fired from that window. At the back of the church three women and one man tried to rush out the back door and flee. They were cut down by hail of bullets before they even cleared the doorway. At the front, a young woman carrying a baby in her hands tried the same thing. She and her child were similarly gunned down, their bodies thumping to the mud. There were no more attempts to escape the church after this. Stu knew that the townspeople had realized that they could neither drive their tormentors away nor escape from them. They would now be setting up to defend against an attempted breach of the building itself. Even as dumb as these people had proven themselves to be they were probably smart enough to have trained every weapon they had on one of the two doors that allowed entry. They would methodically pick off each person as they came through if a frontal assault was attempted. Stu had no intention of wasting either his men or his ammunition that way. "Inside the church!" he yelled loudly, his voice carrying across the rainy street and through the windows. "We are a heavily armed militia group and we have your church completely surrounded by armed men! You cannot escape us! We did not have any wish to harm you. We are just here to take your supplies! Drop your weapons, come out peacefully, and surrender your goods to us and we will leave you in peace! If you do not come out, we will fire tear gas into the building and kill you as you exit! You have one minute to comply with this! One minute!" There was no answer from inside at first. It was only when Stu began to loudly count down from thirty seconds that someone spoke. A hesitant voice yelled out: "How do we know that you won't kill us?" "You don't!" Stu yelled back. "But you know that we will kill you if you don't do as we say! You have twenty seconds left! If we don't start seeing people coming out with their hands in the air by that time, the tear gas goes in! If the tear gas goes in, we will not accept surrenders and you will all die! Nineteen... eighteen... seventeen..." "All right," the voice finally yelled back. "Stop counting! We're coming out!" "Men first! And keep those hands in the air!" Stu reminded them. "Leave your weapons inside! Do not try to run once you get out here or you will be shot!" One by one, the men emerged, hands in the air exactly as Stu had ordered. They were led by the pastor of the church who was, amazingly enough, dressed in his traditional black suit. In all there were eleven adult males, ranging in age from late teens to late sixties. One of them was wounded, suffering from a bullet in the shoulder, undoubtedly taken during the barrage of gunfire at the upper window. "Lie down, face first in the mud over there!" Stu commanded. "Keep your hands out in front of you!" They did as they were told, none of them trying any cute moves. Stu and the rest of them relaxed somewhat once the men were secured. "Now the rest of you!" Stu yelled. "One by one, hands in the air, no weapons! Do it now!" They came out slowly, docilely, marching through the doorway and out onto the muddy lawn. The women, like the men, were of a wide variety of ages, everything from late teens to geriatrics. The largest age group however, was early to late twenties. Some led small, crying children by the hands, whispering encouraging words to them. Others carried smaller children in their arms, holding them tightly. "Oh yeah," the man next to Stu said as they watched. "Look at all that pussy! We're gonna have a good time tonight!" "Shut the fuck up," Stu said mildly, his eyes never leaving the group, keeping a constant lookout for the slightest sign of danger. Once everyone was out of the church, Stu directed the women to sit down on the ground, separate from where the men were lying. They all complied, most of them hugging children to them. The moment they were all seated, Stu gave a hand signal to his group and they suddenly shifted their position, moving to the left, out of the line of fire from the front of the church. They all kneeled down once again, finding cover behind new objects. "Mark!" Stu yelled loudly. "They're out and under control! Move in and secure the building!" "Moving!" came the faint reply from the other side. It took about two minutes before Mark and his group emerged through the front door. "Secure," he told Stu. "And they have a buttload of goodies in there. Canned food, dry food, cigarettes, beer, even hard liquor. It's a motherfuckin' gold mine!" "We'll go through it later," Stu said, standing and waving his men to do the same. He began to walk towards the two groups of captives, relaxing now that they no longer presented a danger. "Good job everyone. That was by the fuckin' book." He looked over the smaller bunch, the men. "Who's in charge?" he asked. "I guess you could say that I am," the pastor announced, looking him in the eye defiantly. "Just take what you want and leave us in peace." "You bet, padre," Stu answered. "But in the meantime, I'd just like to say that you made that way too easy for us. If you would've had a decent defense set up here, we never woulda fucked with you." The pastor said nothing and Stu did not push the issue. "Where are those twist-ties at?" Stu asked his group at large. "Right here, Stu," Harley, a former methamphetamine brewer, announced, holding up a bag of heavy duty zip-ties that they had found in the EDCCC storage room. The cops used them for securing people's arms during mass arrests. "Okay," Stu said. "Let's get a detail formed. Harley, Zipper, Billy, Joe, and Spanky, move the men over to the gas station one by one. Keep a close eye on 'em and waste 'em if they try anything funny. Do them just like we told you earlier; hands and feet." One by one the men were led over to the gas station building under heavy guard. Once inside the former convenience store portion of the station, they were laid down on their stomachs and directed to place their hands behind their backs and their feet against their butts. A zip-tie was then used to bind all four extremities together, making it impossible for the person to move. It took about ten minutes before all eleven were safely hobbled and stored. Once this was accomplished, the group of bikers gathered before the women and children. They held a quiet discussion among themselves as they looked their captives over, gesturing and pointing a lot, laughing to themselves, but talking too softly for the women to hear. Eventually an accord was reached among them. Stu, Mark, and two others stepped forward and began pointing at various members of the group. "All those we just pointed out," Stu said, "I want you to stand up. Leave your children if you've got them with the other women." There was hesitation until Stu fired a shot over their heads. "I mean fucking now!" he screamed menacingly. Slowly the chosen females stood. There were eleven of them in all and the reason for their selection was glaring obvious. They were the youngest and most attractive of the group. They began to shudder in fear as they realized what was in store for them. "Harley, Zipper," Stu ordered, "get 'em in the church. Have 'em sit down and keep 'em under guard. Hands off of them for now." "Right," Harley grinned, looking lewdly at the raid's bounty, his cock already erect in anticipation of what was soon to come. "You heard the man," he yelled at the women. "Get your asses moving. Into the church, right now." Slowly, miserably they marched off to the doorway, the guards flanking them. Several children began to wail as they saw their mothers taken away. "Shut those fuckin' kids up!" Stu barked at the remaining women. They did their best to comply with this command but it was futile. One of the great truths of life is that children will cry when upset and there's not a thing that can be done about it. Stu, realizing this, did not repeat the order. Instead, he ordered his men to start moving the remaining women and the children over to the gas station to be with the men. "Secure 'em the same way," he said. "The kids too?" someone asked. "The kids too," he confirmed. It took the better part of a half an hour to accomplish. Not all of the women went as docilely as the men had, particularly when they felt the children were being mishandled. One of them, an early-thirties babe that had missed the cut of those led into the church by virtue of the fact that she looked like a truck-driver, slapped Mark across the face when he grabbed her four-year-old son roughly by the arm. "You don't need to be so rough!" she said defiantly, standing her ground. "They're just kids!" That was the last thing she ever said. Stu stepped forward a moment later and bashed her squarely in the face with the butt of his rifle. She fell, choking and gagging on her own blood, to the ground. Two more strikes to the forehead quieted her. There was no more rebellion after that. Once they were all securely tied and bound inside the church, Stu, who was smoking a cigarette that Harley had brought out to him, turned to Mark. "You know what to do now." Mark looked at his leader doubtfully. He was looking forward to the night's festivities as much as anyone but he was not at all enthusiastic about his next task. "Are you sure we hafta do it that way?" he asked. "Why can't we just shoot them?" "We don't have enough fuckin' ammo to be wastin' it like that," Stu replied, giving his underling a seething glare. "Do you have a problem doin' it the way I told you?" Mark cowered under Stu's gaze. "No, Stu," he said. "No problem at all. It's just a pain in the ass to find the supplies." "It's a tough job, Markie," Stu said, continuing to glare. "That's why I picked you for it. Now get it done. While you're doing that, I'm gonna take a look around and figure out where to post some guards. If the supplies are as good as you say then we'll stay here for a little while and rest up. And once the job's done, it's party-time." "Right," Mark said, taking a glance at the gas station building. "Party time." He found a five-gallon bucket near the outside of the church. It's sparkling cleanliness in a world in which everything was now covered with mud told Mark that it was what the townspeople had been using to collect their drinking water in. He picked it up and began looking for the next item he would need. Less than a minute of searching led him to a twenty-five foot garden hose that was still attached to the useless faucet outside the church. Using his folding knife, he cut off a six-foot length of it and slung it over his shoulder. Just outside the gas station itself was a Chevy pick-up truck mired to the axles in mud. It would probably still be there when archeologists uncovered this town ten thousand years or so in the future. Mark pried open its gas cap with his knife and then inserted the hose down into the tank. With a few sucks on the other end of the hose, amber gas began to flow. He let it pour into the bucket until it was about three-quarters full. After taking a few deep breaths and bracing himself for what he had to do next, he picked up the bucket, carrying it carefully to avoid spilling any, and carried it inside the gas station store. Lying on the floor, most of them crying or yelling or praying, were 69 men, women, and children, all hog-tied with plastic straps. When he began to pour the gasoline on them, their cries turned to screams of panic. They begged him not to do what he was about to do. They pleaded with him. They cursed at him. Many of them began to vomit uncontrollably. One of them, a child, began to convulse. He tried his best to ignore them. He made sure every person was liberally soaked with the fluid and then he spread the remaining gas over the counters and on the floor. With their deafening cries echoing in his ears, he walked back outside and threw the bucket to the ground. He stood against the wall next to the outside of the door and took a box of waterproof matches from his pocket. His hands were shaking so badly that it took him more than ten tries before he was able to get one of the wooden sticks to light up. When it did, he closed his eyes and, without stopping to consider his actions any further, threw it through the doorway. There was a soft, almost gentle WHUMP and a blast of heat and fire immediately exploded outward from the building. Mark ran away as quick as he could, escaping any burns from the rapidly spreading flames. He could not outrun the screams of those inside however. They were the shrill, high-pitched wails of nearly seventy people dying in sheer agony. They went on for the longest time, for much longer than he would have thought possible. Less than an hour later, while the gas station was still sputtering flames in a few places, the party inside the church was in full swing. Except for those unlucky souls that had been stuck with guard duty, everyone was drunk on the liquor supply that had been found. The women had been stripped of their clothing and handcuffed to the pews. Stu and the others were taking turns raping them in a variety of fashions. Some were forcing the women to blow them, others were forcing themselves into anal openings, others still were performing their acts in the conventional method. All of the women had been beaten to varying degrees, some simply with fists, others with steel-toed boots or gun butts depending upon their level of resistance. Since there were more men then women, most were being raped by several people at the same time. Two of the younger ones had had their handcuffs removed and were being forced to lick each other. All of them had begged to be killed at some point but that was simply not in the cards for the time being. That would be like purposely breaking a favorite toy. Mark simply sat there, chain smoking cigarettes and sipping from a bottle of Wild Turkey that someone had handed him. He didn't feel like partaking in the pleasures of the conquest. He could not get the screams of those dying men, women, and children out of his mind. But after a while, as he drank more and more, his brain began to rationalize what had been done. True, it had been a rather grisly way to go but, in the long run, he had actually been doing those poor bastards a favor, hadn't he? Obviously they were not equipped with what it took to survive in this new reality. Wasn't it better that they be removed relatively quickly instead of suffering through the eventual starvation that they would have faced? Wasn't it the responsibility of the strong to remove the weak? The more he thought about this, the more sense it made. Soon, when about a third of the whiskey bottle was coursing through his veins, he began to get a boner as he watched Turbo and Zipper taking turns fucking one of the younger women up the ass while Stu was forcing her to suck his dick. A smile formed on his face and he stood up, passing his bottle off to a new recipient as he walked over. "Get the fuck outta there, Turbo," he said, grabbing the younger man by the arm and pulling him to the side. "It's my turn." Turbo grumbled a bit but offered no physical protest. "Yeah, Markie!" Stu yelled, giving him a drunken thumbs-up. "Bag this bitch! Show her how we do it downtown!" Mark grinned at Stu as he unbuckled his pants and let them drop. By the time he forced himself into her back door the thoughts of what he had done earlier were nearly forgotten. ------- "Did you and Chrissie have a fight?" Jason asked as they sat on a fallen log after eating their lunch of cold vegetable beef soup. They were in a small clearing in the middle of a thick stand of old growth pine trees. The rain had a hard time falling directly upon them but it had a rather easy time of dripping from the branches above in thick, heavy drops. Their log was located in the zone of least moisture, a zone that they had become intimately familiar with and had learned to expertly locate in any surroundings. Chrissie, the object of this new discussion, was off in the trees relieving her bladder. "A fight?" Brett asked blankly, looking at the fourteen-year-old before him. "Well, yeah," he said. "You haven't talked to each other all day and I saw her crying a few times while we were walking. You haven't been talking a lot either. You're usually teaching us things while we're moving but you haven't done any of that today. Is everything okay?" "Everything's fine," Brett replied. "Or at least as fine as they can be. Things will be back to what passes for normal here pretty soon." "So you're gonna make up with her?" "Make up with her?" "Yeah," he said enthusiastically. "You're like the coolest boyfriend she's ever had. The rest of those guys were all a bunch of dweebs tryin' to impress her. But you're like the real thing, you know?" "Uh... thanks," Brett said carefully. "But I'm not really Chrissie's boyfriend." Jason looked confused. "But you guys were... you know... doing it." Brett fought to keep his expression neutral. It was a battle that he won, just barely. "Doing it?" Jason blushed a little. "Last night," he said, embarrassed. "You... uh... heard us?" "You guys woke me up," he said. "Chrissie's elbow bashed me in the head like five times. You sounded like you were tryin' to be quiet but you weren't doin' a very good job of it. Especially not towards... uh... the end. It kinda grossed me out a little thinkin' that was my sister doing that right next to me, but I got used to it." "Jesus," Brett muttered, about as embarrassed as he'd ever been in his life. Had they really thought that Jason had slept through the whole thing? They really had. 'It's cool though," Jason told him, giving a fairly passable man of the world look. "I mean, what else can you do, right?" He sighed, having to struggle just to meet Jason's eyes. "Look," he said. "What happened last night was... was wrong. I did something that I really shouldn't have done and that I regret now. You don't have to worry. It won't happen again." The reaction that this proclamation produced was not at all what Brett expected. Jason looked downright alarmed by it. "It's okay," he said quickly. "I wasn't complaining or nothin'. You don't have to worry about me. If you want, I'll get out of the lean-to at night until you're done." "What?" "Or I'll build my own. I don't want to get in the way of you guys. I'll give you all the privacy you want. Really." "We won't need any privacy," Brett said. "What happened last night won't happen again. I'd just assume everyone forget about it. You won't have to build your own lean-to or go out into the rain." Jason, if anything, seemed to become even more alarmed. He chewed on his lip for a moment, seeming almost on the verge of tears. Finally, he blurted: "Are you going to leave us then?" "Leave you?" He nodded. "Go off on your own," he said. "Since you and Chrissie aren't... you know?" So that was what was on his mind, Brett realized. Jason thought that if he and Chrissie were not going to sleep together and be boyfriend and girlfriend, that there would be no reason for him to stick around. "Look, Jason," he said seriously. "No matter what happened or happens between Chrissie and I, I'm not going to leave you guys to fend for yourselves. I promised your mother and I'll promise you, I will take care of you as long as I'm able to and as long as you need someone to take care of you. I'm not going to leave you." "Okay," he said softly, but he didn't seem entirely convinced. "But if you and Chrissie ever want to... you know... do it again, you go ahead and do it. Don't worry about me." "I'll keep it in mind," Brett said, letting his head fall into his hands. Chrissie came back a moment later, entering the clearing through a gap in two trees. She did not look at either one of them. She simply unshouldered her rifle and sat back down on a different log. The rest of the lunch break passed in silence. ------- An hour later, at the summit of a steep ridge, Brett, on the point like always, spotted something. He saw a small patch of something orange between the trees about fifty yards in front of them, a color that was very out of place in the green and brown environment of the forest. At this first hint of something unusual he held up his left hand, silently indicating to his two companions to halt in place and keep a sharp eye out. It was probably nothing to worry about but you didn't stay alive in a hostile world by assuming that. Chrissie and Brett, seeing the signal, obeyed it instantly, as he had taught them to do. He dropped to one knee, training his rifle towards the area. He gave two more hand signals to Chrissie and Jason: "Spread out to the sides and cover my flanks". They both trotted about twenty yards in opposite directions, both of them finding fallen trees to use as cover. Had they been under fire, Brett would have covered this move with bursts from his rifle, but since they were not, he simply kept his eyes open and his finger upon the trigger. Nothing jumped out at or attacked them during the move. Once the two kids were in place, Brett took a moment to check their positioning. He was pleased with what he saw. Both of them had placed themselves so well that he had a difficult time even spotting them. Both had their rifles trained outward at forty-five degree angles, covering the sides and allowing him to cover the front. They now had an overlapping field of fire that would allow them to shoot at anything in a 180 degree arc without having to shift position. They really were quick learners. He watched the mysterious orange blot in the trees for nearly two minutes, waiting to see if it would move or not. It did not. Neither did anything else. He raised himself back to his feet and gave a brief whistle, getting the attention of the kids. They looked over at him and he pointed to himself and then forward, giving them the signal that he was going to move up and check things out and that they were to stay back and cover his advance. They both nodded their understanding to him and he began to pick his way forward, moving tree to tree. He made it about twenty yards before the smell hit him. It was the thick, sickly sweet odor of decay, an odor he had smelled a thousand times during his days as a patrol cop. It was the distinctive stink of a dead human body. Not even the rotting corpses of the large animals they had passed smelled quite like that. He continued to move forward until he had a clear view of the orange that he'd seen. He was now able to identify it as one of those bright orange hunting caps that some hunters liked to wear to keep from being mistaken for a deer. It was lying next to the body of a man in blue jeans and a T-shirt. He was sprawled on his back under a tree, his arms and legs splayed out to the sides. He was barefoot. About ten feet away was a smaller human corpse, that of a young teenage boy. Thanks to the constant rain there were no flies about them and there were no ants covering them. But larger animals - rats, raccoons, coyotes, maybe even a bear - had certainly taken their fill. Their faces had been almost completely chewed away, as had large chunks of their arms and legs. Though Brett had seen more than one dead body in his time, these were particularly grisly looking to him. He examined the area around him for a few moments, searching for anything else that did not belong. Seeing nothing, he waved Jason and Chrissie up, giving them the all-clear signal. They came trotting up quickly, their rifles clanking as they moved. "Oh my God," Chrissie cried when they got close. "What is that smell?" "Gross," Jason agreed. They came around the last set of trees and stopped in their tracks as they saw what was on the ground. Both moaned a little in disgust but neither backed away. "Hunters," Brett said, stepping a little closer to the bodies and breathing through his mouth. "Looks like a father and son. They were ambushed by someone." "Ambushed?" Chrissie asked. "How do you know? Maybe they just died." He pointed to the tree right in front of where the father lie. "Brain and blood splatter," he said, pointing out some grayish specks that marred the bark. "This man was shot from behind as he walked up the hill and then he fell backwards onto his back. It looks like the boy was shot almost at the same instant since he didn't try to run away. All of their supplies, their guns, even their shoes are gone. Trust me on this. It was an ambush. Somebody killed them for their supplies." All three of them silently contemplated that for a moment. "Brett?" Chrissie asked softly. "Could that happen to us? I mean, we're probably carrying more than these two were." He looked at her, instinctively wanting to lie to her but knowing that she wouldn't believe him. "That is probably the most likely thing to happen to us," he said. "These guns we're carrying will keep away the casual robber but these packs we're carrying are a magnet for the kind of people who would do this." "Is there anything we can do to stop it?" Jason asked, looking nervously at the forest around them, probably envisioning armed bandits just over the next rise. "We can try to spot them before they spot us," he said. "We can keep alert for danger. People who ambush will usually stalk for a while before they make a move. Other than that," he shook his head sadly, "nothing." They mulled that over for a moment while they stared down at the chewed corpses. Finally Brett said: "Let's get moving out of here. The people who did this are probably long gone, but you never know. They might be nearby." They began to walk again, continuing through the muddy forest. Soon the sight and the smell of the two hunters were behind them. "By the way," Brett said once they were clear, "that was excellent execution by both of you back there when I waved you to the flanks. You both did exactly what you were supposed to do exactly when and how you were supposed to do it. Your cover was so good that even I had a hard time seeing you." "Really?" Jason asked, beaming at the praise. Chrissie, though she seemed pleased by it, said nothing. "Really," he confirmed. "I don't give false compliments, especially not in this world. You two did good, even if it was a false alarm. You keep that kind of thing up and we stand a decent chance of surviving under fire. Always remember that it's usually the people that can keep their heads and respond correctly that survive a combat situation. Panic kills. You two didn't panic, you just did what I told you. I'm proud of both of you." "Thanks, Brett," Jason said, looking between him and Chrissie. "Wasn't that a nice thing to say, sis?" "Yeah," she mumbled, not saying further. Jason let it drop. So did Brett. They marched onward. ------- That night, after the lean-to was built, after the surrounding area was checked for stalkers, and after their simple though satisfying dinner of canned spaghetti, Jason made a big show of yawning and stretching and proclaiming his fatigue. When Brett suggested that maybe he should hit the sack, he immediately took him up on the offer and stripped down. Ten minutes later he was snoring away. Brett reached into his sleeping bag and pulled out the last two cans of Bud. He held one out to Chrissie. "Care to join me?" he asked her. She had been scraping the worst of the mud out of her boots with a stick. She looked up long enough to say, "no thanks" and then went back to what she was doing. Brett put the can he had offered her back where it had been without comment. He considered trying to talk to her but could not think of a thing to say. Chrissie would just have to work it out on her own. He sipped at his beer as he watched the coming of night. Before it was even half gone, Chrissie announced she was going to bed and asked him to keep his eyes forward while she undressed. "Can't have you seeing me naked now, right?" she asked sarcastically. "Right," he answered softly, with a sigh. He kept his eyes forward and listened to the maddening sound of her shucking her wet clothes. Her smell, that wet, feral odor of musk and sweat, was even stronger than it had been the previous night. It assaulted his nostrils, kicking his libido into overdrive. The knowledge that she would welcome him turning around to look, that she would welcome his touch upon her, did not help. He began to wonder just how long he would be able to keep up his vow not to touch her. He wondered if it was worthwhile to even try. No, he told himself firmly. You have to be strong. Sleeping with Chrissie was wrong. He did not turn around. When she was done undressing she climbed into her sleeping bag and covered up. When night finally wiped out the last of the light he made another one of his trips out into the rain to relieve the aching pressure that had built up. It didn't do much good. As he lay next to Chrissie later, listening to her breathing, remembering how good she had felt in his arms, he stiffened up once again. He did his best to ignore it and finally, after more than an hour, sleep was able to take him. ------- The month of October in the Sierra Nevada Mountains signals more than just the start of deer hunting season. It is also the harvest month for the many illegal marijuana plantations that dotted the heavily wooded, difficult to access portions of the mountains. This was the reason that Dave Madison and Matt Horn had been spared when the impact had occurred. Instead of being in their trailer park outside of Rocklin, where they surely would have been drowned by the water surge that took the valley, they had been at an elevation of 3500 feet in a thickly wooded section of the mountains, preparing the half acre of plants they had raised for picking the following week. Unfortunately the two men had been prepared only to stay overnight and had brought only enough supplies to sustain them for that length of time. After the impact they had made a feeble attempt to ration their holdings but had been unable to stretch them more than three days. They had been sitting under a tree, on the verge of starvation, when the hunter and his son had walked by them two days before, not even seeing them so intent were they on ascending the hill they'd been climbing. Though Dave and Matt had both been in numerous fistfights in their lives, though both had done some time in the county jail from time to time, neither had ever robbed anyone or killed anyone. They would have been genuinely appalled had anyone suggested to them that they would one day kill for food. But that had been before. Things were different now. They had held a quick discussion with very little argument and with a great deal of rationalization in it. Both of them, as was customary in the mountains, were armed with pistols. They had gotten up and, utilizing the last of their strength reserves, began to move through the forest behind the two hunters. They'd moved tree to tree, making short dashes from one place to another, steadily closing the gap between themselves and the hunters without alerting them. They'd known that they would have to get very near in order to make their plan effective. Pistols were notoriously inaccurate at much more than ten yards. It was when their quarry stopped for a moment to catch their breath before climbing the last section of hill that the two men managed to get near enough to act. They crept slowly, carefully forward the last few feet, their guns out and ready to fire at the first sign of detection. But the hunters remained oblivious, the father saying something to his son that could not be heard. They were able to get within fifteen feet before Dave, who was tacitly in charge of this operation, signaled that it was time. He took careful aim on the father with his .357 magnum, putting the sights right on the back of his head. Dave was not an expert shot by any means but he had done a fair amount of shooting at cans and signs and other inanimate objects during his many trips to the mountains in the past. When he pulled the trigger the bullet went where he wanted it, dropping the older man instantly to the mud. Less than a second later, while the kid was still turning to see what had happened, Matt pumped three rounds into his chest with his 9mm. They had been disappointed to find that the only food the hunters had had on them had been a few energy bars and a bag of trail mix. It was hardly enough to sustain them for more than a day or two. Had this been the only bounty they'd taken from the operation they would have probably felt guilty for murdering two people for it. But the thick, winter jackets that the two had had on almost made up for the lack of food, as did the fine hunting rifles that they'd carried. They had stripped the bodies of everything usable and had sat right there eating the bulk of the food. Now, less than two miles from where they'd killed the first time, they were reasonably warm and fairly well armed but once again on the verge of starvation. Their last rations had been consumed more than twenty-four hours before. They were resting with their backs against a tree, both feeling the heaviness in their stomachs that went with extreme hunger, when movement below them caught their eyes. Both stiffened up, watching as three people, a man and two teenage children, passed less than a hundred yards from them. All were carrying assault rifles and they were walking in what appeared to be a military formation. They all three had large packs and sleeping bags upon their backs and they did not appear to be grappling with food deprivation. "Did you see that?" Dave whispered to Matt, his mouth actually drooling. "I bet they had food in those packs." "Yeah," Matt said, drooling himself, "but did you see those guns they was carrying? Those are fuckin' M-16s." "Let's follow 'em," Dave said, getting to his feet. "We need to get those packs." "There's three of 'em," Matt protested. "That's three people with combat rifles. We're only two with hunting rifles." This argument did not carry as much weight as it would have with full stomachs. "What do we got to lose?" Dave asked. "If we don't get some food pretty soon, we're gonna die anyway. Maybe they'll drop their guard. They have to rest sometime, don't they?" Dave thought this over for a second and found himself swayed. "Yeah," he said, standing. "I guess you're right. Let's go." They kept to higher ground as they stalked their new prey, moving, as with the two hunters, tree to tree, steadily closing the gap. They kept that gap a little larger with these three however and they kept themselves more carefully concealed as they moved in. This group was considerably more alert than the hunters had been. The one in the lead, the older man, made a point of turning around every fifty feet or so to check their rear. It didn't matter too much though. They, the stalkers, were now equipped with weapons capable of hitting targets from a much greater range. "When they stop," Dave whispered at one point, "I'll bag the big one and you bag the boy." "What about the girl?" Matt wanted to know. Dave grinned. "We'll try to take her alive if we can. Maybe we can have a little fun with her after we eat." Matt returned the grin. "Yeah baby," he said, imitating Austin Powers. ------- Brett had had this feeling before. It was a prickly sensation on the back of his neck, a quickening of the pulse, a feeling of being watched. He sensed something up on the ridges above them, something hostile. It was an instinctive knowledge, born from years of working in hostile situations, and something that he had long since learned to trust. Had he been asked, he would have attributed this instinct to some sort of extra-sensory perception, a weak psychic ability that some people learned to utilize as an early warning system of danger. In fact, it was no such thing. It was merely his subconscious processing a variety of tiny inputs from his normal senses, inputs too weak for him to notice individually. His auditory sense was the first to pick up a signal. Out of the thousands of sounds that were being processed every second by his brain, one pattern did not belong. Though Brett did not consciously hear the soft breaking of wet twigs, or the gentle sucking of boots coming free of mud, or the occasional scraping of a hand against tree bark from above and behind, he did hear them. And though he did not consciously smell a wet odor of sour sweat drifting on the breeze, a few molecules of this scent did reach his olfactory nerve, which was able to identify the fact that it belonged to neither Chrissie, Jason, nor himself. His eyes, when he looked back for routine checks of their rear, did not consciously see, among the thousands of other things, a few broken branches or fresh indentations in the mud where feet had recently trod but his brain did recognize that something was just a little different. His brain would have dismissed any one of these things individually. But when they were all added together in the subconscious, warning bells began to go off. The sympathetic nervous system activated the adrenal glands, dumping fresh adrenaline into the blood stream. As the inputs grew stronger and more constant, the subconscious began to yell at the conscious that something was wrong. Brett swallowed forcefully when the sensation became too much for him to dismiss as nerves. He did not break stride or make any indication that he was nervous but his senses were now on full red alert status. He glanced at Chrissie and Jason with his peripheral vision, seeing that they were keeping tightly in formation. That was good. Trouble was coming soon and he hoped they would react correctly to it. He gripped his rifle a little tighter and began to scan the area around them, looking for favorable cover that would protect them from fire coming from above. He found it less than a minute later. A group of three tall pine trees had been blown down, probably in the hurricane winds that had followed the initial impact. They lay on the ground like fallen soldiers, their root systems sticking up into the air in an interwoven pattern of mud and wood. If they could get behind those trees the trunks would provide cover and the roots would provide concealment. But would they be able to get there in time if whatever was triggering his instincts turned out to be hostile? He didn't know, but he was about to find out. "Chrissie, Jason," he barked when they were almost upon the trees. "Behind those trees on the left! Now!" He waved his gun towards them. They both hesitated for the briefest of instants, probably more out of surprise than fear. It could have been a lethal mistake but this time they were allowed to get away with it. "Go, goddammit!" Brett yelled, "Go!" That got them into gear. They began running as fast as they could, their ankles and knees rising and falling, splattering mud. Within a second or two they rushed past him. "Get under cover!" he commanded, beginning to run himself. Up on the ridge, Dave and Matt saw them break and run, heard Brett's frantic shouts. "They know we're here," Dave told Matt. "Get them! Don't let them get away!" Both men raised their rifles and tried to sight in but their targets were now moving rapidly across their view, making a precision shot impossible. They tried their best anyhow, both pulling off shots at the running figures. The battle began. The bullets traveled faster than the sound of the exploding gunpowder. Brett heard something whiz over his shoulder just as Chrissie, who was in the lead, rounded the roots and dove behind the tree. An instant later bark exploded from the tree, sending chips through the air. Just to the right of this, another shot buried in the mud. Then came the sound of the shots. Two rifle blasts echoed through the air around them. Jason screamed a little but kept moving. He followed his sister around the tree and dove to the ground. Brett was right behind them. Just as he pulled himself around, another shot impacted into a standing tree five yards in front of him. It was followed by the sound of another shot. He threw himself down into the mud behind the logs, scooting as close to it as he could. "Somebody's shooting at us!" Chrissie yelled from her position. She sounded greatly offended by this. "No shit!" Brett yelled back. "Return fire at them! Shoot and then duck! Don't let them close with us!" Brett raised his head up over the log, training his rifle up towards the hill where the shots had come from. He saw nothing but forest, trees, and mud but he knew that at least two armed people were up there. He fired a series of shots across the landscape, the M-16 bucking against his shoulder, the expended casings flying out behind him. To his left, Chrissie and Jason both did the same. Up on the hill, Matt and Dave were forced to dive behind bushes in terror as muzzleflashes winked up at them and bullets began to plink into the mud all around them. "Fuck me!" Dave cried in terror, realizing belatedly that he and his companion were now trapped. There was no way for them to get out of the field of fire without exposing themselves. "Shoot!" he yelled at Matt. "Shoot them or they're gonna kill us!" Below, Brett ordered the kids to hold their fire. They each squeezed off one more round and then ceased. "Now get down!" he shouted, following his own advice even as it left his lips. They put their heads down and an instant later, two shots slammed into the log right on the other side of them. "Move down that way," he told them, pointing further down the log. "Shoot and then cover! Don't fire from the same place twice!" While they crawled along the muddy ground to their new positions, Brett eased three feet to the right and then popped up again. He fired three more shots into the hillside, again not seeing a target but wanting to keep them pinned down. He ducked back down just as Jason popped up twelve feet to the left of him. Jason, his face with an absolute look of terror upon it, unleashed five rounds up the hill before diving back to the mud. The moment he was down, Chrissie popped up from the far end of the log and fired four shots. Things then happened very quickly. As soon as Chrissie was back under cover, Brett raised up again, preparing to fire another quick burst. But just as he did so, he saw a muzzle flash from behind a small mound of earth with bushes atop it. One of their attackers had fired at the spot where Chrissie had just been. In doing so, he had given away his position. Worse still, for him anyway, he was only behind concealment, which just hid a person, instead of cover, which hid and protected. Brett quickly sighted on the bush from which the flash had emitted and pulled the trigger five times in less than two seconds. Just as he ducked his head back down he saw a body come rolling down the hill, a rifle trailing after it. At that instant, another muzzle flash erupted from yet another bush ten feet further up the hill. The bullet slammed into the log less than six inches above Brett's head, peeling a large sliver of wood off and throwing it over the top of him. Specks of wood and mud struck him in the face, stinging his eyes. A fury of rifle shots answered this as Chrissie and Jason unleashed a barrage at the spot where the shot had come from. "We got him!" Jason yelled triumphantly. "We got him, Chrissie!" "He's down, Brett!" she answered back gleefully. "We got him!" Brett, having poked his head back up, saw that they were right. Another rifle and another body was sliding down the hillside. It fetched up against a rock and lie still. He then looked at the two kids, seeing that they were staring at the spot, mesmerized by what they had done. "Get the fuck back down!" he screamed at them. "There might be more out there!" He fired another three rounds up the hill as soon as these words were out of his mouth. Jason and Chrissie, heeding his warning, both hit the dirt once again. Brett slid about five feet to his left, switching his rifle to automatic fire as he did so. It was time to bug the hell out of Dodge. "Regroup," he yelled at them. "Form up on me! Keep low!" He put his head up once more and squeezed the trigger twice, sending two short bursts upward before diving back down. No fire answered this. He allowed himself to be slightly encouraged by this. He had only heard two rifles during the battle and two people were down. But that did not mean that there was not another person lying in wait up there. He began to slide to the left, meeting the two kids near the center of the log. He raised up and fired another burst, again receiving no answering fire. He looked at his two companions. "Is everyone okay?" he asked them. "Yeah," Chrissie said, nodding rapidly. Her eyes were bright and wide with terror, the pupils so dilated that they almost completely erased the blue surrounding them. Her hands gripped her rifle tight enough to make her knuckles white. "I'm okay," Jason echoed, breathing rapidly and fidgeting. "We shot that guy, Brett! We fuckin' shot him!" "Yeah," Brett agreed. "You did good. We'll talk about it later, after we're the hell out of here. I think there was only two but I'm not sure, so we're going to exit this place as if we were under fire, okay?" They both nodded. "Jason, you go first. Chrissie and I will give you covering fire while you move. Head for that small hill over there about twenty yards past these trees. Run as fast as you can without tripping or falling. Zigzag as you go but do it irregularly, without a pattern, understand?" "Yeah," he said, looking where Brett was pointing. "I think so." "Do you think so, or do you know so?" He took a deep breath. "I know so," he said. "Good. Once you're over there, find a firing position. When Chrissie comes across, both of us will cover her. Use short bursts on automatic. Short bursts. Don't waste your ammo. We don't have a whole hell of a lot of it. Once you two are both over there, spread out and give me covering fire when I come over. Got it?" "Yeah," they both agreed. "Then let's do it." They did it, the entire operation taking less than two minutes to accomplish. Though there was no one else left alive to oppose their transit, it was unlikely that anyone would have been able to hit them even if there had been. It was an almost textbook retreat under fire. Once they were behind the dirt mound, Brett popped out his expended magazine and let it fall to the dirt. He reloaded his rifle with a fresh one. He then directed the two kids to do the same, even though they both had a few more rounds in their clips. They saved their partially emptied clips as an emergency reserve. "Now," Brett directed, his eyes never wavering from the direction from which they'd come, "we're going to move down this hill and over to that grove of trees by the mudflow as fast as we can. Don't stop for anything. Keep up the zigzag pattern and don't worry about keeping in formation. Once we're over there, find the best cover that you can and pull yourself into it. We'll hold there for a while and keep an eye out. Are you ready?" They told him they were ready. "Then let's do it. Go!" They continued to leapfrog from one place to another for the next two hours. They dashed from one area of cover to the next, spreading out and holding once they got there to watch for followers. Once they were reasonably certain that they were alone and unobserved, they moved on. Finally, more than an hour after their traditional lunch break, Brett allowed them to stop. "If there was anybody back there," he said, sitting down on a log, "then we've lost them." For the first time in hours he set his rifle down and relaxed. His nerve endings were all tingling with adrenaline overload and a sudden wave of fatigue, common following combat situations, washed over him. Chrissie and Jason, both equally exhausted despite their youth, slumped down next to him. He looked at them affectionately, these two children of a screaming liberal Berkeley professor and his environmentalist wife. They had done good. He could not remember ever being as proud of someone as he was of those two at that moment. "We're alive right now," he said matter-of-factly, "because of you two." They looked at him questioningly. "You guys were bad-ass," he said. "You did everything just right. You didn't panic, you didn't falter. If you hadn't of helped me fight those guys off, they would've nailed us. That was some good teamwork back there. We fuckin' kicked ass!" "Yeah," Jason said, picking up the giddiness. He raised his rifle in the air in triumph. "We fuckin' kicked ass!" "Hell yeah," Brett said, laughing now that the tension was relieved. He looked at Chrissie. She was trembling a little, her mind seemingly on overload. She was not smiling. "What do you say, Chrissie?" he asked her. "Did we kick some ass today, or what?" "Yeah," she said, unenthusiastically. "We kicked ass." "No, no, no," Brett said, shaking his head strenuously. He moved over next to her and put his arm around her companionably, pulling her against him. "You take away from the victory when you say it like that. What you mean is that we kicked some fuckin' ass! Right?" "Right," she said, the hint of a smile marring her face. "Then say it, goddammit," he chided, rubbing his hand up and down her arm. "Are we a team or aren't we?" "Yeah," Jason agreed, pushing at her legs. "Say it." The smile blossomed to full. She shook off his arm and stood up. She raised her rifle above her head. "We kicked some fuckin' ass!" she yelled happily, loud enough to echo off the nearest cliff. ------- Brett allowed them double rations for lunch in celebration of their victory. They ate greedily, their stomachs swelling in a pleasantly uncomfortable way. Afterwards, instead of moving off right away like they usually did, they continued leaning against the log, their feet stretched out before them. "I still can't believe I actually shot someone," Chrissie said reflectively. "I mean, it was like the most intense thing that ever happened to me when it was happening, but now that its over, it seems like it was a dream or something. Something that happened to someone else." "Yeah," Jason agreed. "I keep thinking about it like it was a video game I'd played or something. It's like they weren't really shooting real bullets at us and we weren't shooting real bullets at them. It's like they weren't even real people. But then when I think about it a little more and remember that they were real, and that they were trying to kill us, I get all freaked out." "Understandable," Brett said, taking a sip from his canteen. "Sometimes it doesn't seem real to me either. When I shot those guys that killed your parents, it was the same way. I would find myself wondering at times if that had really happened at all. I think it's because you're a different person when you're in a combat situation like that." "A different person?" Chrissie asked. "Uh huh," he said. "You're in a completely different mode. You get pumped up with adrenaline and your mind starts to speed up. When this happens you either panic and go rushing off blindly, usually right into trouble, or you start to make instant decisions that are geared towards the most basic need: to stay alive. You two were in that category. You didn't panic. You were obviously scared to death but you did everything you were supposed to do. You moved fast, you listened to me and did what I told you to do and you shot back well enough to kill that fuck that was trying to kill us. But the thing is, after everything is over and done with and your body goes back to a normal mode, it gives you the feelings that you're experiencing now. You feel like it wasn't really you that did those things because you never imagined yourself doing them. Or if you do accept that it was you that did it, you feel like it wasn't as serious of a situation as it really was." "That's trippy," Jason said. "Yeah," Chrissie agreed. "Well, trippy or not," Brett told them, "you two are now official combat veterans. Your cherries have been popped, as we used to say back in the 3rd ACR." Chrissie started to giggle. "Gee, Jase," she said, elbowing him in the side, "bet you never thought you'd lose your cherry that way, huh?" Jason managed to look amused, offended, and embarrassed all at the same time. "Shut up, Chris," he barked, pushing her. Brett smiled as he watched this exchange. Though the world had forced his two friends into a brutal adulthood much earlier then they were meant to be thrust into it, for just a moment he was able to catch a glimpse of the kids that they had once been. ------- "I'm glad you're talking to me again," Brett told Chrissie that night as they shared their customary fellowship after Jason's departure to dreamland. There was still a little bit of light left, just enough to make out the silhouettes of the trees around them, but it was fading fast. "I'm sorry for the way I acted," she said softly. She was sitting next to him on the ground, hugging her knees to her chest. She did not look at him as she spoke. "I was being kind of a bitch I guess." "No," he said, shaking his head. "You weren't. I did something that hurt you and you were acting the way a woman does when she's hurt. You don't have to apologize to me. It's me that should apologize to you for sleeping with you and then rejecting you the next morning. I'm not the kind of person that does that, you know." "You had your reasons," she said. "I understand. I didn't at first but after what happened today... well... I think I can face just about anything after that. It seemed like being mad at you and not talking to you after you saved our lives was just... petty." "You saved your own lives. I just told you how to do it." She dismissed this with a wave of her hand. "You know what I mean," she said. "We wouldn't have been able to do that without you. We wouldn't have even known those guys were there in the first place if it wasn't for you. How did you know?" He shrugged, leaning over and reaching into his sleeping bag. He bypassed the one remaining can of beer and instead pulled out the opened bottle of Jack Daniels. "Something just told me," he said, unscrewing the lid and placing it carefully in his lap. "I just started to get a feeling that something was wrong and that someone was up on the hill above us. I don't know how I knew, I just did." "That's creepy," she said, shivering a little at the thought. He tipped the bottle back and swallowed down a healthy shot. Like before, it made his eyes water and his throat constrict but warmth began to spread through his body almost instantly. "It's not really all that unusual though," he told her. "I used to get the same feelings at times when I worked patrol. I'd be in a house and I'd just know that someone was hiding in one of the bedrooms. Or I'd walk up to a car on a vehicle stop and I'd just know that they had a gun or a knife or some rock hidden in it. And it wasn't just me either. Most cops that worked patrol for a while were able to do that. It's just some kind of instinct." He took one more drink and then offered her the bottle. "Thanks," she said, taking it after a moment's hesitation. She sniffed at it carefully and then put it to her lips, taking a tentative sip. She made a sour face. "Yuck," she said. "This stuff is horrid." "I agree," he said. "I can't understand why people paid twenty bucks a bottle for that shit. But you kinda get used to it after a few shots. Take a big drink and swallow it as fast as you can, before you have a chance to really taste it. It still tastes like shit but believe me, the warmth it gives you is worth it." She looked at the bottle doubtfully for a moment and then did as he suggested. She shuddered for a moment as her body tried to reject it and then she began to cough. "Gross," she choked, wiping at her watering eyes. "I almost barfed!" "But how do you feel now?" She wiped her eyes one more time and then paused, as if getting in touch with her biorhythms. "Actually," she said, "I do feel kind of warm now." "Try another shot," he suggested. "Get real warm." She giggled a little. "Are you trying to get me drunk?" "Maybe I am," he said, sliding closer to her, until their legs touched. "Maybe you deserve to get drunk after what happened today. I sure feel like I do and I hate to drink alone." "What if you corrupt me?" she asked teasingly, letting her body lean a little closer to him. "I'll tell you something, Chrissie," he replied, turning her face to his and looking in her eyes. "We live in a corrupt world now. If that little shoot-out we had this morning taught me anything, it taught me that. It seems that we might just have to change our definition of what that word actually means now. If you're woman enough to blow some pukebag away with a fuckin' M-16, then you're certainly woman enough to down some whiskey afterward, aren't you? If Jason were awake I'd give him a couple shots too. I never would have dreamed of giving booze to a teenager before all this shit happened, but I never would have thought that I'd need to rely on two teenagers to back me up in a firefight either. So drink up, if you're woman enough, that is." She took a huge swallow of the whiskey, hardly flinching this time. She handed the bottle back to him. "I'm woman enough," she said. "For anything that you want to throw at me." "I'm glad to hear that," he said, downing one more shot himself. He picked up the cap and put it back on the bottle and then tossed the bottle itself in the general direction of his sleeping bag. He put his hands to the side of her face and slowly pulled her head towards his. "You are a woman now," he told her softly. "Yess," she breathed, as his lips touched hers. She tasted strongly of the whiskey she had just swallowed as his tongue slowly slipped into her mouth. He sucked at it gently, drawing it from her mouth into his own, swirling it against his. She put her arms around his back, pulling him to her, pressing herself into him. He relished the contact, relished the feel of her soft curves beneath her wet clothing. The guilt he had experienced the last time he had done this was gone. "Mmmm," she hummed, pulling her mouth briefly from his. "You're a great kisser." "Thank you," he said, pecking at her lips again, letting his own arms encircle her waist. "Are you sure that you really want to do this?" she asked him, looking in his eyes, her expression wanting but also a little worried. She did not want to be hurt again like she had been the first time. "I've never been more sure of anything," he replied with complete honesty. "I want you very badly, Chrissie. I dream about you at night." "I dream about you too," she said. "No one has ever made me feel like you do when..." she trailed off. "When what?" he asked, giving her top lip a soft suck, making it swell. "When you touch me," she said. "Would you like me to touch you again?" "Yes. Touch me everywhere." Their lips came back together in a passionate kiss, their tongues intertwining once again. It was not a gentle kiss that they shared but a lustful one; one designed to heat them up. It did its job admirably. Brett's erection began to push painfully against the front of his pants. Chrissie let her hands drop down to his ass where she began to knead his cloth-covered cheeks with her fingers. He broke the kiss and put his lips to her neck, biting and sucking on the skin. "Let's get undressed and get in the sleeping bags," she panted into his ear as she felt his mouth upon her. "I've got a better idea," he said against her neck. "Huh?" He stood, holding out his hand to her. "Come with me. I'll show you something I found when I was checking out the area." "You mean, go out in the rain?" she asked, although she did not hesitate to take the offered hand and stand up. "Just for a minute. You'll see." He led her out of the lean-to and into the almost-night. There was just enough light left for him to make out the proper direction. They moved in between trees and over several piles of fallen branches. "Brett, where are we going?" Chrissie asked. "Why didn't we just get into bed?" "Jason heard us the other night," he told her. "We woke him up." "We did?" she said, mortified at the thought. "Yes, or, more accurately, he felt us. He told me that your elbow bashed him in the head a few times." "Oh my Gawd! Did he tell you that?" "He did. But don't worry. He's cool with it. In any case, I thought that maybe a little more privacy was in order. And fortunately, I found... where the hell is it now?" He looked at the confusing array of shapes and shadows that surrounded them. "Damn I wish we had a flashlight... oh... there it is. This way." He headed for a black shape that was just a little too straight and even to have been caused by Mother Nature. Chrissie followed dutifully behind him. "What is it?" she asked. "It's a genuine, American-made, Ford Taurus that got washed down from the road up there," he told her, stumbling his way closer. "A car?" "Correct," he confirmed, reaching out and finally touching cold, wet metal. "I found it while you were making camp. I didn't think you could drive something like this out this far into the woods, even before the comet, but somebody did. You ever done it in a car before?" She began to laugh. "Except for the other night," she told him, "that's the only place I ever have done it." "I see," he said, laughing with her. "Then maybe you can show me the way. It's been quite a while since I've had the pleasure." He opened up the back door of the four-door car and swung it open. It took a little effort since the vehicle was resting at a twenty-degree angle, it's trunk against a tree, the hood the highest point. He held it for Chrissie. "After you, my lady," he told her. She didn't move right away. "There's nothing in there, is there?" she asked, obviously thinking more about somebody than something. "I checked it for supplies when I found it," Brett told her comfortingly. "There was nothing we could use in it but there were no people or critters either. It's empty." That convinced her. She ducked under his arm and climbed into the back seat, scooting over towards the far door. Brett followed her in, allowing the door to shut behind him. With the upward tilt of the car it was actually quite comfortable to sit in since they were naturally reclined. The rain pattered noisily on the roof above them, adding a soothing background noise. The smell was a bit musty, as if the previous owner had not been very fastidious with cleaning, but it was not overpowering. Most important, it was dry; the first completely dry place they had been in quite some time. "All we need now is some music," Chrissie said, stretching out a bit and pulling herself next to him. "I checked on that earlier," he replied, putting his arm around her. "The battery is still good but the keys are gone. And despite my many talents, hot-wiring an ignition is not one of them." "Have you been planning this the whole time?" she asked, mock indignation in her tone. "Who, me?" he asked innocently. "We're gonna have to get shot at more often if this is the kind of effect that it has on you." He pulled her against him, forcing her to twist a little in her seat. "Be careful what you wish for," he told her, kissing her on the mouth before she could answer him. It did not take them very long to get heated back up. Within a minute of their lips touching, both were panting with lust and letting their hands touch forbidden places. Brett reached under her shirts, pushing across the soft skin of her stomach and forcing his way into her bra from below. He cupped her bare breasts, feeling the nipples harden into points against his palms. Chrissie reached down between them and unbuckled his belt, ripping his pants open once they were free. She reached into his pants where she gripped his hardness with her rough hand, squeezing and releasing it almost painfully. "I can't wait to have this inside me," she groaned into his mouth. "And it can't wait to be there," he returned, flicking at her nipples with his thumbs. He pulled his hands from beneath her shirts and then began to take them off, continuing to kiss her as he did so. Though he couldn't see very well in the darkness, he memorized the shape and feel of her breasts once they were bared. He ran his hands over them, squeezing softly, kneading them, pushing them together. Chrissie hummed softly as he did this. "I like it when you play with my boobies," she told him, kissing at his neck now. He pushed her back onto the seat and then scooted himself backward just a tad before leaning down and taking her left nipple into his mouth. He let his tongue slide all around it, feeling the little ridges and bumps that marred its surface, tasting every square millimeter. He sucked it until she began to moan and run her fingers through his matted hair and then he switched to the other one. It wasn't long before both tired of foreplay. "Let's get undressed," Brett said, pulling himself free of her. "Yeah," she agreed, reaching down for her boots. They shed their clothes in record time, throwing each piece over the seat in front of them, forming an untidy pile of shirts, socks, pants, underwear, and holstered guns. Since neither of them had been able to bathe in recent memory, the smell in the enclosed car was very strong and thick and not, in the strictest sense of the word, terribly pleasant to inhale. Neither one cared however. The moment they were naked they reached for each other, their lips once again closing into a passionate exchange of tongues and saliva. Brett ran his hands up and down the smooth skin of Chrissie's back as he held her to him. She rubbed her bare thighs against his, her hands dropping down once again to grasp his turgid erection. "Fuck me now," she told him, nipping at his bottom lip with her teeth. "Put it in me and fuck me!" "Come up here," he said, pulling at her by the armpits (which had developed more than a little hair over the past week and a half), dragging her onto his lap. She swung her legs over the top of his, straddling his thighs and inching forward until her bare stomach was touching his. Her crotch pushed towards his straining member and he felt warm wetness and coarse hair. She began to undulate back and forth, smearing her juices on him. He put his hands on her ass and pulled upward a little, forcing her to raise up. "Put it in," he told her. "I've never done that before," she panted. "It's time to learn," he replied. "Grab it and put it inside." She reached down between their bodies and took hold of him again, her hands smearing more of her juices over the head and the shaft. She moved it back and forth for a moment, trying to line it up just right, rubbing the head against her folds as she did so. Brett groaned at the sensation and pulled on her ass, trying to force her down upon him. The head slipped inside of her at last and, with a gentle tug on his part and a gentle push on her part, she sank down, pulling the rest of him in. Though he had experienced the exquisite tightness of her before, it still came as an altogether pleasant surprise to feel her clutching at him, engulfing him. Both sighed as the penetration occurred, as their crotches joined at the hairs. He began to thrust upward, grinding himself against her body, pushing on the nerve channels that gave her pleasure. They kissed each other hotly as they fucked, his hands squeezing the cheeks of her ass, her hands scratching at his back. "Oh God, it feels so good," she breathed, moving her lips to his neck once again. "Yeah," he panted back, thrusting upward with more force, squeezing her ass together at the top of each stroke. Where their first coupling had been gentle and hesitant, this one was wild and forceful. They began to thrust faster, with more power, grunting and groaning, licking and biting. He dropped his head down to her breasts again and buried his face between them, tonguing the tangy skin, sucking it into his mouth. She put her hands on his shoulders and used them as leverage to push and pull herself up and down. They started to sweat, their bodies sliding together on a film of sticky perspiration. Brett reached down to her crotch and found her clit, which was swollen and wet, a firm little nubbin just begging to be touched. He began to rub it with a finger, using a firm circular motion. Chrissie went immediately and completely wild at the contact. "Oh Godd," she moaned, "ohhhh, ohhhh, yessss!" "You like that?" he panted into her ear. "Yes, yes! Keep doing that!" "Are you going to come all over me?" "Yesssss!" she screamed, her thrusts speeding up, her hands pushing painfully down onto his shoulders. "Do it, Chrissie," he told her, increasing the pressure and thrusting up into each of her downthrusts. "Come on me, baby, come on me!" "Ohhhhhhhhh," she whined, slamming up and down so hard now that Brett began to fear she might dislodge the car from its resting place and send it further down the hill. She arched her back and stiffened up, her teeth biting into his shoulder. "Goddddd!" Her spasms went on for the better part of a minute and, with them, her chasm gripped and squeezed spastically on his cock. He leaned forward and took over the burden of thrusting from her, putting his hands to her waist and holding her in one place while he raised his hips up and down. He felt his own orgasm straining to be released and he fought it down, not wanting this wild ride to end. As soon as Chrissie's orgasm passed he began whispering in her ear again, trying to drive her towards another one. He continued to move himself upward and downward, rotating and grinding as he thrust. It didn't take very long before she began to pant and moan once more. This time, when she was at the height of her spasms, as her teeth buried themselves into the flesh of his shoulder, he let himself go. Now it was his hips that were rising and falling spastically, his lips that were moaning out uncontrollable pleasure. "Oh yesss," she cried from the throes of her own pleasure. "Come in me, come in me, come in meeeeeeee!" When the peak hit him he thrust upward hard enough to bash her head into the roof of the car. Undaunted, he continued to drive into her as his sperm blasted out of his body and into hers. She held onto him tightly as she was bucked up and down like a woman on a mechanical bull. Finally, after an eternity, the spasms died down, with it, his thrusts. They slumped against each other, both dripping sweat, both breathing heavy from the exertion. "That was totally awesome," Chrissie said when she was capable of speech. "Totally awesome?" he said, kissing her sweaty forehead. "Now just partially awesome, huh?" "Totally," she giggled, holding him tightly. They stayed like that for a while, just holding each other, his penis shrinking within her but remaining nestled in her folds. The rain continued to patter on the roof of the car. "So what happens now?" Chrissie asked him. "Between us, I mean?" "What happens now," he said, "is that we live life one day at a time. This is the kind of world where you have to do things that way, wouldn't you say?" "So you're not going to tell me it's all over between us in the morning, that it was all wrong what we did?" "No," he told her. "I don't think that it is wrong anymore. We used to have laws against doing what I just did but those laws, as much as I used to agree with them, were passed for a world where people didn't try to kill other people for the food they carried, where you didn't have to wonder if you were going to be alive the next day. That was a world where people worried about retirement plans and whether or not there would be Social Security when they got old enough to need it. This isn't that world anymore. And while I like to think that some of our old morals are going to survive, I've already determined that a lot of them aren't. There are certain morals that we simply don't have the luxury of embracing anymore." "And sleeping with me is one of them?" she asked, half-seriously. "As far as I'm concerned," he said. "Like I told you earlier, you're a woman now. You proved that today quite nicely. A woman can make her own decisions. While we're on this little journey of ours, I'll be proud to share a sleeping bag with you, if you'll have me." "Oh I'll have you all right," she told him, grinding herself a little atop him. "I'll have you every night if I can get it." He kissed her. "You won't get any arguments from me there," he said. They left the car a few minutes later, not bothering to dress themselves, donning only their boots to keep from getting their feet muddy. They carried their clothes in their hands as Brett led them slowly and carefully back to the lean-to, relying only on his sense of direction to find it. They discovered that Jason was awake when they got back. "Where were you guys at?" he asked, his voice a little nervous. "I woke up and you were gone." "Sorry," Brett said. "We went for a walk. We didn't think that you would wake up or we would've told you." "You went for a walk in the dark?" he asked incredulously, and quite naively. "Why would you do that?" "Just because," Chrissie barked impatiently at him in her older sister tone. "Don't worry about it." "We'll let you know if we ever decide to do that again," Brett said, feeling guilty for scaring Jason that way. "I'm sorry if we scared you." "I wasn't scared," he said quickly. "I was just wondering where you went. It's no big deal." Jason seemed to have finally figured out what was up between the two of them. He asked no more questions of them, not even when he heard them struggling to zip their two sleeping bags into one large one. "Good night, you guys," he said, when he heard them crawling in. "Good night," they both replied. The two lovers snuggled their naked bodies together in the tight confines of the sleeping bag. It was a close fit, forcing them to spoon their bodies together, Chrissie's back to Brett's front. But neither of them minded in the least. ------- Chapter 3 The next two days passed fairly uneventfully for the three survivors. They continued to work their way along the rim of the canyon, keeping consistently just far away from it to hear the roar of the flood waters within, but not close enough for that sound to overwhelm their sense of hearing. They did not directly encounter anyone else although on multiple occasions their presence was noted by other survivors, all of them desperate and starving but none of them quite desperate enough to tangle with the mean looking group that Jason, Chrissie, and Brett had obviously become. Even those with no evil intentions in their heads, who just wanted to try to beg food, kept their distance, electing to try their luck elsewhere. On a few occasions the trio was shadowed for a while, usually by groups of three or more armed men, and usually to scope out whether an ambush would be possible. In all cases, once these groups got a good look at just how the trio moved, how they coordinated their every step, how they constantly checked their rear, the would-be attackers elected to move on to weaker and less capable victims. At this point in the aftermath, there were still other victims to be had. Brett caught the scent of a few of these groups as they shadowed him. Nothing was so strong as the two marijuana growers but on several occasions he had felt the beginnings of that instinct tickling his neck as he realized they were being watched from afar. In each case a signal to his teammates to spread out a little and keep a sharper eye to the sides and the rear (they had gone over many more hand-signals and pre-planned evasion techniques since the shootout) had been the clincher for the stalkers. These were not people to be trifled with. In a world where the strong now preyed upon the weak, Brett's group certainly did not fall into the latter category. Brett toyed with the idea of a rotating watch at night while they camped, just to keep anyone from sneaking up on them and killing them as they slept. But every time this thought crossed his mind, he was forced to conclude that it was an unnecessary waste of precious sleep. The blackness that fell over the land when the sun went down was simply too absolute to allow any sort of attack upon them at night. Unless they had night vision goggles - something that was highly unlikely - a group bent on taking them would not be able to approach or shoot with any degree of accuracy even if they knew exactly where they were. For the time being, they kept a watch until the light was gone and then they went to bed. Brett and Chrissie continued to share a sleeping bag together during their slumber hours, enjoying the warmth of each other's body and, at least once during each sleep period, a slow, careful session of sexual coupling. They took great pains to be quiet and still during these sessions, neither very wild about the thought of Jason listening in on their activities. If he heard them (and he did, every single time) he said nothing about it. As they continued to climb in altitude - on the day after the shooting they passed 4500 feet - the air grew steadily colder, without any significant difference between day and night temperatures. This was mostly due to the increasing elevation but it was also due to the fact that it was just getting colder everywhere. When the clouds had initially covered the planet after the strike they had served almost like a blanket, trapping the residual heat beneath them and keeping temperatures reasonably high despite the lack of sunlight. But now, at impact+10 days, much of that trapped heat was being slowly leeched away in the mid-latitudes and the equatorial regions, dissipating towards the poles instead. Brett began to wonder if the rain they were experiencing would turn to snow at some point or, even worse, if it already done so at the higher altitudes above them. If too much snowfall accumulated at the mountaintops it would eventually come sweeping downward in a tremendous avalanche. But, as Brett had told Chrissie not long before, this was a life that was to be lived one day at a time. There was not really anything that could be done about hypothetical avalanches that might be months in the future. Their current goal at any given time was simply to live through the day; and after that, the week. He could not honestly see or plan any further than reaching the bridge that crossed the canyon at Garden Hill. There were too many variables and possibilities to worry about in that alone. The bridge might be down, probably would be in fact, or the town might be washed away. If the bridge was intact and the town still there, the inhabitants might be like the bikers that had found Chrissie and Jason's family. If they were not like that, then they might not be feeling very charitable to a traveling band of strangers. Only in his wildest moments of optimism did he think that they might find friendly, sharing townspeople in Garden Hill. Most of the time he tried not to think about such things. He kept moving and his two teammates, as he now thought of them, moved with him. He kept up a cheery, hopeful attitude even though he sometimes felt blackly hopeless, and they responded to it, their own attitudes echoing his. Brett, a second born child, had never been a natural leader of others but in the course of his lifetime he had learned to embrace that role and excel at it when it was necessary. He had done it in the army and as a cop, usually with favorable results, and he did it now. Though their food supply was dwindling steadily and there were no replenishments in sight, though they had used up nearly half of their rifle ammunition in one minor firefight with a couple of inept morons, he kept his chin up and he kept them moving. ------- It was late afternoon, just about the time when they usually started looking for a suitable place to camp for the night, when Brett caught sight of movement up ahead of them. He saw two figures about two hundred yards away, walking together. He saw them only for the briefest of instants, through the maze of trees and shrubs before them, but it was enough. He chopped his left hand downward several times, the sign to Chrissie and Jason to get down immediately. They did so, throwing themselves instantly into the mud on their bellies, their rifles trained forward. Brett was on the ground at the same instant that they were, his eyes peering forward, searching for another glimpse. He caught one a moment later, just as the two people moved from one area of trees to another. There were two of them, both men, both dressed in hunting clothes. Both were armed with rifles that they carried slung over their backs. It appeared they were oblivious to the presence of the trio as of yet, but, if they kept to their current course, they would soon blunder directly into them. When they passed from view again, Brett looked over his shoulder at Chrissie and Jason. They were looking at him anxiously, awaiting his next instruction. He pointed forward and then held up two fingers, indicating where and how many. He then mimed the firing of a rifle, letting them know what they were armed with. They nodded their understanding. Next, he gave them the signal to spread out and keep low. He covered this move with his rifle while they each crawled on their bellies about ten yards to each side, both slipping behind the trunks of trees that would protect them from the front. Once they were in place and aiming outward to cover him, Brett inched forward as quickly and silently as possible, until he too was behind a large pine tree. He leaned outward, training his rifle towards a gap in the tree line ahead of them where he figured that the two people would emerge. It was very tense while the trio waited for them to approach. Several times they caught further glimpses, enough to identify as them as people that were on their last legs. Their clothing hung off of them like rags and their skin was abnormally pale and drawn. They didn't seem completely alert as they approached, as if they were moving forward on autopilot only. Several times they could have been shot down with ease as they moved through open ground, but Brett had signaled to Jason and Chrissie to keep their weapons tight, meaning that they should not fire unless he did or unless they saw some immediate threat. Brett was hoping that the two men would pass either to the left or right of them without even seeing them but it became apparent as they got closer that this was not in the cards. They were heading directly towards where they lie. He got the attention of Chrissie and Jason and then reiterated the "weapons tight" signal: a pat on the side of his rifle followed by a clenched fist. They nodded their understanding. He waited until they were less than fifty feet in front of them, as they were in open ground and easy targets for any one of the three rifles pointed at them. "Stop where you are!" he yelled clearly towards them. "Do not come any closer to us!" They both jumped, startled at the loud voice that had jerked them out of whatever world they had been in. Both instinctively reached for the rifles on their backs. "Don't touch those guns!" Brett warned, his finger tightening on the trigger of his M-16. "You have several people pointing weapons at you right now. If you bring those rifles down, we will be forced to shoot!" The two men stopped in mid-reach. They shared a look with each other, as if passing a telepathic signal. Finally, the one in front said: "We don't have any food. You're wasting your time with us." His voice did not sound the least bit scared, only resigned. "We have no desire to hurt you," Brett said. "We're only making sure that you don't hurt us. Now put those rifles down on the ground and back away from them. We won't take them from you, we just want to make sure they're safe before we approach." They shared another look, seeming to hold a silent conversation with each other. Finally they both shrugged at each other and tossed their rifles into the mud. They backed up six feet and put their hands in the air. Brett signaled to his team that he would move forward and that they should keep him covered. He then stood up and began to walk towards them, his rifle held at hip level, the barrel towards them, his finger on the trigger. He made sure he did not, at any time, cross between either Chrissie or Jason and the targets. As he got closer he saw that the two men looked even worse than he had first thought. So emaciated were they their cheekbones were protruding from beneath their skin. Their eyes were nothing but hollow sockets, haunted by impending doom. They looked like they had already died days before and just didn't know it yet. "You guys look like shit," he observed when he got close enough to converse in a normal tone. "Brilliant observation, Einstein," one of them, the nearer of the two, shot right back. "Any more of you out there?" "No," the second one said, shaking his head wearily. "There's just the two of us left." Brett had no sense that the man was lying to him. He relaxed a little. "Have a seat," he said, waving at the ground with the butt of his rifle. They made no move to sit down. "Go on," he encouraged. "I wasn't lying to you. We're not gonna hurt you or take anything of yours." They sat, both of them slumping down and plopping their butts into the mud. Brett gave the all-clear signal and waved Chrissie and Jason forward. They trotted up, staying to the sides of him, their rifles pointing downward but still gripped in the firing position. They kept their mouths shut as they took in the two strangers. "Where'd you two come from?" Brett asked, lowering his own rifle a bit. "We were up near Blue Canyon when the comet hit," the first man told him. "Deer hunting?" "That's right. Up on our annual trip from San Jose. I don't suppose there's much left of San Jose these days, is there?" "I wouldn't imagine," Brett said. "Wives and families down there?" They both nodded sadly. "I know the feeling," he commiserated. "I'm from Stockton. There's not much of it left either. How are things further up the hill? Do you know if the bridge to Garden Hill is still intact?" The two men looked at each other knowingly. "Oh it's intact all right," the second man said, shaking his head a little. "At least it was two days ago. I wouldn't plan on getting across it though." "No?" Brett said, raising his eyebrows. "Why not?" "It would seem that the Garden Hill people aren't taking too kindly to visitors these days," the first one said. "They've piled cars up on the bridge and they shoot at anyone who tries to cross it. There are guards posted just on the other side and they'll just shoot around you the first two shots to try to make you get off. If you keep moving after that, boom, right through the heart." "Interesting," Brett said, absorbing this information. "They're not letting anyone in?" "They didn't let us in," the second said. "And they didn't come down to question us either, they just shot." "We're trying to make it down to the Auburn bridge now," the first told them. "Any idea if that one's still up?" "Don't know," Brett told them. "We were up near Castle Point when everything started. We were heading up towards Garden Hill because we thought that bridge was more likely to be there." "Well, like we said," said the first, "it's there but you ain't gonna get across it. Not even with the firepower you're packing." The second man started to get a gleam in his eye. "Maybe you'd like to throw in with us and head down to Auburn," he said hopefully. "There's safety in numbers." Brett was able to clearly read the underlying implication to the offer. If they joined up with the two hunters they would be expected to share their food supplies with them as well. As much as he felt for their predicament, he had to watch out for his own group first. There simply was not enough food to feed five people for the week and a half to two weeks it would take to walk back to Auburn. "Sorry," he said, shaking his head. "I think we'll keep moving up the hill and take a look at that bridge ourselves. Maybe we can find a way to negotiate our way past it. I appreciate the information though." "There's no negotiating with those people," the first reiterated, starting to see where his companion was coming from. "They'll just gun you down. Come with us." Brett shook his head. "No," he said firmly. "We'll part company here, gentlemen. I've got enough to worry about without picking up two more stragglers. I wish you the best of luck down in Auburn. We're going to move off now. You two keep your butts on the ground until we're gone. Don't try to follow us, okay? People get hurt that way." The both nodded feebly, neither trying to push the issue. "I don't suppose," the first said, licking his lips a little, "that you have anything to spare?" "Just a little bit?" the second put in. "We're about used up." Brett, Chrissie, and Jason all looked at each other for a moment. They passed a careful shrug back and forth. "Give 'em that low-fat turkey chili shit," Brett finally told Jason, who was carrying that particular supply in his pack. "That stuff makes us all want to puke anyway." "Glad to get rid of it," Jason said, unshouldering his pack and opening it up. The two men were beyond grateful for the gift. They thanked the trio approximately two hundred times in the three minutes it took to give them the two cans and allow them to use their single can opener to access one of them. "Once again," Brett told them as they reached into the can with their bare fingers and pulled out globs of it, "good luck to you down there and don't try to follow us. We'll know and we'll deal with it harshly." "Mmmm hmmm," said the first, chomping and chewing the brown gruel. "Hmmph," agreed the second, stuffing his face as well. The two hunters did not bother them after they left. Brett figured that the information that they provided had been well worth the price of two cans of disgusting turkey chili. ------- It was late the next day when they saw the bridge for the first time. The terrain that they had been passing through had become extremely steep, rocky, and hard to penetrate, forcing them, as the day passed, much closer to the wall of the canyon than they felt comfortable with. Several times they were forced to inch along the edge in places, listening to the deafening roar of floodwaters passing below them and contemplating the dizzy height. Finally they reached a steep rise that completely blocked their way. It was a rocky outcropping that rose several hundred feet above them. They were left with the choice of either backtracking a few miles to go around it or climbing over it. Neither idea was terribly appetizing. After a few minutes of discussion they elected to try scaling the rise. The going was a little easier than it had looked from the bottom but it was no cakewalk. They clawed and scrambled over slippery rocks, inching their way upward foot by foot and occasionally sending small rockslides clattering down behind them. The climb made Brett extremely nervous, not because he was afraid of falling but because they were easy targets to any enemies while they were up there. But luck was with them and nobody took any potshots at them as they ascended. The top of the rise was a gently rounded plateau full of loose boulders and protruding rocks of all shapes and sizes, some of them more than ten feet in diameter. Brett was the first one to the top and he pulled himself between two large rocks at the summit, his eyes looking outward to what lay beyond. "The bridge," he whispered to himself, his eyes taking in the sight of it. It was a single span, steel arch bridge that stretched about three-quarters of a mile from one side of the canyon to the other. The support structure of the bridge had been built beneath the roadway, a solid steel curvature that was fastened to the canyon walls at both ends. The steel was painted forest green. It was just over a half a mile in front of him, its outline a little indistinct through the haze of rain. As the two hunters had told them the day before, a mess of automobiles clogged the bridge at both ends, snarling the roadway. Beyond the bridge on the far side of the canyon, the roadway passed between two low hills and disappeared. Brett knew that the main part of the town of Garden Hill itself was just on the other side of those hills, out of sight. He also knew that there had once been expensive houses lining the upstream rim of the canyon. Those houses were no longer there. The changed shape of the hillside where they had been told him that either erosion from the rain or the earthquake had carried them into the canyon itself. On Brett's side of the canyon the topography was a little different. The roadway climbed upward, away from the near end of the bridge at nearly the steepest grade that the law had allowed, twisting through holes that had been blasted in the steep cliffs around them. The view from the top of the rise on this side was actually quite commanding and Brett immediately began to wonder why the people that were controlling access to the bridge below hadn't occupied it. He filed that thought away for later examination. "Keep down as you come up here," he told Chrissie and Jason, who were just now scrambling up next to him. "The bridge is down there and we're probably close enough to be spotted by the people that are guarding it if we silhouette ourselves." "We're at the bridge?" Chrissie asked excitedly, crawling on her hands and knees until she was next to him. She looked out over the landscape. "Finally." "It's still there," Jason said, coming up next to him on his right. "You were right, Brett." While the two younger members of the team took in the sights around them, Brett reached into his pack and pulled out the hunting rifle that had been in it ever since the shootout with the bikers. He put it to his shoulder and looked through the telescopic sight at the bridge, bringing the view closer. He trained the crosshairs on the near end of the bridge, where two Ford Expeditions and a Chevy Suburban had been placed, their tires flattened to keep them from being moved. Through the magnification he was able to see multiple bullet holes in the vehicles as well as two rotting corpses of men on the roadway of the bridge. "It looks like these people mean business," he said, moving the sight from one end to the other. "There are two bodies down there. They must be the people that didn't heed the warning shots." "We're not gonna be able to get across then?" Jason asked. "Well," he said, training his sight over the rest of the bridge and examining every visible portion of it, "we're not gonna be able to just walk right over it, that's for sure." "So what are we gonna do?" Chrissie wanted to know. "We're gonna scope this place out for a bit," he said, noting that there was a maintenance catwalk just below the roadway. It looked to be about two feet wide and hung about six feet under the center of the span. "We'll see how things work around here, see if we can observe any of the people on the other side, and then we'll decide what to do from there." "Do you think there's a way?" she asked. "Maybe," he said, training his sight on the hillsides across the canyon now, trying to spot their guards. "I can already tell that these Garden Hill people are not as smart as they think they are. If they were, they would be sitting up here on this hill right now and we never would have been able to get this close. This is the optimum place to guard the canyon approaches from." Neither one of them said anything to this, bowing to his superior grasp of tactics. He was not able to spot their guards or anything that resembled a guard position. He put the rifle back in his pack and looked at his two companions. "Let's go back down," he told them. "We'll try to find a place to camp down there and we'll keep a watch on this place until sunset." ------- Chrissie stayed down at the campsite to guard it while Brett and Jason climbed back up onto the rise after dinner. There was about 45 minutes to an hour left of daylight and Brett wanted to see what, if anything, the townspeople did to protect the approaches to the bridge once the light was gone from the sky. Surely they wouldn't just leave it unprotected at night, would they? They didn't. Brett, seeing what they did, actually was impressed with their cleverness. It was about twenty minutes before dark, the light fading fast, when he spotted two people emerging from around the hill. They walked down the roadway, both of them carrying rifles over their shoulders, heading towards the bridge. "I got two people coming our way," Brett told Jason quietly. He put his hunting rifle to his shoulder once again, peering through the scope to get a better look at them. Since they were nearly a mile away from him and since there was a sheet of rain impeding the view, the magnification did not help all that much. Still he was able to make out that one was a male and one was a female and that they were wearing black rain slickers. "A man and a woman," he said. "They both have backpacks and rifles. I bet they're heading for those two SUVs that are blocking their end of the bridge." "You think they guard it from there?" Jason asked, his sharp eyes taking in the tiny figures as they walked down the road. "I think they do," Brett confirmed. "You see how they're right next to each other and facing outward. That's pretty smart. I bet they got those engines gassed up and they keep the batteries charged. If anyone tries to cross the bridge at night, they can turn on the headlights and spotlight the whole roadway in front of them. If they stay behind the cars, they can shoot with impunity since their targets will be blinded." "That is pretty smart," Jason agreed. What was even smarter was what they did next. The female guard opened up the left SUV and took two objects out of it. Brett could not quite make out what they were, only that they were something black, about the size of a paperback book, and wrapped in clear plastic. While the male guard took up a position behind the opened door of the SUV, the female, still carrying the mysterious objects, began to walk out onto the bridge itself. "What're they doing?" Jason asked. "I'm not sure," Brett replied, continuing to watch. "It looks like they're putting something on the bridge." "Land mines?" "I don't think so. Land mines are kinda hard to come by in a yuppie town like Garden Hill." He chuckled a little. "They probably could've got some in Stockton though." Jason, finally figuring out that he'd made a joke, dutifully laughed. When the woman reached the far end of the bridge Brett was finally able to identify what she was carrying. "They're video cameras," he said. "What the hell?" As he watched, she removed them from their plastic wrappers and placed them in the backs of the two vehicles that were positioned on Brett's end of the bridge, one camera in the back of each vehicle, facing outward, towards the entrance to the bridge. It appeared as though they were resting on some sort of mounting device that had been fashioned. Once they were in place, she picked up cables from the inside of the vehicles and plugged them into the backs of the cameras in two places. "Son of a bitch," Brett said in wonder, taking his scope off of the woman and training it onto the back of the SUVs. Sure enough, barely visible unless you knew to look for it, was a black cable stretching out the back of each one. The two cables, which probably each consisted of an individual power supply cord and a coaxial cable twined together, joined each other and stretched back across the bridge towards the far end where they snaked into the guard post SUVs. "I bet you those cameras are the kind with night vision on them," he told Jason. "They keep them trained on the front of the bridge all night long on that setting and monitor them from the other end on small television sets." "Won't the batteries die?" Jason asked. "No, they have a power cord running to their SUVs. They probably have the cameras and the monitors plugged into the cigarette lighters and they start their engines every now and then and run them just long enough to keep the batteries charged up. Impressive. They must've stripped that whole town of coaxial cable and extension cords to do it. Either that or the local Radio Shack managed to survive the comet." "So there's no way across the bridge then?" "Well now, I didn't say that," Brett said. "They're smart but they've left a few holes in their defenses." "What do you mean?" "I'll tell you once I've thought it all the way through," he said, watching as the woman raised a walkie-talkie of some sort to her lips and spoke into it. Back at the other end of the bridge her companion, who also had a walkie-talkie, said something back to her. She nodded and then started back across the bridge. Brett lowered the rifle and eased backwards a little. "Let's get back down," he said. "We'll get some sleep and then do some more surveillance in the morning." ------- Brett and Jason both climbed back up at first light and resumed their positions. They arrived just in time to see the dismantling of the cameras and the pullback of the bridge guards. Brett, peering through his telescopic scope, noted that the guards were not the same ones that had put up the operation the night before. These two were both females. That meant that they had enough people to work in shifts. It also meant that they had some sort of organized group functioning. That was just what was needed if the human race was going to survive another year: organization. "We need to become a part of that group," Brett said, speaking mostly to himself, but loud enough for Jason to hear. "What?" Jason asked. "I thought we were just trying to get across the bridge." "We are," he said. "We're trying to get to Garden Hill. And it looks like Garden Hill has made itself into an enclave. They've pulled together, organized, and they are defending their borders from outsiders. If they can keep themselves organized and fed, they'll live long enough to see the sun again. If they live that long, they'll be one of the groups whose children and grandchildren will rebuild. We need to make ourselves a part of that." "But how?" Jason asked. "It don't look they want any more people in there." "No, it doesn't, does it? So we'll just have to convince them that they need us." "Why would they need us?" He smiled a little. "They need us," he said. "I'm just going to have to show them how much." ------- "I don't like it," Chrissie said when they discussed the plan that afternoon. "They'll kill you." "I don't think so," he replied. "I've watched them all day and I'm convinced that they don't just kill people for the hell of it. Five times people walked up to that bridge and tried to cross it. Every time they just fired down into the cars near the front until the people decided to go somewhere else. They just want to keep people out." "But those are people that are just walking across the bridge openly. What's going to happen when they find you?" "If I do it right," he said, "they won't find me until I'm already well across. At that point the example I'm trying to make for them will be well-established." Chrissie was not convinced. "We don't really need to be a part of this town," she said. "We can do just fine by ourselves. We have so far." "We can't," he told her firmly. "We've done okay so far because we have a food supply and good weapons and we keep a sharp eye out. Our food supply is running out though and we don't have any way of getting more. Our luck will eventually run out as well if we stay out here. Eventually some desperate group of hunters is going to bag one or more of us. Our best chance of survival is to join a larger group that holds a defendable piece of ground. This is it, Chrissie. We have to convince them to let us in." She was struggling not to cry. "What if you don't come back, Brett?" she asked him. "What happens to us then?" "Then you carry on," he told her. "You do the best you can without me. You guys are fighters now. You're a bad-ass, ass-kicking team. But I will come back. I don't think I'm wrong about these people. They're not sadists. They're just ordinary people. Even if they reject me, they'll let me back out again. I'm sure of it." "And what if you are wrong?" He looked at her levelly. "Than I'll die. Sometimes you have to gamble. I think this is a good one." She said no more. She only turned her face from him and wept softly. Beside her, Jason was fighting not to do the same. ------- It was late afternoon again when he departed; about two hours before sunset. He kissed Chrissie, shook Jason's hand, and then gave both of them a few encouraging words and some final instructions. He then left them, climbing up the rise again. He traveled lightly, absent of his pack and his sleeping bag. He left his M-16 and his hunting rifle behind as well, taking only his trusty .40 caliber, which was strapped to his waist. He wanted to be able to maneuver freely and, most important, he did not want to appear to be an immediate threat when he was finally discovered. His observations throughout the day had shown him exactly where the daytime guards of the bridge were located. They had hidden their bunker well but had foolishly given away its location by the muzzle-flashes of the guns they fired to keep intruders away. Predictably it was near the crest of the hill overlooking the bridge. Keeping this location in mind, Brett always kept boulders between it and him once he reached the top. He then started down the far side, the side that was not visible from the Garden Hill side of the canyon. The going was a little rough at first and several times he very nearly lost his grip and went sliding downward. But at last, about three-quarters of the way to the bottom, the angle leveled out to something a little less suicidal and he was able to move more freely. He nearly trotted the rest of the way down until he was once more in the safety of the trees and shrubs. Being in the open had scared him more than the threat of falling. Once at the bottom, he worked his way carefully, moving tree to tree, keeping a sharp eye and a sharp ear out around him. There were probably a lot of people about, camped out in the woods trying to figure out a way across the bridge. He had no desire to run into any of them. It took him the better part of an hour to reach the road. In a way it was surreal seeing a stretch of two-lane blacktop after so many days of wandering in the wilderness. Though it had undoubtedly been washed out in many places and rendered all but impassible, this section was still intact. He paused near the edge of it, watching both directions carefully for any signs of life. Seeing nothing he finally crossed, doing it at a full-out sprint and diving into cover on the other side. He kept another watch on that side for a few minutes to see if he had attracted any attention. When he began to move again, he paralleled the pavement, sticking to the woods to travel but walking exactly twenty yards from the roadbed as he closed with the bridge. In front of him loomed the large granite ridge that had been opposite the one he and his group had observed from. The two hills had once been connected until high explosives had blown them in two so the roadway could be constructed. Brett, during his observations of the Garden Hill security measures, had noted a fatal blind spot in their plan. The crest of the upstream hill was hidden from the view of the guards by the bulk of the downstream hill. He exploited that blind spot now by climbing to the top. The going was a little steeper than what he had endured on the other side and it was doubtful that anyone with a full pack could have negotiated the ascent, but less than ten minutes after he started up, he was at the summit, crouching behind a rock and looking out over the small portion of bridge that was visible to him. He looked out over to the summit of the other hill, which was about a quarter mile away. He couldn't see Chrissie and Jason there - they were too well concealed - but he waved at them anyway, knowing that they would be glad to see that he had made it that far. They did not wave back - he had taught them better than that - but he knew they had seen him. The downside of the hill was even steeper than the upside over here. He worked his way towards the canyon, necessarily confined to a narrow portion of the hill that was hidden from the guards view. He slipped several times and had to grasp for dear life onto boulders or rocks to keep from bouncing and tumbling all the way down. For the first time he began to wonder if this was really such a good idea as he realized that, if he fell, he would not stop at the bottom but would instead continue over the edge of the cliff, falling several hundred feet into the rushing waters below. "Relax," he told himself, taking a few breaths and regaining his equilibrium. "Just take it slow." He took it slow. He continued to work his way downward and finally, after nearly twenty minutes, he was resting on a narrow outcropping of rock that protruded out over the canyon. He was below the roadway of the bridge itself by about twenty feet. A narrow ledge led from where he was to the point where the steel support section joined the walls about a hundred yards away. He edged along the ridge slowly, trying not to look down into those rushing waters, until he had gone as far as possible without being spotted from the guards' lookout. He then began looking for a place to conceal himself. He forced himself into a tight ball between two outcroppings of rock and kept his head down. From here he was able to peer through a small gap and see the two SUVs at the front of the bridge but hopefully, not be spotted when the guard came to set up the cameras. He thought he was fairly safe from detection as long as they did not look directly at the spot where he was hiding. To help minimize this threat he put his fingers into the brownish muck that had accumulated under the rocks and smeared it all over his face, hair, and any exposed clothing. When he was done he was nothing more than a shadow among shadows. He waited. As the light faded from the landscape and night began to fall, he saw the guard approaching the SUVs that guarded his end. It was another female, different from any he had spotted the night before. She went through the set-up procedure quickly and then spoke into her walkie-talkie. Apparently receiving the answer that she wanted to hear, she turned and began to move back across the bridge, passing out of his line of sight. He waited some more, staying in place as the landscape around him grew darker and darker. He had a narrow window in which he would be able to act. He had managed to place himself so he could approach the bridge without being detected by their cameras, but he could only avoid detection by the guards themselves if he waited until it was too dark to be seen by them. At the same time however, he needed some light so he could see where he was going as he moved along the ledge to the bridge. Trying to negotiate that last fifty yards in complete darkness was a thought that did not even bear contemplating. Fortunately it was easy to tell when that particular window had been reached. When Brett could no longer see across the canyon, he knew it was time. He pulled himself out of his hiding place and continued his trip along the ledge, taking each step carefully and slowly. Several times he dislodged loose rocks, sending them tumbling downhill and over the edge. Thankfully the deafening roar of the water below easily masked the sound that this created. At last he reached the bridge. He ducked under one of the massive steel supports and, utilizing the last of the light available to him, scrambled up another ridge until he was able to put his hands on the maintenance catwalk. This narrow access was suspended from the bottom of the bridge by steel support beams that were located every twenty feet. During his examination earlier that day, he had counted these beams, finding that there were exactly 198 individual supports on each side. Now, he pulled himself up and ducked under the handrails that had been mounted along the length on both sides. He put his feet on the grated metal surface and breathed silent thanks that he had managed to make it to relative safety without falling to his death. Just behind him was an L-shaped platform that protruded outward to the edge of the bridge. It had a ladder bolted to it that allowed access up onto the roadway. Brett knew that there was another such platform at the other end of the bridge, exactly 192 support columns away from where he now stood. The townspeople had foolishly left the two ladders in place. He had no interest in the ladder behind him since it only would have led him directly up to where the cameras were pointing. But the ladder on the other end, that one he had uses for. He began to walk along the catwalk, keeping his hands on the handrail as he went. He stepped carefully, his boots treading along the grated surface. Each time his hand passed over one of the support beams he counted off silently to himself, thus keeping track of his progress. He was disconcerted to discover that the entire catwalk was rocking gently back and forth in the wind, the sway increasing the further out over the canyon that he went. He began to wonder about the structural integrity of the surface he was walking on. Was it possible that the earthquake had loosened the catwalk but left the bridge intact? Not being an engineer, he simply didn't know. But he had gone too far to turn back now. By the time he reached column 96, the light had disappeared completely, forcing him to move by feel only. Though this was part of his plan he still was forced to struggle with doubts about his ability to ascend back to the roadway blindly. True he had obsessively studied the ladder on the other side of the bridge through his rifle scope that afternoon, and true, he had the layout of the platform memorized to the last detail, but now that the reality of what he was doing was here, worry assaulted him. Nevertheless, he pushed on. Brett was not a quitter. The closer to the far end of the bridge he came, the slower and more carefully he walked. For the first time he wondered if maybe the guards up above had another night vision equipped video camera that they used to periodically check the catwalk with. It would be a simple matter of climbing out of their SUV from time to time and leaning over the access ladder to point the camera downward. Surely they hadn't completely disregarded the possibility that someone would infiltrate them in the manner that he was now utilizing. After all, despite a few glaring security breaches they had proven themselves to be rather clever. Oh well, he finally concluded, if that was the case then they would catch him. There was simply no way for him to counter that possibility. He continued on. Nearly thirty minutes after he had started walking across, Brett's hand finally touched the 192nd structural support beam. He stopped, listening carefully but hearing nothing but the rushing water. This did not make him feel any better. He shuffled forward a few more steps, using the handrails to support his weight while his left foot stretched out over the side of the catwalk. It encountered nothing but empty air for the first couple of steps but finally, right where he had thought it would be, it encountered the grated surface of the ladder platform stretching out to the side. He withdrew his foot and stepped two more steps forward, turning to his left as he went and facing out over the canyon. He moved his foot around again, familiarizing himself with the small dimensions of the platform. It was narrower than the catwalk surface, only about eighteen inches wide, barely enough to squeeze between the rails. He ducked under the catwalk handrail and made his way out onto the platform. Moving as slow as ever, he began to move outward at a 90-degree angle. The platform extended out a little more than ten feet, to just beyond the edge of the bridge, and then it made another 90 degree turn to the right. This last section was only about two feet long, just big enough to house the ladder that led up to the guardrail and the roadway. When he reached the turn in the platform he looked upward into the darkness, the rain falling on his face. He saw absolutely nothing, nor did he hear anything. He took the fact that no one was challenging him or shooting at him to be a sign of his success so far. He turned his body around and, groping blindly, finally found a rung of the ladder. He pulled himself over to it and gave it a soft, experimental tug to see if it was loose or if it was going to rattle as he climbed. It seemed relatively solid in its mountings so he put his foot on the first step and pulled himself upward. He climbed one step at a time, pausing as he went up each rung, until finally his hand touched the top of the guardrail itself. He pulled himself up two more steps until his head was up over the rail. The end of the bridge would be about ten feet to his left. The two SUVs that constituted the guard shack were about twenty feet to his right. He could see the closer of the two SUVs plainly despite the darkness because of the small televisions that the guards were using to monitor the cameras. A faint blue glow emitted from the cab, just enough to allow him to see the outline of the vehicle. For perhaps the hundredth time since he'd started watching the townspeople's security measures, he wondered why, in the name of God, they had positioned those SUVs in front of the bridge's access ladder. Had they just not considered that someone would do what he had just done? Or had they maybe run out of the power or coaxial cables that connected the two ends of the bridge? If that were the case, Brett would have moved the SUVs on the far end backward instead of moving the Garden Hill ones forward. Whatever the reason, this lapse served to convince Brett that he had a decent chance of convincing them that they needed him. He looked at the outline of the SUV for a minute, trying to catch a glimpse of the people inside. Though he knew that they would not be able to see him even if they were staring right at the spot where he emerged, he wanted to make sure that one of them was not off taking a leak or something and that he didn't accidentally blunder in to him or her as he made his getaway. As his eyes adjusted to the dimness his brain finally began to make some sense out of the blurry shadows within the vehicle. He identified one human head in the front seat, on the driver's side. The head was leaning back against the headrest, moving from side to side every now and then. On the passenger side, he saw nothing. Where was the other guard? The answer came a moment later when a second head popped upward right next to the first head. This second head had a lot of long hair, obviously designating it as belonging to a female. Brett began to suspect where that second head had just been. Surely he was mistaken though? Nobody would do that on guard duty, would they? They would. This became apparent a moment later when the two heads came together in a passionate kiss. He could not make out much detail but it was obvious that the two guards' hands were rather busily stroking each other. "You have got to be fucking kidding me," Brett mumbled, shaking his head in disgusted wonder. What were these people thinking? Obviously it wasn't about security. After only a minute or so of kissing and groping, the female suddenly pulled away and began making motions that could only mean that she was removing her pants. Her head dropped from sight once she finished this process and the head of the male followed it down. Shortly after this the SUV began to rock back and forth, slowly at first and then gradually picking up speed. Brett had seen enough. No longer making any particular effort to be cautious, he swung his foot over the railing and hopped down to the roadway. With one last contemptuous glance at the rocking SUV, he began to walk along the roadway in the direction of town. ------- The road climbed steeply upward from the bridge where it passed through a gap between two hills before curving back down into the town itself. Brett walked slowly along the shoulder, right where the pavement met the dirt, using the contrast between the two surfaces to keep him oriented in the darkness. He would step forward gingerly each time, carefully feeling with his foot before shifting his weight forward. His progress was slow and it took him nearly an hour to make it to the top of the hill. He followed the curve of the road and, once he was about halfway around it, he was able to see faint lights in front of and slightly below him. They were houses! The flickering softness of the light told him that the illumination he was seeing in the various windows was from fire, either oil-lamps or fireplaces. Fire! The very thought of that natural warmth thrilled him. He continued to walk, moving steadily closer, trying to get some sort of count of just how many buildings were lit up in the wealthy subdivision that he was looking at. A hundred? Maybe a few more? As incredible as that seemed, it was accurate. How many people were left in this town? His mind conjured up an image of the town as he remembered it from his many hunting trips in the area. The actual township itself was nothing more than a few gas stations, a motel, and some simple houses at the intersection of State Route 63, which he was now walking upon, and Interstate 80, which was about two miles in front of him. Until about ten years before, Garden Hill had been nothing more than an exit sign that people passed on their way up to Reno or the ski resorts, it's only purpose to serve as a chain installation point and to gobble up the money of travelers who stopped there for gas. And then the real estate developers had discovered it and bought up all of the land adjacent to the canyon, slapping down expensive subdivisions among the pine trees and advertising the town as "luxurious rural living". The yuppies from Sacramento had flocked there in droves, buying up the 200 to 300 thousand dollar homes long before they were even built. These subdivisions were of the sort that were called "gated communities", which meant that they had eight foot concrete walls around them to keep the riff-raff out. They had all been grouped together on the top of a series of hills near the rim of the canyon although, with the exception of the really expensive houses, none of them had any sort of view of the canyon. Across Route 63 from the houses was the inevitable strip mall; home to a grocery store, a Starbucks, a computer store, and an expensive hair salon. Looking at the lights now, Brett could see that they were only showing in the nearer of the subdivisions, the one closest to the bridge. He continued walking down the road, heading directly for it. As the road dropped down out of the hill, Brett lost sight of the lights once he was lower than the security wall that surrounded the houses. He continued walking, switching to the other side of the road until he felt he was adjacent to the wall. He then inched forward, through the mud that made up the shoulder, his hands outstretched before him. He touched wet, unyielding concrete with his fingertips. He stopped. It was time to put his plan in action. He jumped upward, his hands grasping the top of the wall and holding on. He swung his left foot upward and hooked it over the edge, using it to pull the rest of his body up. Once atop the wall he adjusted himself carefully until he was seated on it, facing into the subdivision. In front of him were two houses, both with the faint glow of firelight showing from within them. He could not see the inhabitants because the blinds were closed. The light did provide him with enough illumination to see that he was overlooking a street that paralleled the wall. He did not jump down. Though the wind and the rain were particularly biting from eight feet up, he withstood them, hoping that it wouldn't take too long for him to be discovered. ------- It took nearly an hour; a length of time which both disgusted and encouraged him. What the hell was the matter with these people? How could they be so smart about some things and so stupid about others? He should not have been allowed to climb that wall at all, let alone sit atop it long enough to develop hypothermia. Just as he was about to give up and simply go find someone to surrender to, he spotted a flashlight bobbing and weaving its way towards him from the far end of the street. "About goddamn time," he muttered, keeping a sharp eye on it as it approached. It moved slowly forward, switching from the wall side of the road to the house side with predictable regularity. It was obvious that the person holding the light did not really expect to find anything, that he or she was just going through the motions. It turned out to be a she, two of them actually. He could not make out what they looked like since they were standing behind the flashlight beam, but they were talking to each other loudly enough for him to hear their conversation long before they were close enough to see him. "She's such a bitch," one of them was saying. "I'm telling you. It's like she's happy about all this or something." "I'm sure she ain't missing her husband too much, that's for sure," the other one replied. "That old fart was able to bring in the money for her pretty well but he sure wouldn't have been much help now. I wonder what she would've done if he'd lived. How long you think it would've been before she sent him packing?" "Probably before the rain started," the first said, giggling a little. "You think it would've taken that long?" the other shot back, giggling as well. "Pathetic," Brett whispered to himself, watching the light grow closer and closer. Finally it swung directly over him, illuminating him for all the world to see. He waited for their surprised squeals, for the challenge, for the swinging of guns towards him. It didn't come. Apparently they were so involved in their conversation that they had not even noticed the fact that they had just spotlighted an armed man sitting on their wall right in front of them. They continued on by without pausing, the flashlight beam continuing to swing back and forth. Brett watched in amazement as they walked less than ten feet in front of him, continuing to talk about "that bitch". He saw, in the residual light that reflected back at them, that they were both wearing black rain slickers and carrying rifles, which were slung carelessly over their shoulders. "HEY!" he yelled loudly at their backs, unable to keep a tone of total exasperation from slipping through. Now the squeals came. They both sounded as if they had been goosed with a hot curling iron. They spun around quickly, spearing him with the flashlight beam. Another squeal followed when they actually saw him sitting there. They began to scramble for the guns on their backs. Brett, waiting patiently, raised his hands into the air in surrender. "Don't move!" the one with the flashlight yelled in a trembling voice. "I'm not," he said, keeping his hands up. "I've been waiting here for a goddamn hour. Why should I move now?" "Who the hell are you?" the other one demanded, her voice shaky. "I'm Brett," he said. "The man who could've killed you a long time ago if I had wanted to. Can I jump down onto this side?" "What?" they both said in unison. "Jump down," he told them. "I'd like you to take me to whoever is in charge of this town. I need to talk to them." This seemed to cause an overload of some sort. Neither one of them answered. "Hello?" he said. "Are you still with me?" "How did you get up there?" one of them, the flashlight bearer, finally asked. "How did you get here?" "It was much easier than it should have been," he said. "So how about it? Are you gonna take me to your leader, or what?" They continued not to answer his question. Instead they stared up at him, keeping the light on him, doing nothing. He imagined that he looked rather frightful to them. He had not shaved or bathed in nearly two weeks now and his clothing was clotted with filth. "Where did you come from? What do you want?" one of them asked. "I came from across the bridge," he replied. "That's impossible," the flashlight holder said. "We have that bridge guarded." "Yeah," he said, "by a couple of guards that are more interested in getting in each other's pants than they are in protecting you from me." This threw them for another loop. He heard them hurriedly whispering back and forth to each other about who was stationed on bridge guard tonight. Laura and Steve? Could it be true? They had heard rumors about those two. "Excuse me?" Brett interrupted. "Do you think that maybe you can update your gossip a little bit later? I'm freezing my ass off up here and I'd kind of like to get down. I'd like to talk to whoever is in charge of this operation." "About what?" "About security," he said. "I've surrendered to you, okay? Now if I jump down there, are you gonna shoot me?" There was a pause. Finally: "No." "Good," he said. "Stand clear. I'm coming down. I'll keep my hands up." He pushed himself off of the wall and landed neatly on his feet on the sidewalk of the street below, his knees easily absorbing the shock. The two guards kept him in the beam of the flashlight the entire time. He kept his hands up in the air, his arms bent at the elbow. "Do you have walkie-talkies like the bridge guards?" he asked them. "Huh?" "Walkie-talkies," he repeated. "You know? Communication devices? Are you in contact with anybody? If so, don't you think you should radio in to let them know what's going on here?" "No," the flashlight holder told him. "We don't have any." "You don't have any?" he asked, exasperated. "Why the hell not?" "Batteries don't grow on trees you know," she said, somewhat defensively. "And nobody's going to be making any more for a while." "I see," he said, shaking his head a little. "Well, how far do we have to walk then?" "About a half a mile. We'll go down to the end of the street the way we were walking and turn right." "Got it. Do you want me to get in front of you?" he suggested. "That way you can keep an eye on me from behind and its more difficult for me to attack you." "Uh... yes," she said. "Do that." "Right," he told her, not moving yet. "But before I do, shouldn't you disarm me?" "Disarm you?" "I have a gun on my waist, don't I? Surely you can see it there. You're not going to let a prisoner carry a firearm, are you?" There was another long pause. "This is just too fucking weird," the flashlight carrier said at last. "All right," she told him. "Put your gun on the ground." "Right away, ma'am," he said. "I would suggest that you have me remove it from the holster with my left hand. That way it will be much more difficult for me to fire it at you in a controlled manner." "Do it," she said softly. He did it, reaching across his body and unsnapping the quick-release catch. He slid the weapon from its holster and carefully placed it on the ground. He then raised his hand back up. "Now kick it over here," he was told. "Uh... if you don't mind," he said apologetically, "would you just have me step away from it and then you can come and pick it up. I'm rather fond of that weapon and I'd rather not scratch it all up." "Oh Jesus Christ," she cursed, obviously quite flustered. "Go ahead. Back up!" He backed up about ten feet, moving slowly. The woman without the flashlight came forward to retrieve it. "You shouldn't cross in front of your partner's line of fire like that," Brett warned. "Shut up!" barked flashlight. "Mitsy, do you have the fucking gun?" "Yes," Mitsy said, scuttling quickly back over to her friend. "Okay, Mister," she told him. "Start walking. We'll tell you where to turn." "You're the boss," he said lightly, moving out. ------- He was marched to a three-story building that stood in the middle of a small park just inside the main gate to the subdivision. Several vehicles, including a green fire engine and a grass fighting truck that had belonged to the California Department of Forestry, were parked out front. From the bottom floor windows came the glow of multiple oil lamps burning within. "What's this place?" Brett asked his captors as they entered the parking lot. "It used to be our community center," the woman named Mitsy replied. "Now we kind of use it as our headquarters." "I see," Brett said, noting that they at least had guards posted out here. There were two of them before the front door; a male and a female. Like the two that had "captured" him, they were wearing rain slickers and packing rifles. When they saw him being led up to the building at gunpoint they both jumped to their feet (they had been sitting in chairs under the protective overhang of the roof) and rushed over. "Who's this?" the male guard asked, pointing his gun menacingly at Brett's abdomen. Brett saw that he was a younger man, probably no more than nineteen or twenty. He looked scared shitless. "We caught him sitting on the wall," the flashlight bearing guard replied. "He wants to talk to the committee." "He wants to do what?" the other guard asked incredulously. "And you brought him here?" "I think that maybe we're going to want to listen to what he has to say," Mitsy said. "He was very persuasive." Brett stopped near the bottom of the steps that led up to the community center door. The male guard continued to point his rifle at him. "Howdy," Brett told him, eyeing the kid's trigger finger nervously. It looked like he had about four pounds of pull already applied. "I'm unarmed now and I'll sit quietly anywhere you tell me to, but would you mind pointing that gun downward a bit. I sure wouldn't want any accidents to happen." "Shut up," the kid said toughly, not moving the barrel. "I don't know who the hell you think you are, but you can't just come walking in here and..." "Actually," Brett interrupted, "I did just come walking in here. That's why I want to talk to whoever is in charge of this joint, so that it doesn't happen with someone a little more dangerous than I am. So how about I go sit on those steps there and you go get whoever that person is?" Without waiting for a reply or even acknowledgment, he turned around and plopped himself down on the cement steps. The four guards all looked at each other in confusion for a moment. It was obvious to them that, even though they were the ones holding all the weapons, they were somehow not in charge of the situation. It was Mitsy who finally spoke. "Jeff," she said, addressing the male guard, "are Jessica or Paul in there?" "Uh... both of them," he answered. "So is Dale." "Go get them," she said. "Tell them that we have a prisoner that has some information that they're going to want to hear. We'll wait here." Jeff didn't seem too keen on this idea. "What if he tries something while I'm gone?" he asked, as if his mere presence would be enough to prevent this occurrence. "We got him this far," Mitsy said, a little impatiently. "I think we can safely watch him for the next couple of minutes. Besides, as he so dramatically pointed out to us earlier, if he had wanted to hurt us he would have done it a long time ago. Isn't that right?" "That's right," Brett said, smiling up at her. Jeff grumbled a few more times under his breath, but finally mounted the stairs and disappeared through the double doors of the building. The three guards watching Brett kept their distance from him and said nothing while he was gone. About two minutes later the doors opened back up and two men stepped out. They both had pistols in their hands that they wasted no time in pointing at Brett. Brett looked up at them placidly, keeping his hands up in the air. The man who came out of the door first was in his late twenties or early thirties. He was a very average looking person, of medium build with short brown hair. He looked a little tense but otherwise calm. Immediately behind him was a much taller man, a man who looked big enough to be a professional football linebacker. He had a head of dark blonde hair and he looked nearly as scared as Jeff, the young male guard who had retrieved him. Again, Brett became cognizant of just how filthy and disgusting he looked, especially in contrast to the townspeople. They were all clean. Not just un-filthy, but clean, as if they had been bathing regularly. "Who the fuck are you?" the linebacker demanded, stepping forward and towering over Brett. "And how did you get in here?" "My name is Brett Adams," he said, keeping his voice mild. "Before the comet I was a deputy with the San Joaquin County Sheriff's Department. Before that, I was a warrant officer in the US Army. I got in here by walking unobserved over the canyon bridge." "You're lying," the man accused. "There's no way that anyone could walk across that bridge without us seeing it. You came in from the north side." "You have two guards stationed in a Chevy Suburban monitoring the approach to the bridge with night vision equipped video cameras," Brett said, spouting off details so they would know he was being truthful. "The Suburban has a Toyota Landcruiser parked next to it. You've run coaxial cables and power cords from the Suburban to another set of SUVs parked on the other end. That's where the cameras are. The guards watch the take on small television sets from the other end." The two males looked at him in surprise for a moment. The linebacker than yelled: "That doesn't mean anything! He still coulda come in from the north and seen all that!" Brett turned his attention away from the linebacker, shifting it instead to the smaller man, whom he suspected had more authority. "I did not come in from the north," he told him. "I walked in here to make a point to you. Your bridge defense is flawed. If I did it, others can do it. I could have led an entire attack force right to the gates of this subdivision if I'd wanted to and you would have known nothing about it until the first shot was fired." "Bullshit," linebacker declared. He turned to the smaller man. "Paul, we don't need to listen to this shithead anymore. I'll take him back out to the north side and throw him out." "No," Paul said thoughtfully. "I don't think we should do that just yet." "What? What do you mean?" "Tell me how you got in here, Mr. Adams," Paul said. "It wasn't very hard," he said, only lying a little bit. "I located your guard position just by watching you from the hill across the bridge. Every time you fire a shot down at someone trying to cross, you give yourselves away. You probably waste a lot of ammo as well. Anyway, the smaller hill on the east side of the canyon is mostly hidden from that position by the larger hill across the road from it. I simply walked around and placed myself on the edge when it was daylight. Once it started to get dark and your guards set up the nighttime position, I walked to the catwalk and climbed up onto it. Your cameras aren't looking at that part of the bridge and the guards couldn't see me because of the darkness. I simply walked across and came up behind your guard position." "You climbed up from the catwalk to the bridge in complete darkness?" Paul asked, though his tone did not seem to be one of disbelief. Brett shrugged. "I memorized the layout from across the canyon while it was still daylight. That's another security problem you have. I shouldn't have been allowed to even get that close to the bridge in the first place. Once I was on the surface of the bridge it was nothing more than a matter of walking into town along the shoulder of the road. You don't have to be able to see to do that. I climbed up on the security wall when I got there and waited for your two guards to arrive." He shook his head a little. "It took much longer than it should have. You really should increase the interval of your perimeter patrols." "Hey, fuck you," yelled linebacker. "Our security is not any of your fuckin'..." "Shut up, Dale," Paul interrupted, his voice still even. "You can't talk to me like that!" Dale shouted, turning on his own now. Obviously he had a bit of an anger management problem. "You'd better remember who you're talking to, boy! Remember who feeds you!" Paul did not seem the least bit upset by this outburst. Nor did he seem intimidated by it. "I'll remember," he said. "Now why don't you go get hold of the bridge guards on the radio and make sure they're all right. I don't think Mr. Adams hurt them but it's best we make sure." "You're not gonna listen to this scumbag, are you?" Dale asked. "Let's just say that he's captured my attention for the moment," Paul answered. "Now go check on the bridge guards and then meet me in the conference room. If Jess is not already in there, send her that way." Dale grumbled and postured a few more times but finally disappeared back through the double doors. Paul didn't watch him go. He kept his eyes on Brett. "Are you carrying any weapons on you, Mr. Adams?" Paul asked. "Not anymore. Your two guards took my pistol from me. The rest of my weapons are back at my camp across the canyon." "Very good. But you'll understand if I make a quick check, just to make sure, won't you?" "Of course." While the other guards pointed their guns at him, Paul had him stand up and submit to a pat down. It was far from the efficient, all-inclusive search that Brett would have performed had their positions been reversed - Paul was squeamish about patting down the crotch area and beneath the arms - but Brett decided to keep his comments to himself. At least the man had been on the ball enough to make the effort. "Walk through the doors," Paul directed when he was done, stepping back and waving with his pistol. He was wiping his hands on his clothing as he did so. "Sorry about the dirt and grime," Brett said, mounting the steps. "Bathing facilities are a little scarce these days you know." "Understandable," he said, taking up position behind him. "You can put your hands down if you'd like." He was directed to a closed door off one of the hallways that was marked: CONFERENCE A. He pushed it open and found himself in a spacious room that was equipped with several oak tables with chairs around them. Oil lamps set at both ends of one of the tables provided illumination. Standing next to the table was a tall blonde woman in her thirties. Though she was wearing blue jeans and an old sweater there was no mistaking the look of aristocracy in her pretty face. She looked like a woman who had grown up with money and had lived with it all of her life. Brett had no trouble at all picturing her in one of the expensive houses of Garden Hill. She looked at Brett with unmasked distaste in her eyes and stepped backwards to keep from being close to him. Her nose wrinkled up as she caught a whiff of the odor he was exuding. "Is this our intruder?" she asked Paul in a high, nasal voice. "This is him," Paul confirmed. "Meet Mr. Brett Adams. He alleges to be a former San Joaquin County Sheriff's deputy and a former army warrant officer. He claims to have walked through our bridge defenses and into our town under the cover of darkness." "But you said that was impossible," she said. "No," he corrected, "I never said any such thing. I told you that it would be very difficult. Dale is the one who has been saying it's impossible." She let that go. "So why did you bring him in here? Why don't you take him right back out to the edge of town and put him back where he belongs?" "We may do just that," Paul said. "But first, I think we should talk to him. He went to a lot of trouble to do what he did and then he simply gave himself up. I suspect that he has a proposal of sorts to make for us. Is that right, Mr. Adams?" "That is exactly right," Brett agreed. "A proposal?" the woman asked. "What could he possibly have that we need?" "What indeed?" Paul said. He waved Brett to a chair. "Why don't you have a seat, Mr. Adams and tell us what brings you here." "Don't let him sit on our furniture," she said, wrinkling her nose. "He's disgusting." Paul looked at her pointedly. "Jessica," he said, "Mr. Adams is a guest here at the moment. I will not ask a guest to remain standing no matter what he looks or smells like. Besides, it's a lot harder for him to attack anybody if he's seated." He waved to the chair again. "Go ahead." Jessica fumed and seemed about to say something else before deciding it wasn't an issue worth pushing. She pulled her own chair out and sat down as far away from him as she could get. Just from the brief exchange he'd witnessed, Brett could tell that Paul was a little more conscientious about contradicting her than he was about contradicting Dale. Interesting. He pulled out a chair and made himself comfortable. Paul remained standing, his gun held in his hand, barrel pointing at the floor. Before any conversation could begin, Dale entered the room. He shot a foul look at Brett and then walked over to the table, grabbing a seat next to Jessica. "The guards are still in position on the bridge," Dale announced. "They report seeing no unusual activities tonight. They say that there is no way that anyone could have come up the ladder behind them without them noticing it." "The ladder?" Jessica asked. "When you talk to them again," Brett said, "tell them that I came up just as the female guard was finishing up the blowjob on the male guard, but before they both ducked down and started making the Suburban rock." A collective gasp came from the three members of the group. "That is disgusting that you would imply something like that," Jessica said. "Paul, take this man out of town immediately!" "Goddamn right," Dale agreed righteously. But Paul only looked embarrassed. "Were they really doing that?" he asked Brett. "He's making this up as he goes along," Dale yelled. "Jesus Christ, Paul, can't you see that? Steve and Laura wouldn't do anything like that. Especially not on guard duty!" "If he's making it up," Paul asked his companions, "then how did he know that there was a male and female on tonight? How did he know that we use a Suburban?" Neither one of them had an answer for that. "They were really doing that," Brett said. "But don't be too hard on them. They wouldn't have seen me anyway. They were in a lighted position and I was in complete darkness. The rain and the canyon noise kept any noise I made from reaching them. While I wouldn't recommend that particular activity on watch, it wasn't because of it that I got in." "Christ," Paul muttered, pacing back and forth for a moment. "Paul," Jessica said, "don't go yelling at Steve and Laura just because of something this... this man says. I mean, sure, it might be possible. But I think that you should talk to them first and find out..." "Oh, I'm gonna talk to them all right," Paul said. He looked over at the doorway. "Mitsy!" A moment later it opened and she stuck her head inside. "Yes?" "Find me two more guards and have them take over at the bridge for Steve and Laura right away. Once they're relieved, I want those two to report immediately to me." Mitsy took a moment to digest all of that. She nodded and said: "Right away, Paul. I'll have Barbara and Maggie go out there." "Good enough," Paul said. "Please close the door as you go." No sooner had it swung shut then Jessica asked, "Do you really think it was necessary to do that, Paul? I don't think we should make too big of a deal about this. Rumors have a way of getting out of control. I'd really hate it if Cindy heard that Steve was..." "The guards are my responsibility, Jess," Paul said wearily. "I'll handle the situation as I see fit. And as for containing the rumor, you of all people should know it's already too late for that." Jessica blanched a little, obviously unaccustomed to being talked to like that. "I don't really think that..." "I will handle the guard situation," Paul said firmly, in a voice that there was no compromising with. "It is my responsibility. Now how about we move on to the subject of Mr. Adams here, shall we?" "Fine," she pouted. Paul looked over at Brett. "Why don't we get right to the point and save everyone a lot of time? What exactly is it that you want?" "Safety," Brett said immediately. "Since the comet came down I have almost died more times than I care to count. I want to be safe and live long enough for the sun to come back out. This town represents safety of sorts. You are organized and functioning. I want to be a part of this." "You want to join this town?" Paul clarified. "That is correct." "Impossible," Jessica articulated. "We're not a charitable organization here. We don't even know if we have enough food to feed ourselves for more than a few months. Taking on another mouth, especially a sneaking thief, is out of the question." "Oh, it wouldn't just be one mouth," Brett said, ignoring the sneaking thief remark. "It would be three. After the comet hit I picked up a couple of teenage kids that had been camping with their parents. Their parents were killed and now I'm looking after them." "Kids?" Paul asked. "Where are they?" "That doesn't matter!" Jessica yelled. Next to her, Dale nodded his head in agreement. "We can't take any more people in here! Our food supply is critical enough as it is." "Why don't we hear the man out before we make any decisions?" Paul asked her. "There's nothing to hear," she said. "He's a beggar. We've already made the decision that we can't feed beggars. Not if we want to live." "I'm not a beggar," Brett interjected at this point. "I have something quite valuable to offer you in exchange for taking me and my companions in. Something that you need here almost as much as food." "Oh?" she asked, looking at him skeptically. "And what might that be?" "My experience," he said simply. "Your experience?" "Exactly," he told them, leaning forward a little. "I have six years of active experience as a military man. I was the pilot of a combat helicopter as part of the 3rd Armored Cavalry. I flew medivac during the invasion of Panama. I flew combat missions during Desert Storm. I know all about natural and man-made defenses because it was my job to penetrate and destroy them. I was also a cop for eight years in one of the shittiest cities in California. I know about security. I can help you defend this little town from invasion by the hordes of starving and desperate people that are outside, because, believe me, they will be here and they will find a way to get in if what I've seen so far is any indication of how you're protecting yourselves. Quite frankly, I'm amazed that you've made it this long without being hit." "Thanks, but no thanks," Jessica said icily. "Our security is quite adequate." "No," Paul said, taking a step closer to the table. "It is not." "Paul?" Jessica said, glaring at him. "What are you saying? You are the one that set up our defenses!" "And that is why I'm saying it," he said. "I'm a fireman, Jessica. A fireman. My job was to sit in a fire station and wait for someone to get sick or burn their house down. I've never been in the service. I did the best I could because no one else had any ideas, but, as Mr. Adams has shown us, my measures are simply not enough." "We can't feed him!" Jessica insisted. "Especially not with two kids tagging along with him." "If we don't take him up on his offer," Paul told her, "there may not be anyone here to feed. He penetrated our most secure line of defense, Jess. That bridge was the one thing I didn't worry about and he walked right across it and sat on the wall less than a half-mile from here. Can you imagine the kind of mistakes I've made on the north side of town or the east?" "How do we know he's not scamming us?" Dale put in. "So he says that he was in the army and that he was a cop. How do we know he's not just making that up?" "I agree completely," Jessica said, smiling at the linebacker next to her. Paul looked over at Brett, giving him a look that told him the ball was in his court. Brett handled that ball nicely. "I have no way of proving who I am," he said. "All of my identification is buried under a couple of tons of mud up by Castle Point. All you have is my word at this particular point in time. However, as a gesture of good faith, I'll give you some free advice about how to secure your bridge route and keep from being invaded from that direction." "I don't think we need to listen to any advice from this man," said Dale. "I do," Paul disagreed. "Let's hear it." Brett looked at Jessica, waiting for her to parrot the opinion of Dale, as he had done with all of her opinions. She did no such thing, she only looked at him expectantly, an arrogant expression upon her face. "You need to occupy the hill on the other side of the bridge," Brett said. "The one that I observed your current guard position from." "Oh that's just brilliant," Dale said, smirking. "You want us to put our people outside of our protected area and let them get cut off?" He turned to the two other members of the committee. "This guy is scamming us." "He does have somewhat of a point," Paul said to Brett. "What happens if that position is attacked? How would we get them back across the bridge?" "You don't seem to understand," Brett said. "I'm not suggesting that you place people outside of your area, I'm suggesting that you extend your area to include that hill. From up there you have a panoramic view of every conceivable approach to the bridge. The only blind spot would be if someone came around from the other side of the smaller hill across the road like I did. And even then they would have to cross about a hundred yards of open ground along the canyon ledge before they could access it. You could close that loophole simply by stringing some barbed wire or something like that on that approach. Or you could maintain another watch from your original post." "I'm sorry," Paul said. "I really don't see the advantage to what you're talking about." "The advantage," Brett explained, "is that no one could approach anywhere near the bridge without being seen. As it stands now, they're able to walk right up to it before you see them, right?" "Well, right." "And as I've proved, they can use the very hill that I'm talking about to conduct a thorough reconnaissance of your defenses. If you position your guards where I'm suggesting, no one will be able to get within a quarter mile or so without being seen. That overlook is perfect and it would be almost impossible for a force to dislodge your guards from there without heavy weapons, mortars, or air power - things which are in kind of short supply these days. The only way up that hill is from the road, which is a very steep climb, or from the south, the way we came up, which is an even steeper one. If you hold that hill, you hold everything within view of it because your guards can just pick off anyone that tries to climb up or get to the bridge. Two guards with a sufficient supply of ammunition could fight off fifty people easily." Jessica and Dale were both doing their damnedest to keep looking skeptical about him, but he could see that they were carefully considering what he was saying. "Does that make sense to you, Paul?" Jessica asked hesitantly. "Yes," he said. "It does make sense. I'd have to look the place over to be sure, but I don't see any flaw in what he's saying." He looked over at Brett. "What about at night? That was the problem we had with the original guard position. You just can't see the bridge at night. That's why I came up with the idea of the video cameras." "And that was a damn good idea," Brett said. "I have to give credit where it is due. I'm not sure that I would have even thought about something like that." "Thanks," Paul said, beaming a little. "I was rather proud of that." "And you should be. But your problem is that, although it's a great idea, you did not execute it as well as you could have. You left a hole that I was able to find and exploit. And the reason I was able to find that hole is because I was able to observe you at will before I made any sort of move." "So what is your suggestion?" "I'd have to see the capabilities of your camera system before I came up with a firm plan," Brett said after a moment's thought. "But the one thing that is absolutely necessary is that you move the two SUVs on this side of the bridge backwards so that they are between the ladder from the catwalk and the bridge entrance. You can't let people come up behind your position like I did." "We don't have any more coaxial cable connectors," Paul said. "We made the chain as long as we could." "Then either splice on some more or move the camera positions back. It's better to do that than to leave yourself exposed from the rear. Also, those ladders should be removed on both ends to keep people from moving up and down on them. Hell, if you can cut holes in the catwalk itself or even drop the whole damn thing into the canyon, that would be even better. The important thing is that somehow, some way, you deny the use of that catwalk to an enemy. Without that catwalk, I wouldn't have been able to get in here from that direction. With that catwalk, I could have led as many people as I wanted to across to this side and you wouldn't have known about it, even if your guards had been doing their jobs at the time." They discussed other aspects of the bridge defense for more than twenty minutes, Paul and Brett holding up most of the conversation but Jessica and Dale gradually starting to throw in a few contributions and ask a few questions as well. Brett began to sense a thawing of the malevolent feelings that Jessica had for him as the talk went on, a very small thawing but a thawing none-the-less. The look of disgust in her face whenever she looked at him was replaced by a look of something that was almost like interest. He sensed no such warming from Dale, who seemed to perceive him as some sort of threat, but he had also figured out that Dale's position among the town leadership was more symbolic than anything else. Finally the discussion wound down and the time came to take a vote on the matter of Brett's leaving or staying. The vote did not go well. "I still think we should put him back out of town," Dale said when the table was opened for discussion. "I don't like him and I don't trust him. He snuck in here in the middle of the night and God only knows what his intentions are. We have too much to protect in this town to be taking in strangers." "I have to agree with Dale," Jessica said when he was finished. "While he has proved himself to be knowledgeable in the matter of defending our bridge, I think that the cost of feeding him and his companions is too high to pay for a few good ideas. As I said earlier, we don't even have enough food to feed the people that we have here already for more than a few months. We don't have the luxury of taking in outsiders." "I think we should take him," Paul said. "Neither I nor anyone else in this town knows the least bit about defending us from attack. We can put up basic defenses, sure, we can keep out the stragglers, true, but if there were ever any sort of organized attack upon us, we would probably be defeated." "You're being paranoid, Paul," Jessica said. "The stragglers are all we have to worry about. There is no organization out there." "I beg to differ," Brett put in at this point. He told them about the bikers that had attacked Chrissie and Jason's family, killing the parents. He then told them about the interrogation that he had conducted on the survivor of that firefight. "He said there were thirty of them and that they had automatic weapons. That is organization. Those people are probably still out there somewhere and they will probably head for towns where there are survivors to try and secure more supplies. They may eventually find there way to your front door, either by coming to your bridge or by working their way up the other side of the canyon from the west. If they don't get here, other groups like them will. You cannot just assume that you will not be attacked. If that group comes here with your defenses as they are, they will defeat you. I've told you what they were trying to do to Chrissie and Jason when I interrupted them." "You're just trying to scare us," Dale accused. "How do we know that you didn't make all of that up?" "And how do you know that he did?" Paul put in. "Wouldn't the smarter course be to prepare for the worst instead of to hope for the best?" "Not to the point of paranoia," Jessica said. "I'm sorry, Paul and I'm sorry, Mr. Adams, but we've voted on the matter. Dale and I voted not to take any more people. That means that you will have to be put back out of town. I'll have the guards lead you back across the bridge." "No," Paul said firmly. "Paul," Jessica said. "We've voted! It was two to one against you." "You're not going to do this to me on this issue," Paul said. "This is not about whether or not to allow three baths per week or only two, this is not about whether or not to increase rations or keep them where they are. This issue is for our very survival and I will not allow an impulsive decision from the two of you that is probably based more on snobbery than it is any practical matter to stand." "What the hell are you talking about?" Dale said, leaping to his feet so fast that his chair clattered to the floor behind him. "How dare you!" Jessica said, just as angrily. "You'd better watch how the fuck you're talking to us or you're going to be walking out with him!" Brett watched this exchange carefully, with the eye of a man who had seen a thousand angry people arguing with each other. Never before had the argument been so directly connected to his own survival but, interestingly, the tones and the posturing were the same. Jessica, and particularly Dale, were both exaggerating their anger, yelling louder than was necessary. This was usually a sign that people displayed when they were doubtful about their stated position but were afraid to show it for fear of losing face. Paul, on the other hand, showed the kind of determination that came with knowing you were right. He held his ground, his face remaining calm. "This is too important of a decision to allow you two to piss away with your little voting alliance," Paul said. "This is something that needs to be decided by the entire town, and only after they have listened to the facts. I want Mr. Adams to stay here tonight..." "No!" shouted Dale. "He is not staying here another minute." "He will stay here," Paul said, taking a step closer to the larger man. Incredibly, Dale backed up. "That is my decision. I will keep him under guard in this building for the night. I will feed him and allow him to bathe and I will even give him fresh clothing." "You will do no such thing," Jessica spat. "How dare you..." "And tomorrow," Paul went on, his voice overriding her, "we will tell our fellow townspeople what Mr. Adams has offered us and what the cost would be. We will then have a town-wide vote on the matter of whether we should sacrifice a little bit of our food supply for increased security." "That is not how things work in this town," Jessica said, pointing her finger at him with short jabs. "We are the committee and we make the rules. You are not free to change them just because you were outvoted on something. If you have a problem with that, you would do well to remember that you were not even a resident of this town and that you can be put out of it just as easily as your friend here." "And you can keep in mind," said Paul, unfazed by her speech, "that you two are not really liked by the other residents of this town. They accept your leadership, Jessica because you have assumed it and none of them wish to take it. They accept yours, Dale because you used to be the friendly grocery store manager that they all had wet dreams about and because you're fucking Jessica now." "You don't need to be so crude," Jessica said, paling. Paul ignored her. "They accept my leadership however, because I get things done around here. It was me that organized the defenses. It was me that set up the hot baths and the laundry area. Now I don't know what the result might be if you try to throw out the one member of this committee who actually does anything and who is actually worth a damn, but it could be that you might find that you are not as well-supported as you think you are. It could be that you two will be the ones walking across the bridge." Jessica crumbled under this onslaught. Brett saw it happen in the way that her eyes suddenly became full of doubt, in the way that her shoulders suddenly slumped in defeat. Paul had pushed exactly the buttons that needed to be pushed in order to change her mind. He had played upon the natural insecurities that bullying people all had. "Well," she said slowly and carefully, "since you feel that strongly about this, I suppose we can make an exception to the rules just this once. He can stay until the morning and then I'll talk to everyone and tell them..." "We will talk to everyone," Paul broke in. "I'm not about to let you go out there and tell your version of the story. We'll do it together and we'll do it objectively." Her face angered but she controlled the outburst that she so desperately wanted to unleash. "Fine," she said. "We will go out and talk to everyone. But make sure you keep him guarded all night! He is not to be left alone." "I think I can handle that," Paul said, allowing the slightest smile to touch his face. ------- "Smoke?" Paul offered to Brett, holding out a red and white box of Marlboros. "I haven't smoked since I was in the army," he told him. They were still in the conference room although Jessica and Dale had both departed for parts unknown. He had just swallowed down a meal of baked beans, cornbread, and applesauce, easily the best he had consumed since leaving his home in Stockton before the hunting trip. The beans had actually been hot! "Yeah," Paul agreed, taking one out of the pack and putting it in his mouth. "They're bad for you. Give you cancer and heart disease and emphysema and all that." He struck a light with a pack of matches. "Somehow that just doesn't scare me as much as it used to." He put the end of the match to his smoke and took a deep drag. "Good point," Brett agreed. "But all the same, I'll pass." "Suit yourself," Paul told him, leaning back in his chair a little. He had long since reholstered his gun and dropped his guard. "So, you were a fireman you said?" "I was with the CDF," Paul confirmed. "I was the captain at the station just outside of town, near the interstate. I lived in Penryn, just down the hill in the valley. My crew abandoned me once the shit really hit the fan and tried to make it home. They both lived in Sacramento. I don't know what ever became of them but they've never shown back up here. Some of the people in town tried to make it down to Auburn about a week after the impact. They say the interstate is washed out near the gulch down there." "Family?" Brett asked. "Wife and two kids down in Penryn," he said a little sadly. "I would've gone with my crew if I'd thought there was the slightest chance of them being still alive, but... I knew better. I imagine my house is under about sixty feet of water or so. There's no way they could've made it." "I'm sorry," Brett said. "Mine were back in Stockton. I saw the water come in from Castle Point. There's no way that mine made it either." They both contemplated their losses for a few minutes, Paul smoking, Brett just staring at the wall. "So how many people are in this town?" Brett finally asked to change the subject. "One hundred and eighty-three," Paul told him. "Of which, one hundred and sixty-two are either women or children under the age of seven." "What?" Brett asked. "There are only..." he tried to do the addition in his head. "Twenty-one men," Paul said, providing the answer. "Not including you, although I'm pretty sure we'll let you in once the decision is taken out of those idiot's hands. And not a single one of us men are from this town. We all just happened to be here because of our jobs." "How is that possible?" Brett asked. "It's simple," Paul told him. "This is an upscale, higher income town. Or at least it was before the comet. There was not much diversity here like you might find in other places. This was a very structured, closed-minded, we-must-conform-to-the-elite-standard-of-living kind of place. It was the home of the lawyers, the dentists, the investment bankers, the accountants, the doctors. For the most part these people were all men and they were all married. This was not a place where there were a bunch of unemployed men hanging around, drinking beer and watching NASCAR on the tube. When the impact occurred we were smack in the middle of a Thursday afternoon, remember? Every last one of these men was down in the valley doing whatever it was they did to bring home the bacon. Now there were a lot of women who worked in this town as well and all of them were down in the valley as well. There were not any jobs in town that anyone who actually lived here would have been doing. So what we had left after the earthquake and the flaming rocks and the mudslides swept through, were a bunch of high-class housewives, a few female employees from the school or the grocery store or the library and twenty-one men whose jobs just happened to bring them here at the particular moment that the impact happened. "There's me for instance, the captain of the local firehouse. I got put into a leadership role because I'm able to take charge of people and figure out how to get things done. And then there's Dale, who was the manager of the grocery store. He was here doing what he does and he came into power because he was perceived as being the one who controlled the food. This position was strengthened because Jessica, who was the leader of the PTA and the homeowners association and the library committee and god knows what else, snatched him up as a plaything before any of the other women thought to do that. Dale's a major pain in the ass, but he's manageable. As for the rest of the men, we have a few teachers from the elementary school, a few of them were checkers at the grocery store, one worked at the gas station, one was a pool guy, two were PG&E workers that were installing an electrical box. We also have a couple of landscapers that were up here mowing lawns, a plumber that was fixing someone's pipes, even a couple of nineteen year old Mormons that were up here doing the bicycle rounds." "Not one man was home from work for the day?" Brett asked. "Not a single one?" "Not that survived anyway," Paul told him. "Keep in mind that nearly a third of the houses were located up on the hill over the canyon. They all went down in the earthquake. Maybe some of the men were home up there but there weren't any down here. It's not all that surprising when you think about the kind of people we're talking about here. Very conformist. They were all office hours type of people doing their climb up whatever ladder they were on. There was hardly a person in town under thirty-two years old, which means they were in the frantic parts of their careers where they have to put in ungodly hours. They wouldn't have taken a day off unless they were just about dead." "So you have a bunch of yuppie women to deal with?" "You got it," he said. "And I'm telling you, it's a trial. Some of them are pretty sharp but a lot of them are just the most stereotypical airheads you could ever imagine. They're women who've been used to their good looks getting them by for all of their lives and they don't really seem to grasp that things are a lot different now. It seems like every day I'm dealing with some kind of crisis about work details or guard duties or some other task that someone has been assigned that they think is beneath them. I actually had one refuse to learn how to shoot a rifle because she broke a fucking fingernail while she was trying to load it." "Jesus," Brett said, trying to imagine how he would have reacted to that. It probably wouldn't have been pretty. "Take the issue of the baths for instance. That was made the number one priority when we organized and started getting our shit together. Before we even got around to gathering weapons up and learning how to use them, before we tackled the issue of town security, they wanted to have a working bath that had hot water. Can you fucking believe it? The world collapses around them, billions of people are dead, we don't have enough food to make it through the winter, and they demand that someone rig them up a freakin' bathtub with running water. I'm telling you, sometimes it seems like it would just be easier to take a few guns and head out on my own." "No," Brett said, shaking his head. "You wouldn't want to do that. You can't imagine what its like out there unless you've been through it. At least you have some semblance of order in here, at least you can tell yourself that you'll probably be alive this time next week." "That's true," Paul sighed, crushing out his smoke in a beer can that had been fashioned into an ashtray. "I hope I wasn't belittling what you've gone through with my whining. Part of the grass is always greener syndrome I guess." "Don't worry about it." "So what about these two kids you have? You said they're still out on the other side of the bridge. Are they safe out there? Should we try to bring them in?" "They're as safe as they can be out there," Brett said. "I've taught them how to build their shelter so no one will happen across it or spot it. They'll be under cover in there by now and they're well armed with weapons that they know how to use. There won't be any way to bring them in tonight. I told them to climb the hill in the morning and keep an eye out for me." "They sound like they're pretty smart," Paul said. "They're good kids," Brett agreed, smiling as he thought of them. "Actually, I don't have any right to call them kids anymore. They may be teenagers, but they've grown up since the impact." He told Paul about the firefight with the two hunters. "Unbelievable," Paul said, obviously impressed. "You took two teenagers that had never held a gun in their lives and turned them into an infantry squad. I wish I could do that with my people. I'm afraid your experience with the bridge guards and the two that captured you is more the rule than the exception. They volunteer for guard duty at night not so they can help protect us from outsiders but so they can boff each other in privacy. I just cannot get these people to take security seriously. They're too caught up in the who is fucking whom game." "I take it that the woman to man ratio is somewhat of a problem?" "It's a huge problem," he said, pulling another smoke from the pack and sparking up. "It's funny. I never would have thought that I would end up in charge of a group in which the women were all very attractive, in their sexual prime, and outnumbered the men by a ratio of nearly six to one, and that I would hate it. But I'm here to tell you now, it is not the freakin' Garden of Eden. People were not meant to live like this. It screws with their sensibilities and their morality. It pushes them over the edge." "What do you mean?" Brett wanted to know. "Well, the basic problem is that all of us men have latched onto a woman who is our "official" partner, I guess you'd say. I'm no exception to this. Even though my wife is less than two weeks dead, I'm now sharing my bed with Janet, who used to be one of the kindergarten teachers at the school. I mean, why not, right?" "Right," Brett wholeheartedly agreed, thinking about his own relationship with Chrissie. "So that's the surface of the whole thing. All of the men have a partner. The problem is that that leaves more than a hundred women, all of whom are in the prime of their lives and most of whom are accustomed to having a male to take care of them, without a partner. Most of these women are also the types who have no problem undercutting each other and backstabbing in order to get something that they want. So here in our happy little town we constantly have attractive women on the prowl, trying to steal a man away from one of the women who already has one. And we're not talking about coy flirtation or innuendo here. They will do almost anything to achieve this goal short of actually killing a rival. I imagine it's only a matter of time before one of them tries that. And the men..." he shook his head a little. "Well, I don't have to tell you how men are. Most of us up here were blue-collar types before the comet and these are the kind of women that we always considered to be way out of our league. It's not very surprising that we find it hard to resist the temptation when one of these women basically asks us to fuck her. They are often quite shameless in their manner of seduction. I myself, as moral and monogamous as I like to think I am, have given in more than once. You simply can't help it." Brett listened to all of this carefully. "Beautiful women constantly on the prowl?" he asked. "I'm waiting for you to tell me that part about how this is bad." Paul laughed, taking a deep drag on his cigarette. "Sounds ideal, doesn't it? It's not. Most of the men here have already switched partners three or four times just since the comet struck and of those that haven't, I can't think of a single one that's not stringing two or three along on the side. The tension that this creates among the women is volatile. Most of the conversation around here is about who is making a move, who is thinking of changing partners, who is resorting to what to get what she wants. Every day there are at least four physical fights about someone who either has or is perceived to have tried to make a move. The rumors spread around like wildfire and the fact that you cannot judge how accurate they are only makes things worse. And then you have Jessica, who lives in constant fear of someone stealing Dale from her. She is one of the worst sources of the rumors and prides herself on always knowing what's going on. But at the same time, she is always trying to push us, as a group, to kick out any woman that is caught engaging in 'adulterous activity', as she puts it. So far Dale, myself, and some of the other men have always managed to keep her from actually expelling someone who gets caught fucking the wrong person, but her point of view is starting to spread, particularly among those who have a legitimate partner." "What is it that they are after?" Brett asked. "I mean, besides sex, why is it so important that they have a man to call their own. Don't they realize that this is a different world now?" "I don't think that a lot of them realize that," Paul said. "As for what they are after, a lot of it depends on the individual woman. For some, it's strictly sex that they want. They're horny and they want to fulfill a biological need. They are the easiest ones to deal with and they are the only ones that I, shall we say... transgress with, when I do. They just want to get fucked for the sheer enjoyment of it. Others however, cannot seem to live without a man's identity locked up with theirs and they are the ones who are the source of most of the problems here. Thanks to Jessica and a few others like her, there is now a perception that those who are officially partnered with a man are somehow better than those who are not. Thus, we have the fierce and often violent competition to secure attached status. I don't mess with the women who are out for that." "God," Brett said, shaking his head a little. "And I thought relationships were complicated before." "No shit," Paul agreed. There was a soft knock at the door and Mitsy opened it a crack without waiting for a reply. She stuck her head in. "Paul," she said, "Steve and Laura are here. I had them wait for you in the main office." "Thanks, Mitsy," he said, standing up. "Do they know why they're here?" "Well..." she started, obvious hesitant to say that they'd been filled in on their mistake. "Never mind," Paul sighed. "Has Hector checked in for his perimeter shift yet?" "He just got here," she told him. "Good. I want you and Hector to keep an eye on Brett here. I've already got Jeff rounding up some clothes and shaving stuff for him. Take him over to the bath and let him get himself cleaned up. Then find him some place to crash for the night in the building. Brett is to be treated as a compulsory guest, okay?" "A what?" she asked, her brow wrinkling in confusion. "That means you will treat him politely and tend to his needs within reason, but don't give him a gun or let him out of your sight, okay? He is still to be considered potentially dangerous to us." Her eyes tracked over to Brett for a moment and she offered a nervous giggle. "Okay," she said. "I'll wait here until you find Hector. Be sure you each have a pistol please." "Right," she said, her head disappearing. Once she was gone Paul looked at Brett. "No offense taken I hope? You seem like you're on the up and up but, as you've pointed out yourself, you can't be too careful." "No offense at all," he said. "And if nothing else, I think the chance to bathe will make this whole trip worthwhile." Paul gave a cynical look. "I'm sure you'll enjoy it," he said. "Freakin' baths are what we specialize in here." ------- The bathing area was located in what had once been a women's locker room adjacent to the community center's basketball court. A large marble tub had been placed atop of jack stands directly above the drain in the floor of the communal showers. Two hoses - a two and a half inch diameter fire hose and a standard garden hose - were curled neatly up on the floor next to it, nozzles on one end, the other ends snaking up and out of the building through a window. A shelf had been erected next to the tub and it was filled with towels, washcloths, bottles of shampoo, conditioner, bubble bath, bath beads, and every other conceivable bath option. A hand lettered sign, printed in spiky, feminine script, read: PLEASE, CLEAN THE TUB AFTER BATHING. HAVE COURTESY FOR OTHERS! Light came from a serious of oil lamps and candles that had been placed around the perimeter of the tub. Brett looked at all of this in frank amazement as Mitsy and Hector, a young Mexican man, led him into the room. Hector was carrying an armful of fresh clothing with him, which he set down on the towel shelf. Both of the guards had pistols strapped to their waists but neither one of them seemed particularly concerned that he would try some sort of dangerous move on them. "Hecky," Mitsy asked her fellow guard, "can you go start the pump on the fire engine?" "Sure," he said in heavily accented English. "Right away." He headed back out the door. "The water comes from the fire engine?" Brett asked. "The cold water does," she said. "It'll take a minute for him to get it going. In the meantime, you can put the garden hose in the tub and start putting in the hot." "Hot water?" Brett said, shaking his head in wonder. "Where does that come from?" "Paul rigged up a big rain barrel for us near the side of the building," she said. "He diverted one of the rain gutters on the roof so that it would dump into it and keep it full for us. We have a fire burning under it all the time. Ted - he was a plumber before the comet - rigged a faucet in the side of the barrel and we ran the hose in from there. It doesn't flow very fast so you probably want to get it started right away. It takes about ten or fifteen minutes to get your bath at the right temperature." She shrugged a little, as if to say that somehow, they were coping with these primitive conditions. "It works." Paul picked up the garden hose and put the end of it into the tub. "Be sure to close the drain first," Mitsy warned. "We try not to waste hot water here." "Of course," Brett said, pushing down the locking drain button. He then opened the nozzle on the end of the hose. Water began to slowly flow, at about a third the rate of a normal faucet. It was lukewarm at first but, by the time he heard the sound of the fire engine's motor turn over outside, it was too hot to touch. Steam began to rise into the air. "Here," Mitsy said, bringing over the fire hose. "You can leave that one in there and spray in the cold with this one. It comes out pretty fast. Be careful not to overspray it." "Right," Brett said, taking the heavy hose in his hands after leaving the smaller one on the bottom. He examined the controls of the nozzle for a moment and then, pointing it into the tub, slowly opened it up. Water began to spray out, slowly at first and then with considerable force. The tub began to rapidly fill. "Here," Mitsy said, "let me put some soap in there for you." She had a bottle of dishwashing liquid in her hands. She squirted a generous amount into the flow of water. White bubbles immediately began to form. "Thanks," Brett told her, looking over at her for a moment. She had taken off the rain slicker that he had first seen her in and was dressed now in Levi's jeans and a flannel shirt. Though her clothing was baggy it was still easy to tell that she had a nice body beneath it. Her hair was dark brown and cut short. Her face was without makeup but was still very pretty. He wondered what her husband had done. Had he been a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant? "That's enough cold," she told him when the tub was about two-thirds of the way full. "Shut it off and let the hot water fill up the rest." He did as she said, shutting down the nozzle and cutting off the flow of water. He set the hose back down on the floor. "I'll have Hecky keep the pump running," she said. "As dirty as you are you're gonna need two tubfulls to get everything clean. Get the worst of the dirt off and wash your hair and then we'll drain it and start over. The second tub will get the rest of it off and you'll be squeaky clean." "Squeaky clean," he said. "I didn't think I'd ever be squeaky clean again." As they waited for the hot water to heat the tub up, Mitsy sat on a bench just outside the shower area while Brett sat on the end of the tub. She asked him about how he had come to be in their little town and he explained about Chrissie and Jason and his desire for something approaching safety. "I can't believe you actually lived out there for almost two weeks," she said, her eyes wide. "It must've been horrible." "It wasn't a PTA meeting," he said. "That's for sure. Hopefully you'll never have to find out just how nasty it really is." "God forbid," she said. She did not ask him about just why he was still here and what his current status in the community was. Apparently that rumor had already spread to her. He asked her about her former life, just to make conversation. She told him that she was twenty-six years old and had been the wife of a senior auditor for Arthur-Anderson. Her husband had been in a Sacramento high-rise, well into his seventieth hour for that week when the comet hit. "I imagine his building probably collapsed around him in the earthquake," she said, without a trace of sadness in her voice. "It hit pretty hard down in the valley from what I understand." "Do you have kids?" he asked. "Two girls," she said. "Four and six years old. The older one was in school, the younger one was home with me when it happened. Luckily the school stood up to the quake and Megan was all right. They're both over at one of the other women's house right now. We kinda watch out for each other's kids when someone has guard duty." "I see," Brett said, putting his hand into the tub. The water was nice and toasty, just begging for him to enter it. He dragged out the hot water hose and shut down the nozzle. "Well," he told Mitsy. "I guess it's time." "I guess it is," she smiled, making no move to leave her perch on the bench. "Any chance of getting a little privacy?" he asked her. "Paul told me to keep a close eye on you, didn't he?" she asked sweetly, her eyes teasing. Brett took a deep breath, remembering what Paul had told him about the women in town. He sighed. What could he do? "All right then," he said. "Just be advised. What you're about to see won't be pretty. I haven't had a bath since before I left Stockton. The only thing approaching clean is my teeth, and that's only because we found some toothbrushes in that trailer." "I'll take my chances," she said. He peeled off his filthy clothing, piece by piece, dropping it into a pile near the edge of the tub. Soon he stood naked, his back to Mitsy, thoughts of her almost forgotten as he looked down at himself in the light for the first time. He could hardly see his skin through all of the dirt and grime and the smell that rose from him was offensive even to his own nose. "Let me in there," he said, mounting the wooden step that stood next to the tub. "Let's see if there's a man under all that," Mitsy said from behind him. He ignored her remark, putting his foot into the blessedly hot water. The rest of him quickly followed it in. It was hot enough to sting but the sensation was beyond description. For the first time since the impact, he was hot! The heat caressed every inch of his skin, sank into his muscles, opened his pores. "Ahhhhh," he said in a voice that was near orgasmic. "You can't believe how good this feels." "I bet," Mitsy said, her voice closer than it had been a moment before. Brett looked up to see that she was standing near the edge of the tub. She held a bar of soap in her hands. "Need any help?" she asked. "I'll manage," he said, taking it from her. He picked up a washrag and went to work. Within a minute the water that he was sitting in had turned a dirty brown color. Even the soap bubbles lost their whiteness in favor of the mud color. He soaped and scrubbed everywhere with the washrag, which itself soon turned as brown as everything else. Eventually he began to see a faint pinkness to his skin. "Here's some shampoo," Mitsy said, handing him a bottle of a popular name brand. "Let me fill up your bucket for you." She picked up a one-gallon bucket and released some water from the fire hose into it by spraying for a few seconds. She then picked up the garden hose and warmed the water up by putting some of it in there. "Close your eyes," she told him. A moment later warm water was dumped over his head, thoroughly wetting his hair. "Now lather up." He dumped a generous amount of the shampoo, which smelled like fresh apples, onto his hair and scrubbed for the better part of two minutes, rubbing the lather over his face and the hair of his beard as well. While he was doing this, Mitsy filled up another bucket of water that she dumped on him to rinse the shampoo off. They did this two more times until his hair and beard were clean and sweet smelling. "Okay," Mitsy said next. "Pop the drain and let that dirty water run down it. When it's all gone, we'll hose out the tub and then refill it so you can wash again. That oughtta get the worst of it off of you." Brett pushed the drain with his foot. A moment later the sound of water running onto the ground beneath echoed up. He turned to Mitsy. "Can I get a towel?" he asked her. She smiled mischievously. "They're over there on the shelf," she said, taking a step backward, her eyes remaining riveted on him. When he finally figured out that she had no intention of getting a towel for him or even turning around to give him privacy, he stood up. Dirty water and soapsuds ran off of him in streams, pattering back into the tub. Not making any effort to cover himself, he stepped out of the tub, putting his bare feet on the cold tile of the floor. "You look like you're in pretty good shape," Mitsy said appreciatively, her eyes continuing to take in his form as he walked over to the towel shelf and pulled a bath towel from a stack. "It comes from marching around with a fifty pound pack of canned food on your back," he told her a little testily. He began to towel off, sopping up the dirty water that clung to him. Mitsy watched his every move, her eyes starting to shine now. Brett knew that he was soon going to have trouble with her. "You look semi-clean now," she told him while the brown water poured out of the bathtub and into the floor drain. "I think one more dunking should do it for you." Once he was dry he wrapped the now-filthy towel around his waist and walked back over to the tub. With disgust he realized that he had not just left a ring on the sparkling white surface, he had coated the entire thing with grime. Mitsy handed him the fire hose and he spent the next ten minutes just hosing it out and scrubbing it down with another washrag. She stayed carefully behind him as he worked, paying particular attention to the view that was provided whenever he bent over. "Now I know how secretaries feel when their bosses drop pencils for them to pick up," he told her, annoyed. She did not seem to be particularly concerned with his feelings. "And now I know how those bosses feel," she said. "You have a really nice ass you know." "Jesus," he said, scooting around the other side of the tub. "Can I fill this thing up now?" "By all means," she said. He closed the drain and put the hot water hose back in. Once it was running, he picked up the fire hose and began to spray. As before, he shut it off when the tub was two-thirds full. When he set it back down on the concrete, Mitsy walked over to the window that the hose came in from and stood on a small ladder that had been placed there, climbing until her face was looking out over the parking lot. "You can shut it down now, Hecky," she yelled. "He's done with it!" A moment later the rumbling of the fire engine cut off. A minute after that, Hector appeared in the doorway, his expression neutral as he took in the sight of Brett in a towel standing around waiting for the tub to fill while Mitsy watched him. As soon as she saw him she walked over to him. They held a whispered conversation for a few moments, during which Hector developed a pleased grin upon his face. They said one last thing to each other and Hector disappeared, heading in the direction of the community center's front door. Mitsy, wearing a smile of her own, walked back over to Brett. "What was that all about?" he asked her. "Hecky's got a little thing going on the side with Brenda Callahan," she told him. "He's living with Maria Sanchez you see. She was one of the cart girls at the grocery store, but Brenda's been doing him for a few days now, trying to steal him away. Myself, I think he's just tearin' some off for the fun of it. Hecky likes Mexican girls and Maria's the only one in town. He won't leave her." "Shouldn't he be helping you guard me?" Brett asked, a big part of him appalled by the fact that he had left her alone. "You're not gonna attack me," she said. "You would've already done it back on the wall earlier if you were gonna do it. Did I tell you that you almost made me pee my pants when you yelled at us?" "No," he said dryly. "You did," she said. "You scared the crap out of both of us." "If you would've been paying attention to your duties as perimeter guards instead of gossiping with each other, maybe you would've seen me before I had a chance to scare you." She scoffed a little. "Do I look like a damn security guard?" she asked him. "I grew up in Granite Bay and went to private schools all my life. How the hell was I supposed to know that you were going to be up there?" "You weren't," he told her. "But you could've at least kept an eye out. Don't you know that the world is a different place now?" "I'm starting to learn that," she said. She pointed at the bathtub. "Looks like you're full up. Are you gonna climb in?" He climbed in after dropping his dirty towel to the floor and pretending not to notice Mitsy's interest in what was revealed by this motion. As before, the water was stinging at first but he quickly got used to it. This time he did not immediately pick up a washrag. Instead, he leaned backward against the sloped rise of the tub and relaxed, letting his body soak in the warmth, letting it ease his sore muscles. He closed his eyes, intending to ignore Mitsy in the hopes that she would go away or at least retreat back to her bench. This hope turned out to be quite naïve. He heard the sound of her boots being unbuckled and slipped off. He opened his eyes and saw that she was doing exactly that. As soon as they were free of her feet, she unbuckled her belt, sliding the holstered gun free and setting it on the towel shelf. "What are you doing, Mitsy?" he asked her wearily. "We're only allowed three baths a week," she said, undoing the buttons on her flannel shirt. "It's not my turn for another two days and I thought, since you've already got it full, that you wouldn't mind if I cheated a little." She winked at him. "A girl really does love her baths you know." "I would prefer to go it alone," he said, watching as her shirt opened up revealing a white bra beneath. Her breasts were small, smaller than Chrissie's, but they were nicely formed and the contrast of the white bra cups against her tanned skin was alluring. "Oh, don't be such a prude," she told him, shrugging the shirt off her shoulders. He could now see her smooth stomach and her belly button. "Surely you've taken a bath with a woman before. I don't bite." "But maybe I do," he said, unable to tear his eyes away from her skin. She really was a very attractive woman. Her curves were prominently displayed for him as she slid her hands down to the buttons of her jeans. "We've already been over that," she said, unsnapping the first button. "You wouldn't hurt me." "Mitsy," he said firmly, "I don't want to do this with you. I just want to get cleaned up and get some sleep." "Who says we're going to do anything," she said, feigning disinterest in him. She popped open the second button, revealing the top of her pink panties. "I just want to sneak in an extra bath. Help a girl out, will you?" "Then I'll get out," he said. "You have your bath and I'll get dressed." "Oh no," she told him, shaking her head. "I'm supposed to guard you. I can't do that if I'm in the tub and you're not." She undid another button, revealing even more of her panties. He began to feel his penis filling with blood, very much against his will. "Mitsy," he told her, shifting uncomfortably in the tub. "I'm trying to get accepted into your town. My very survival depends upon it. If I get caught naked in a bathtub with you on the first night, it won't look real good for me." She pushed her pants down, revealing her long legs. They, like her stomach and her chest, were nicely tanned. They were athletic legs, with hardly an ounce of fat on them. It seemed that Mitsy had spent a good portion of her adult life working out. She stood with them slightly apart, her weight distributed evenly. Her pink panties were bunched up just a little bit, the crotch showing a distinct dampness, a few stray strands of black pubic hair sticking out from the sides. His erection grew larger, reaching maximum pressure. "If we get caught," she told him, stepping out of her pants and walking a step closer to the tub, "I'll tell them that you were under duress." She smiled, reaching behind her for her bra strap. "In a way, you are you know. I have a gun over there on the shelf." "Jesus," he breathed, his hand unconsciously sliding down beneath the soapsuds to grasp his penis. He slid it up and down a few times without even realizing what he was doing. Her bra came free with a quick twist of her fingers and, with a single shrug of the shoulders it fell to the floor at her feet. Her breasts were perfectly rounded mounds that stuck out from her chest proudly. They did not sag. There was not enough of them to cause a sag. Little more than the size of avocados, they were capped with disproportionately large nipples and aureoles. The nipples were starkly erect, protruding outward more than half an inch. "My husband used to think these were too small," she said, cupping them for a moment with her hands. "He always used to nag me to go get a boob job but I was always scared to do that. All the horror stories about implants, you know. What do you think?" "They're very nice," he said shortly, his voice wavering. He could not keep his eyes off of them. "Very nice," she repeated, mocking his tone. "You really know how to sweet talk a girl, you know that?" He said nothing, just continued to watch as she hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her panties and pushed them down her hips. Her bush was very hairy and very black, hiding everything beneath it. She rectified this by sliding her fingers into it and spreading open her lips, allowing him to see her pink membranes. "I seem to be kind of wet down there," she said, as if puzzled. "Isn't that weird?" She kicked the panties off and began to walk to the tub, her eyes locked on his face. "Mitsy, we can't do this. I don't want to," he said, making a last ditch effort to dissuade her. She mounted the step, looking down at him. "We're not going to do anything," she said teasingly. "I'm just going to take a bath, remember?" With that she swung her leg over the edge, preparing to step in. This opened her crotch up to Brett's inspection from less than two feet away. Her lips were swollen and reddened, moisture glinting off of them. He even caught a brief glimpse of her clit before she stepped in and hid the view. It was protruding from its hood and ready for action. Brett growled a little in the back of his throat, partially in desire, partially in frustration. She eased into the tub, sitting down in the water directly opposite from where he reclined. "Ahhhhh," she moaned, letting herself lean back against the edge, her legs stretching out before her. Brett felt her feet contact his and then her legs slide over the top of his. He jumped a little at her touch. "What's the matter?" she asked. "You don't expect me to keep my legs all curled up beneath me, do you? I have to relax a little." Her legs continued to move forward until the backs of her thighs were resting firmly on his ankles. Her skin was hot and very smooth against him and his hand stroked a little faster on his erection. He felt the cheeks of her ass lightly touching his toes beneath the water. When he tried to pull back to break the contact, she scooted down further in the water, maintaining it. "Now isn't this nice?" she sighed, putting her arms on the edge of the tub, everything but her face and neck beneath the bubbles. "Yeah," he breathed through clenched teeth. He finally realized that his hand was grasping his cock and he removed it, putting his own arms to the side. "Are we ready to get out now?" "Not even close," she said, squirming a little closer to him. "I haven't even begun to relax yet." "Great," he said, trembling a little. He thought of Chrissie, who was out on the other side of the bridge, huddling alone in a lean-to in the rain while he was warm and safe in a hot bath with a beautiful woman trying to seduce him. Guilt added itself to his emotions, putting them into even more of turmoil. "There's just nothing like a hot bath," Mitsy said, her legs moving a little on his, sliding back and forth with an unbearable softness. "Everything else in the world is gone but at least we still have this, right?" "Right," he squeaked, knowing that the "this" she was talking about was not the bath. He felt her legs sliding together, felt her feet moving over his ribcage. Suddenly, before he realized it was happening, his dick was being grasped from both sides by the bottom of her feet. He jumped a little, trying to pull himself away, but she gripped him strongly, her legs holding him down. "Now what's this?" she said, rubbing her feet up and down a few times. "It seems that somebody in this tub has a little problem." He could not help but groan at the pressure. Never had a woman done what she was doing to him. He had never imagined that feet could feel so good on his manhood. "You like that, don't you?" she asked softly, applying a little more pressure and moving her feet just a little faster. "You never had a foot job before?" "Uhhh," he groaned, still trying to resist her. "I could make you come like this you know," she said, increasing the tempo, forcing him to raise his hips up to her. "I could make you shoot all over my feet if I wanted to." "Mitsy," he moaned. "Please?" Her foot action continued, the water in the tub starting to ripple with the motion now. "But I wouldn't do that," she said, the action slowing a bit. "That would be an awful waste of a good load of come, wouldn't it?" She let her feet come to a halt, ending the sensation for him. He groaned again at the sudden cessation. Unable to help himself, he plunged his hands in the water and grabbed her feet, forcing them to start moving on his cock once again. "Well, well," she said, smiling wickedly, her own hands dropping to his legs. "I thought you didn't want to do anything in here. I though we were just taking a bath. Could it be that you're starting to get a little interested?" "Ohh god," he moaned, continuing to force her feet against him. His hips moved up and down, driving him in and out. She suddenly jerked her feet away from him, breaking the contact. He tried to grab them and bring them back but she was too fast. "You don't want to come on my feet," she told him, sitting up in the water and showing him her soapy breasts. "You want to come in my pussy. Don't you?" "Mitsy," he said, his voice choked, his body trembling, his mind pulling him in several directions at once. "Don't you?" she asked again, her hands sliding up and down his legs sensuously. "Yes," he said, giving fully in. He wanted her. He had to have her. Chrissie huddled in her lean-to didn't matter at that moment. He needed Mitsy like he needed air. "Tell me what you want to do," she said, continuing to rub his legs, her hands going higher and higher up his thighs with each repetition. "Tell me." "I want to fuck you," he said, sitting up and grabbing for her. "I'm going to fuck you." "Oh yes," she said, bringing her own hands up and putting them around his neck. "Do it to me, Brett. Fuck me good. I need it too." He pulled her over the top of his legs, his hands going to her firm ass, his mouth mashing against hers. Their tongues stabbed out and connected, plunging together passionately. She continued to move forward atop his legs, until her small breasts were pushing against him, until he felt her ass nestled against his thighs. Their bodies slid together on a slick film of hot soapy water. Her hands left his neck and reached beneath the water, grabbing his prick. She stroked it up and down. "So nice," she said, breaking the kiss and attacking his earlobes. "So hard." "Yes," he said, his fingers digging into the firm flesh of her ass cheeks, squeezing it nearly hard enough to hurt her. She didn't seem to mind. In fact, her moans encouraged him to squeeze even harder. She continued to squirm forward on him until he felt the head of his dick dragging through hair. She shifted her hips a little more, adjusting him with her hands until it was rubbing against slippery lips. "Oh, you can't believe how much I've wanted a dick in me," she said. "Let's do it!" "Yeah," he agreed. He lifted up on her ass, positioning her opening against him. He then pulled her down, forcing his dick into her lips, plunging himself inside of her in one smooth stroke. She was not as tight as Chrissie was but she was experienced. He felt it in the knowing way she clenched him, in the way she drove herself downward to meet him. It was an almost violent thrust, not for the faint of heart. And the pleasure that it sent radiating through him was almost more than he could bear. "Ohhhh," he groaned, feeling the penetration. "Yesss, oh fuck the shit out of me!" she agreed, her hands going back around him. He began to thrust up and down, not bothering with a slow build-up, just rutting at her like an animal. She responded in turn, forcing her hips downward to meet each of his strokes. Waves of sheer pleasure radiated outward from his cock as he plowed into her. Water, churned up by their motion, splashed over the side, turning the area under the tub into a slippery, soapy puddle. His hands moved from her ass to her slippery tits, each breast fitting neatly into a hand, the nipples pushing into his palms. She pushed her chest forcefully into him, squirming her shoulders back and forth to increase the friction. He craned his head downward, taking her right nipple into his mouth. He sucked it between his lips, biting at it with his teeth. "Oh yesss," she moaned, her hips moving faster, her hand pulling him against her. "Suck my titties, suck them!" He continued to suck at that nipple until it was blood red and hard as a rock. He then switched to the other one, giving it the same treatment. Through it all his hips kept rising and falling, pushing and pulling, slamming his cock into her body like a piston. She loved every second of it, every thrust, ever motion of his lips and tongue against her. Her hands clawed at his back, twined through his hair, squeezed his ass. When she came, she slammed her pelvis down onto him so hard that he bounced upward. Her fingernails dug into his back and her tongue slammed down his throat so far that he almost gagged. She moaned into his mouth as she fucked up and down, as water splashed out of the tub by the gallon. He sucked at her tongue obscenely, taking over the job of thrusting as her orgasm faded away. He powered up and down in her and her muscles continued to clench and unclench rhythmically, gripping and ungripping him. He ground himself forcefully into her with each movement, his pubic hair abrading against hers beneath the water. Soon, too soon, he felt the spasms start. His thrusts became more powerful, less controlled. Mitsy, sensing the change, began to suck on his shoulder, licking and biting at it. "Yes," she breathed, her hands gripping his shoulders. "Come in my pussy! Give it to me!" "Uhhhhh," he grunted, as the waves of pleasure began, as the machinery of orgasm kicked into maximum overdrive. The sensation climbed and climbed and finally peaked in a pinnacle of pleasure. The first jet shot from his driving member, splashing forcefully against her insides. "Yesssss!" she cried, feeling it. "Oh yessss!" He continued to plaster her insides with his seed. Her vaginal muscles gripped hungrily at him, drawing every last drop from his body. Her channel was suddenly a lot slipperier as his semen was added to her juices. When the last spurt was finally shot, when the last tingling of pleasure started to fade, she continued to grind herself atop him while they kissed passionately. "Oh god," she told him, kissing his lips and licking at them. "You can't imagine how good that felt. It's been sooooo long." "I can imagine," he panted, feeling sweat running down his face. His hands continued to run up and down her soapy back, caressing the silky skin. "You're pretty good at this," she said, giving him one more little grind atop his wilting cock. "Thanks," he said, glowing from the aftereffects of orgasm but already starting to feel the first tinges of regret at what he had done. "Yes," said a female voice from the entrance to the locker room. It was not an amused voice. "That was a very impressive performance indeed." With a start they both looked at the doorway. Standing there were Paul and Jessica, their eyes glaring at the two lovers. Both of them had pistols in their hands. ------- Chapter 4 "Mitsy, get the hell out of that bathtub right now!" Paul yelled at her angrily. "All right, all right," she said, pulling herself off of Brett, her voice far from regretful. She stood, unashamed before Paul and Jessica, stepping down and heading for the towel rack. "Are you okay Honey?" Jessica asked her gently, her gun pointing at Brett. "Okay?" she said, grabbing one of the towels and starting to pat herself dry. "Of course I'm okay." "Thank God for that," Jessica said, continuing to glare at Brett. "How dare you abuse our hospitality like that," she accused. "We invite you into our town, feed you, allow you to bathe and you repay us by attacking the girl who was guarding you?" "Attacking?" he said, raising his eyebrows. "How else did she get into that tub with you?" Jessica asked. "And just what happened to Hector?" "Christ almighty," Paul said, shaking his head sadly. He put his gun back in its holster and then turned to Jessica. "Jess," he said, "I don't think Brett attacked Mitsy, did he Mitsy?" "No," she admitted without shame. "It was actually more the other way around." She bent over to dry her legs. "You attacked him?" Jessica asked in disbelief. She shrugged. "He has a nice ass," she said. "And I was horny. What's wrong with having a little fun?" "What's wrong with it," Paul said, "is that you were supposed to be guarding him. What if he was dangerous? What if he had attacked you? Nice ass or not, we don't know this man! Anything could have happened, anything! For Christ's sake, Mitsy, he is in the building that we store our goddamn food and ammunition in!" "Sorry," she said softly, her eyes downcast now. "Sorry," Paul repeated, mocking her. "And just where is Hector, your partner in this guard detail?" "I'd rather not say," she replied. "He's all right though." Paul buried his face in his hands for a moment and took a few deep breaths. When he looked up he noticed that Jessica was still pointing her gun at Brett, murder in her eyes. "Jessica, would put that freaking gun away before you accidentally shoot something with it?" "Put it away?" she asked. "What about him?" "What about him?" he returned. "At least this proves he wasn't trying to attack us from the inside, doesn't it?" "It doesn't prove anything except that he's an animal willing to come in here and take advantage of our hospitality by..." "Oh please," Paul said, cutting her off. "I hardly think it makes him an animal because he responded to the seduction of a beautiful woman after he's been out in the wilderness for two weeks." "Do you really think I'm beautiful, Paul?" Mitsy asked, beaming, immediately interested. "Shit," Paul muttered. He turned to Brett. "Are you about done with your bath now?" "Uh... yeah," he said. "Look, I'm really sorry about all of this. The last thing I wanted to do was..." "Don't sweat it," Paul told him. "Just get out and get your clothes on. We'll get you a bed set up in one of the rooms." "You're not going to let him stay here after what just happened, are you?" Jessica asked. "I don't see how this changes anything," Paul replied. "You know as well as I do that what just happened is far from unusual in this town these days. I probably should've known better than to have Mitsy guard him. I should've found two of the men. But then I probably would've had both of them run off to screw someone and Brett would've been free to wander around at will. At least this way someone was with him." "I don't think we need to discuss town business in front of him," Jessica whispered, although loudly enough for Brett to hear. "Especially not... you know?" "He already knows about it," Paul said. "I filled him in earlier on the various games that are played here." "You did what?" she asked, horrified. Paul ignored her. "Now you see what I mean, right?" he asked Brett, smiling a little. Brett smiled back hesitantly. "A very graphic lesson," he agreed. "Sorry we came rushing in here with guns," he said. "We heard moaning and splashing coming from in here and we thought that maybe... well..." "That I was hurting her?" "Yeah." "I didn't realize we were so loud," Mitsy said, embarrassed now. "Nobody ever does," Paul said. "Nobody ever does. Get yourself dressed, Mitsy and then I'd like to have a word with you in the office." "Okay," she said, dropping her towel and grabbing her clothes. She began to put them on. "Jess," he said, turning to her, "can you go get Jeff from the front and have him take over watching Brett for us?" "You want me to do that?" she asked with distaste, as if she was being asked to gut a fish or slaughter a chicken. "Yes, please," he said, just a hint of sarcasm tinting his words. "If it's not too much trouble that is?" "I don't like the way you've been talking to me tonight," Jessica practically hissed at him. "You seem to have forgotten what your place in this town is. Remember..." "I wasn't a resident," he said before she could. "I know. You've only told me that a hundred times or so. And as for forgetting my place, I think that it's the opposite that's happening here. I think I'm just starting to realize my place as well as your place." "Are you threatening me?" she said, taking a step closer. "Because if you are, you'll be out of here so fast..." "Take it for what you want, Jess," Paul told her, standing his ground. "We've already been over this once tonight, haven't we? Now, if you're finished, would you please go get Jeff so we can make sure that Brett doesn't find himself in any more mischief tonight?" "I am far from finished," she said angrily. "We will talk about this some more." "Fine, let's just do it later, okay? It's been a hell of a long night and we have a lot of people to talk to tomorrow." "You're overstepping your bounds," she warned, pointing a finger at him. "And you'd better check yourself." This statement might have had a little more dramatic effect had she not then turned and headed off to do exactly what she'd been told to do. "Fuckin' bitch," Mitsy, who was now completely clothed again, muttered once she was gone. "Enough of that," Paul told her wearily. "I'll see you in my office, Mitsy." "Sure," she said, sulking to the door. Before she went out she shot an affectionate look at Brett. "See you later," she told him. He gave no acknowledgment to her and a moment later she disappeared. Once she was gone he looked at Paul. "Sorry about all this," he told him. "I seemed to have created some power struggles for you." "Nothing to be sorry about," Paul said. "I'm kind of glad that all this happened tonight. Jessica and Dale need to be taken down a few notches and this struggle over you has given me the means to do it." "I see," he said. "Will this incident with Mitsy affect how people feel about me staying?" "No, not in the least. Trust me on this. You'll be voted in as long as I'm with Jessica when the story about you gets told. You're a man in a town where men are scarce. You'd have to be Ted Bundy before these women would vote to exclude you. If nothing else, the rumor about what happened here tonight will strengthen your case. After all, they'll know you can be seduced, right? That's the best thing you can say about a man in this town." "That's good to know," he said. "Don't be so happy about us accepting you though," Paul warned. "Once you're a member of this community, I'm going to move to put you in charge of defense and training. And then you can be the one who deals with all of this guard duty crap. I imagine it will be the toughest job you'll ever have." ------- "So I hear you bagged Mitsy," Jeff, the nineteen-year-old guard that he had first encountered at the front entrance, asked him with a shrewd smile. He seemed to have put his hostile feelings aside. "How was she? She was one of the virgins but I was thinking about maybe giving her a try." They were walking down the hallway of the community center, Jeff in the rear, lighting the way with a flashlight. "Virgins?" Brett asked, raising his eyebrows a tad. Mitsy certainly had not been a virgin. "You know," he said, "it means none of the guys have tapped her yet. Nobody's worked their way around to her yet. So was it worth it?" "Jesus," Brett muttered. "I'd rather not say. I prefer to keep my experiences to myself." "Bummer, dude," Jeff said sadly. "But I can get down with that, you know? That's the same thing Paul and Matt do. They don't say shit. Sometimes I think they're out there getting more pussy than anybody." They arrived at a small storage room near the back of the building. "Here's your suite. Sorry it ain't much." He shined the flashlight inside, allowing Brett to have a look at it. It was pretty much a case of what you see is what you get. It was a windowless room with only one door. About ten feet by ten feet, the floor was covered with the same industrial carpet that covered the rest of the building. There was a rollaway bed of the sort usually found in motels set up in the corner. A neatly folded stack of linen sat atop it. On a small table next to the cot was a candle, unlit, with a pack of matches next to it. Brett walked inside and picked up the matches, lighting the candle and allowing Jeff to douse the flashlight. "So, dude, you were like a cop and all, right?" Jeff asked, pulling a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his flannel shirt. "That's right," Brett told him, picking up the stack of linen. It was soft, dry, and smelled faintly of laundry soap. Clean linen! Amazing. He began to unfold it and place it on the bed. He would get to sleep in a real bed. "Well," Jeff said, "even though you were a cop, I guess it's only polite to ask. I'm not a Bogart you know?" "What are you talking about?" Brett asked, looking over at him. "You wanna burn one with me?" he asked, holding up a tightly rolled joint. "It's good shit." "You want to smoke a joint with me? The man you're supposed to be guarding?" "Hell yeah," he said, putting the joint in his mouth and pulling out a disposable lighter. "I ain't never smoked out with no cop before. It'll be the bomb." He lit it, taking a large hit and filling the room with the pungent smell of marijuana. "My work is going to be cut out for me here, I can see that." "So what do you say?" Jeff squeaked, speaking and holding his breath at the same time. "Wanna get loaded?" "What the hell?" Brett said, reaching out and taking the joint. "I guess they can't fire me now, can they?" "You the man," Jeff squeaked, grinning at him. Though he had not smoked any since his high school days, it really was like riding a bicycle. He put the smoldering joint between his lips and sucked, drawing a medium hit into his lungs. "This is some good shit," he squeaked back as he handed the joint back to Jeff. "Where'd you get it?" "Are you kidding?" Jeff asked, dipping the ash that had formed onto the floor. "We have more than a pound of this shit in storage. When we went through all the houses looking for supplies we found pot in more than half of them. I guess these rich people liked to smoke out. They bought quality buds too." "Really?" Brett said, exhaling a plume of smoke. "And that ain't all," Jeff said, holding the joint near his mouth but not hitting it. "We got enough booze, wine, and yuppie beer to kill everyone in town five or six times. There's enough Prozac, Xanax, and Valium to paralyze an army, and even some coke and crank. In one of the former doctor's houses we even found some morphine and a box of syringes. Fuckin' rich people. They're disgusting, ain't they?" He took a hit, sucking up more than a quarter inch of the joint in one inhale. "I guess it shouldn't surprise me," Brett said, "but somehow it still does." He grabbed the joint and took another hit. "So what's your story?" he asked once he'd exhaled and handed it back over. "Me?" Jeff squeaked, once again talking while holding in a hit. "I'm from Salt Lake City. I was here on my mission." "Your mission?" He blew the smoke out and handed what was now nearly a roach to Brett. "My mission," he said, coughing a little. "You know, for the Mormon Church. I was up here riding a fucking bicycle around spreading the word." Brett found this extremely funny. He began to laugh, unable to stop once he was started. "You," he chortled, "are a Mormon?" "Fuck no," he scoffed, laughing himself. "But my family was. If I wanted my piece of the pie, then I had to play the game, right? Now my parents couldn't afford to send me to Japan or Russia or anything like that, so I was doing my time here in California. I was gonna start at BYU next semester and major in business and be a part of my old man's firm but the comet kinda toasted those plans." He shrugged. "I don't mind though. This is, without a doubt, the best time that I've ever had. I mean, I got to score some pretty good puss back in SLC, you know, being a football player and a future BYU student, but I never imagined anything like what we got here. I've been laid at least once a day since the comet hit, usually twice. My friend, you are now living in paradise." "Paradise," Brett said, feeling his head reeling from the pot. "You ever listen to The Eagles?" "The who?" "No, not The Who, The Eagles," Brett said. "Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Joe Walsh." Jeff shrugged. "Maybe my parents did. Didn't they sing Hotel California?" "That's them," Brett agreed. "I remember the last line of one of their songs. The song was The Last Resort. The line was about paradise." "What was it?" "If you call some place paradise," Brett quoted, "kiss it goodbye." Jeff didn't get it. "What the fuck does that mean?" he asked. "It means that you people have something that everyone is going to want. You have paradise. It's apparent just by watching you from the outside but its even more apparent by watching it from the inside. Somebody's gonna try to take this place away eventually. It's human nature. And you, as members of paradise, will give it to them by your inaction." "Why are you telling me this?" Brett took another hit. "I'm a guest of yours right now," he said. "But pretty soon I won't be. Pretty soon, I'm going to be in charge of security here." "Yeah? So what?" "So enjoy your pot-smoking on guard duty while you have a chance, my friend. Once I'm in charge, you won't be doing it. Nor will you be fucking anybody on guard duty. I guarantee it." Jeff started to laugh. "Oh, dude," he said, pulling out an expensive looking roach clip and inserting the joint into it, "you don't know the people in this town very well." "Oh, I think I do," Brett replied with a smile. "They just don't know me very well." ------- For most of the night Jason, and especially Chrissie, had lain awake, tossing and turning, their minds worried sick about the fate of Brett. Was he dead? Was he alive? Had he been taken prisoner in Garden Hill? Or had he fallen to his death from the bridge? They did not know, could not know and their minds, insisting upon dwelling on the worst possible things imaginable, refused to shut down and let sleep take over for more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a time. Finally, after what seemed like days, first light touched the sky, turning the blackness into indistinct shadows and shapes. Wearily, both of them with bags beneath their eyes from fatigue, pulled themselves from their sleeping bags and put on the same wet clothing that they had worn since that day at the trailer. They ate a breakfast of spaghetti-O's, washing it down with sips of water from their canteens. They talked little as they ate, neither wanting to vocalize the fear that was gripping them. When the can was empty and the rumbling in their bellies quieted, Chrissie felt a familiar fullness in her lower regions. Though their limited diet had certainly cut back on the frequency of bowel movements in this new life, the mail did still go through every few days or so. It seemed that this was going to be one of those days. "I gotta go around the corner for a few minutes," she told Jason, using the euphemism for "I have to drop a load" that had developed among the three team members. "Don't use the poison oak to wipe with," Jason warned, repeating an overused joke between them, formulated on their first day with Brett when he had given them an amusingly serious lecture on that very subject. "I'll try not to," she dutifully replied, picking up her rifle and slinging it over her shoulder. "Once I get back we'll climb the hill and start looking." "Right," Jason said, deliberately injecting a note of optimism into his tone. Brett had instructed them to climb the hill and keep an eye on the bridge starting at first light. If his plans had gone well, he would wave them over. Chrissie walked out of the lean-to and into the rain, feeling the first icy sting of water on her face and wincing a little, as she always did at the first contact of the morning. She put her head down a little and trudged around the rocky outcropping they had made camp at. It was in a wider section of the canyonside cut, about two hundred yards from the tall ridge overlooking the bridge. She worked her way out of the rocks and into the area where the trees and foliage grew, sliding in between a group of pines. She found a relatively clear area and then dropped her pants, squatting down over a small hole she'd dug with the toe of her boot. She set her rifle down on the ground next to her, within easy reach. It was just as she was finishing up, just as she was wiping with a handful of wet leaves, that she began to get a very uncomfortable feeling. It was like what Brett had described to her when he'd sensed the two gunmen that had attacked him on the ridges. Her neck began to tickle, the hairs on it standing on end. Her pulse was suddenly beating faster and she had the strong sensation that she was being watched. Brett had told her that she should never ignore such a sensation, that non-mentally ill people rarely had such feelings for no reason. She dropped the leaves onto the ground and quickly pulled her pants back up, buckling the belt just enough to keep it from unfastening. Her eyes were looking outward as she did this, tracking over every rock, bush, tree, and mound of dirt, searching for whatever was jigging her senses. She saw nothing that she consciously considered to be out of the ordinary but, for some reason, she kept coming back to a group of boulders that was sitting about thirty yards away. They were just ordinary boulders, no different than a thousand others that she had seen, grouped in no particular pattern, but, as she looked at them, she became convinced that someone or something was behind them. Her adrenaline began to flow faster, her pulse to hammer harder. Where was the nearest cover? Slowly, trying her best not to look as if she was alarmed by anything, she reached down to pick up her rifle, wanting it's comforting weight in her hands. Just as her hand touched the plastic of the grip, there was movement from behind the boulders and a man suddenly emerged. He was wearing filthy blue jeans and an equally dirty forest green down jacket. His face was heavily bearded but did not have the sunken, haunted look of starvation. Whoever he was, he had been eating regularly. He carried no rifle but his right hand was hidden in the pocket of his coat. His eyes were looking at her as he walked forward, his mouth formed into a broad, ain't-I-glad-to-see-you smile that Chrissie instantly did not trust. "Well hello there, young lady," he said with obviously forced friendliness, his eyes remaining locked on her as he continued forward. "Wherever in the world did you come from?" Chrissie moved fast. If Brett had been there to see it, he would have been quite proud of her. In one swift motion she picked up her rifle and sidestepped to her left, throwing herself behind a tree. Once the trunk was between her and the mysterious man she swung towards him, bringing the butt of the rifle to her shoulder, her eye peering out over the sights. "Stop where you are!" she yelled, loudly enough for Jason to hear back at camp. "Don't come a step closer to me!" "Whoa," said the man, holding his left hand up in a gesture of appeasement. His right hand however, stayed in the jacket. His pace slowed a little but did not stop. "Nothing to get excited about. You don't need to go pointing a gun at me. I'm harmless." "I said stop!" she said. "Take your hand out of your pocket!" He slowed a little more but continued to move forward. He was now fifteen yards away. "Where did you find that gun anyway, sweetheart?" he asked. "It's awfully big for such a young girl. You really should put it down before you hurt yourself with it." "Stop, motherfucker!" she yelled. "I mean it! I'll shoot you!" "You don't want shoot anyone, do you?" he said, continuing his slow advance. "Really now. I'm here to help you. I'm a good guy. Why don't you..." "Don't take another step!" she warned, her finger tightening on the trigger. "Sweetheart," he said, "you need to put that gun down. I know you don't want anything bad to happen here, right?" He took another step forward. He would never take another. Chrissie squeezed the trigger twice causing the rifle to thump against her shoulder and sending the crack of two shots echoing off the rocks. Two holes appeared in the man's jacket, right in the center of his chest, sending a small puff of goose feathers out into the wind. He screeched as the wind was driven from his lungs and there was a flash from his right pocket as the gun he had hidden in there was fired. The bullet ripped a hole in the jacket and ricocheted off the ground about ten feet in front of her. The man then fell to his face on the ground, his hand still pinned beneath him. "Chrissie!" came Jason's voice from behind her. "What's going on? What's happening?" Before she could answer him, before he was even really done speaking, three more shots suddenly rang out from the boulders where the first man had come from. They were pistol shots - by now she was able to tell the difference - and she caught a brief glimpse of another bearded face in the gap between two of the rocks. Two of the bullets that had been fired whizzed by on her left. The last one struck the tree she was hiding behind. Before she even realized she was doing it, her finger was squeezing the trigger again, sending a hail of rifle bullets right back at him. The pinged and sparked as they hit the rocks. She fired five times and then stopped, her sight trained on the spot where she had last seen him. "Chrissie!" yelled Jason again, frantically this time. "Jason," she shouted back, "stay down. Take cover. There's one down and at least one behind some rocks over here." "Are you all right?" "So far," she yelled. "I'm behind cover." She continued to watch the rocks, her body tense, her eyes dilated, her heart going nearly one hundred and eighty beats per minute. She saw nothing but the rocks, heard nothing but the rain and the canyon. Had she hit the gunman back there? While it was possible, it would not be a good idea to assume that, or even to assume that there was only one more of them back there. What now? she wondered. Why the hell wasn't Brett here? Brett would know what to do. On the other side of the rise, near the lean-to, Jason was even tenser. He lay on his stomach behind a rock, his rifle trained outward towards where Chrissie had gone, but he couldn't see anything of the area where the shooting had come from. He did not know exactly where his sister was or where the gunmen were. He was useless. He needed to change that. Slowly, moving rock to rock, crawling on his belly, he inched forward until he was against the mound of rocks and sparse shrubs that stood between he and where he figured Chrissie had gone. He began to climb up it, step by step, foot by foot, picking his footholds carefully and making sure that his head stayed below the crest. When he reached the top he peered over, keeping his face behind a rock. He was able to see a body lying on the ground, face down. After a moment's searching he was able to see his sister. He could not, however, tell which rocks their enemy might be behind. There were simply too many rocks down there. Now what? Meanwhile, Chrissie had an idea. "You, with the gun," she yelled from her position behind the tree. "There are two of us out here with rifles. Come out now with your hands up and we won't kill you." As to what she might do if her offer was accepted, she did not quite know, but it was a mute point. The gunman or gunmen did not come out or give any indication that she had been heard. "Goddamn it," she muttered to herself, not even realizing she had spoken aloud. "Chrissie," hissed a voice from behind and to the right. It was Jason. "Don't look up here. Just nod if you can hear me." Though she was desperately afraid that her brother was exposing himself and though every big sister instinct that she had was commanding her to at least take a look, she kept her eyes forward. She nodded twice. "Where are they at?" he asked her next. "The group of rocks at my two o'clock," she said back, talking only as loudly as she thought necessary for him to hear her. Hopefully the gunman wouldn't hear as well. "The tall group with the big egg-shaped rock in the middle?" Jason asked. "That's right," she said. "There's at least one back there with a pistol. I don't think I hit him when I shot. Can you see anything back there?" "Nothing," Jason whispered after searching the formation with his eyes for a few moments. "What do we do now?" Chrissie looked around her for a moment, checking the terrain. There was not much to the right of her as far as cover or concealment. Trying to move that way would be a mistake unless she could verify that her assailants were down. But the left however, that led deeper into the trees. A person could find lots of things to hide behind back there. And even better was the fact that the tree line extended forward. "Hmmm," she hummed to herself, her mind spinning a thousand miles an hour. She risked a look over her shoulders, up to where her brother's voice had come from. She did not see him, but she gave him a series of hand signals. "Cover me," her gestures said, "I'm going to flank him to the left." "Are you sure, Chrissie?" Jason's voice called down. She nodded, positioning herself to run. She took a few deep breaths and gathered her courage and then gave Jason one more signal. The go signal. Jason began firing down into the rocks, several shots a second, giving her covering fire so she could move. Again the sparks began to fly and the bullets to ping and ricochet around. Rock chips exploded upward. As soon as she heard the first shot, Chrissie broke from behind her tree and sprinted to the left and slightly forward, moving into the area of thicker foliage, throwing herself down behind another group of trees that provided a better angle of attack. She rolled over onto her stomach and aimed out towards the rocks just in time to see two flashes of the gunman's pistol as it rose over the rock to return fire. She aimed her rifle in that direction but could see nothing but the man's hand extending upward. That one glance only lasted a second or two before the hand dropped back down. She did not fire. Jason held his fire for a few moments, waiting to see what would happen next. When the man behind the rock had returned fire he, Jason, had aimed for the arm that had poked up but he was pretty sure he hadn't hit it. He looked downward to where Chrissie was, searching for a moment and finally finding her. She was looking up towards him, unable to see him but trying to attract his attention. "I got you, sis," he yelled down at her. Chrissie, gratified that she hadn't hidden herself too well, gave him another set of hand signals, indicating that she wanted him to cover another advance. Now she knew why Brett had told them so many times that the key to a successful battle was communication and coordination. Without being able to signal her intentions to Jason, she was pinned down and trapped, with being able to do that, she was nearly invincible. "Got it," came Jason's voice, drifting downward at her. "Good," she mumbled to herself, gripping her weapon and slowly raising to her knees, preparatory to running. She took another deep breath and gave the go signal. Gunfire once again exploded from Jason's position, pattering down on the rocks. She jumped to her feet and dashed through the open ground to the next set of trees, moving strictly forward this time. She glanced at her enemy's position and still saw nothing but rocks. Jason continued to fire and she dashed forward again, diving behind a fallen log and scrambling as far forward along its length as she could go. The gunfire from Jason's rifle halted again and there was no answering fire from the pistol this time. Slowly, cautiously, she raised her head up and peeked over the log, ready to dive back down in an instant if she saw danger. She did not. What she saw instead was a man crouching behind the rocks, his body as close to the edge of them as he could physically get it. He was in profile to her, holding a pistol in both hands, pointing it upward. Even from twenty yards away Chrissie could see that he was scared shitless and didn't know what to do. He was close to panic, finding himself pinned between two armed people. Had she more time and inclination to think the situation through, she might have felt sorry for the man, might have hesitated to shoot at him as he cowered there. But she didn't. She acted as Brett had taught her. She took tactical advantage of the situation. She brought her rifle up and sighted in on him, aiming at the bulk of his body. She fired four times in rapid succession, seeing more goose down fly, seeing blood splatter on the rocks, hearing the startled scream of the gunman even over the sound of the rifle fire. He slumped to the ground, the pistol falling from his hand into the mud. He did not move. "Chrissie?" Jason's voice yelled from back at his position. "I got him, Jase!" she yelled back, her breath raggedly moving in and out of her lungs, terrified sweat running down her face with the rainwater. "Move down to where I'm at. I'll cover you from here." As she waited for her brother to come down to her she began to tremble with fear overload. Her hands, which had been steady as a rock during the battle, began to shake, making it difficult to keep the barrel of her rifle steady. She closed her eyes for just a second and commanded herself to be calm. This wasn't over yet. There still might be others out there. There wasn't. Jason came down and she signaled him to find a position opposite of her. He did so and, after a furious exchange of signals, they moved in, advancing to the rise behind where the gunmen had emerged, searching with their eyes the downhill portion of the forest there. They saw no signs of anyone else, nor did they receive any jigs on their nerve endings. "I think those were the only two," Chrissie said when they finally stood together behind the trees. "If nothing else, we're secure up here." "Jesus, sis," Jason said, trembling himself now. "What the hell happened? Where did they come from?" "They must've just been two people that were heading for the bridge when they stumbled onto me." She told him the story, her voice breaking a few times as it came out. "It's a good thing I finished my business before he came out," she concluded, feeling the giddiness that she remembered from her last firefight now. "If he would've came before, I'd be cleaning it out of my panties about now." ------- The thundering roar of water rushing through the canyon had masked all sounds of the battle from Brett, Paul, and Jessica, who were standing just in front of the SUVs on the Garden Hill side of the bridge. All they knew was that it was first light, the agreed upon time for the two kids to show themselves, and they hadn't done so yet. Brett, starting to become seriously worried now, kept waving his hands every few minutes towards the hill, giving them the pre-arranged signal. They were supposed to stand briefly and acknowledge the wave and then move down the hill towards the road. "I'll give them ten more minutes," he said to Paul, "and then I'm going over there to look for them. Something's wrong." "Hmmph," Jessica said from around a large wad of gum she was chewing. "It wouldn't surprise me if something happened to them. I still can't believe you left a couple of children out there alone all night. And with guns. That's criminal behavior if you ask me." Brett glared at her, giving her such a seething look that she took a step away from him, her mouth stopping in mid-chew. "They're not children," he said to her. "They're more capable out there than anyone I've seen in this town so far." She said nothing, just glared back at him. "Maybe they're having trouble getting up the hill," Paul suggested, trying, unsuccessfully, to break the tension a little. "You said they have full packs to lug, not to mention your pack and your weapon as well." "It shouldn't have taken this long," Brett said, reaching his hand beneath the black rain slicker he had been provided and itching at his chest. He had discovered that his body was so used to wearing wet clothing that it did not know what to think of dry clothing. The material of the shirt, jeans, and underwear he had been given felt rough to his skin, almost like sandpaper. A strange irony. The minutes ticked by slowly, agonizingly, and finally, just before Brett was about to begin heading for the far side on his own, he spotted movement atop the hill. "There," he said, pointing, his voice full of relief. "Do you see it?" All three of them peered intently upward until they saw two people, so dirty that they would not have been visible had they not been silhouetting themselves deliberately. They both waved their hands back and forth for a moment. Brett waved frantically back, giving them a "come down" gesture. They stopped waving and began to scramble downward, towards the road. "They're not going to fall, are they?" Jessica asked. "Shouldn't they go around the hill to the other side?" "They're a lot safer coming down that way," Brett said, keeping his eyes on their progress. "God only knows how many lowlifes you have camped out in the forest over there." "But if they fall..." she started. "You weren't very concerned about them last night," Brett said. "You were perfectly willing to leave them out there to the wolves. Why are you so worried about them now?" "I did not say I was unconcerned for them last night," she barked at him. "I just told you that we couldn't afford to feed outsiders. I still feel that way. I'm just shocked that you allow children to carry guns and camp out in the woods by themselves. And that you encourage them to climb over wet hills where they could fall and hurt themselves." Brett opened his mouth to retort, and God knows what might have come out of it, but Paul, keeping with his role as mediator, stepped in between them. "That's enough, you two," he said, holding up his hands in a gesture of supplication. "Really. It looks like the two of them are coming down just fine. There's no need for anyone to worry." Brett let his mouth close. Jessica, after a moment's consideration, did the same. Silence ruled during the rest of the descent. As soon as Chrissie and Jason put their feet on the roadway and started walking towards the bridge, Brett began trotting towards them. By the time they reached the first set of barricade vehicles that guarded the entrance, he was running and so were they, Brett's backpack held between them. Jessica and Paul stayed back, neither willing to venture any further out of town then they already were (this was, in fact, Jessica's first trip to the bridge since the impact itself). "Brett!" Chrissie yelled, dropping her half of his backpack to the pavement and rushing into his arms. She hit him nearly hard enough to knock him over, her clothing leaving a dirty smear of mud on his rain slicker. He didn't care. He put his arms around her and hugged her tightly to him, kissing her muddy face. Jason came up right behind her - after carefully setting the pack and Brett's rifle down - and joined the embrace, not caring if people thought he was a fag for hugging a guy. He could not remember ever being so glad to see someone in his life. Brett let one arm come off of Chrissie and put it around his shoulders. "You're safe," Chrissie said, her voice choked. "You made it in!" "Fuckin aye I did," he said, continuing to hug both of them. "Are they gonna let us stay here?" Jason asked, fighting back tears of his own. "We're working on it," he told them. "We'll know by the end of the day, but it's looking good." "Did you shake 'em up like you said you would?" Jason asked. "Even more," he said, pulling back from the embrace. "Even more." "My God," Chrissie said, looking at him closely for the first time. "You don't even look like you. You're clean!" "And you shaved," Jason put in. "I never saw you without the beard before." "You like it?" he asked, running his wet hand over his reddened, itchy face. "This is what I used to look like before." "It's different," Chrissie said, reaching out to touch the bare skin. "What took you guys so long?" he asked. Their expressions darkened. "We ran into some trouble this morning," Chrissie said. "What?" They explained what had happened, Chrissie doing most of the narration but Jason throwing in a few comments from time to time. As they talked, the happiness they had shown at seeing him again turned to fear and despair at what they had been through. "When I got over along that log," she said, trembling a little at the memory, "I saw him just sitting there, cowering. He still had the gun in his hand but he looked so scared, Brett. He looked terrified! I shot him anyway, four or five times, until he fell down." "That's exactly what you should have done, Chrissie," Brett told her, sensing that she was feeling guilty for killing someone who hadn't actually been shooting at her at that moment. "You did everything just right. Perfectly. Both of you did." "But what if I would've just told him to leave?" she asked. "I mean, he looked like he just wanted to get away from there. I could've yelled over to him..." "You gave him that chance once, didn't you?" Brett asked, lifting her chin to make her look him in the eyes. Tears were running down her face, mixing with the rainwater. "He didn't take you up on it, and in fact, he fired at you again after you'd made the offer, didn't he?" "Yes, but..." "No buts," Brett said firmly. "You have nothing to feel guilty about. That man took his chances and he lost. I would've been pissed off at you if you'd done anything but smoke his ass once you got him in your sights." "Yeah, sis," Jason replied. "You smoked his ass! Fuck him." "It sounds like you two performed a picture-perfect flanking maneuver. It's like I've told you all along, you're bad-ass." "I suppose," Chrissie said, still sniffing a little, still unable to get the final moments out of her head. "Come on," Brett said, going over to his pack and picking it up. "Let's get into town. It's about a twenty-minute walk during the day but they have hot baths and warm food and fresh clothes there. You guys deserve all of that." "Hot baths?" Chrissie said. "Are you making that up?" "Nope." "Wow," she said, giving another sniff. "I didn't think I'd ever get to have a bath again." "I don't usually like baths," Jason said, "but I think I can make an exception." They began walking across the bridge, heading towards Paul and Jessica, who were still standing on the other side, watching the reunion. "Look how filthy those children are," Jessica told Paul as they approached close enough for them to see. "It'll be a wonder if they don't have some sort of... disease or something." Paul looked at her in annoyance. "Jess," he said, "it's not like they have bathing or laundry facilities out there. They've been living in the wild for nearly two weeks now. What did you expect them to look like?" "Children just should not be exposed to this sort of thing," she said, giving an extra hard chomp on her gum. "It's criminal if you ask me. That man is a menace!" "Christ," Paul muttered, shaking his head in wonder. Just what world did Jessica live in? It certainly was not the same one that he did. Brett made the introductions once they were close enough to talk to each other. "Jessica, Paul, these are Jason and Chrissie, the baddest-ass fighting team that I have ever had the privilege of serving with. Jason and Chrissie, this is Paul and Jessica, two of the leaders of Garden Hill. They are going to discuss with the other members of the town today whether or not we will be staying with them." The kids muttered some brief but polite "nice to meet you's" to their hosts. "Brett has told me what you two have been through," Paul said, shaking each of their hands. "Let me be the first to tell you that you sound like a couple of troopers." "Chrissie dear," Jessica said, looking at her, making no move to shake either hand. "Are you crying?" "I'm okay," Chrissie said, giving a very teenager-like shrug. "We've just had kind of a rough morning." "I can imagine," Jessica said. "Being left all alone out there all night long." "They had a little encounter with a few men this morning," Brett said. "That was why they were late for the meeting on the hill." "Men?" Jessica said. Brett let Chrissie tell the story, thinking it might be therapeutic for her. In a way it was. By the time she was done with the second narration, her tears had dried up and her voice was a little more like itself. Jessica however, did not seem to be terribly impressed with what she was hearing. "That all sounds rather fantastic," she said, making no attempt to hide her skepticism. "Fantastic?" Jason said, anger showing on his face. "What is that supposed to mean?" "Yes," Chrissie said, giving a rather evil glare of her own. "What is that supposed to mean? Are you trying to say I made that up?" "Well you must admit," Jessica said, "that it seems highly coincidental that such a thing would happen right before we start considering whether to take you in. And the fact that two children could come out the better in a gun battle with two grown men, well that is very difficult to swallow." Brett took an angry step toward her. "I don't give a shit who you are, lady," he said. "You will not call Chrissie and Jason liars. Not while I'm around. How dare you belittle what they have just been through!" Jessica, alarmed by Brett's tone and his advance towards her, then made a mistake. She let her hand drop down to the butt of the gun on her waist. Before her fingers could even close around it, before Paul or Brett could intervene, there was the simultaneous clanking of two rifles swinging towards her as Jason and Chrissie instinctively moved to protect their leader. Jessica squealed as she found herself facing two automatic weapons and took another step backward. Her feet tangled together, overbalancing her. She fell to her butt on a puddle of standing water, sending up a little spray. "Holy shit," Paul said, keeping his own hand well clear of his weapon. "Stand down," Brett barked at them. "It's okay. She was just posturing." Slowly they lowered their rifles. "She was gonna pull a gun on you Brett," Jason said. "Didn't you see it?" "Don't worry about it," he told them. "Everything's cool." "They pointed guns at me!" Jessica yelled, still sitting in the water. "At me!" "And you were about the point a gun at Brett," Paul said, extending a hand to help her up. "It's okay. Nobody got hurt." "What if they would've shot me?" Jessica, seemingly near hysterics, asked. "I can't believe these children are carrying loaded guns and that think they can just go pointing them at people who have invited them into their town!" "Brett," Chrissie said, fighting back tears again, "I don't need a bath this bad. Let's get out of here. How can we stay in a town with someone like that?" "Shhh, Chrissie," he said, glaring at Jessica. "It's okay. They're not all like her." "Get those guns away from them," Jessica yelled at Paul. "Why aren't you doing something about this?" "Shut up," Paul said to her. "What did you say to me?" "I said shut up," he repeated. "Everything that's happened here, you brought on yourself. First you call them liars right to their faces after they relate a traumatic experience they went through this morning and then you try to draw a gun on their leader." "Did you hear the way he talked to me?" she asked. "He talked to you just like you deserved, Jess," Paul said. "And I will not take those guns away from those kids. It is quite obvious they know how to use them properly. I don't think they'd give them to me anyway. Now, can we start heading back to town or would you like to stand out here in the rain and piss off a few more people first?" "You're forgetting your place," she said, pointing an angry finger at him. "And that line is getting old fast," he replied. "Now, let's move out, shall we? We have a lot to do today." "I won't stand for this, Paul. You're mocking my authority." "That's only because you're abusing it. Now let's go." She muttered a few more things under her breath but said nothing else aloud. She turned and began heading across the bridge, her feet splashing through the puddles. ------- About six miles to the southwest of the bridge, on the wilderness side of the canyon, the two hunters that Brett, Chrissie, and Jason had encountered two days before were on their last legs. They had long since consumed the two cans of turkey chili they had been given and the brief surge of energy that meager offering had provided was long since used up. In desperation they had tried eating a few of the dead squirrels that they had found lying around, cutting them up and peeling the stringy, foul smelling meat from the bones. Since they had no means of making a fire in the relentless rainstorm they tried to choke the horrible tasting chunks down raw, but neither had been able to force it past the back of their throat without triggering uncontrollable vomiting. They had staggered on, making increasingly worse progress as the hours ticked by, lugging their hunting rifles with them more out of instinct than anything else. Both had started to think that maybe those rifles would be used pretty soon to simply end it all. One quick pull of the trigger while the barrel was placed in the mouth would instantly quiet the painful rumbling in their stomachs, instantly end the black fatigue that pulled at them incessantly. Neither had suggested this aloud as of yet but both knew the suggestion was coming. Both also knew it would more than likely be agreed upon once it was brought up. Maybe they could shoot each other at the same time? If suicide really were a mortal sin, wouldn't the simultaneous mercy killing of each other be a loophole around that particular prohibition? "Let's rest a minute, Jack, " Rod, the older of the two said wearily. They were just about to start up another rise. It was only a shallow one, no more than fifty feet up at a gentle angle, but to Rod it looked nearly as formidable an obstacle as Everest. "Yeah," Jack agreed, breathing hard. "A rest will be good." He slumped to the ground, not caring that he'd landed right in the middle of a patch of poison oak. They did not talk, they did not look at each other, they did not really even think as they sat there, their bodies drawing on whatever non-essential tissue it could find to burn for energy and propel them forward. Their mouths hung open listlessly, their sunken eyes staring at nothing. They did not even hear the cracking of branches or the squishing of boots through mud as three men crested the top of the hill above them. All three carried assault rifles and wore camouflage clothing from head to foot. They had sidearms on their hips, heavy packs upon their backs, and military helmets upon their heads. The first man to spot the two hunters below them gave a hand signal that Brett would have been familiar with. He had taught the same signal to Chrissie and Jason. The two men to the rear halted in place for a moment and then spread out to the sides, their rifles pointed downward, beads drawn on the two men. The men to the rear then passed more signals to a larger group behind them. This group of thirty, who were all armed and equipped as the front three, spread out to the flanks and found cover. The man on the point at first thought he was dealing with a couple of dead bodies, so slack were they, so motionless. It was only the lack of any mutilation caused by scavengers that convinced him that these two just might be still alive. Whatever they were, they did not look like they presented much of a threat. He waved the two men to his sides forward and began a slow advance of his own, closing to within ten feet of the men before they finally looked up. Both blinked at them, taking in their features without fear or even much surprise. "Who the hell are you guys?" asked Rod wearily. "Placer County Militia," said the point man, his rifle never wavering from Jack's chest. "Who are you? Hunters?" "Yeah," Jack agreed. "What's the Placer County Militia? You the army, or what?" "We are now," the point man said cryptically. "We are now. Anyone else out there?" "No, not with us anyway." He nodded, his eyes neither believing nor disbelieving. He pulled a small walkie-talkie from one of the pockets on his webbing and keyed it. "Two hunters armed with rifles," he said into it. "They look harmless enough. They say there's no one else out there and I don't see any signs that there might be." "Right," said a tinny voice from the speaker. "Hold in place. I'll send second and fourth squads out in front of you to check things out. I'll be down in a minute." "Right." A moment later came the sound of multiple people moving through the trees on both sides of them. A moment after that, three men crested the hill above. Their carried their rifles over their shoulders, their stride normal instead of cautious. The one in front was about thirty years old, clean-shaven, with a few locks of reddish hair protruding through the front of his helmet. He stopped just behind the point man and took in the two hunters. "I'm Lieutenant Bracken," he said at last, "leader of the third platoon of the Placer County Militia Group. Who're you two?" They told him their names, both speaking quietly. He then asked them how they came to be in the woods, which they also answered, explaining about their annual hunting trip. He nodded at their words, showing no other reaction to it. "Either one of you have any military experience?" Bracken asked them next. "I was in the coast guard," Ron said hesitantly. Jack simply shook his head. "The coast guard," Bracken repeated, obvious disgust in his voice. He shook his head a little. "NRA members?" They both nodded. "Good," Bracken said. "That's a point in your favor. Where you heading to?" "We were working our way to the Auburn bridge," said Rod. "We wanted to see if it was intact. We couldn't get across at Garden Hill." "Oh?" Bracken said, interested. "Is the bridge down there?" "No," Rod said. He then explained about how it was guarded and how the townspeople would shoot at anyone who tried to cross it. "Interesting," Bracken said. "Very interesting." "It sounds like they got the same kind of set-up going up there as we do," the point man opined, spitting a spray of brown tobacco juice to the ground. "I don't know who would be running it," Bracken said. "There ain't no militia members up there far as I know. That's more of a rich town, full of fuckin' bureaucrats and shit. I know those people didn't have the know-how to do something like that." "Somebody did." Bracken nodded. "Sure sounds like it, don't it?" "Uh... excuse me?" Rod said. "Did you say that you're from Auburn?" "That's right," Bracken agreed. "We're in charge of Auburn now. Got it all organized up and running nice and efficient-like. Colonel Barnes is in charge of it." "Colonel Barnes?" Bracken nodded. "He's the head of the militia. We keep Auburn fed and running and protect it from scavengers. What did you two do before the comet?" "What?" Ron said, confused by the abrupt change of subject. "We need people with skills in town," Bracken said. "What did y'all do for a livin?" "Oh," Ron said, getting it now. "We were both electrical engineers for Intel." Bracken scowled a little. "What the fuck's that mean? You computer nerds?" "No, no," Ron replied vehemently. "We were in charge of power usage and wiring and all that. We made sure that there was enough power to run all the equipment." "I see," Bracken said, although it was fairly obvious that he really didn't. "And y'all know how to use guns, right?" "Right," they both agreed, sensing where this was heading. Could there be salvation in these people? Granted, they were not the savoriest characters in existence - in fact, they were downright scary when you came down to it - but beggars couldn't be choosers, could they? "Give 'em some food," Bracken told one of his men after a moment's thought on the matter. A pack was opened and two army issue MRE's were tossed down to them. They immediately grabbed hold of them and began trying to rip them open. "You need to use a knife," Bracken said, somewhat amused. While they both began reaching for their hunting knives he looked at his cohorts. "Let's leave third squad here with them and get 'em rested up and ready to move. Then we'll have them take 'em back to Auburn and talk to the Colonel." "What if there's trouble in Foresthill?" the other man asked. "Will we be able to handle it short a squad." "We'll be able to handle it," Bracken said confidently. "You know what our mission is." ------- While Chrissie and Jason remained in the community center building to get cleaned up and fed, Jessica and Paul led Brett around town. Jessica had objected to taking him with them while they went and discussed his fate with the various members of the town on the basis that they would be giving away their "secrets" which he might use against them after he was kicked out. But Paul had vetoed this idea telling Jessica that she knew as well as he did that the townspeople were going to vote to allow them to stay and that they might as well give their newest member and future security chief a tour. "Security chief?" Jessica said, blanching. "Well sure," Paul replied. "Isn't that the whole basis of inviting him to stay in the first place? Remember, we're not a charity. He'll have to work for his room and board." Jessica, who seemed to sense a great deal of her power slipping away by the minute, looked physically ill at this prospect. She favored Brett with an evil look but said nothing more on the subject. They started within the community center itself. It was a 25,000 square foot, two-story facility stock full of rooms of all shapes, sizes, and purposes. Most of these rooms, no matter what their original purpose, were now being utilized for storage of supplies. Food was the primary stock, mostly canned or dry goods. There were literally thousands of cans of soups, vegetables, beans, fruits, meats, and anything else that could be stuffed into an airtight piece of tin. There were also glass jars of all shapes and sizes as well as stacks and stacks of flour, sugar, rice, and cornmeal. "We pretty much cleaned out the grocery store of everything that doesn't spoil and moved it over here where we can defend it better," Paul told Brett as they moved from room to room. "It was a lot of work and took the better part of three days to accomplish, even with vehicles, but it's a good thing we did. Every day we find outsiders sneaking into the store to see if anything's in there." "Is there anything in there?" Brett asked. "Rotting meat and spoiled dairy products mostly. Also some vegetables that we couldn't store long-term. We took some of the meat and either dried it or salted it. It's not the best you've ever had, but it's edible." "It's hard to believe that all of this is not enough," Brett said, looking at the mountains of food. "Hard to believe but true," Paul replied. "We've done the math more than once and update our estimations once a week. At the rate we're consuming it we've got maybe two, three months worth, depending on how severely we ration as we get lower. We try to keep upbeat about it, but we all know that if we don't secure a food supply of some sort, we're going to starve." "So you see," Jessica said, her voice uncharacteristically humble, "why we aren't too fond of bringing in outsiders here?" He nodded, making an uncharacteristic assuagement of his own. "I guess something will have to be done about food, won't it? Are you working on anything?" Paul shrugged a little. "We've rigged up some lights in one of the rooms and we're trying to use them to grow vegetables with. We got the seeds from the little garden display at the store and we power the lights by using a lawnmower engine to turn a car alternator." "Smart," Brett said, impressed. "Yeah," Paul said. "One of my ideas if I do say so myself, but its just not enough. We don't have enough gasoline to expand the program and what we've planted, assuming it does grow, won't be able to extend us by much." "How much gasoline do you have?" Brett wanted to know. "We don't know exactly," he replied. "We figure that the tanks over at the gas station have close to six or seven hundred gallons in them. There's a little bit of water contamination of course, but luckily, that sinks to the bottom and we've figured out how to keep any more from getting in. There's also what's in all of the gas tanks of the vehicles that were at people's houses. We haven't done any kind of count, but that might be as much as five hundred gallons there. Who knows?" "We should find out," Brett suggested. "And make it a priority." "We?" Jessica said icily. "Or you," Brett allowed, not bothering to look at her. "I'm just trying to offer suggestions here, okay? Don't take them the wrong way." They moved on to the armory. It was located in what had once been the male locker room adjacent to the basketball court, directly across the hall from the bathing area. Stacked neatly on shelves in the shower stall were about sixty rifles, mostly of the hunting variety but with a few .22s mixed in. Below them were twelve assault rifles of varying design: Five AR-15s, five AK-47s, and two H&Ks. Next to this were nearly fifty shotguns ranging from simple skeet guns to 12 gauge Remington police models. On the bottom two shelves were the handguns: everything from .22 target pistols to .40 caliber police issues to .44 magnum "Dirty Harry" guns. There was even, wonder of wonders, a chrome-plated .44 Automag that had probably cost close to a thousand dollars before the comet. "Damn," Brett said, looking at all of the firepower. "Did all of this come from town?" "You betcha," Paul said. "It was a big part of the psyche of the people that bought houses up here. Kind of a 'my dick is bigger than yours' thing for the yuppie mountain folks. Most of these guns have hardly been fired and their previous owners probably had no use for them whatsoever. I mean, nobody burglarized houses up here and most of the men didn't have time to go hunting or target shooting, but they had to have them all the same, thank God." "I'll have you know," Jessica put in, "that my husband used to go target shooting on a regular basis. He was quite good too." Brett and Paul ignored her. "And how about ammo?" Brett asked. "A gun's kind of useless without it." "Well luckily for us," Paul said, "we're reasonably well set up in that category as well." He led him around to another shelf where box after box of bullets of every conceivable category were neatly stacked. "Most of the men who owned the guns had obscene amounts of rounds for them as well. Why did they need two hundred rounds for their hunting rifle or their magnum? Who the hell knows? Who the hell cares? We have it now." "The AR-15s," Brett said immediately. "How many rounds for those?" "Let me check," he said, walking over to a clipboard that was hanging from a piece of string on the end of the shelf. It had several papers clipped to it, which he consulted. "That would be the 5.56 mm jacketed rounds, right?" "Right," Brett said, "the same thing the M-16s fire." His finger traced up and down the page for a moment. Finally he found the entry he sought. "Well well," he said. "We seem to be rather wealthy in that regards. We have 24 boxes of that." "You're shittin' me," Brett said. "Nope," Paul assured him. "This inventory is done daily." "Twelve hundred rounds," Brett whispered, already formulating the basics of his town defense now that he had heard that. "Glory hallelujah. What about reloading equipment? Do you have any of that?" Paul looked a little confused for a moment. "I'm not sure," he said. "If someone in town had any, we probably left it where it was. Nobody here knows how to reload as far as I know. At least nobody suggested that be something we look for during our scavenger hunt." "We need to find out. Reloading equipment will be more valuable than gold. If there's an adequate powder and primer supply, we can extend our ammunition supply by maybe half, especially on the high value weapons like the rifles." Jessica gave him a sour look. "Exactly what kind of conflict do you think we'll be fighting here?" she asked him. "I've told you, there's nothing but scavengers and thieves out there. Even if those so-called bikers you told us about show up, we wouldn't use up all of our ammo fighting thirty men." "You'd be surprised how fast you burn up your rounds during a battle," Brett told her. "And I'd be surprised if those bikers were the worst we had to worry about out there." From the supply rooms they went to the main gathering area of the community center: the basketball court. In here a chow line had been set up and breakfast was in full swing. Cafeteria tables were sitting on the polished surface of the court and each one was filled with people eating the course of the morning - pancakes and orange juice - from a variety of fine looking china. At each table there were two or three men, three or four small children, and eight or ten women shoveling food into their mouths and talking, occasionally sipping from their glasses. Each man was very obviously the focus of attention for the group around him and Brett saw that not a single one actually went up to get his plate himself. In every instance a woman did it for him. And in every instance where a woman disappeared from a man's side to accomplish this task, some other woman would immediately home in and try to engage him in conversation. They weren't standing there more than two minutes before a fight erupted near the back of the building when a woman came back to find that someone else had actually taken her seat. "Christ," Paul muttered, shaking his head sadly as he watched the verbal battle turn physical when the first woman pushed the second one to the floor. "Here we go. The first of the day." He tromped over quickly, Brett and Jessica trailing him. By the time he got there the fight had degenerated to the two women rolling around on the floor, scratching and trying to punch each other. The onlookers in the immediate vicinity stopped what they were doing to watch. Some cheered for either one or the other women. It reminded Brett strongly of high school. "Goddammit!" Paul yelled loudly, standing back away from them and making no move to actually pull them apart. "Jenny, Lisa, knock that shit off right now. Break it up!" They immediately did as he said, separating from each other and standing. Both started pleading their cases to him. "This slut was trying to home in on Steve," the first women, who had blood dripping from her nose, yelled. "I didn't do anything!" the second protested. Her hair was tattered and torn in a few places. "I just sat down to eat and she came over and attacked me! And don't you be calling me no slut, you bitch!" "You are a slut! Just because you don't have a man you're always trying to take someone else's!" "Enough of this shit!" Paul yelled. "Do you hear me? Enough!" They both looked at him sheepishly, refusing to meet each other's eyes. "What have I told you about fighting?" he asked. "About scratching and breaking the skin? For Christ sake, what if you get blood poisoning? Do you see any doctors around here? Do you want to die or cause someone else to die? We don't have enough antibiotics to be wasting them on people beating each other's ass!" They both turned their eyes downward, looking at the floor. "Kitchen detail for both of you," he said. "Three days worth, breakfast, lunch, and dinner." "Paul!" both of them protested at once. "That's my decision!" he said. "If you don't like it, file an appeal with the freakin' judge. You can start with dishes after breakfast today and if there are any more fights between you two, I swear to God I'll put you on house arrest! Do you understand?" "Yes," they both muttered. "Good," he said. "Now finish your breakfast and get to work." "And who is this?" the second woman, the one who had been pushed down asked, her eyes locking onto Brett. Immediately her face went from pouting to keen interest. "Do we have a visitor?" "You know damn well who this is," Paul said. "Don't try to pretend this entire room wasn't just talking about him. This is Brett. He's kind of applying for citizenship with us." "Hi," she said, stepping forward and holding out her hand to him. She smoothed back her mussed hair and then put a big, almost seductive smile on her face. "I'm Lisa. I heard you used to be a cop." "Nice to meet you," Brett said, taking her hand and giving it a quick shake. It was soft and dainty, the kind of hand that was not used to doing much work. "Yes, I was a cop not too long ago." Before Lisa had a chance to make another reply there was suddenly a swarm of women surrounding her, jostling each other to try to get close to him. Multitudes of names were thrown at him as they all tried to introduce themselves at once. A multitude of smiles was thrown at him as they all tried to attract his attention. "Ladies, ladies!" Paul said. "Please. Give the man a little room. Why don't you all go back to your seats and Brett here will come around and talk to each table, okay? I'll introduce him and explain what he wants from us and what he can do for us." "I know what he can do for me," one voice proclaimed boldly. Brett was unable to see whom it had belonged to. "Please," Paul reiterated. "To your seats. Everyone will get a chance to meet him." Reluctantly they retreated, shuffling back to their tables. Brett noticed that the men were all looking at him as well, although not with hostility, as he would have thought. They seemed to be more amused than anything else. A few of them even winked at him before going back to their breakfasts. "Well," Paul said. "Shall we begin?" "I guess so." It took almost an hour but he managed to meet and say a few words to every single person in the room. Names were thrown at him and he promptly forgot them. Faces smiled and flirted at him and he smiled back. His hand was shaken by soft hand after soft hand, only occasionally with a rough, male hand thrown in for variety. He found that Paul had not been exaggerating when he'd described the town as being full of beautiful women. Though not all of them would qualify as centerfold material, a portion of them did. And of those who didn't, it was not by much of a margin. There was not a single woman among them that a reasonable, average male would consider to be grossly unattractive. If effect, it was kind of an exercise in sensory overload. Especially with the flirtations thrown in. These flirtations ranged from the barely subtle to the outright bawdy. One woman, a petite brunette of about twenty-five, actually invited him to come to her house for "a proper introduction" after he was done with the tour. Several others made no bones about telling him that they were unattached at the moment and looking for a man. The only ones that did not openly flirt in some way were the ones that were sitting next to one of the males, usually in a protective stance. And even they were not unfriendly. On the contrary, they seemed just as happy to have him among them, probably to help occupy some of the unattached women. One remarkable thing that Brett noticed as he moved from woman to woman, table to table, was the fact that they were all freshly made-up. Though their clothing was mostly jeans and sweaters or flannel shirts, their faces all had carefully applied layers of cosmetics and their hair was all neatly and fashionably styled. Most had hair ribbons or clips that matched their clothing and all had nail polish on their fingernails. Jewelry was also quite prominently displayed; earrings, necklaces, bracelets, diamond rings; everything except wedding rings, although many of them still had the fading tan lines on their left ring fingers. He also smelled many different varieties of perfume wafting upward, some quite strong and nauseating, some soft and arousing. It was quite a culture shock to see and smell all of this self-pampering less than twenty-four hours after he had been living and eating and sleeping mud and filth. As they moved from group to group, after the initial chitchat and introductions were made, Paul, and, to a lesser extent, Jessica, would explain what Brett's proposed place in the community was. During the first stop Jessica tried to seize the initiative by declaring: "This is the man who snuck in here with a gun last night and scared us half to death. He's traveling with two small children that he left alone all night out there so he could do that. Now he wants to know if he can stay here." Paul immediately took her aside after this statement and a heated, though quiet discussion took place between them, ending with Jessica frowning and pouting. After that it was Paul who did most of the talking. "Brett is a former cop and a former army pilot," he would say. "He knows a lot about security and military matters and is offering to help us defend this place against outsiders in exchange for citizenship for himself and the two teenagers he's traveling with." From there, a brief discussion would usually ensue, although it was fairly obvious by the third stop that most of the women didn't give a rat's ass WHO he was, just that he was an available man. Jessica did manage to put in at least one snide comment per stop, usually related to the fact that he had left Jason and Chrissie to fend for themselves all night, but the sting of these words was usually muted by the obvious fact that no one really liked her that much. Not one person, male or female, raised any objections to his staying and it became apparent before they were halfway through the process that the community vote on the matter that was scheduled for dinner that night would be little more than a formality. Finally, as the breakfast dishes were being carried into the kitchen portion of the court and the groups began to disperse towards wherever it was that they went when they weren't eating, Paul and Jessica led him on a tour of the rest of the center. "Hopefully Jason and Chrissie are all cleaned up and dressed by now," Paul said as they walked through the hallway next to the bath area. "Baths start after breakfast for those who are scheduled today. A good way to get voted out of this joint is to put any kind of a kink in the bathing schedule." He said this with a mocking tone of sarcasm that was plainly evident to Brett but apparently not to Jessica. She nodded in solemn agreement to these words, as if that was the most serious offense that one person could inflict upon another. "Here's the nerve center of Garden Hill," Paul said, leading him into an upstairs office that had once housed the homeowner's association. Several desks full of paperwork and clipboards occupied its space. In a corner were the computer terminals and monitors that had once sat atop them. "In here is where we the committee and a few helpers keep track of inventories, work schedules, housing assignments, and just about everything else that goes on here. Jessica and Dale spend a lot of their day here doing the paperwork and I spend about half of my day here. The other half I'm out breaking up fights and fixing whatever's broke." "You have work schedules?" Brett asked. "Oh yes, there's a hundred things that need to be done around here on a daily basis. Food detail, water detail, hot water detail, wood gathering and drying, child care, and of course the guard detail. We can also monitor the guard posts with the two way radio set there." He pointed to a CB that was hooked up to a car battery. "It ain't much, but it serves its purpose." "How do you pick who is on what detail?" "We try to rotate people from one thing to another on a regular basis," Paul explained. "The people here tend to get kind of antsy if they're stuck with one job for too long. Everybody gets to try their hand at everything, with a few exceptions like guard detail. There are a few women here who can't or won't learn to shoot a gun. It's my feeling that it's best not to force such people." "Uh huh," Brett said. "How many such people do you have?" "I don't really see how that matters," Jessica said. "You have to remember that these are mostly women of breeding. They never thought they'd end up having to walk a guard post." "And the rest of the world never thought it would end up dead either," Brett replied. "So, how many?" "About twenty or them," Paul said before Jessica could object any more. "And a good portion of the rest of them don't take the job that seriously, as you've seen." "Oh yes," Brett said. "That's going to have to be the first thing to change. We cannot have people screwing each other on guard duty. It is completely unacceptable." "For once I find myself agreeing with you," Jessica said. "As Paul told you yesterday, we have a bit of a problem with... well... fornication here. All of the women who are unattached..." she said that word with a great deal of distaste in her voice, "... are constantly flaunting themselves in front of the men. That little fight you saw this morning is a perfect example. And the men are simply pigs about it, showing very little restraint. I am firmly of the opinion that the only way to counter this problem is to exile a few people." "Exile people for screwing?" Brett asked. "Don't you think that's a bit harsh?" "Not at all," she said. "We may not have the ability to perform marriages here but the sanctity of the couple is still very alive and well. This is a sanctity that must be protected at all costs, wouldn't you agree? It is what civilization is based upon." "There isn't any civilization any more," he told her. "And I've been out there, you haven't. I'm not sure you quite grasp what you would be sentencing people to if you booted them. It's truly a fate worse than death. Now as a punishment for murder or for rape or something along those lines, yes, that's probably a fitting response, but for 'fornication', as you put it, I don't think it's appropriate." She smirked a little. "So just how would you suggest punishing those who threaten the fabric of our society with their wanton behavior? I've been over this time and again with Paul and Dale both and what happens is that nothing is done and the problem continues. How would you handle it, Mr. Adams?" "I don't know," he said honestly. "You don't know," she said, shaking her head. "Obviously it is a problem," he said. "Any time you have high class women rolling around on the floor clawing each other's eyes out and guards boffing each other at their posts because that's the only place they can do it, you have something that needs to be addressed." "They need to be punished harshly," Jessica insisted. "You can't enforce a ban on sex," Brett told her. "That would be even more futile than prohibition or making marijuana illegal. People are going to do it no matter what you say and with sex, they don't even have to distill anything or grow anything or buy anything to imbibe. All they have to do is find a place to be alone." "That's why we should exile them," she said, as if he were an idiot. "And pretty soon," Paul put in, "we wouldn't have anyone left here." "After you kick out the first one or two, the rest would fall in line. Trust me on this." "No," Brett said, shaking his head, "what you'd have would be an open revolt. Trust me on this. I'm very familiar with human nature." Jessica scoffed at his views. "Well, either way, the decision is not in your hands. We on the committee will find a way to deal with this problem." ------- After the upstairs tour Brett checked on Jason and Chrissie finding them sound asleep in rollaway cots in the same storage room where he had spent the night. Both were cuddled tightly under warm blankets and snoring the snores of the nearly comatose. "They didn't even get anything to eat first," Janet, Paul's official companion and the woman that had taken charge of getting them bathed and clothed, told him. She smiled affectionately at them. "They just wanted to sleep." "That's kind of how I felt last night," Brett replied. "We've been sleeping on the ground in the wind and rain all this time. After that, you can't imagine how nice those cheap roll-aways and fresh linen look. If I never see those arctic sleeping bags or a lean-to again, it'll be too damn soon." "Poor things," Janet said, shaking her head a little. "Paul told me what you've been through and what they went through this morning. It's a shame that people so young are forced to have experiences like that, isn't it?" Jessica, who was standing with them, gave a little snort of disgust - she still seemed to think that Jason and Chrissie had made up the tale of their gunfight this morning - but said nothing. Janet shot her a brief look of annoyance - a look that Brett had noticed nearly every person they contacted give at some point - but kept her mouth shut as well. "Well," Paul said, "On that note, shall we go tour the outside now?" "Sure," Brett said. "Let's do that." They went on a two-hour walk around the entire subdivision and its guard posts, Paul showing him the defenses that he had set up and introducing him to the guards that were currently on duty. Though Brett had been able to catch brief glimpses of the terrain on the walk to and from the bridge that morning, he was now treated to a detailed look of everything in Garden Hill. Brett found that Paul, in setting up town defense, had not done too terribly badly for someone without military of law enforcement experience. Even before the tour he had figured out that the former firefighter had a healthy amount of good old common sense and seeing what he had done for protection only served to reinforce this view. For the purpose of keeping isolated stragglers from entering the walled area where everyone lived and worked, he had covered every base, leaving no part of the subdivision exposed to someone slipping inside during the daylight hours. Except for the bridge approach, all of his guard posts were located in the upper floors of two-story houses along the outside wall. He had four of these positions, each manned with two guards armed with scoped rifles and binoculars. Between the four of them, the entire perimeter of the irregularly shaped subdivision was visible as long as the guards did their jobs and kept watch. The problem with this set-up however, was twofold. In the first place, while it effectively kept stragglers at bay, it would be almost useless against a concentrated attack by more than ten or fifteen people. They were simply allowed to get too close to the walls before they were spotted. Along those same lines it was a defense that depended heavily upon the guards maintaining a diligent watch - something that they had already proven themselves incapable of - since there was potentially only a matter of a few minutes or so between when an invader would first appear and when he reached the safety and invisibility of the wall. Another problem was that, when they did spot a straggler heading in, the way they drove him or her away was to fire at them, not aiming to hit, just to persuade them that they did not want to be there. This was a horrible waste of ammunition since it usually took two or three shots to accomplish this goal. Brett, as diplomatically as possible, pointed out these flaws in the plan as he observed. Paul seemed to take it well. As for the guards themselves, they tended to be male and female teams. Of the four interior guard posts, three of them were coed posts. Though they did not actually walk in upon any coitus in progress - probably since the guards knew that they would be getting a visit from the boss on that morning - it did not take extra-sensory perception to figure out that there was a great deal of sexual tension between each pair. Nor did it take much to figure out that a guard position was the ideal place to carry out an affair since they were located inside of an actual bedroom and had an actual bed in them. "Who makes the guard roster?" Brett asked as they left the final post and began heading out towards the hilltop position that overlooked the bridge. "I do," Paul told him. "I do it mostly on a volunteer basis since I don't really want to send people out there that don't really want to be there. Of course the cost of that is that I end up having couples with an agenda volunteering. I do make sure that everyone who mans a post is able to shoot their rifles and pistols, but that's about the only qualifying factor at this point." "Might I make a suggestion?" Brett said. "Hey," Paul told him, "You're the new security chief. You don't make suggestions, you make changes." "If he's voted into town," Jessica said from her position right behind them. "And only if the committee approves them." "Right," Brett said. "Well, the first thing that will change is that male and female combinations will no longer be allowed on guard duty. It's going to be either two males or two females. That should cut down on the 'fornication' wouldn't you think?" "People aren't going to like that," Paul said dubiously. "You're going to have a hard time getting volunteers if you implement that rule." "Guard duty is not for people to like or dislike," he said. "It's for people to do. It is a job, not a fuckfest. Nobody here seems to realize that that is the most important job in town. Without an effective security force, you might as well just set all of your food outside the wall right now because at some point, someone is going to take it away from you. We'll need to develop teams of people who specialize in this duty and will take it seriously. And they will then be the only ones to do it. We'll partner them together every shift so they can learn to rely on each other and I'll train them up into an effective fighting force that can back each other up if it becomes necessary." "These are not military people that we have in this town," Jessica said. "They're women of breeding and men who fix things or mow lawns." "They're going to have to be military people," Brett said. "And in addition to the guards, every person in this town needs to learn how to shoot and fight. Everyone. If we're ever attacked in force the job of the guard force is going to be to simply hold until the rest of the town can grab weapons and man whatever positions are needed to fend them off." "You must be kidding," Jessica said. "These people can't do anything like that." "If they want to live to see the sun again, they'd better learn," Brett said. ------- "Well, let's find Brett and his friends a house, shall we?" Paul said as they reentered the main office in the community center. It was just before lunch and the odor of cooking food - it smelled like some kind of rice dish - was wafting upwards from below. "A house?" Jessica immediately said. "Don't you think that's a bit premature?" "Yeah," agreed Dale, who was going over some paperwork at his desk. "We haven't had the vote yet. We don't know if they're going to be staying." "They'll be staying," Paul said. "You know that as well as I do. So how about we concede the inevitable and start figuring out a place to put them." "But, Paul..." Jessica started. "If I'm wrong," Paul said, giving a little roll of the eyes, "then how much trouble is it to move them back out? They don't have anything anyway." This argument seemed to do the trick. Brett, who watched the conversation from his position in the corner, wondered, not for the first time, just what it was that Jessica had against him anyway. True, he had upset her little power trip but he was not directly responsible for that. That had just been Paul insisting upon what he knew was a needed addition. "All right," Jessica said, opening a drawer on her desk and pulling out a sheaf of papers. "I guess we can at least look. I think a small house would suffice for them, wouldn't you?" "By all means," Paul said. "I certainly wasn't suggesting that you give him a bigger house than yours. How about the one on the corner of Sycamore and Cypress? It's one of the small, three bedroom models. That should do them, don't you think?" "That was Bob and Vickie Whalen's house!" Jessica immediately protested. "They were good friends of mine." "And they're dead now, aren't they?" Paul said, quite exasperated. "That's what they get for both being at work on that particular Thursday." "That's not a very nice thing to say." "And that house is empty and it's not a freaking shrine. It's close by the community center in case Brett has to get over here fast and it has furniture in it. All we'd have to do is move a couple of beds over there for the kids and give them some linen and they're all set." They argued back and forth for a few minutes about the appropriateness of that decision, Dale echoing everything that Jessica said, but eventually they were worn down. With only one warning that Paul was 'forgetting his place' it was agreed upon. 415 Sycamore became the official residence of Garden Hill's unconfirmed security chief. "I'll take you over to look at it," Paul told him. "And after lunch we'll get you all moved in and set up." "Cool," Brett said, following him down the stairs. He checked in on Chrissie and Jason, hoping that they would be awake so they could go see their new home as well but they were still quite unconscious in their beds, both in the same exact position he had last seen them in. He shut the door on them, leaving them to their slumber, and then donned his rain slicker once again, following Paul out into the rain. "Why does Jessica hate me so much?" Brett asked as they walked over. "I mean, Dale, I can understand. He's just pussywhipped and takes whatever position Jessica does. If she hates me, then he hates me. But why does she hate me?" "Ahh, Jessica," Paul said, a queer smile upon his face. "She's a very complex and interesting psychological phenomenon. Are you familiar with psychology at all?" "Not really," he said. "I mean, I know human nature from my job, I know it all too well in fact, but as far as formal training goes, I haven't had any." "Well, neither have I, but I did take quite a few courses while I was in college. Jessica is the epitome of the classic, textbook, inferiority complex. Something, somewhere in her childhood has led her to believe that she is worthless and inferior to nearly everyone else. Now she is smart, crafty, and before the comet she was quite rich, but still, she always compared herself to other people and found herself lacking in some way. So to compensate for this feeling of inferiority, she tries to make herself look superior in everything to everyone, to the point that she becomes quite annoying and possibly dangerous under the right circumstances. Her entire reason for living is to prove to everyone that she is better than they are because she feels that she is not. Her husband was richer, her house was nicer, her car was more expensive. If someone bought something nicer than she had, she would immediately go out and top it. If you told her you had the flu and you were in bed for three days with it, she would tell you that she had it worse but that she didn't have to stay in bed at all. If you told her your kid got an A in school, she would tell you that hers got an A-plus." "Okay," Brett said, nodding. "I'm following you so far. I've known a few Jessicas in my time, but that doesn't explain the hatred for me." "Oh, but it does. Don't you see? Her position in this town is very important to her. She is a leader, a committee member, someone who makes the rules and enforces them. She helps control the food that we eat and can potentially get someone exiled from town. Having such a position helps her to convince herself that she is not inferior, that she is somebody. But at the same time, deep down inside, she realizes that anybody could do what she is doing. She tries to come across like only she has the strength and the smarts to help dole out food and make decisions, but she knows that she doesn't and tries to hide that fact from everyone. And then you come along. You are someone who does possess skills and knowledge that no one else in this town has. You truly are an important person and you will be doing something that she could not do or even pretend to do. This town really does need you." "But I am someone who can help this town," Brett protested. "Doesn't that mean anything to her?" "No," Paul said. "That's what is scary about this. The terror she feels at being exposed as just another person is greater than her fear for the safety of Garden Hill and everyone in it. In a way, her response to you is almost sociopathic. She would rather see our town overrun and destroyed, all of our food gone, all of the men killed, all of the women raped and captured, than admit that she's just another citizen that relies on others to help keep things running." "That is a rather scary thought," Brett said slowly. "Yes it is. And I'm going to be keeping a close eye on Jessica as things progress here. I have no idea how far she is capable of going to protect this image she tries to maintain. The more it slips, the more likely she is to do something drastic." "Drastic? How drastic?" "There's really no telling," Paul said. "But just remember that you and, to a lesser extent, me, are going to be the focus of her insecurity. You saw her reach for a gun today down on the bridge. Keep that in mind." ------- The house was a simple, 1600 square foot, three-bedroom single story. It had a two-car garage and a muddy backyard with soggy, dying grass. The smallest model available in the Garden Hill subdivision, it had probably been worth close to $250,000 before the comet impact. The previous owners - Bob and Vickie according to Jessica - had decorated it tastefully if slightly effeminately. The carpet and the padding were top of the line, the kitchen appliances - useless as they all were now - were of the highest quality, and the furniture was all name-brand and expensive. In the bedroom was a large, King-sized bed with a canopy over it. One of the other bedrooms had been used as an office and contained a computer desk and some bookshelves. The third bedroom was decorated with a mobile and had a large, oak crib in it. Brett tried not to think too much about what had happened to the baby that had once slept in that crib. "Now the bathroom," Paul said, as he led him through the tour, "is the most important room in the house." "Oh?" Brett replied, wondering if he was kidding or not. "Yes indeed. It is where your water supply, your bodily functions, and your laundry are all accomplished. Now the toilets are just like the ones in the community center." "Meaning that you can still use them," Brett said. "Right. As long as you dump enough water down in them after you finish your business, they will still drain down into the septic system and you will still be able to refill them with fresh water. We'll have Ted - he's our resident plumber - come out later today and rig up a hose assembly from the rain gutter for you. He's devised a little device that lets you tap into all of that water draining off of the roof. It plugs into the bottom of the gutter and gravity feeds through a hose and a nozzle right into the bathroom through the window. That will be your toilet water and your laundry water, but I wouldn't advise that you drink it straight. For drinking water you should fill up a five-gallon bucket with rainwater and don't let it sit for more than a day or two. We've been putting a few drops of bleach in our buckets just to make sure we don't catch any nasty bugs. Remember, we don't have a doctor here and we don't have a lot of antibiotics either." "You say we do our laundry in here? How does that work?" "It's not a power Maytag, that's for sure. Every household is given a laundry soap ration for the week. Just fill the tub with some water, throw in some soap, and then let your clothes soak for a while. Squish them around a little bit and then rinse them off until the soap is gone. Then rig yourself a clothesline someplace in the house. Most of us use the formal living room part since that's pretty much a useless waste of space anyway. I'd advise doing your laundry every day. If you let it build up and then try to do it all at once, it takes a long time for it to dry and the house gets unbearably humid." "Amazing," Brett said, feeling a little bit of unreality wash over him. "What's that?" "It's just kind of strange," he said. "Not too long before I was wondering if I was going to be able to survive from day to day. Now, I'm pondering the best way to go about installing a clothesline in my new Garden Hill home. It's probably the way my dad felt when he came home from Vietnam. They kept him in combat in the jungle right up until his very last day. And then, on day 365, a chopper came and took him out and flew him to Saigon. He climbed on a plane and eighteen hours later, he was in Seattle waiting for a flight home. I never understood him before when he tried to tell me how weird that was, going from a deadly jungle where VC are trying to kill you to the streets of Sacramento in the USA in less than 24 hours. Not even when I came home from the Gulf War did I understand it. The Gulf War was pretty much a pussy war in comparison. But I understand now. I really think I do." "Yeah?" He nodded. "Yeah. I only wish my old man were still alive so I could tell him. It's unreal. It's hard to grasp." Paul looked at him, his face deadpan. "Molly bolts," he finally said. "What?" Brett said, having no idea what he was talking about. "Molly bolts," he repeated. "That's the best way to install the clothesline. We have a supply of them back at the community center." Brett started to laugh. Paul, dropping the straight face, joined him. ------- About two hours after lunch Brett was up in the main office with Paul, going over some maps of the town that had been made since the impact. For the most part they were crudely done and not even close to scale but they did show the topographical features around the subdivision fairly well. The two men were discussing various ideas about defense while Jessica and Dale, both at their own desks, worked on some items of their own, one or the other occasionally throwing in a negative comment or two that was mostly ignored. "Look who finally decided to join the living," said a voice from the doorway. Everyone looked up to see Janet standing there, a bleary looking Chrissie next to her. "Chrissie," Brett said happily, standing up to go greet her. Seeing her in fresh clothes, her blonde hair neatly combed, it was a little like looking at a different person. "Look at you. You're clean!" She giggled a little tiredly. "Yeah, it took me two tubs full of water to get everything off of me but I finally found some skin underneath there." "I know what you mean," Brett said, feeling a little pang of guilt as he was reminded of his own bath last night. "That's about what it took me as well. Did you get something to eat?" "Yes," she said. "Janet took me down to the gym and gave me some of the rice that everyone had for lunch." She scratched herself on the shoulder, making a sour face. "These clothes itch, Brett. And they feel so rough!" He nodded. "Mine too," he told her. "Give it a few more hours, you'll get used to it eventually." He filled her in on the developments that had occurred while she had been sleeping, telling her of his tour of the town and speculating that the vote scheduled for dinner that night seemed like it would go in their favor. "People seem to like us here," he said, casting a sideways glance at Jessica, who was monitoring the conversation. "At least most of them do." "Well that's good," she said happily. "I could get used to living here I think." "Of course you will be expected to work if we take you," Jessica said from her seat. "Don't get the idea that it's a free ride or anything." Chrissie looked over at her with distaste. She had already determined how she felt about Jessica and she didn't do much to hide it. "I have no problem pulling my weight," she said to her. "I certainly hope you don't," Jessica said. "I imagine you have some babysitting experience don't you? Most teenage girls do." "Babysitting?" "Yes," Jessica said. "We have a great many small children in town that need to be watched while their mothers are out doing their assigned tasks. I think you would fit that bill nicely. That will free up Janet or one of the other women who normally do that for guard duty or some other detail." "Babysitting?" Chrissie said a little louder, her face flushing a bit. "You want me to babysit?" "Chrissie," Brett said, putting a hand on her shoulder. "Not now." "But, Brett," she said, turning towards him. "I'm..." "Not now," he told her sternly. "We'll talk about this later, okay?" "Do you have a problem with babysitting?" Jessica asked her, standing up and walking over. Before she could answer, Janet answered for her. "I would think," she said, "that Chrissie probably feels she would be more suited to guard detail instead of babysitting." "Guard detail?" Jessica laughed. "That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Send a child out with a gun and entrust her to keep a watch?" "Chrissie is not a child," Brett said, abandoning his effort to avoid a conflict on the matter. "Neither is Jason for that matter. Both of them have been surviving out in the wilderness with me for more than a week and both of them have been in combat situations twice now. They know how to shoot those guns and they know when to shoot those guns. They know how to maneuver under fire, how to communicate silently with each other, and I would venture to say that they are more qualified for that duty than anyone else in this town." "I would have to agree with Brett on this," Paul said. "Putting Chrissie in the day care center would be a waste of talent. Her services would be better used at a guard post." Now it was Jessica whose face was flushing in anger. "Not as long as I am a member of this committee," she said firmly. "I will not entrust our lives to children nor will I allow them to carry guns. This is not the Middle East. This is America." "That's where you're wrong," Paul said. "This isn't America anymore. There is no America as far as we're concerned. This is Garden Hill and Garden Hill and the people in it are all we've got. We have to make the best use of our resources." "I will not budge on this issue," Jessica said, turning away and stomping back to her desk. "No children on guard detail. No children carrying guns. That is final." ------- "That woman is such a bitch!" Chrissie, still fuming, proclaimed as Brett led her through the abandoned streets towards their new house. In order to defuse the situation before it got completely out of hand, he had suggested that maybe it was time to go look at their assigned domicile. "Don't worry, Chris," he told her. "Jessica is kind of prone to making impulsive decisions like that. Paul is pretty effective at changing her mind when he really needs to. I've seen him do it more than once now." "What does he do?" she asked. "Throw holy water on her?" "No, he's just figured out that she's a lot of bark without much ability to bite. When push comes to shove she'll give ground, but it's more likely to happen if the object of the discussion is not right there. Don't worry, we'll get you on guard detail. Common sense will prevail." This made her feel a little better. Her mood was improved even more when they entered the house and started the tour. "All of this is really ours?" she asked, her eyes wide as she went from room to room, looking at everything. "We get to sleep in a real bed?" "We do," he said, seeing that the plumber had been there at some point and installed the hose assembly. "They're going to bring over some beds for you and Jason later." "A bed for me?" she said quietly, looking away from her perusal of the water system. "What do you mean? Aren't we going to sleep together anymore?" "Yes," he said, feeling uncomfortable. "We will. It's just that... well... I don't think we should tell people about us just now. Especially not before the vote. They might not understand." "Who cares?" she said. "Brett, I don't want to have to hide. You've seen how many women are in this town!" "And you saw the way that Jessica acted towards you," he told her. "She thinks of you as a child and no matter what, she can't think of you as anything else. How do you think she'll react if she finds out that I'm sleeping with you? She'll try to have me exiled. And I imagine that a lot of the other women would see her point of view on that subject." "How long will we have to hide it?" "Until they get to know us better," he said soothingly, feeling like a complete ass, feeling like a criminal trying to cover his tracks. "Until they realize that you are the woman you are and not a child." She lowered her head sadly, dropping the garden hose back into the bathtub. "Oh Brett," she said. "Are you sure that this is the town for us? These people here are all so... phony." "I know," he said. "But this town is where we're gonna have to make our stand. Like Paul said, it's all we got." "What a mess," she said, walking over to him. "Can you hold me? I missed you so much last night." He put his arms around her, feeling the familiar curves of her body through the unfamiliar layer of dry clothing. "You smell so clean," he told her, inhaling the scent of apple shampoo. "And you feel so dry." She raised her head up and kissed his chin a little. "I'm starting to get wet somewhere," she said slyly, rubbing herself against him, letting him feel the weight of her breasts. "Are you now?" he asked, allowing his hands to drop from her back down to her ass. He gave the tight cheeks a squeeze. "You know, I've never seen you naked in decent lighting before." "No," she agreed, licking at his neck a little, causing blood to run to his cock. "You never have. And I shaved my legs while I was taking my bath, my armpits too." "So you're all smooth now?" he asked, grinding his crotch into her, making his dick even harder. "All smooth," she said. "Shall we go try out our new bed? I've never done it on a bed before." "There's a lot of things you've never done before," he told her. "I think we should go try a few of them." He twisted in her grasp and then slid his right arm down to the back of her knees. With a quick motion, he picked her up, cradling her as a groom does his new bride. She giggled, her arm going around his neck. "I've never been carried to the bedroom before," she said, kissing his neck. "I kind of like it." "Well don't get used to it or anything," he told her teasingly. "You weigh a damn ton." "I do not," she said, slapping at him. "I hardly think a hundred and sixteen pounds qualifies as a ton." "It's pretty close," he said, walking through the doorway and into the master bedroom. The pink canopied bed awaited them, although no linen had been brought over as of yet. He stopped near the side of it and put his lips to hers, giving her a passionate kiss. Their tongues swirled together and she pulled him tighter to her. He set her gently upon the mattress on her back and then released her, standing up and looking down at her. "You really are a beautiful woman, Chris," he told her, touching her face. She grasped his hand in hers and took one of his fingers into her mouth, sucking it and swirling around it with her tongue. It was an incredibly erotic sensation. She did this for a moment and then let it slip free, a small string of saliva stretching out and then breaking. "Show me how beautiful I am," she told him. "Make love to me the way it's supposed to be done." He undressed her, piece by piece, starting with her shirt and her bra. The skin of her chest was a little reddened, not quite a rash, from the recent removal of the protective layer of dirt it had developed and from the unfamiliar exposure to laundry soap residue in her new clothing. Her breasts stood up proudly, the nipples erect. He bent and took them into his mouth, licking and sucking each one until her back started to arch upward. Her hand reached out and began to squeeze his erection through his jeans. A simple pair of Nike tennis shoes had replaced the camping boots that she had worn out in the wild. She kicked them off, letting them drop to the floor, as he began to unbutton her jeans. Beneath them was a pair of plain cotton panties, sparkling white against her pink skin. As he slid the jeans down her shapely legs, he saw that the crotch was wet with her juices. He ran the knuckle of his finger over her sex, feeling the damp cotton, feeling the outline of her swollen lips beneath. Her smell, her natural smell, reached him for the first time and he moaned, thinking how nice it was going to be to finally enjoy her body like it should be enjoyed. Their past couplings had all been marked by an unspoken, but very real effort to avoid touching certain places due to the filth and odor that they'd accumulated. He dropped her pants to the floor and then took one of her legs in his hand, bringing her foot to his face. Looking her in the eye he took her big toe into his mouth and began to suck on it, treating it the same way she had treated his finger. She immediately began to squirm on the bed, her breathing kicking up a few notches as unfamiliar sensations coursed through her. "Oh my God," she whispered, craning her head backward. "I... ohhhh..." He sucked each toe in turn, moving from the big one to its neighbor and finally ended up with her small toe. He then began to kiss, lick, and suck his way along the side of her dainty foot, paying particular attention to the sole, delivering sensation that was just below the threshold of a tickle. "You're driving me crazy," she said breathlessly. "That's what I'm trying to do," he said. "Do you like it?" "Yessss," she assured him. He kissed his way up the back of her calf, his lips and tongue moving over the smoothness of her recently shaved flesh. Thanks to the all of the walking uphill they had been doing with full packs, her calves were tight and muscled, very toned. She opened her legs widely as he worked his way upward, her hand dropping down to the outside of her panties, where her fingers began to idly play in the crotch area, spreading her wetness around. He continued to move higher and higher, his hands caressing the flesh ahead of his mouth, enjoying the silky softness. When he reached the back of her knee, a particularly erogenous zone on most women, he spent nearly two minutes there, tonguing it and tasting it, making her beg him to keep moving. At last he did, his kisses trailing along the inside of her thigh, his teeth occasionally nipping at the tender skin. As he moved closer to her center her odor began to grow more powerful, more insistent and she began to grow more restless upon the bed. "Ohhh, Brett," she moaned. "Stop teasing me." "When the time comes," he told her, his mouth giving a quick suck high on her thigh. When he felt the damp material of her panties touching his cheek, he slowly turned his head forward, finding his eyes less than three inches from her cotton-clad sex. Her musk was now very strong in his nose, driving him onward, breaking his will to keep teasing. "Put your mouth on me, Brett," she pleaded, her fingers finding his hair. "Please? I want to feel it. I want it!" He leaned forward, his tongue sticking out and contacting her panties right over her lips. He gave a little suck, the tart flavor of her juices being transferred to his taste buds. He could feel the quivering outline of her clit through the cotton, could make out the soft shape of her vulva. "Oh God, take them offfff!" He kissed her through the panties, rubbing his face in her, pushing against her, making her squeal with the sensation. "Now, Brett," she begged. "Take them off now!" "And then what?" he asked between kisses and licks of the cotton. "You know what," she panted. "Do I?" he asked, giving her an extra-hard rub. "Yessss!" "Maybe you should tell me..." another kiss, another suck, "just so I can be sure." "Eat me!" she nearly screamed, her fingers giving a yank at his hair. "Please, eat me!" With a smile he hooked his thumb into the crotch of the panties and slowly pulled it to the side, exposing her treasures to him. The lips were an angry red and invitingly open, the surface glinting with wetness. They were framed on the sides by her sparse growth of blonde, curly hairs and on the top by a thicker carpet of the same. Her clit bulged out almost like a small nipple. He inhaled deeply of her scent, relishing its clean, musky odor, and then, without warning, he plunged his tongue inside of her. "Ohhhh, yesssss!" she screamed, her hips raising up from the bed for an instant. He licked up and down the length of her pussy, gathering her juice on his tongue, loving the slippery texture of her membranes. He lapped at her like a starving cat at a bowl of milk, his saliva dripping from his mouth, making her even wetter, even slipperier. She moaned and bucked on the bed, her legs moving back and forth seemingly of their own volition, her hands moving over his head and the back of his neck, urging him on. He paused for a moment (over her vocal protest) to pull the panties off of her and drop them on the floor and then he dove right back in, licking and sucking, tasting and smelling. He slid two fingers inside of her and began to move them in and out while his mouth moved upward and began to lick at the hood of her clit, swirling around and around, occasionally stabbing at the sensitive organ itself. Each time he contacted it Chrissie's legs would tighten against his back, her fingers would tug at his hair, and her mouth would utter a delighted moan of pleasure. When he added a third finger to her pussy and locked his lips onto her clit and began attacking it with his tongue, she did not last long. She bucked wildly against him, forcing him to hold tightly to her with his free hand to keep his mouth where it belonged. No sooner had her bucks and spasms stopped then he went at her again, starting back at the slit and eventually moving to the clit, drawing a second and then a third orgasm from her body. By the time he pulled his head from her crotch she was sweaty and hardly capable of speech. "Oh God," she moaned, squirming back and forth on the bed. "I had no idea that could feel so good. Come here." She held her arms out to him. "Kiss me." Still fully clothed he climbed atop her naked body, his hands caressing everywhere. She pulled his face to hers and plunged her tongue into his mouth, sucking his tongue obscenely, relishing the lingering taste of her own body. Next she sucked his lips into her mouth, first the bottom and then the top, and then she began to lap at the skin around his mouth. "Mmmmm," she hummed, "it's so nice to do this while we're clean. Your skin tastes so good, Brett." Her wet tongue lapped at him some more, moving from his face down to his neck. Her hands went beneath his shirt, to his bare back and her fingernails began scratching lightly at him in a way she knew he liked. "Let me get these clothes off," he told her, pulling away. Reluctantly, she let him go. He was naked in a flash, his jeans, shirt, and underwear flying off into an untidy heap behind him. His erection was tremendous, sticking upward at a sixty-degree angle, the head purple and moist with pre-come. Chrissie's eyes looked at it hungrily. Her hands reached out to touch it, sliding up and down its length. Her legs opened wider. "Fuck me, Brett," she told him. "Fuck me in this bed." "You know it," he said, once again climbing atop her. For the first time in their relationship they had the freedom to perform the act as it should be performed, with no constricting sleeping bag pinning them down, with no need to keep their grunts and groans quiet to avoid waking Jason. He grabbed her legs at the thighs and pushed them backwards, spreading her as wide as was physically possible. Since she had been a cheerleader used to stretching, that was pretty wide indeed. Her juicy opening gaped before him, begging for his entry. He did not disappoint. He put the head against her and slid smoothly in with one thrust, sinking to the bottom, feeling the head of his cock pushing against her cervix. "Yessss!" she cried, arching her back beneath him, trying to draw him even deeper. "Fuck me! Fuck me hard, Brett!" He fucked her hard. Keeping her legs pushed backward he slammed in and out of her with vigor, his balls slapping against her ass with each stroke. Juices poured out of her and soaked into the mattress beneath them. A wet, squishing noise joined the sound of their grunts of effort and pleasure. He pounded into her as he never had before, quickly working up a sweat in the muggy air. As the droplets fell from his face onto hers, she lapped at them with her tongue. He only lasted about five minutes in her tightness before his orgasm hit him like a freight train, blasting jets and jets of sperm into her body. When he finally collapsed atop her, panting like a dog, slick with perspiration, his heart hammering in his chest, he knew that he would never be able to give up the pleasure her body gave him. Though this session had been among the shortest that they'd shared over the past week, it had undoubtedly been the most passionate and it had only hinted at the unrestrained passion of the future that they could share now that they had a bedroom to themselves. "Oh, Brett," she said into his ear as her hands traced idle circles over the moist skin of his back. "It just keeps getting better and better. I never dreamed when I let Stan Corban screw me in the back of his dad's car that it could feel this good." "No?" Brett, still panting a little, asked her. "Stan didn't do a good job of it?" "No," she said. "In fact, I was about to give up on sex after that. It hurt like hell when he crammed that thing in me. And then it only got worse. I'd always read that it was supposed to be a little pain followed by the most intense pleasure. Instead it was a lot of pain followed by even worse pain when he started to jam it in and out." "You can't always believe what you read, can you?" "No shit. At least it didn't last very long. He made it about ten strokes before he shot off." She giggled. "And his orgasm triggered an asthma attack. He had to climb off me and get his inhaler." Brett chuckled. "Poor Stan," he said. "But it's understandable. If you'd have given yourself to me when I was... what? Sixteen?" "Seventeen," she said. "He was seventeen and the star pitcher of the baseball team." "Now why doesn't that surprise me?" Brett said with another chuckle. "Anyway, if you would've let me have you when I was seventeen - which I doubt you would have, I was kind of skinny and nerdy looking - I probably wouldn't have even made it in before I shot off. That's how beautiful you are, Chris. That's how much of a fantasy you are. You can't blame the guy. He must've had incredible control to make it even ten strokes with you at seventeen." She grinned at him. "That's not the most romantic thing that I've ever heard one person say to another," she told him. "But it's strangely arousing all the same." "The truth often is," he told her, feeling himself starting to twitch within her body once again - a process she helped along by rotating her hips back and forth. "How about another one?" she asked, widening the rotation of her circles. "We've got a night to make up for, after all." He continued to grow within her, waves of pleasure starting to radiate outward. "We do have to be back to the community center soon. Jason will be waking up and then there's dinner and the vote tonight." "We'll make it a quick one then," she said, nibbling on his neck. "A quick one it is," he said lowering his lips to hers. "After all, they might kick us out tonight. It might be our last chance to do it in a bed." "Then let's do it right," she told him. "Let's do it right." Their mouths locked together in a kiss of passion once more and soon he was back up to a full erection. He began to move within her once more, moving slower, drawing it out. They did it right. ------- Chapter 5 "Right here is perfect," Brett told Paul as they stood atop of the hill. "I could not have placed this high ground in a better place. Just look at the view!" "It is very impressive," Paul agreed, looking out towards town. The hill was on the northeast side of the town, about a half mile from the corner of the concrete wall and about a quarter mile from the eastbound lanes of Interstate 80 to the north. The summit of the rocky, sparsely vegetated rise stood approximately 400 feet above the surrounding terrain. This offered a panoramic view of the entire wall as it stretched away to the south, and most of it as it stretched away to the west. The roofs of Garden Hill, clumped together in geometric patterns, a few of the chimneys spouting smoke, could nearly all be seen from this vantage point. It was four days after the town vote that had accepted the trio into Garden Hill and made Brett the new head of security. As had been predicted in advance, the only nays that had been shouted out had come from Jessica and Dale. Now, on his third day at his new job, Brett was scouting out new guard post locations. The hill they were on was one that he had pegged as a likely candidate on his first trip around the area. "It's more than impressive," Brett said excitedly. "It's perfect. It slopes gently on our side, making it easy to get guards up and down, but it is very steep on the I-80 side, making it hard for outsiders to climb from that angle. To the west we can see the most likely avenue of approach from this side - namely, crossing the freeway and moving over those low hills. To the east," he pointed that way, "we can see the only chokepoint people can move through to approach us from that side." "You mean the freeway surface?" Paul asked. "Right," Brett said. "The interstate starts to climb up this mountain towards Donner Summit right there. They blasted a cut right between those steep cliffs." He pointed to that spot, which was just over a mile away. "There is no way in hell that anyone could come at us from the east without either rappelling down those cliffs or coming through that sixty-foot gap where the roadway goes through. From this vantage point, we can keep a constant lookout on that chokepoint, at least during the daylight hours. This will not only secure us from the north but from the east as well since it won't be possible for anyone to slip along the east side of the wall without being seen. Since our southern flank is secured by the canyon, there is no need to keep a guard post on the east anymore as long as this hill and the bridge approach is covered." Paul nodded slowly, starting to see what he was talking about. As strange of an idea as it was to leave an entire side of the subdivision unguarded, it made sense. Nobody would be able to get over to that side unless they first passed in view of this post or came across the bridge. "It's kind of rocky up here," he said. "What would it take to build a bunker?" "About ten people with shovels," he answered. "It would take maybe two days worth of work. Dig down about four feet and put up some sandbags over here behind these rocks. Cover it up with some kind of canvas or plastic material and put mud and dirt on top of that for camouflage. I'd have two guards in here during the day, both with scoped rifles and one of the M-16s. They'd have at least a hundred rounds of .30-caliber ammo and four hundred of 5.56 mm. That way, if we're attacked in force from this side or if someone tries to take their hill, they'll be able to fight them off either until they surrender or we can get reinforcements up to them. Maybe we can even rig some sort of rope and bucket system to get more ammo up to them if they need it." "Very ambitious," Paul said, reaching under his rain slicker and pulling out a cigarette. He spent a moment fiddling with a lighter beneath his hood before he finally got it going. "I wish I could tell you that you have a chance of getting Jessica and Dale to approve a work detail like that, or a major change in the deployment plan." Brett sighed, knowing his companion was right. In only three days he had had nearly every change, nearly every improvement, nearly every policy he wished implemented, voted down by the alliance of Jessica and Dale. It had been stipulated that any changes he wished to make would need to be discussed with the committee first and then voted on. This, in effect, made him almost useless at his job. No matter how carefully he explained the need for something, no matter how concisely he presented his case, they both voted no on whatever his proposal was. Dismantling the catwalk on the bridge had been shot down. Moving the guard positions backwards to at least cover the catwalk exit better had been shitcanned as well. Putting up signs on likely approaches to the wall that warned outsiders not to approach or they would be shot; that had been voted down too, despite his conservative estimate that it would cut their ammunition usage by more than two-thirds. It had been that vote that had really infuriated him. "Why?" he had demanded of them as they sat smirking in their chairs. "What possible reason do you have for not allowing warning signs along the wall?" "It puts us in a position where we appear weak," Jessica had said. "I think the cost of a few extra rounds fired is more than worth the image we portray to those scavengers out there." "That make absolutely no sense," he'd cried. "Where in the hell did you come up with that?" "I am not required to discuss my rationale with you, Mr. Adams," she'd replied. "The matter has been voted upon. Do you have anything else you'd like to discuss?" The only exception to this blackballing was his proposal that coed guard teams would no longer be allowed. That one had been approved only because Jessica knew it would be an unpopular rule which would serve to diminish his popularity which, in those first two days, had been very much like celebrity status. That measure was passed unanimously the first day and implemented the next. It had had very much the effect that Jessica had guessed it would. The first thing to happen was that volunteers for guard duty almost completely dried up, forcing Paul to take the drastic step of assigning people to the job against their will. Several of these recruits had to be threatened with kitchen duty or house arrest before they agreed to the task. In less than twenty-four hours Brett went from most popular citizen to unpleasant, slave-driving boss. He was considered a spoilsport by the many couples that were using guard duty to carry out their affairs. Though he was still the object of intense flirtation by the unattached females of town, the males now regarded him with open hostility. One, Jeff the Mormon, the kid he had smoked a joint with the first night, actually told him to his face: "I wish I wouldn't of voted for you now, dude. You're such a Bogart!" "I'm not here to be liked," he had replied. "I'm here to keep you alive." "Well you're doin' a good job of not being liked," was the sour response. His slave driver reputation was made even worse by the fact that he insisted upon visiting each guard position several times a day, always at random, unpredictable times. Always he found two grumpy men keeping a listless watch or two grumpy women doing the same. The women would at least perk up a bit at his presence, assuming that they were unattached, which most of them were, and the flirtations would begin. He had been offered every conceivable sex act, up to and including a threesome, at the female-manned posts. But at the male-manned posts he sometimes felt himself in danger of being assaulted or even shot. The resentment at his presence would radiate off of them in waves. "How long you gonna keep coming out here?" he was asked once by Hector, the man who had slipped away that first night, leaving him alone with Mitsy. "Until I don't feel I have to anymore," he'd answered simply. "And the way that's looking, it's gonna be a long time." Fortunately, Brett's experience as a cop had long-since made him accustomed to being the authority figure that no one wanted to see or deal with. The efforts of the Garden Hill men to get under his skin with snide comments, the silent treatment, or glaring looks, were strictly small-time compared to the way the residents of Stockton had tried it. With everyone he kept his voice even and monotone, his commands clear and concise, his criticisms constructive and non-insulting. If he responded to a jibe at all it was with gentle sarcasm. If open hostility was displayed for him, as it had been a few times, locking eyes with the person and maintaining the contact always defused it rather quickly. Brett, like most cops, had long since learned how to project a strong vibe towards such people that warned them that attempting a physical confrontation would be a bad mistake. Though this vibe had not always worked in Stockton (sometimes it was taken as a challenge) it never failed to work its magic in Garden Hill. Brett was feared, that was easy enough for him to see. He did not mind being feared as long as he was feared and respected. As of yet, that second factor had not come into play and he knew of no easy way that he would be able to earn it. "Look on the bright side," Paul told him now as he smoked his cigarette atop the hill. "What's the bright side?" he asked, shifting the AK-47 that he'd lugged up the hill to a more comfortable position. "At least the women still like you. I heard earlier today that Cindy Groton is going to be your squeeze. They seem to be really sure about that one." Brett smiled a little. Among the women, whether they feared him or not, the main topic of conversation was who he was going to pick as his "official" companion, as if doing so was a town ordinance or something. He had so far shunned all of the advances that had been thrown at him. Chrissie was keeping him well satisfied in the bedroom department and, at least at this point in his relationship with the townspeople, he felt it important to keep himself out of the games that were played, to seem as aloof as possible to those he was trying to teach to protect themselves. This did not stop the rumors from flying however. On the contrary, it only seemed to encourage them. Whenever he was seen talking to a woman for more than a minute or so the word was passed around that he was "interested" in someone. Before an hour would go by the word would be inflated to "she's the one." "Which one is she?" he asked Paul. "She's the brunette with the big bolt-on titties that you were talking to this morning at breakfast." "The one that asked me to show her how I used to pat women down?" "That's the one," he agreed, taking a deep drag. "She used to be a part-time massage therapist." He grinned. "Word has it that she has a real special massage she'll show you if you play your cards right." "I'm sure she does," he said sourly. "But my experience with Mitsy was eye-opening enough. I'll just let it ride at that for now." "You must have the willpower of a priest," Paul said. "How do you turn down as much sex as you've been offered these last four days? Even I, who is getting it regularly, find it hard to say no to a lot of them." "It is hard," he said honestly. "I mean, I have the same urges everyone else does. But it is my belief that sex is going to be the undoing of this place if it is not brought under some kind of control. These people are obsessed with it. They will happily keep screwing each other until the hoards out there come walking through the gates and then they'll ask themselves how it happened. If I'm going to help prevent that from occurring, then I cannot allow myself to become a part of it. If I start going on the same sort of sex binge that everyone else seems to be wrapped up in, pretty soon I'll convince myself that we really don't need to post guards up on the hills or keep them alert. I don't want that to happen." "I'm with you there," he sighed. "When we first started to organize things here, nobody wanted to do guard duty at all. They convinced themselves that it wasn't necessary. It was only when the first groupings of males and females started to fall apart, when the men started to realize that they could have virtually all the sex they wanted, that it began to be a popular thing to do." "So they could screw each other," Brett said bitterly. "Correct." He shook his head. "The problem we have here is that nobody has been out there. Nobody has seen how desperate things really are. I mean, they can intellectually grasp that most of the world is dead and there isn't any more food to feed anyone and that there are starving people out there, but they can't mentally grasp it. Until you've seen two men with guns stalking you, trying to kill you so that they could have the backpacks you're carrying, you just can't appreciate how real the danger is." "Especially not these people," Paul added. "None of our women have even been on the wrong side of the tracks before. And our men, they're too locked up in the glory of the sex game. They're like kids at a candy store. Remember that I've been in charge of them longer than you have. I've gone through this same shit." "I know," he sighed. "And you've done a good job of it too, don't let me give you the idea that you haven't. It's just that this town is going to get a rude awakening at some point if things don't change. It's as inevitable as the tides." ------- "Now let me get this straight," Jessica said later that afternoon, back in the main office. She was sitting behind her desk, Dale next to her, chewing a wad of gum and looking at Brett and Paul with her patented smirk upon her face. "You want to move the northern and eastern guard positions from their current location and place them on a hill more than a half a mile from town?" "That is correct," Brett said, keeping his voice as monotone as possible, allowing no emotion to show upon his face. "And you would like a work detail of ten people to work on this project for the next two days?" "Or until such time as it is completed," he put in. She shook her head in bewilderment. "That is the most ridiculous thing that I've heard you suggest so far," she said. "Move the guard posts outside of the wall? Leave the eastern side of town completely undefended? Have you been dipping into the marijuana supply or something?" "Yeah," Dale said, giving his own version of the smirk. "Some military expert you are." He looked at Paul. "Didn't I tell you from the start he was scamming us? Isn't that the most idiotic thing you've ever heard?" Paul, taking Brett's lead, kept his face neutral and his voice even as well. "If you went and stood on that hill," he said, "I think you would see where Brett is coming from. From the top of it you can guard the entire north side and prevent anyone from accessing the east side since there's only one way in there. He's convinced me. His plan is sound and I think we should do it." "Yes," Jessica said, "you seem to agree with most of what he says, don't you? Well, I don't know how Dale feels on this matter, but I certainly cannot vote to approve such a gross downgrade in our defenses. Our guards belong inside of the wall, where they can do us some good, not a half a mile away on top of a hill." "Your bridge guard position is almost a mile away," Brett said. "It is well outside of the wall and yet it prevents anybody from entering from the south, doesn't it?" "That's different," Dale said. "That's a bridge. If people can't get across the bridge, they can't get in from the south." "And if people can't get through the gap in the cliffs to the east of town, a gap that that hill I'm talking about has a view of, then they can't get in from the east. And they can't approach us from the north because that hill can see them before they even cross the interstate. The most basic military tactic is to occupy high ground surrounding your position. That is common sense." "I don't think that tactic applies here," Jessica said. "My vote is no." "My vote is no as well," Dale added. "The guards need to stay inside of the wall." Brett took a few deep breaths, wanting to give a seething lecture on how their stupidity and pettiness was going to get everyone killed but knowing that such a thing was just what Jessica wanted. Instead, he calmed himself and went on to his next proposal. "I'd like to ask for volunteers to be permanently assigned to the guard force," he said. "Volunteers?" Jessica said. "Permanently assigned? What for?" "With a permanent group I can concentrate on training them for specific duties and actions. In a way, they will be professionals at the job. That will increase the overall effectiveness of the force." "I see," she said thoughtfully. "And just how many of these volunteers do you think you're going to get?" "Probably not very many at this point in time," he admitted. "But that will change in the future I think. I'd like authorization for thirty such volunteers." "Thirty?" Jessica barked, laughing. "As I said, I know I'm not going to get that many at first. But that is how many I would eventually like to have. With thirty I can keep all of the posts manned twenty-four hours a day using the same people all of the time. This would keep Paul from having to assign people the job every day and night. To get these volunteers I will place sign-up sheets on the bulletin board in the gym." Jessica and Dale looked at each other, clearly amused by his suggestion. "I'll vote yes on this one," Jessica said, shaking her head a little. "You go ahead and ask for your volunteers. Of course..." she snickered, "you'll have to come to us for approval if you want more than thirty." Dale was snickering as well. "You can have a yes from me too. Hope you don't get overwhelmed with volunteers now." While they laughed about this Paul added his yes vote to the tally and it became official. Brett Adams, security leader, was now authorized to raise a group of volunteers to help guard the town of Garden Hill. Though Jessica and Dale thought it quite a funny joke - Brett thinking people were going to sign up to be permanently assigned to guard detail - they had no idea that they had just impulsively voted to establish a professional armed forces for their town. In other words, Garden Hill had just added the ability to create an army to its constitution. ------- One small victory that Brett had managed to win over the last four days had been the inclusion of Jason and Chrissie on guard details. As he had predicted, Paul had been able to convince Jessica in a private meeting that packing guns and watching over the safety of the town were where the two kids' talents were best utilized. As such, both of them were Brett's prime volunteers. Each post was manned with two guards that worked six-hour watches, which meant that there were four crew changes each day. Chrissie and Jason typically worked double shifts in order to keep themselves busy and to reduce the number of people that Paul had to actually assign. Jason preferred the night watches since it allowed him to sleep most of the daylight hours away. Chrissie, on the other hand, preferred the day watches since it allowed her to sleep with Brett every night. At dinner that night, when Brett gave a short, impassioned plea for volunteers (a plea that was received somewhat listlessly by the audience) Chrissie was working her second straight shift on the east side, awaiting her relief. By the time she made it to the dining hall and ate the plate of stroganoff that had been set aside for her, Brett had already gone off to take care of other duties. When she made her way to the small house that they shared, well after darkness had covered the land, he was still out. She lit the two oil lamps that they had been provided (Paul had rigged them so they could burn gasoline by adding a small amount of motor oil to the fuel) and waited for him alone. He came in about an hour later, stomping mud out of his boots and shaking excess water from his rain slicker before removing them in the entryway. He had had a long day that had involved much tromping around from one part of town to another and his muscles ached dully. "Hi, Chris," he said, leaning down to give her a kiss on the lips. She allowed the contact but did not contribute to the display of affection in any way. She had a determined expression on her face. He looked at her, puzzled. "What's the matter?" "Where have you been?" she asked, a clear note of accusation in her voice. He looked at her carefully, already sensing that something was in the air. "I was out at the bridge," he told her, quite honestly. "I rigged up some trip-wires on the catwalk exit so that if someone comes up that way like I did, it'll at least make some noise. I also checked on the western position on my way back." "You weren't out visiting someone?" she asked, crossing her arms over her chest. "Visiting someone?" "One of the women maybe?" she said. "One of those sluts who are trying to get you into bed with them?" He sighed a little. He had known that at some point this conversation was going to occur. This was, after all, a small town with a small town mentality. "No, Chris," he said, sitting next to her on the couch. "I wasn't out visiting anyone. I was out trying to take care of a few things. I wouldn't lie to you." "Who was at the guard posts?" she asked, her voice on the verge of hysteria. "Was Cindy Groton out there? I heard that you and she are fucking each other!" "Jesus," he said, turning towards her. "Chris, I don't even know Cindy Groton other than the fact that I talked to her for a few minutes at breakfast this morning. She's not even on the guard detail." "Everyone says you're fucking her," she said. "They say that she's going to be the one you pick to be your woman." "They're just rumors," he said. "I've already got my woman." "A woman that you won't tell anyone about!" "We've been over this, Chris," he said, trying to calm her. "We need to give it a little more time before we let people know about us. They're still locked up in pre-comet morality here. You know that as well as I do." "Pre-comet morality?" she nearly shrieked. "Every time I leave this house I get women coming up to me and asking questions about you. Is it true he's doing this girl? Is it true he's thinking about hooking up with that girl? Out on watch it's all my partner will talk about! I've been asked a hundred times to put in a good word to you about someone. I've been told a hundred times how good of a big sister someone would make for me! I've seen them get into fights over you, Brett! They hit each other and pull each other's hair while they're arguing about who has a chance with you and who doesn't! And it's not just you; they do that over every man in town, even that dweeb Jeff. These women fight over a nineteen-year-old! Does that sound like pre-comet morality to you? Did they used to do shit like that before?" "No," he said. "I'm sure they didn't. Their morality does tend to be ruled by self-interest and abandoned for the same thing." "So if they can give up the morality when it comes to keeping their hands off of other people's men, why can't they give it up about you sleeping with me?" "Because it's not in their self-interest to do that," he told her. "Chrissie, I am not sleeping with any of these women, okay? I'm not meeting up with them in secret and I'm not looking for someone to replace you with." "What about Mitsy?" she said, glaring at him. "I heard you fucked her your first night here. Everyone seems to be real sure about that rumor." His hesitation gave him away. "You did, didn't you?" she said. "Yes," he said slowly. "She caught me off guard that first night. It just kind of happened." The look of pain on her face was almost more than he could bear. Her lips started to quiver and a tear rolled down her face. "Chrissie," he said, sliding closer to her, intending to put his arms around her. "Get away from me," she told him. "Don't touch me. Don't ever touch me again!" "Chris, listen..." "I said stay away from me!" He stayed away from her. She refused to talk to him any more that evening. That night, at bedtime, she slept in the bed that had been placed in her bedroom for the first time. ------- Twenty-three miles to the south, in Foresthill, the convicts were still in occupation of the church building they had taken from the townspeople there. The food supply they had captured was rapidly dwindling to nothing thanks to the fact that they had made no real effort to ration it in any way. All of the booze and most of the cigarettes were gone as well, again due to the lack of a rationing plan. The fact that they had had a drunken, weeklong party after they took the town did not help much. Even the women they had captured and amused themselves with, they were all gone as well, every last one of them dead. Most had found ways to commit suicide. The most common method of this had been by goading the men that were raping them into beating or shooting them to death (the first woman to try this began laughing and making fun of Harley's admittedly small penis until, humiliated, he had bashed in her skull). Two of them had tried an escape attempt that had not had a prayer of allowing them to get away but that did succeed in getting them shot to death with M-16s. One had actually chewed a hole through the skin of her inner elbow, ripping open the vein that runs there and bleeding to death while everyone slept. Yet another managed to strangle herself by wrapping the sleeve of her shirt around her neck and pulling it tight. The non-suicidal deaths had all been caused by injuries sustained during the party itself. After becoming bored with the more conventional methods of rape, some of the bikers had experimented with the insertion of foreign objects into vaginas or rectums, namely rifle barrels or booze bottles. Two of the women subjected to this had died of internal bleeding from perforated uteruses. Another had died of a particularly nasty case of peritonitis after her colon was torn to shreds by the raised sight of an M-16. Even the women that they had had before taking Foresthill, some of them prisoners captured from other raids, a few of them pre-comet wives and girlfriends, they were all gone as well. These women, appalled by what they saw going on around them, had fled into the woods. Their fate was unknown but it was thought that they wouldn't last long. They had taken no weapons or food with them when they'd gone. Now that all of the booze and women were gone and the food and cigarettes were in short supply, order among the convicts had broken down a little. Though Stu and Mark were still firmly in command of them the grumbling and the fights were becoming more vocal and more frequent. Stu knew it was about time to move on and find another place to crash for a while. On this morning, while most of the crew were still sleeping on the floor wrapped in their filthy sleeping bags, Stu and Mark were sitting in what had once been the pastor's office going over some gas station maps of the area. "Foresthill is the only sizable town on this side of the canyon," Stu was saying, tapping the features with a pencil. "At least until you work your way back to Placerville. And we know there ain't much left there. We're gonna have to cross the canyon somehow if we're gonna find more supplies." "Right," Mark said. "But how do we get across? Do you think that either of these bridges are still there?" "Maybe," Stu said thoughtfully. "The only way to find out is to go there. The question is, which one should we try first?" They discussed the matter for a few minutes, each tossing ideas back and forth. On the one hand the Auburn bridge was located in an area that was more populated, which meant that there would be more targets to scope out and possibly attack. On that same note however, the Auburn bridge was also much more likely to be guarded by a force that they would not be able to overwhelm. The Garden Hill bridge, on the other hand, led to a very small town where there may or may not be anyone left. "I think that bridge is a lot less likely to be guarded," Stu said. "And if it is, whoever is guarding it would probably not be anything we couldn't overcome. And if the bridge is out or is too heavily guarded to cross, we can always come back down and try Auburn." "That make sense, Stu," Mark said. "But what about..." His thought was interrupted by the sound of two pistol shots from outside. Two seconds later, there was a third. It was the pre-arranged danger signal from their guard post. "Shit," Stu said, standing up so fast his chair fell over. He picked up his rifle and ran out into the main room. "Everyone up, right now!" he yelled. "We got a danger signal from the guards!" They moved impressively fast, shooting out of their sleeping bags and picking up their firearms. Stu and Mark went to the front door and opened it up, looking out over the rainy parking lot to the bait shop, where the perimeter guard that had fired the shot was stationed. They saw nothing out of the ordinary. "Battle stations everybody," Stu told his men. "Look sharp!" With that he ran outside, crossing the parking lot and the street at a sprint, Mark right behind him. The other convicts all went to pre-planned firing positions that Stu had worked out their first day in town and had made them practice moving to several times. Within thirty seconds a deadly ring of rifles encircled the church, capable of engaging any target no matter what angle it attacked from. Stu and Mark entered the bait shop, guns ready for anything, and saw Harley looking out the rear window, his rifle trained out over the hilly ground behind it. He looked very tense. "What do you got, Harley?" Stu asked. "A dude out there about two hundred yards away. He's waving a white flag back and forth." "What?" Stu said, walking to the window and looking out. Sure enough, in the distance, was a single man standing atop one of the rises. He was dressed in rain gear and an army helmet and had no weapons in evidence upon him. He had a stick that was about six feet in length and had a scrap of white cloth, probably an old T-shirt, tied to the end of it. He slowly moved it back in forth above his head. "Somebody's surrendering to us?" Mark, who had come up behind Stu to observe as well, asked in confusion. "What kind of idiot would do that?" "That's not just a surrender flag," Stu said thoughtfully. "It also means that someone wants to approach for negotiations." "Negotiations?" Harley asked. "What the fuck for?" Stu chewed his lip for a moment, trying to think. "I guess we should find out, shouldn't we? Harley, don't fire at him unless you see a weapon and he looks like he's going to use it." "All right." Stu walked back over to the door and stuck his head out, looking towards the upper floor of the church where several of his men were aiming their rifles outward at the flag waver. "Don't fire at him unless he shows a weapon," he yelled at them. "I repeat: Hold your fire unless you see danger! Pass it on!" He waited a minute for the word to spread to everyone and then he stuck his head out the window of the bait shop. "Approach us slowly!" he yelled to the man. "Keep your hands in sight at all times!" The man nodded his understanding and dropped the flag to the ground. He put his hands up and began to walk, his pace steady but slow. When he got close Stu sent Harley and Mark out to him while he stayed inside and covered them with his rifle. "Check him for weapons," he ordered. "And then bring him in here." They searched the man thoroughly, patting him down much the same way that they had been patted down numerous times by cops in their previous lives. He kept his hands in the air and his bearded face expressionless as they performed this task. "He's clean," Mark yelled when the frisking was complete. "We're coming in." The first thing that Stu noticed was the man was young, only about twenty years old or so. The second thing was that he was not starving. There was no hollow look to his cheekbones, no sinking of the eye sockets. In fact, he looked like he was in very good shape. "Who are you?" Stu asked him, keeping the barrel of his rifle trained downward. Mark and Harley were back at the window, keeping an eye out for any further intruders. "I am Private Stinson with the Placer County Militia Group," he said. "The what?" "Placer County Militia," he repeated. "We have a force surrounding this town right now, hidden from view. Lieutenant Bracken, the commanding officer of this force, has sent me here to request a meeting between your leader and himself." "How big of a force?" Stu asked, raising his rifle a tad. "I am not at liberty to say, sir." Stu raised it higher, so it was pointing at his abdomen. "You fuckin' well better say!" he said. "How many goddamn people you got out there?" "Will all due respect, sir," Stinson said, his voice even, "I am just a messenger. Lieutenant Bracken can provide you with the information you request and more. I am an expendable member of the force out front but do be warned that if any harm comes to me it will taken as an act of war and will be dealt with severely. I am authorized to say that we do have enough people out there to defeat your group in battle and we have the advantage of knowing where all of your men are." Stu bit back on the urge to strike the young punk that stood before him. "What does he want to talk about?" he asked instead. "I am not at liberty to say," Stinson replied. "He will explain everything when you agree to the meeting." "And if I don't agree?" "Then that too will be taken as an act of war, sir." Stu fought to maintain control of his temper. He was not a man accustomed to being threatened in any way, especially not by young punks like this one. Though it was a struggle, he kept himself from striking or otherwise harming the man. "All right," he said. "I'll meet with him. What now?" "I will walk outside and give the go-ahead signal," Stinson replied. "Lieutenant Bracken and Sergeant Johnson will approach your encampment unarmed and meet you beneath the overhang in front of the church. You will provide chairs for them to sit in and they will discuss the matter at hand with you. They will not enter the building with you or walk anywhere besides to the meeting place. Any attempt to harm them or force them to go somewhere else will result in attack by the rest of the force. Taking them hostage will do nothing but force an attack as well. Lieutenant Bracken and Sergeant Johnson realize that they too are expendable. Do you agree to these terms?" Stu stared at him for a moment, feeling a pit of fear in his stomach. "Yeah," he said. "You give the signal. I'll tell my men and get us some chairs." ------- Stu did not bother searching Bracken or Johnson for weapons when they entered the town. He knew that their goal would not be a close assassination attempt. Instead, after the introductions were made, he led them to the overhang in front of the church where four chairs had been placed in a small circle. Mark and Stu sat down in two of them while Bracken and his sidekick took the other two. Harley had been placed back in his guard post and the other members of the convict team were still on heightened alert in their battle positions. "So what is it that you want?" Stu asked, lighting up one of the last of the cigarettes and taking a drag. "Before I tell you that," Bracken said, lighting a cigarette of his own, "let me first explain a little bit about who we are." "Sure," Stu said. "We are the third platoon of the Placer County Militia Group based in Auburn," he said. "We are well armed and well trained and we are dug in around your town and have been so for the last two days." "Impossible," Mark said. "We would've spotted you." "Really?" Bracken said, dipping his ash on the ground. "You seem a bit overconfident in your abilities. Perhaps I can convince you that I speak the truth." "Please do," Stu said. "There are twenty-one of you here," Bracken said. "You had some women a few days ago but they are all dead now. You are armed with M-16 rifles, shotguns, and sniper rifles as well as pistols and you have some rudimentary knowledge of military tactics and fairly good discipline. Your guard positions are the bait shop, the upper floors of the church, and the storage shed behind the burned out gas station. You routinely send out two-man patrols that circle the town and probe into the hills a little bit. Your battle plan is to reinforce these guard positions with your remaining personnel and to keep a small reserve force inside the church itself, ready to move to wherever it is needed. You seem to be getting short on food and you drank up the last of your alcohol yesterday. When one of the women dies you carry the body over to the gas station and put it with the other bodies that were burned up in there." Stu and Mark both looked at him slack-jawed as he recited this to them. Bracken simply smiled. "Not a bad defensive plan if I do say so myself," he told them. "It would have been sufficient to keep just about everyone except us away from you. However, as you can probably see, we know where to hit you if need be. Our positions are set up specifically to counter yours. If we go to battle with each other, we will kill you. If you try to flee, you will find that we've covered all escape corridors with overlapping fields of fire. In short, you are trapped here and you only continue to draw air because we have chosen not to attack you." "You're lying," Stu said, feeling that pit of fear getting bigger. Bracken shrugged. "I don't need to prove myself," he said. "If you think I'm lying then you are free to try us. I would prefer that you do not since I am currently sitting in a very bad spot if the bullets start to fly. So how about we try to come to some sort of arrangement instead?" Stu swallowed with a mouth that was very dry. "What kind of arrangement?" he asked. "We need people in Auburn," Bracken said. "Specifically, we need people for the militia so that we can continue to keep our city running and continue to secure supplies until such time as food can be grown again. We have nearly a thousand people in the city and our food supply is dwindling fast. Now all over the mountains are little towns like Colfax and Baxter and Grass Valley and Nevada City. Many of these towns are still standing and have food stocks in their grocery stores or their warehouses or their residential houses. For the most part there are people left alive in these towns and most of them have guns and have organized to some degree. Our plan in Auburn is to raise an army that is big enough to take control of these towns and seize the supplies within them. We will also take any women that are of breeding age and any men who have skills that will be useful to rebuilding civilization when this is all over. When the sun comes out again we will be alive and well fed in Auburn and ready to begin expanding our influence throughout the area. We do not know what is going on elsewhere in the country, but we will control this region and be able to defend it. We will remake civilization when this is over and we will do it right this time." Stu listened to all of this carefully. "So you want us to be a part of your army?" he asked. "That is correct," Bracken said. "A couple of hunters that we picked up a week past impact saw you take this town. They were rather shocked by the methods you employed, particularly the way you got rid of the men, children and older women" Stu said nothing to this. "I must say, that we were rather shocked by that as well. Colonel Barnes, he's our commanding officer, was inclined at first to just destroy you as a menace because of that. Eventually however, he decided that your obvious military skills could be useful to us so he dispatched my platoon to observe you in action. What I've seen has impressed me enough that I made the decision to try to recruit you. You must understand however, that actions such as you took in this town cannot be repeated." "You're willing to take other towns and steal their food but you get mad at killing people?" Stu asked. "In the barbaric way that you did so, yes," he replied. "Our way is the natural order. We take what we need from a town and we bring it back to Auburn. We kill anyone who tries to fight us because that is the way you win a battle. But we do not kill prisoners and we especially do not kill children. True, they will probably die of starvation after we leave, but that is simply natural selection. God's law, you see. Some of them may be strong enough to live through it and that too is God's law. It is the strong who will survive and if someone can live after we remove their food supply, more power to them." "Interesting philosophy," Stu said. "And you must also realize," Bracken said, "that if we take you into the militia, you will be subject to military discipline and orders. You will do as you are told by your commanding officers without question, whether you agree with what you were told or not." Stu felt himself turning a little red in the face. "I'm not a real good order taker," he said. "You'll have to learn to be. And real fast too. Now I imagine that with your abilities to lead, you'll probably be made a sergeant and given a squad. But your squad will be part of a platoon that is commanded by a lieutenant and that platoon will be part of a company that is commanded by a captain, and so on and so forth. You will be expected to follow certain standards and to follow every order that you are given." Stu and Mark looked at each other for a moment. "Maybe we'd just better forget this whole thing," Stu said at last. "I don't think that my people will fit in too well with yours." Bracken shook his head. "I don't think you understand," he said. "My orders are to either bring you under control and recruit you to our side or to destroy you. There is no forgetting about it." "Destroy us?" Stu asked. "What happened to natural selection and God's law and all that? I thought you didn't kill prisoners." "You're not prisoners," he said. "You are a potential threat to us. If you do not join our ranks and agree to abide by our rules, you will all die." "And you will die too if your people attack us," Stu said. "That too would be God's law," Bracken said. "But perhaps I should tell you a few things about Auburn before you make your decision." "Like what?" "We have hot baths, hot food, and dry houses for you to live in. We also have four times as many women of breeding age than we do men. And while we do not tolerate rape, most of these women are quite desperate for the company of a good man and will do damn near anything to keep him happy. In a way, its kind of like that way things should be." That statement by Bracken served as the clincher. Though they continued to talk for sometime after, the decision was pretty much made at that point. Early the next morning Bracken's platoon and Stu's convicts - the newest recruits of the Placer County Militia - began the three-day march to Auburn. ------- "I got somebody coming towards the wall," Jason told Jeff, his partner on guard duty that night. They were in the top story of the house that served as the guard position for the northern wall, one of the most active for stragglers, as they were called. The shift had just begun and there was still enough light out to be able to see. They were twenty yards from the wall. On the other side of it were low, rolling hills that were studded with pine trees and scrub brush. Emerging from a group of trees was a filthy, emaciated man wearing muddy clothing and carrying a hunting rifle. He was looking at the wall and the houses behind them as if he had never seen such a thing before. "Let me see," Jeff said. He had been lying on the bed staring at the ceiling, leaving lookout duty to his younger companion. He pulled himself off it and picked up a pair of binoculars, aiming at the window. "Yep," he said. "Another straggler all right. Pathetic looking piece of shit, ain't he?" Jason didn't answer. Instead, he dropped his own binoculars and picked up his rifle. It was a Winchester, scoped hunting rifle, not the M-16 that he had learned to love, but he had learned over the past few days to shoot it with precision. Not that shooting with precision was all that hard to do with such a gun. You simply placed the crosshairs where you wanted the bullet to go and it went there. And deer hunters had called it sporting when they shot defenseless animals with such things. "He don't look like he has the energy to climb the fuckin wall anyway," Jeff commented, continuing to watch the man as he stood in place. "Why do we even worry about people like that?" "Because they're desperate," Jason said, putting the rifle to his shoulder and training it out the open window. "A couple of people like that tried to kill us when we were out there." "So you say," Jeff said, putting the binoculars down. He yawned and then picked up the walkie-talkie that was sitting on a nightstand. He keyed the microphone and spoke into it. "This is Jeff at position three. We got a straggler near the wall. He looks pretty pathetic. We're keeping an eye on him." "Copy that, post three," came Brett's voice from the speaker. "Is he armed?" "Yeah, dude," Jeff replied, bored. "He's packin' a rifle." "Copy. Keep me updated." "Yeah," Jeff said into the radio before throwing it back down. "I got your fuckin update right here, dickwad," he said, grabbing his crotch a few times. Jason, hearing this, said nothing though inside he was fuming at the insulting tone towards Brett. He was used to such comments however. It was a sentiment that he had heard a lot of while pulling guard duty the last few days. "So what's he doin now?" Jeff asked, sitting back down on the bed. "Still just standing there," Jason replied, watching him carefully through the scope. The man was looking back and forth along the wall, an expression of wonder on his face. Finally, he seemed to come to some sort of decision. He began to walk towards it. "He's moving in," Jason said. "I'm gonna drive him off." "I'm down with it," Jeff replied, picking up the radio and relaying this information to Brett. Jason shifted the sight from the man's body to a mound of dirt about ten feet in front of him. He took a deep breath, held it, and then squeezed the trigger, feeling the sharp kick of the rifle against him. The sound was much different than that produced by the M-16. It was deeper and louder, not so much a crack as a boom. The bullet hit right where he had aimed, sending up a little spray of mud and water. The hunter did not seem to notice the bullet impact at all but he noticed the sound when it reached him. He jumped in fright, looking everywhere at once. "Did that do it?" Jeff asked as Jason jacked in another .30 caliber bullet. "No," he said, taking aim again. "He's just standing there, looking around." "Idiot," Jeff mumbled. He then reported this development to Brett. When the man stepped towards the wall again, Jason pulled the trigger again, this time sending the bullet into the ground about five feet in front of him. He saw the impact this time and immediately turned and sprinted back the way he had come. "He's running north into the trees," Jason reported, tracking him with the scope as he went. "Looks like that might've done it." "Another job well done," Jeff said cynically. He reported the success of the driving off operation to Brett and then answered a few questions as to direction of travel that he was asked. Finally he threw the radio back down again. "What does he wanna know all that shit for?" he asked Jason. "I mean, the guy ran away. What fuckin' difference does it make where he ran to?" "I think he's worried that he might try to go around and try another approach," Jason said. "You know, a flanking maneuver?" "Fuckin' flanking maneuver," he said, shaking his head sadly. "You've been hanging out with him too damn long, dude. You're startin' to talk like him. You need to loosen up a little." "He's just trying to keep you alive," Jason told him. "You could be a little grateful for it." "He's trying to keep me celibate is what he's doing. We were getting along just fine without him. We'd get along just fine without him now." He reached into his pocket and pulled out his cigarette pack. "Come on, dude, let's loosen ourselves up." He pulled a joint from the box. "Let's burn one." Jason looked at the joint. "Not on guard duty," he said. "That's against the rules." "Fuck the rules," he said, pulling out a lighter. "There ain't no rules anymore anyway. That's the advantage of having a fuckin comet crash into your planet. It kills a lot of people but it kills the rules too. I'm gonna burn." He lit the joint and took a tremendous hit. He then tried to pass it to Jason. "No," Jason said firmly. "We're on guard duty, Jeff. We're supposed to be watching for people." "Fuckin' pussy," Jeff squeaked contemptuously. He tapped the ash on the floor and then took another hit. "You keep watchin for those scrungy lowlifes. I'm gonna make the most of what we got." He smoked the joint until it was about half gone and then carefully extinguished it and placed it on the end table next to the walkie-talkie. Jason, though disgusted by his actions, made no further comments. He simply kept watch as the light finally gave up its hold on the sky, bringing on the darkness. "I don't know why we have to stay up here once its dark," Jeff said. "We can't see shit anyway." "In case the perimeter guards find something," Jason told him, continuing to stare out into the darkness. "Then we're in position to cover them." "Nobody's gonna try and get in after dark," Jeff scoffed. "You have to be able see to invade." "Brett got in after dark, didn't he?" "But he's a fuckin maniac. No one else would try something like that." "He is not a maniac!" Jason yelled, turning towards the sound of Jeff's voice. "Don't talk about him that way!" "Hey, fuck off, little dude or I'll break your fuckin nose for you. Don't think I won't!" Fuming, Jason turned his attention back outside. Like his sister, he was of the firm opinion that they had been better off when they had been living out there. Outside he had been an important member of a team; a member of a fighting squad that had battled armed men and come out the better. In here he was treated as a child, not just by people like Jeff, who was little more than a child himself, but by damn near everyone. The women all called him cute and tussled his hair when they saw him. A few had even been known to pinch his cheeks like visiting aunts at family holidays. They seemed to think that they way to Brett's heart was by treating his younger companion in a motherly way. As for the men, they treated him with indifference at best, with subtle hostility at worst now that Brett's unpopular guard duty decree was up and rolling in full force. Some, lacking the courage to confront Brett directly, had chosen him as the channel with which to pass along their displeasure with the new security chief. "Tell your friend that he can be voted out just as easily as he was voted in," he had been told more than once. He had learned quickly not to respond to these requests by suggesting they tell Brett that information themselves. That generally just made them threaten him in some way. Not wanting to be seen as a fink or a crybaby, he had not complained to Brett about any of these attitudes, nor had he passed on any of the messages he was given. But sometimes, like now as he was sitting on guard detail with Jeff whining at him about how unfair it all was, he wished that they would vote Brett out. At least then things could go back to the way they had been. For the next hour, things were quiet in the guard post. There was no conversation of any kind, nor were there any reports from the walkie-talkie. Jason kept watch over the blackness outside and Jeff maintained his position of repose on the bed, occasionally smoking a cigarette or unleashing a loud fart. It was the sound of footsteps approaching that finally broke the monotony. "Someone's out there," Jason said, picking up his rifle. "Just chill, little dude," Jeff told him, the squeak of bedsprings indicating he was getting up. "It's just a visitor that I've arranged." "A visitor?" "This all-male guard team bites the big one. I've invited over someone who will be a little bit better company than your skinny ass on these long nights." "You did what?" "Hello?" came a soft voice from downstairs. Jason recognized it as belonging to Mitsy, the woman that had caused the ongoing fight between Chrissie and Brett. "Is anyone here?" "Up here, baby," Jeff called down. "You know where we're at." "Jeff," Jason hissed. "You know we're not allowed to have visitors at post. Brett made that clear to us!" "Brett's not gonna find out about it though, is he?" he said menacingly. "What if comes out here?" "I'll take my chances on that," he said. "You just keep your fuckin' mouth shut after you get home or you might find yourself a victim of friendly fire next time we're at post together." "Jesus," Jason said as he heard Mitsy's soft footsteps on the stairway. He could see the bobbing beam of a flashlight moving back and forth as she worked her way upward. "I mean it, dickwad," Jeff threatened. "Hi guys," Mitsy said with a giggle as she shined the flashlight on the two of them. "What's up?" "Turn off that light," Jason yelled at her. "You're spotlighting us for God's sake!" "Oh, good idea," she said with another giggle. "Brett might be out there." She clicked it off. "Wouldn't want him to spoil our little party, would we?" "Hell no," Jeff said, picking up the half-joint on the table. "Wanna get high, baby?" "There's a lot of things I wanna get tonight," she said seductively. "And there's a lot of things I wanna give," Jeff assured her. "Come on, let's leave Captain America here to keep a diligent watch. I'll show you the master bedroom. It's real nice." "Does it have a nice bed in it?" she asked. "Queen sized, baby. Queen sized." A moment later they disappeared through the doorway, Mitsy's flashlight once again lighting their way. With an angry sigh Jason went back to doing his job. Before long the sound of giggles, moans, and grunts began to drift down the hallway accompanied by the squeaking of bedsprings. ------- Mitsy slipped away at about 11:30, just before the change of watch. Jeff came back up shortly afterward, reeking of pot, booze, and sex though in a much better mood than he had been in when he had gone down. "Now that," he told Jason in the darkness, "is what post-comet life is all about. Sex, drugs, and more sex. I'm tellin' you, that bitch knows how to fuck. And she can slob the old knob with the best of 'em. I might just dump Carrie to the sideline and have Mitsy move in with me instead. That kinda poontang I can handle every night." Jason did not favor this with a reply, he simply kept staring out into the darkness, looking and listening for intruders. Thirty minutes later, when the clock struck midnight, Rob Handy, who had been in Garden Hill cleaning a swimming pool when the impact occurred, relieved Jeff. Jason, as usual, was scheduled for a double shift, until 6:00 AM. After one last gentle threat to Jason to keep his mouth shut about what had happened, Jeff headed back to his assigned house. Ten minutes later, after a few condescending comments, Rob was sound asleep and snoring on the bed. With another sigh, Jason maintained his watch. When he was relieved at 6:00 AM by Chrissie and her partner de jur, Laura Fletcher, he walked listlessly back to the community center building to grab some breakfast. The official breakfast service took place at 8:00 but the kitchen staff always served some early meals to those going on and coming off watch. Jason preferred the low-key atmosphere of the pre-meal service as compared to the rowdy chaos that accompanied the official service. When he entered the gym the smell of hash browns and pancakes filled the air and his stomach immediately began to gurgle in anticipation. "You look extra-hungry this morning," said Stacy Keagan, the pregnant twenty-year-old who always seemed to be on kitchen duty. Stacy was somewhat of an outcast in the town, just like Jason. She was not a town woman. Like all of the men, her job had been what had brought her to Garden Hill on that fateful day. She had been one of two employees on duty at the Starbucks franchise in the strip mall. Though she was not the only woman who had been pregnant at the time of impact she was by far the most advanced in the process - her belly bulged outward with six-months of swelling - and she was the only one whose "condition" had been outside of the bounds of legal matrimony. These two facts combined with her decidedly un-Garden Hill-like appearance - she had short, died-black hair and a nose piercing with a gold stud - had guaranteed her second-class citizen status in the hierarchy of the town. "It's been a long night," Jason told her, watching as she shoveled a double helping of hash browns and an extra pancake onto his plate. "Is all of that for me?" She offered him a smile, the first he had ever seen her offer anyone. "You work twice as hard as anyone else around here," she told him. "Why shouldn't you get a little extra chow at mealtime? Just don't rat me out, okay? That bitch Jessica would have a shitfit about it." "Mum's the word," he told her, returning the smile. He was surprised that she was talking to him. Stacy was usually one of the quietest people in town. She was also one of the most talked about in gossip circles. The women loved speculating upon just who the father of her illegitimate child was. Jason had heard Jessica and several of her cronies advance the firm conviction that it must be "a nigger" that had knocked her up. Why else wouldn't she tell people who he was? "Do you mind if I join you?" she asked him, grabbing a plate of her own once she handed him his. "You're the last of the guard detail to stagger in and I just have enough time to get a little down myself before I gear up for the main breakfast. "Uh... sure," Jason said shyly. "Be my guest." She gave him another smile and began to fill her plate with food. When she was finished she waddled her way along next to him to one of the tables. They sat down next to each other and began to tear into their food. "I hate the morning service," she said as she cut up her pancake with a fork. "The little alien doesn't like me to be up this early." "The little alien?" "That's what I call the baby," she said, patting her large stomach affectionately. "Remember that movie? That's what it feels like to have something growing inside of you. It's weird." "I bet," he said doubtfully, unable to think of anything else. They continued to chat idly about various subjects, mostly their work schedules and their respective jobs. Jason was unsure at first of just what her motivation was for engaging him in conversation. Usually when the town women talked to him in a friendly manner it was because they were either trying to ingratiate themselves with one of Brett's "kids" or were trying to hit him up for personal information about Brett. But Stacy did not seem to fit this category. As they talked and as the words began to flow more easily from their mouths, Brett's name did not come up at all. It occurred to him that maybe Stacy just craved human company and that he was the only one who would provide it for her without making snide remarks or being condescending. If that was so he was glad to be the one to give it to her since, necessarily, it meant that she had no snide remarks or condescending tones of her own to offer him. He told her an abbreviated version of how he had come to be in the mountains on that particular Thursday afternoon. "Your mom was a wildlife photographer?" she said. "That's like, so cool. What magazines was she in?" "Oh... National Geographic a few times, Life Magazine once, and a couple times a year the Sierra Club magazine would publish her shots. Those were the ones she was really proud of. Most of her work was just for home display or for the UC Berkeley paper." He felt a pang of sadness wash over him as he thought of her emerging from her darkroom with the latest batch of shots from her outings. "You know, it's funny," he told Stacy. "Me and Chrissie used to hate it when she would force us to sit down and look at another stack of her stupid animal pictures. But now... now I'd give anything to be able to be annoyed by them just one more time." Stacy nodded, patting him on the shoulder companionably. "I know what you mean," she said. "My mom used to tell me I was too skinny, that I didn't eat enough, that I wasn't taking care of myself. After I started growing the little alien she got even worse. 'Stacy, you're not gaining enough weight for that baby, ' she would say. Or 'Stacy, are you taking your vitamins the way you're supposed to?' I swear, I wanted to kill her sometimes. But like you said..." she sniffed a little, a single tear running down her face, "if I could just hear her voice one more time." She looked over at him, embarrassed for herself. "I'm sorry. We hardly know each other and I'm crying in front of you. Us pregnant women don't have a lot of control over our emotions." "It's okay," he said. "Really. There's been a lot to cry about since that day and not a lot of time to do it in. I understand." She smiled again, wiping away the tear. "You're a sweetheart," she said. "Thanks for putting up with me. There are not a whole lot of people in this town that I can talk to. I'm not exactly one of the girls." "I know the feeling," he said. "Believe me, I do. And you can talk to me anytime you want to." "Thanks. I'll be taking you up on that. Count on it." ------- Brett was somewhat disappointed in the number of people that signed up for his permanent guard force. Though he had not expected the numbers to be overwhelming by any means, he had expected that maybe ten or fifteen people would realize that security detail was a vital job. Not so. Of the nearly one hundred and fifty people in town that were old enough to sign up he got a grand total of six volunteers of which Chrissie and Jason were two of them. Though he and Chrissie were still not speaking to each other or sleeping together because of the Mitsy incident, Chrissie was not a vindictive person. Her name had topped the list followed by her brother's. Of the other four volunteers, personal interviews had shown Brett that two of them were women who thought that signing up for his detail would help win his favor. When told that it would not, one of them promptly withdrew her offer and the other had given him a look that seemed to say: we'll just see about that. On the plus side of the equation, two of the volunteers - one a man, one a woman - genuinely did seem to realize the importance of the position and, at least in the interviews, seemed to have signed up in that spirit. The male was Matt Engle, a thirty-three year old that had been one of the teachers at the town's small elementary school - a colleague of Janet. Though he had no military experience of any kind, he did hold a master's degree in history and did seem to realize just what kind of atrocities the human race was capable of when pushed to the edge as it had been. "I think the formation of a protective force - an army if you will - is vital to the continuation of this society here," he told Brett. "It shames me greatly that no one seems to be taking the very real threat of invasion seriously. I don't know a lot about how to protect us from it, but I'm willing and even anxious to learn." "Good enough for me," Brett had said upon hearing this. He held out his hand for a shake. "Welcome to the Garden Hill security force. Training will start tomorrow morning." The female was Michelle Westover who, at thirty years old, was the third oldest woman in town. Brett, who was suspicious of the motivations of every female that crossed his path, spent a good deal of time interviewing her. She had been a town woman before the comet and she was attractive in a plain-Jane sort of way, but at the same time she was not quite cut from the same mold as the other Garden Hill women. In the first place it had been she, and not her husband, who had been the primary breadwinner for the family prior to the comet. She had been a free-lance writer whose talents had been much sought after by various women's magazines. A regular contributor of articles to Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and Vogue, she had pulled in more than eighty thousand dollars the previous year by telling the nation's women how best to please their man in the bedroom and how to get the most out of their cosmetic and fashion dollars. Her husband, who she had genuinely loved and who she genuinely missed, had been a cameraman for a Sacramento news station who had happened to be on assignment in Modesto at the time of the impact. "It is just incredible to me," she had told him, almost angrily, "how locked up in the gossip and relationship war everyone in town is. Three days after the comet I was still grieving for Stan, still crying myself to sleep over everything that was gone, even debating suicide because I didn't think I could go on. And the rest of the town, what were they doing? They were fighting each other over who was going to pair up with whom, who is officially attached to someone and who is trying to move in. It's obscene. It's absolutely obscene." "So why do you wish to be a part of the guard force?" he asked her. "Because I've decided to live," she said matter-of-factly. "I want to see the sun again, I want to be one of the people whose grandchildren rebuild everything that's been smashed. I know that the only way that is going to happen is if people make the effort to keep us alive. I'm scared to death of guns and I don't know the first thing about guarding a town but I want to learn. Most of these women here are the types that expect things to just be taken care of for them. They want to just live in their houses and do what everyone else is doing and be important without having to work for it. That's why you're having so much trouble with them now. They need someone to tell them how to live and how to act and what to wear. They were the women I wrote those stupid articles for. But I am not one of them. I'm a fighter, Mr. Adams, willing to claw my way upward to achieve a goal. That's how I went from editing term papers at Sac State to being able to name my own price for an article in a magazine. I proved myself. I'm willing to prove myself now and help defend this town so the rest of these idiots can go on pretending like they're in high society." "I see," Brett said, impressed with her statement. "There is one other thing that I think I should add. Forgive me if it portrays me as somewhat arrogant." "Of course," she said, her eyes telling him that she already knew what he was going to say. "You must realize that joining my detail will not assist in any endeavor you might have towards acquiring me as a male companion. That is not why I'm asking for volunteers." She laughed, her intelligent eyes amused. "That is rather arrogant," she told him. "But it is understandable considering the current socio-sexual climate. I understand, Mr. Adams and you can rest assured that I have no interest in you in that way. Stan was the only man for me. He was my soulmate and I will grieve for him for the rest of my life. As for sexual outlets, well, I've written more than one article on how a woman can take care of that matter for herself and believe me, I have a lot of those research devices still in my house and I know how to use them." Brett was not the easiest person in the world to make blush, but this declaration by Michelle was more than enough. "I see," he said slowly, extending his hand. "In that case... uh... welcome to the detail. Training starts tomorrow after breakfast." "See you then," Michelle told him with a smile. ------- Brett and Paul had to fight and argue with Jessica and Dale over each aspect of the training program that Brett wanted his new guards to go through. They did not want to release the volunteers from the other duties that they had been assigned to, they did not want to have Paul assign other people to guard detail during the training time, they did not want to allow the release of four hundred rounds of ammunition for firearms training. "They're security guards!" Jessica had yelled, quite exasperated. "What kind of training do night watchmen need?" Fortunately the issue was not one that required a vote by the committee since the establishment and training of the guard force had already been voted in. Their arguments were more for form's sake than anything else. The personnel roster was adjusted, the ammunition was released from the supply room and the training went forth as planned. Brett led his troops just outside of the subdivision wall on the north side, within easy view of the guard post there. He then ran them through a complete course of firearms training that included all of the various types of weapons in the Garden Hill inventory. They qualified on the pistols, the shotguns, the hunting rifles, both scoped and un-scoped, and the assault weapons, both the semi-automatics like the AK-47s and the AR-15s as well as the fully automatic M-16s. Brett had them learn the assembly, cleaning, and relative advantages and disadvantages of each type of weapon. He then had them shoot at fixed targets like cans and human shaped silhouettes he had constructed from black paper scavenged from the elementary school. Everyone did well except for Georgia Miles, the slinky former housewife who had joined with the hope of gaining Brett's favor. She had jumped in feigned fear each time a cartridge was exploded from her weapon, giving a girlish squeal and constantly trying to get Brett to give her more personal instruction. Twice he had to bat the barrel of her loaded weapon downward as she turned to talk to someone and unconsciously trained the weapon towards them, her finger on the trigger. After the second of these incidents he pulled her weapon from her hand and told her to go back to town. "What do you mean?" she asked. "I mean I need people a little more dedicated than you are. You're dismissed from guard detail." "Dismissed?" she nearly screamed. "What the hell does that mean?" "It means you're washed out," he said. "You can leave now." "You can't fire me from this shitty detail!" she yelled, standing before him with her hands on her hips. "On the contrary," he said calmly, "I not only have the ability to do so, but the obligation. Your services are no longer needed here." She had of course gone immediately to Jessica and Dale to complain but her complaints fell upon deaf ears. While the popping of weapons continued from just outside the wall, Georgia went back to the wood-gathering detail she had been on before. In addition to firearms training Brett taught them the basics of movement and squad procedures, going into more detail than he had been able to with Jason and Chrissie on their march to town and also having them practice the techniques as well. His four-person squad was forced to crawl on their bellies in the mud, to practice flanking the grocery store and breaching it under simulated fire. He taught them the various communications signals, both hand and verbal, and went over the importance of keeping in close contact with one's teammates. During the second day of training Paul even participated by giving a two-hour lecture on basic first aid as it applied to the types of injuries they were likely to encounter in battle. His lecture was followed by a practical lab session in which the firefighter made them dress and triage simulated injuries. "Well," Brett told Paul after the course was completed, "they're not exactly Navy SEALs or anything, but they're a damn sight better than they were before. Even Chrissie and Jason, who were pretty tip-top before the class, have shown significant improvement." "So you think we're a little more secure?" Paul asked. "A little," he agreed. "But not much. Until I get more people to sign up and take the training seriously we're still fighting an uphill battle if we're attacked. But at least I have four people who can take charge of some of the others if the shit hits the fan." "You do what you can in this world," Paul said, clapping him on the back. "Come on, let's go get ourselves a little drink from the supply room. I think we deserve it." ------- Once the permanent guard volunteers were trained, Brett tried to keep two of them on duty at all times. He did not order them to work double shifts at their posts but they all did this anyway, Chrissie and Michelle usually working the day shifts while Matt and Jason worked the night shifts. The trained guards were never posted together in these early days, although that was eventually what Brett wanted to do. Instead, they were augmented with the conscripts assigned by Paul each night. Brett's orders were of course that the trained guard was in charge of the post but he knew that it didn't always work out that way, particularly when Jason and Chrissie were involved. Nobody was willing to take orders from them. In all it was an imperfect, very flawed system that still utilized sub-standard positions and was staffed, for the most part, with people who did not wish to be there. The fornication on duty, though slowed by the same-sex rule and driven deeper into the shadows, persisted none-the-less, particularly at the posts where one of Brett's people was not part of the team. Brett was rendered pretty much powerless to prevent this from occurring since Jessica was only interested in finding out who it had been so she could try to push the issue of banishment for fornication. She didn't care that it was on guard duty, just that it had occurred at all. "I don't give a rat's ass what they do when they're not on duty," Brett had pleaded with her on one occasion after he had caught two of his female guards having sex with a male visitor. "They can stick live gerbils up each others asses if that floats their boat as long as they do it off shift." "I cannot differentiate between on guard duty and off guard duty," was her answer to this argument. "They are either punished for every fornication episode - and the only appropriate response is exile - or we don't punish them at all. Now I know Dale feels the same way as I do about this problem." "Of course," he said. "We can't have people fornicating. It's wrong." "But," she went on, "Paul still will not vote with us to banish these people and, unlike most of our other decisions, banishment has to be unanimous!" "I will not vote to kick anyone out of here for sexual impropriety," Paul said before she could get started on her lecture. "But I do think that some form of punishment for those who do it on watch is appropriate. Brett has suggested three days of house arrest. What's wrong with that?" "What's wrong with it," Jessica said, "is that by banning fornication in one particular instance, it automatically says it's okay in other instances. I cannot be a party to that. It's either banishment for every instance or nothing." "I agree," Dale said, rapping his fist firmly on the table. And so the problem persisted, worsening even once the word of the committee's inaction spread throughout the town. Guard detail once again became a favorite assignment for the fornicators. "There's gonna be a reckoning in this town one of these days," Brett warned the committee during his morning briefing at one point. "And you'd better hope its not too bloody because that blood is gonna be on your hands." ------- Meanwhile, at the house where Chrissie, Brett, and Jason all lived, tensions remained very high. Chrissie continued to sleep in the small twin bed that had been provided for her instead of the large bed in the master bedroom where Brett slept. She did not talk to him unless it was absolutely necessary and even then she kept her responses to as few syllables as practical. Whenever he tried to sit down and discuss the matter with her she shunned him, not even favoring him with a response, simply leaving the room. She spent most of the time that she was not on shift either reading books from the supply in the community center or sleeping. Brett began to wonder if she was ever going to come around. Jason of course saw all of this occurring but kept mostly out of it, neither taking sides nor attempting to mediate the dispute in any way. He knew what the problem was of course. The story about Mitsy and Brett on that first night had not escaped his attention. And though he was somewhat disappointed that Brett had cheated on his sister he thought that maybe it was time for her to get over it and get on with her life. After all, Brett could have practically any woman he wanted. Chrissie was lucky he had only slipped once. But he kept his mouth shut and remained on friendly terms with both of them and they remained on friendly terms with him. Another person Jason remained on friendly terms with was Stacy Keagan of the kitchen detail. After that first morning chat she had made a ritual out of sitting with him and having her breakfast as he wolfed down his own. She always slid him a little extra something in his plate and always poured just a little more of the juice of the day for him, telling him that he deserved it for working so hard. He found her very easy to talk to despite the six year difference in their ages and he typically stayed at the table with her long after he was finished eating, until it was time for her to start working on the full breakfast service. As they became friendlier with each other, she began to tell him more personal things about herself. "I hear everyone speculating on who the father is," she told him one morning. "It's almost funny in a way. Jessica thinks it's a black baby since I'm not telling anyone. Mitsy thinks I'm a lesbian and that it's from artificial insemination." "Really?" he asked, laughing. "I haven't heard that one." "It goes on my list as most original," she said, laughing back. "I guess since I have a nose ring and I dye my hair black and I worked in a Starbucks that makes me a lesbian by default, doesn't it? I swear, sometimes these women here are just too much." "At least they don't muss up your hair when they see you," Jason said sourly. "You mean like this," she giggled, reaching over and grabbing a handful of his brown locks. "Stop it," he cried, though he made no move to enforce his words. "Oh, Jason," she cooed in a falsetto voice. "You're just sooooo cute. How's that handsome man you live with doing today? You think he'd like to come over and unplug my plumbing for me?" This sent both of them into near hysterics, her words made all the more amusing by the fact that someone had asked Jason that very thing the previous day. "Oh God," Stacy said, untangling her hand. "Sometimes I crack myself up." She pushed his hair back into somewhat of the position it had been in before. "There," she said, admiring her work. "Good as new, almost anyway." He said nothing, simply blushed. He had really enjoyed the feel of her hand moving through his hair. "Do you want to know who the father is?" she asked him. "Uh..." he stammered. "Well..." "It's okay," she told him. "I never really tried to keep it a secret from anyone until they all started speculating about it. You see, while they were all thinking that its some black football player or some anonymous sperm donor, I realized that the truth would actually be somewhat disappointing for them, anticlimactic even. Far be it from me to spoil the fun they have spreading rumors around." "So who was it?" Jason asked. "He was the manager of the Starbucks I worked at down in Auburn before I transferred up here. He was a white, middle-class small business manager in a hick town. Nobody in this town even knows him. It's totally boring, isn't it?" "Well, uh... yeah," Jason admitted. "It is." She shrugged, giving him her smile. "He was married," she said. "I guess that makes it a little more interesting of a story. He told me he was going to leave his wife for me, that he loved me. The same shit that a thousand married guys have told their pieces on the side and I fell for it just like all of the other one's did. And then my birth control pills didn't work the way they were supposed to one month and I got knocked up. Funny how if you forget to take them for a week or so that kind of thing can happen. Funny how when you confront your lover with a pregnancy and try to push the issue of leaving his wife, he never does. Christ, didn't I read enough Ann Landers and Dear Abby when I was growing up? I guess I didn't." Jason didn't know what to say. He had never had a conversation even remotely like this one before. He said nothing, only listened. And in doing so he gave Stacy exactly what she had been after: a sympathetic ear. "He told me he would pay for the abortion," she said. "That was awfully big of him, wasn't it? I told him to go fuck himself and threatened to call his wife and tell her what had been going on between us. Of course, I wouldn't really do anything like that but he didn't know that. He made the arrangements for my transfer up here and my promotion to assistant manager. I don't know how many strings he had to pull to do that, but he pulled them." "You didn't get the abortion though," Jason said. "No," she said. "I mean, I think a woman should have a right to do that if she wants to but... it wasn't for me. I couldn't bear the thought of them sticking things up into me and ripping the baby out. I told him that I was going to keep it and he hit the roof. He threatened to have me fired if I didn't get my ass to the clinic that day. He told me if this was all some scheme to get him to pay child support that I could just fucking forget it." "Jesus," Jason said. "That was perhaps the biggest mistake he ever made," she said with a predatory grin. "And it was a dumb one too since I'd already told him that as long as he relinquished any custody claims to the baby that I wouldn't ask for any child support. He could've been home free if he would've just let it drop. But he didn't. When he tried to pull his strings and get me fired, I filed a sexual harassment suit with corporate and told them the whole story. He lost everything. They fired him a week later and his wife found out the story of how it had happened and she left him too. Then he had the balls to come crawling back to me and asking me for forgiveness, can you believe that shit? He wanted me to take him back. I sent his ass packing and told him if he ever showed his face in front of me again I would get the cops on him. I haven't seen him or heard from him since then." "Do you miss him?" Jason asked. "Yes," she said. "I hate to admit it, but I almost called him half a dozen times before the comet hit. I mean, I was in love with him, I really was. It's hard to let love just die like that, even when you see the person for who they really are and that person is a piece of shit. Sometimes I think we women are just a hopeless species. I'm really starting to think that now that I see how everyone in this town is behaving." "Brett says that Auburn is probably still there," Jason told her. "Do you ever wonder if maybe he's still down there alive?" She gave him a warm look. "You're pretty insightful, Jason, you know that?" she asked him. "I catch myself thinking about him all the time, wondering if he was in town when it happened, wondering if he ever thinks about trying to come up here for me. If he's alive he would've known that I was at work that day and not down in the valley." "Would you go with him if he came?" "I don't know," she said looking at him. "There's not a lot for me here. Sometimes I think that this is my punishment for trying to trap a man like I did: I'm sentenced to be an illegitimate mother in a town full of hypocritical rich women." "So would you go?" "I probably would," she admitted. "I know myself well enough to say that. I probably would. Who would miss me here anyway? They'd have to find someone else to help cook their damn pancake mix and mix their damn orange juice, but would anyone miss Stacy? Would anyone miss me?" "I would," he said. She smiled, leaning forward and giving him a hug. "You're a sweetie, Jason," she said. "Thank you for being my friend." He returned her embrace, feeling the weight of her stomach pushing into him, feeling the softness of her in his arms. He liked the feeling a lot. "Thank you for being mine," he told her. Later that morning, as he lie in his bed at the house, he took himself in hand as he always did at this time of day. Jason was, after all, a normal fourteen-year-old boy in most respects of the word and masturbation was something that he did at least once every twenty-four hour period. Usually the fantasies that accompanied this jacking were somewhat vague in nature. He thought of girls he had known in school, of women that he lusted after in the town itself. This time his thoughts spun only to Stacy. Though he had never thought of a pregnant woman as being erotic before, he did now. As he envisioned seeing her naked, seeing that bulging stomach in all of its glory, as he remembered how her softness had felt when he had hugged her at breakfast he exploded in a spontaneous orgasm of staggering power. ------- It was Chrissie who spotted him first. It was less than an hour before the end of her second shift on duty and she was looking out the window of the northwestern guard position. Her partner for the shift - Brenda Callahan - was chatting away behind her about how Hector had promised her that he was going to dump Maria Sanchez pretty soon and make her, Brenda, his new official woman. Chrissie was hardly listening to her, so sick was she of the whole subject. "I don't know why you threatened to tell Brett if Hector came out here to visit me," Brenda said huffily. "Someday when you're old enough and the men start paying attention to you, you'll understand where I'm coming from. You have to take it when you can get it in this world." Chrissie ignored her, keeping her eyes trained outward. They were dry and sore from fatigue and she had a nasty headache forming behind them. It was getting so that she always felt like this towards the end of a double shift. It wasn't like her partners ever helped her keep an eye out. If she could even get them to stay awake for more than half the shift she considered herself lucky. She stretched a little, relieving the pain in her aching back and sighed, knowing that when she got home after her late dinner she would have nothing to look forward to but a cold bed and her own company. She was still terribly hurt over what Brett had done with that bitch Mitsy and was not sure that she could forgive him for it. He had cheated on her! Though it had been nearly two weeks now since he had admitted it to her she still could not get the betrayal out of her head. She did not know what to do. Should she move out of his house and start a new life without him? As drastic a move as that seemed, she sometimes thought it was the only solution. How could she ever trust him again? Did he even realize how much she loved him? But if she let him go, would she ever find love again? In a town with five times as many women as men, was that really likely? Especially when everyone thought she was nothing more than a child? Was she being too petty, too judgmental just because he had given into temptation a single time? She sighed, her heart torn in two directions. Should she stay or should she go? Should she abandon the love that she had with a man she couldn't trust and risk living without love forever? She didn't know, had no precedents in her short life upon which to base such an important decision. And so she held in limbo, refusing to resume her relationship with Brett as it had been but also refusing to take the terminal step of declaring an end. All she knew was that she was going to have to make up her mind soon. Brett had been giving her the room that she needed, holding in limbo with her, but that wouldn't last, it couldn't last. Soon, if she didn't decide, he would undoubtedly make the decision for her. "So," Brenda said from behind her, derailing her train of thought, "is Brett like a homo or what?" "A homo?" she said, turning her eyes away from the window for a moment to stare in astonishment. "Well, yeah," she said. "I mean, he's not sleeping with anybody and I'm here to tell you, some of the best in town have tried. The word is that maybe he's not interested in women at all. They think maybe that he and your brother have a little something going." "You think he's sleeping with Jason?" she yelled, horrified with the very thought. "That's just what people are starting to think," she said defensively. "I mean, he doesn't sleep with any of the women and he has a teenage boy living in his house. What do expect them to think?" "That is the most disgusting thing I've ever heard," Chrissie said. "Hey, don't blame me. I'm not the one that came up with this. I'm just telling you what I heard." Chrissie shook her head and put her eyes back out the window. She was about to launch into a seething lecture about how idiotic the rumors that passed in this town were but before she could do that, movement outside the wall caught her eye. She had caught just a brief glimpse of someone flitting from one tree to another, right on the edge of the open ground that separated the last set of hills from the concrete wall. "Someone's out there," she said, putting her hands on the binoculars around her neck. "Imagine that," Brenda said, bored. "Another straggler." "I don't think so," Chrissie said, trying to spot more movement. "He didn't move like a straggler. He's being sneaky." Brenda got up from the bed and walked over to the window. She took a quick glance outside. "I don't see nothing," she said. "Are you sure you're not imagining things?" Chrissie did not favor this with a response. She put the binoculars to her face and started examining the tree where she had last seen the movement. At first she saw nothing but bark and pine needles dripping with water but after a moment, a face appeared from behind it. Though all of the people that appeared behind the wall were bearded, dirty men, Chrissie instantly realized that she had seen this particular bearded, dirty man before. "I see him," she said, watching as he peered carefully at the wall in front of him. "He's someone I ran out of here yesterday from post 3." "I still don't see nothin," Brenda said from behind her. "Why would someone come back after you ran him off anyway?" "Because he really wants to get in here," Chrissie said. "Get on the radio and tell Brett what's going on." "Shouldn't we wait until we're sure that someone's out there?" "Someone is out there, you idiot," she barked. "Now get on the fucking radio and tell Brett!" "Now listen here," Brenda said huffily. "I don't know who you think you are, little missy, but you will not..." "He's moving," she yelled, watching helplessly as he suddenly broke into a sprint towards the wall. She dropped the binoculars from her face and picked up the rifle. Before she could get it to her shoulder he passed out of her line of sight, the wall itself hiding him from view. "Goddammit," she said, putting the rifle back down. Now she fully understood what Brett had always said about the vulnerabilities of the current guard positions. Though they could see the open ground on the other side of the wall, they could not see the area immediately on the other side. Now that the intruder was safely there, he could move along the wall at will, invisible to all of the guard positions. "Where'd he go?" Brenda, who had finally gotten a glimpse of the man, asked. "He's against the wall," she said, pushing Brenda aside and picking up the walkie-talkie. "This is position 2," she said into it. "Brett, are you there?" ------- Brett was in the community center in the main office, going over the roster for the upcoming night shift when the call came in. He knew immediately from the tone of Chrissie's voice that something unusual was happening. He picked up the microphone from the CB set on his desk. Jessica and Paul, who were both going over paperwork of their own, also noted Chrissie's tone and looked up from what they were doing. "Right here, Chrissie," Brett said. "What's up?" "A man armed with a hunting rifle and a sidearm just sprinted from cover a hundred yards west of my position. He's now up against the wall somewhere and I've lost visual. I was not, repeat not able to get a shot off at him. He was moving too fast." "Copy that, Chrissie," he said, grabbing a map of the subdivision and unfolding it. He placed his finger on the approximate spot that she was describing. "Any idea where he is now?" "None. He could be moving either way. Information only, he's the same person I drove off about two o'clock yesterday afternoon from position 3." "Are you sure?" he asked. "That is affirmative. It's him all right." "Okay," Brett said. "Stand by for a minute, Chrissie and keep your eye out for him. Position 1, Position 3, Position 4, all of you check in right now." This took a minute to accomplish but all of the other posts finally did acknowledge him and affirmed that they had heard what Chrissie reported. "Keep a sharp eye out, everyone," he told them all. "Especially you guys at position 1. There's a good chance he might be heading for the gate. Since Chrissie didn't get a shot off he might not even realize that we know he's here." He set the microphone down and looked at the map again. Paul got up from his chair and came over to look over his shoulder. "What do you think he's up to?" Paul asked. "He's trying to get in, obviously," Brett replied, his finger tracing back and forth along the wall. "Since Chrissie recognizes him from yesterday that means he realizes we guard the place and has probably figured there's something worth guarding in here. He's also figured out that we're blind to what happens directly under the wall. That means he has a fairly good idea of where our guard positions are. If I was him I would wait until dark and then scale the wall." "The same way you got in," Paul said. "Right," he agreed. "Only he won't give himself up to the perimeter patrol. If he manages to get inside after dark then we'll have no idea where he's at. He'll be able to hide anywhere." "Then we have to make sure he doesn't get in," Paul said. "Exactly," Brett said. "Uh... excuse me," Jessica, who had been monitoring the conversation, broke in. "What?" Brett asked. "Has anyone besides Chrissie seen this person?" "I don't know. What does that have to do with anything?" "Well, she might be mistaken," Jessica said. "I mean, it sounds rather incredible that someone would try to hide against the wall like that. And given her propensity for exaggeration, maybe..." "I'm not even going to favor that with a response," Brett said, glaring at her. "If you don't have anything constructive to add, why don't you keep your mouth shut, okay?" "How dare you talk to me like that," she yelled. "Maybe I should remind you that..." "Jessica, shut up," Paul told her. "Give it a rest for now." She fumed at him but did as he asked. "What's the plan?" Paul asked Brett. Brett continued to look at the map for a moment. "We need to catch him before it gets dark. He must not be allowed entry into the subdivision where we'd have to do a house-by-house search to track him down. Someone's gonna have to go outside and get him." "Who?" Paul asked. "Me," he said. "I'll grab one of the AK-47s out of the supply room." "You can't go out alone," Paul told him. "I'll grab a rifle and go with you." "No," Brett said. "You stay here. Michelle is in position 1 with Cindy. They have one of the M-16s up there. I'll have her go with me." "Why her?" Jessica asked, seemingly happy about the idea of Paul and Brett both going out into danger. "Because that's what she's trained to do," he said, picking up the microphone again. "Position 1, this is Brett. Are you there, Michelle?" "Right here," she said. "We haven't seen anything so far." "Copy that. Michelle, grab the 16 and meet me at the front gate. We're gonna flush this fucker out. Don't go out until I get there. Cindy, keep a sharp eye outside while Michelle is gone and I mean a sharp eye. This is the real thing." ------- The front gate of the complex consisted of a thirty-foot gap in the concrete wall through which the main road of the subdivision passed. Directly in the middle of this gap was a small structure that had once served as a guard booth where a uniformed security officer - his salary paid for by the homeowner's association - had controlled access to the subdivision by raising and lowering a small railroad crossing type arm over the roadway. The exit lane of the road was guarded by a set of steel spikes that would rupture the tires of any vehicle trying to enter from that side but that would allow the safe egress from the inside. The front gate, which was the most likely avenue of entry by stragglers, was watched over by the guards of position 1 during the day and by an infrared equipped video camera at night. Brett found Michelle, the M-16 rifle in her hands, standing just to the side of the gate when he arrived. She was wearing one of the black rain slickers, complete with hood and a pair of heavy-duty boots. Her face was nervous but determined. "Do we have any idea where he is?" she asked him as he trotted up to her and put his back against the wall next to the gate. "No," he said, patting the walkie-talkie attached to his belt. "Other than that he's still along the wall somewhere. If he would've left, one of the position guards would've seen him." "If they're watching what's going on," she said cynically. "Yeah," he agreed. "If. I'd like to think that they'd at least put their extra-curricular activities on hold for the few minutes it takes us to clear this asshole out of here." "I'd like to think a lot of things," she said. "But they don't usually happen, do they?" "No," he said. "They don't. But you work with what you got. Are you ready for this?" She looked at him doubtfully, her eyes dilated in fear, her knuckles white on the grips of the M-16. "I don't know," she said. "To tell you the truth, I'm scared shitless to go out there." "So am I," he said. "It's never fun to go out where someone with a gun is waiting for you. But it's our job, Michelle, so let's do it." "Why don't you take the 16?" she suggested. "You're better with it." "But it's your assigned weapon," he told her. "And it would be insulting for me to take it away from you." "I don't mind," she said. "This is not like writing articles on how to masturbate or put on make-up! I'm not sure I'm cut out for this!" "You are," he told her. "And maybe you can write an article about it later. Now let's go." He pointed to the gate. "I'll clear the wall just around the corner and you step out to cover me. Ready?" "Brett," she pleaded, actually trembling now. "You'll do fine," he said. "Remember, this is our job. It's time to get your cherry popped." "My what?" "I'll explain later," he said. "Let's do it." Without giving her any more time for self-doubt, he poked his head around the corner of the concrete wall, looking at the other side. Along the Route 63 side of the subdivision the concrete wall curved back and forth, following the twists of the road. This meant that only about a hundred feet or so was visible at any given point before a blind spot intruded. Brett saw nothing in that first length. "It's clear," he told Michelle. "Move!" She moved, her doubts and fears pushed to the back of her mind now that the moment was at hand. She trotted sideways through the gate, her feet squishing in the mud, and trained her rifle along the wall, eyes searching for the intruder. "Clear," she said, just loudly enough for him to hear. Brett then slipped around the corner, hugging the wall. Holding the AK-47 at the ready, he moved forward, edging out sideways so that more and more of the wall came into view. Michelle, as she had been taught, edged out even further, covering his advance with the automatic weapon, her eyes taking everything in at once. They continued to move sideways, crossing over the highway and squishing through the mud on the other side until all of the blind spots along the western wall were visible. They could now see all the way to the point where the wall turned the corner. There was no straggler visible. "Okay," Brett said. "He's probably still on the north side somewhere. Let's move up to the corner real carefully, keep a sharp eye on the bend in case he comes around it." "Right," Michelle said. She began to move forward. It took them almost twenty minutes to cover the distance from the front gate to the northwest corner of the wall. They stayed to the west side of the road, keeping close to the rolling hills and the trees that marked that particular approach. As they drew closer they began to move from tree to tree, trying to keep their bodies hidden from view. First Michelle would move forward and then Brett would leapfrog past her, then the cycle would repeat itself. As such, it was Michelle that was first in position to peer around the corner. The northern stretch of wall was perfectly straight and she saw their quarry immediately. He was about a hundred and fifty yards from the corner, crouching in the shadows, his back to the wall, his rifle held tightly against his chest. He had seen her last dash from one tree to the next and he reacted to it. He stood and turned towards her, bringing his weapon down into firing position. "Shit," Michelle gasped, training the M-16 on him. She began to shoot, squeezing the trigger in short bursts of three and four rounds apiece. The sharp cracks of gunfire sounded off and reddish-orange flashes exploded from the barrel. She saw specks of concrete chip off of the wall next to the man and she adjusted her fire, swinging just a hair to the left. Just as he got his own rifle into firing position, it suddenly fell from his arms and he dropped to the ground, rolling into a shallow gully. He didn't move. "He's down!" she yelled at Brett. He leapfrogged around her and pulled himself behind a tree, looking in the direction that she had been shooting. It took him a moment of searching but finally his eyes locked onto the prone man. "He was gonna shoot at me, Brett!" Michelle said, near the verge of hysterics. "He was pointing the rifle at me! I swear!" "It's okay, Michelle," he said softly. "I didn't want to shoot him, but he... he..." "Michelle," he barked, a little louder this time. "Chill out, baby. We're not done out here yet. Let's move up and make sure he's not playing possum." "Move up?" she said. "Right," he told her, his eyes never leaving the man on the ground. "Take the lead please." "But... but..." "Take the lead, Michelle," he said. "Keep that 16 trained on him. If you see him move, shoot him again. Let's finish our job, okay?" She took a few deep breaths. "Okay," she said, nodding. "Let's move up." As they started to move forward, Brett took a brief moment to report what had happened to Paul and the other guards that were monitoring the walkie-talkies. "We're moving along the northern wall now," he reiterated to them, "so you guys in positions 2 and 3, hold your fire. If you see movement it's probably us." They reached the man a minute later. He was not playing possum. He had a series of holes in his chest and even one in his throat from the bursts that Michelle had fired at him. His eyes were open, unblinking, staring upward. His mouth was locked forever in an expression of panic. "He's dead," Michelle whispered in awe. "I killed him." "You sure did," Brett agreed, bending down to take a better look. "That was damn good shooting. You did well." "I've never killed anything before," she said, unable to take her eyes from him. "I mean... I mean..." She shook her head a little. "I mean, he was just alive a minute ago and now he's not." "And he was just about to shoot at you a minute ago, wasn't he?" Brett asked. "And he was also trying to sneak into our town with a gun." "Well... yeah... but..." "But nothing," he said firmly. "You did what you had to do, what you signed up to do." He stood up, turning towards her. He took her face in his hands and forced her to look away from the body and up at him. She was trembling all over. "It's okay to feel guilty about it," he told her gently. "It's a natural reaction among those of us that have morals. Just don't feel too guilty about it, okay? He played the game with us and he lost. Too bad, so sad for him. We get to go back to town now, and he gets to stay here and contribute to the future ecology. And that's the way it should be." "I never thought it would be like this," she said, her eyes trying to look at the dead man again. "So... so... fast. It was all over in a second." He put his arms around her, pulling her against him. "That's the key phrase," he said, patting her back comfortingly. "All over. You reacted just like you should have and now it's all over, right?" "Right," she said doubtfully, letting her head fall to his shoulder. "All over." He held her that way for a minute, feeling her body tremble with adrenaline overload, knowing that embracing each other in this hostile environment outside the wall was a bad idea but doing it anyway. Finally she calmed a little and he was able to release her. He could see a few drops running down her cheeks that might've been rainwater but were probably tears. "Sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to freak out like that." "As long as you do it after the shooting stops and not during it, don't sweat it. I think we should head back in now though." "Okay." She gave him a weak smile. They quickly stripped the man of his weapons and ammo and then began to walk back the way they had come, their pace a little more hurried. Brett reported over the radio that the subject was dead and that everyone could return to normal alert status. As they reached the surface of the highway and began to walk south along it, towards the main gate and the safety of the subdivision, he noticed that she was trembling even worse then she had been back at the body. "It takes a while to get it out of your system," he said, putting his arm around her shoulders again and pulling her against him. "We'll get you some dinner and you'll feel a little better." "I don't think I could eat right now," she said, leaning into him. "I already feel like I'm about to lose my lunch." "Well how about a drink first then," he suggested. "We'll get Paul to break loose a little whiskey ration from the supply room. There's nothing like a few shots to help put killing someone into perspective." "Now that sounds like a plan I'd be happy to participate in," she said. ------- Meanwhile, back at the community center, dinner was in full swing and most of the town population, oblivious to the events going on just outside their wall, was contentedly chomping down on bowls of stew that had been made with cans of beef and vegetables and more than twenty packages of Top Ramen noodles. They sopped up the juice of this soup with pieces of freshly baked bread that had been cooked in large ovens powered by propane piped into the kitchen area from a series of tanks that had once stood outside every home. Jason, his belly full, finished up and carried his dishes up to the large cafeteria rack that stood in the corner of the gym. Stacy was there, just removing a fresh batch of dirty dishes so she could carry them to the trough that was used as a sink. His arrival there at the same time as hers seemed like a coincidence but was not. He had timed it carefully in advance. "Hi, Jase," she said, flashing the smile he had become increasingly infatuated with. "How was chow tonight?" "It was bitchin," he said enthusiastically, setting his plates down. "Did you cook it?" "Me and Tina did," she told him. "It's kinda hard to keep from getting boring when you only have canned food and powders to work with, but we try. I'm glad you liked it." "I did," he said, giving her his own smile. "It was like totally the bomb. Really." "So you heading out for watch now?" she asked, her hands moving plates from the large cart to a smaller, wheeled one. "No," he said. "I'm off tonight." "You get a day off?" she asked, surprised. "Brett makes all of us take at least one day off a week. He calls it a mental health day." "So he's not quite the slave driver everyone thinks he is, huh?" He shrugged. "I'd actually rather be on shift tonight," he said. "What else do I have to do anyway?" "If you're bored," she told him teasingly, "you can always come back and help us do dishes." He thought about that for a minute. "Okay," he finally said. She looked at him strangely. "I was kidding, Jase," she said. "You don't really have to help us." "So I can't then?" he asked, disappointed. She looked at him as if he were insane. "Are you trying to tell me that you want to come back and help with dishes?" "Why not? Like I said, what else do I have to do around here?" She shook her head a little, the way one does when one realizes they are dealing with the mentally challenged. "If you wanna help clean up after these slobs," she said, "then I sure ain't gonna stop you. Start grabbing some dishes." He got a crash course in Garden Hill kitchen clean-up operations over the next two hours. Though Tina Gillian, who had been a cafeteria worker at the elementary school before the comet and who was the official leader of the "culinary department" as it was called, thought he was crazy too, she had no problem putting him to work. The hot water hose that normally supplied the bathtub had been run into the kitchen area and was used to fill the trough with soapy water in which the dishes were soaked and scrubbed. They were then moved to another trough full of cold, clear water from the fire engine where the soap was rinsed off. From there they were given a final rinse with running water supplied via hose from the rain gutter before they were neatly stacked on drying racks until the next morning. Jason was put on rinse detail, making him the middle of a chain of motion. "Hey, Tina," Stacy said at one point as she scrubbed the grime from a bowl, "did you know that Brett makes the people on his detail take a day off every week? What do you say about that?" "I say dream on," she answered. "Until that cunt Jessica decides to assign me a few more women to help out in here, we're both stuck working every day." "Like that's gonna happen," Stacy said bitterly. "Yeah," Tina said, "because we can't have women of breeding working as mere kitchen hands, can we?" "God forbid," Stacy said. "Even if most of them don't have any assigned jobs from day to day." "Wait a minute," Jason said, wondering if he was hearing correctly. "Are you saying that the two of you work in here every day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and that you never get a day off?" "That's the way it is, sweetie," Tina replied. "Jessica refuses to force any of the town women onto kitchen detail," Stacy clarified. "And you can imagine how many volunteers we get for the job. So, unless someone is getting punished for fighting or something and gets assigned kitchen detail, it's just the two of us. We're here from 4:30 every morning to almost 7:00 every night. We can usually get a little bit of a break between lunch and dinner, but it ain't much." She shrugged. "It's our lot in life I guess." "Yep," Tina said. "That's what we get for being poor women in a rich town. We're not part of the clique so we've been turned into the servants." "Don't ever let anyone tell you that the old ways are dead, Jason," Stacy added. "Believe me, they're alive and well." ------- "Would you care to see a lady safely home?" Stacy asked Jason after the kitchen was finally shut down for the night. "I hear that there were bogeymen out there today." "Uh... sure," he said doubtfully, opening the back door of the community center for her. She waddled out into the darkness and the rain. He let the door swing shut behind him and then he quickly trotted after her to catch up. "Thanks a lot for helping out tonight, Jase," she said once he fell in step with her. "That was really sweet. We got done almost twenty minutes early because of you." "I'm glad I could help," he said. "It gave me something to do. And I mean what I said. I'll talk to Brett about talking to Jessica about getting some more people assigned to you." "Well," she said, "I won't hold my breath or anything. I've heard Jessica routinely turns down anything that Brett asks for." "Maybe I'll have him ask to keep the kitchen staff just the way it is," he suggested. "You know? Reverse psychology." She laughed, slapping playfully at his arm. "It just might work," she told him. They walked on through the rain, their feet splashing through puddles of backed up rainwater on the sidewalks, navigating along by using the ambient lighting of the houses they passed. They went up three blocks and then turned right, onto a street that backed up to the western wall. Most of the houses out this far were uninhabited and dark. Finally they came to a single story house, the same model that Jason, Brett, and Chrissie lived in. "Well, here it is," Stacy said, digging in her pocket for a key. "Home sweet home. You wanna come in for a little bit?" "Come in?" he said nervously. "Yeah," she told him. "I don't get company very often. And we won't have a chance to have our little talk in the morning since you're not on guard duty tonight." "Well... uh..." he stammered, suddenly nervous for no good reason. "Come on," she prodded. "I'm not gonna bite you. It's me, Stacy, remember?" "All right," he finally agreed, following her as she waddled up to the front door. She lit two oil lamps and two candles, bathing the room in soft, orange light. In the formal living room portion of the house, her laundry was hanging by a line, drying in the air. He saw several pairs of the stretch pants and stretch jeans she habitually wore as well as a variety of flannel maternity shirts, bras, and even some cotton panties. He blushed when he saw this, quickly turning his head away. Pretending not to notice his embarrassment she hung up his rain jacket for him and then led him into the family room of the house, which was just adjacent to the kitchen area. "Grab a seat," she told him. "I'm gonna go change into my jammies and get comfortable." "Uh... okay," he said, walking over to a couch and planting himself on it. "Don't I have a nice TV?" she asked as she disappeared down the hall with a candle. "It came with the house. Turn it on why don't you? Find us something to watch." Jason dutifully laughed at her joke although inside his stomach he almost felt as if he was going to throw up. What was going on here? Why had Stacy invited him into her house? Was it really just for company, as she had said? Or was it... something else that she wanted? Surely it couldn't be that, could it? He was just a kid! And she was pregnant! Pregnant women didn't do things like... like... sex did they? He didn't know but suspected that they didn't. After all, they were already pregnant. What would be the point of their body making them horny? In the five minutes it took for Stacy to change her clothes, Jason went through several cycles in which he first convinced himself that she was definitely trying to seduce him and then convinced himself that she just wanted to talk like they always did. He would first envision her emerging from the bedroom wearing a see-through negligee straight out of a Frederick's of Hollywood catalogue and then the vision would degenerate to a baggy sweater and a pair of sweats. He would talk himself into believing that she wanted him and then, just as quickly talk himself right back out of it. He was a kid for Christ sakes and she was a full-grown woman! Sure, she liked to talk to him, like to hug him, and had even pecked his cheeks a few times when she was feeling particularly affectionate. But desire? Need? He thought not. But still, maybe if she... "Much better," she said at last, walking out of the bedroom. He looked up at her with a little jump, seeing neither the negligee nor the baggy sweater. Instead, she was wearing a matching set of very proper, non-revealing silk pajamas. They were gold in color and appeared to have been specifically designed for pregnant women to wear since the hem of the top did not ride up and show her belly. "You like them?" she said, noting his interest in her attire. She gave a quick spin around, modeling them for him. "Pretty high class, huh?" "They're uh... nice," he almost croaked, not failing to notice the jiggle in her chest as she spun. He knew from living with Chrissie that that jiggle meant she was not wearing a bra. When he saw such a thing in his sister it always made him mildly disgusted for having noticed it. Seeing it in Stacy however, he felt a wave of desire wash over him. Blood began to rush to his penis. "They were probably about a week's salary for me before the comet," she said, setting her candle down on the table and plopping herself into the couch next to him. "But there's tons of shit like this in the supply room at the community center. Maternity wear for every occasion. I guess those rich bitches were good for something, weren't they?" "I guess so," he said, seeing that she had a bottle of something in her right hand. She tucked it in one of the cushions before he could see what it was. She put her bare feet up on the coffee table in front of her and leaned back into the couch. "Ahhhh, relaxation," she said. "This is my favorite time of the day. I can just kick it for a few hours until it's bedtime. Usually I just read or something but now I have some company." She smiled, her hand reaching out to touch his arm. "Did you know that you're my very first guest here? Not even Tina has been over to my pad." "I'm uh... honored," he said. "Well you should be," she said, keeping her hand where it was. "It's not everyone who gets invited over to the pregnant hussy's house you know. I do have an image to maintain in this community." That broke the tension a little bit and they shared a laugh. A moment later they were talking naturally together, as they did in the mornings at breakfast. Jason hardly noticed when she scooted closer to him, edging her bottom across the cushion inch by inch. It was only when their hips came into contact, when he felt the warmth of her touching him, that he became cognizant. His penis, which had softened back up during the talk period once again became interested in the goings-on. "Can you do me a favor?" she asked him, turning towards him a little. "Uh... sure," he said. She reached into the couch and held up the bottle that she'd had in her hand earlier. He saw that it was baby oil. "I have to put this stuff on my stomach every night to keep stretch marks from forming. Would you mind doing it for me?" "You want me to... put oil on your stomach?" he asked slowly, his penis taking a huge lurch in his pants at the very thought. "If you don't mind," she said. "I usually do it myself but it kind of hurts my shoulders to reach forward like that now that I'm as big as a whale. And since you just happen to be here..." She gave him a pleading smile. "Uhhh, well..." he stammered, wanting desperately to do what she asked but not wanting to seem too eager. After all, she might think he was a pervert or something. "If it grosses you out, I understand," she said. "Really. I'll just go in the bathroom and do it." "No no!" he nearly shouted, sensing his opportunity slipping away from him. "I'll do it." "Are you sure?" she asked. "Yes," he said. "What are friends for?" She smiled and handed him the clear plastic bottle. Its surface was already slightly oily from many previous handlings with greasy fingers. His hand trembled as he took it and it almost slipped from his grasp. Stacy pretended not to notice this. Instead, she grabbed the hem of her pajama shirt and pulled it up, uncovering her bulging belly to his gaze. Her skin was smooth and tight, very pale from the lack of any recent sunlight upon it. Her belly button was small and protruding slightly outward from the pressure behind it. She ran her fingers over the bottom third of her stomach and the sides. "Here's where you get stretch marks," she told him. "Be sure to rub it in really good down there." He nodded, his mouth too dry for him to speak. He opened the bottle up, flipping the lid back on its plastic hinge by pushing upward with his thumb. This revealed a small hole through which the oil could be squirted. He upended the bottle over her stomach, right above the belly button, and gave a squeeze. This propelled a generous amount of the mineral oil onto her flesh. It puddled up and began to run quickly down the sides of her tummy, towards the couch. She giggled a little at the contact. He moved his shaking hand to her stomach and put it right in the middle of the oil puddle he had created. He began to rub in circles, sliding his digits over her skin, smearing the oil all over her. The oil quickly heated up from the radiant warmth of his hand and her stomach and she sighed a little, closing her eyes and leaning backwards against the couch. The feel of that slippery, oily flesh against his hand was perhaps the most erotic sensation he had ever experienced. Her stomach was very tight and hot, almost frictionless as his circles became wider and wider. "Ohhhh," Stacy moaned with a pleased giggle. "This feels soooo much better when you do it." "Does it?" he croaked. "It's the bomb," she assured him. "Be sure to get the sides." He continued to rub and caress her skin, even going so far as to dump some of the oil into his other hand so he could use both of them. Soon the entire mass of her pregnant stomach was coated and glistening in the candlelight. His penis was, by then, so turgid within his pants that he was forced to shift back and forth uncomfortably trying to adjust it. "How's that?" he asked her after about five minutes. Though he did not want to stop what he was doing he figured that her tummy was now very well oiled up. She opened her eyes for a moment and looked at him. "A little bit more," she told him with a contented smile. "Be sure to get the tops and the bottom." With that she reached up and pulled her pajama top even higher. He gasped a little as he realized that he could see the bottom of her breasts protruding from beneath the silk. It was just a hint of swelling, pale flesh but it was undoubtedly her tits - her tits - he was seeing. And then she moved her hands lower, grasping the waist of her bottoms. These she pushed downward, just a hint, revealing even more of her lower stomach far below where the bulge of her uterus stopped. Peeking from just above the waistband he was now able to see a narrow strip of bright red hair, very curly and very sparse, peeking out. That was her pubic hair, he realized. He was seeing the top of her bush! He hesitated for a second, his mind whirring in confusion as it tried to process what she was doing. Did she realize that she was showing him the bottom of her tits? The top of her bush? Did she have any idea at all? And if she did, why was she doing it? Was she trying to tease him? Or was she trying to seduce him? "What's the hold-up?" she asked softly, picking up the bottle of oil and handing it to him. "I can feel stretch marks forming as we speak." "Sorry," he said, taking the bottle. He squirted a little bit on her lower stomach and a little bit more on her upper. He began to rub again, spreading the slippery warmth towards her most private regions. She closed her eyes again, leaning back against the couch as he worked on her. His own eyes kept darting between that small patch of fiery red fuzz poking out of her bottoms and those two bits of pale pink swelling peeking out from the tops. His hands moved in wider and wider circles, his right hand moving upward with each rotation, his left hand moving downward. His erection was now throbbing almost painfully in his pants, bulging outward with enough pressure to make a noticeable lump beneath the button-fly. He noticed that her nipples were hard, their shapes pushing against the material of her top. Her breathing was also quicker than it had been a few minutes before. Did that mean anything? Or was it just a coincidence? Soon, the arcs of the circles he was making as he rubbed in the oil increased to the point that he was almost brushing against her clothing. His left hand began to slide along the patch of hair at the downward limit of its exploration and his right hand began to slide along the soft swelling of her tits. He watched her face as he made the first few contacts, expecting her eyes to fly open and her hands to slap his away from her. Instead, she only sighed and sank deeper into the couch, her body squirming back and forth a little bit under his touch. Suddenly, her hands were in motion, moving almost before he registered it. They grabbed at the buttons on her top, undoing them one by one. Her eyes opened up and looked at him. When the last button was released she pulled open the top, baring her breasts to his view. They were swollen and tight, about the size of softballs, the nipples huge and engorged with blood. This was Jason's first view of bare female breasts that did not belong to either Chrissie or his mother (he had once accidentally walked in on his mom in the bathroom about a year before the comet). He thought that they were, hands down, the most beautiful, feminine things that he had ever had the privilege of casting his eyes upon. "Put some oil on them," Stacy said breathlessly. "You mean..." he croaked, almost shooting off in his pants. "Touch them," she said. "Squeeze them. Rub it in!" With a hand that was now shaking like a paint-mixer, he squirted oil onto both of her mammaries, drenching them. He let the bottle drop to the couch between them and then reached out for her, each hand grabbing a slippery tit. He began to rub all over their surface, spreading the oil around and coating them until they were as glistening as her tummy. He then began to squeeze and feel them, touching everywhere at once, squishing them and feeling the soft skin give under his caress. Her nipples pushed insistently into his palms, slipped through his fingers, and begged for further touch. They swelled up even larger than they had been, becoming virtual rocks of pink flesh. "I like your hands on me," Stacy whispered to him, her eyes watching his exalted face. "Do you like touching me?" Speechless, he could only nod as he pushed the two boobs together and then pulled them apart, as he fondled and squeezed and palpated. "Why don't you suck them?" she breathed, her hand reaching out to touch the back of his neck. She pulled him gently towards her chest. A little groan escaped from his mouth as he lowered his head and put his lips to the nearer breast, capturing the slippery nipple and slurping it into his mouth. He tasted the bitter tang of the mineral oil on his tongue and felt it coating his lips but this did not detract from the pleasure of the moment in the least. He swirled his tongue around the nubbin and sucked on it like a baby. "Mmmmm," Stacy moaned, her hand continuing to caress the back of his neck. "I just love having my nipples sucked. That feels so good, Jason. Soooo good." Encouraged by her responses, Jason switched to the other breast, attacking that nipple and sucking all the oil off it. This forced him to lean over her body just a little bit more, bringing more of her flesh into contact with him. He could feel that big, pregnant belly pushing into his chest and he liked it. She grabbed one of his hands in hers and pushed it downward, sliding it over her stomach and down, until his fingers were touching the oily strip of hair at the edge of her bottoms. She continued to push and his hand slid beneath the silk and into the forest of pubic hair. Her legs opened up, giving him room and soon his fingers were touching the wet lips of her sex. He could not believe that this was happening to him. How many times had he imagined touching a girl's pussy? A thousand? A million? And now it was really happening to him. Not only was he touching it but Stacy was encouraging him, with the way she raised her hips up and down, to explore it thoroughly. "Mmmmm," she moaned as he felt all around the swollen lips. They were hot and very slick, made even slicker by the oil clinging to his fingers. He slipped his middle finger inside of her, having to reposition his arm to do so, and felt a wonderful tightness clenching at him. It felt even better than he had imagined it would in his fantasies. He fingered her for perhaps ten minutes, gradually adding a second digit to her chasm. The wetness continued to pour out of her, saturating his hand in fragrant juices. When the musky odor of her vaginal secretions reached his nose for the first time it gave him pause. It was strikingly similar to the odor that Chrissie had given off in the lean-to during those black nights when she and Brett would have sex next to him, thinking he wasn't awake. An odor associated with one's sister is not generally the best aphrodisiac in the world. But gradually, as nature intended, the subtle differences between Stacy's scent and Chrissie's asserted themselves in his mind. Stacy's smell was cleaner, fresher, not quite as strong (undoubtedly because Stacy was relatively clean as compared to how Chrissie had been on the occasions he had smelled her). Soon, instead of reminding him of Chrissie grunting and groaning and occasionally whacking him with her elbow, he began to associate the smell with the pleasure he was now feeling with his hands and his lips. He began to associate the odor with Stacy's body instead of Chrissie's, with the slippery feel of mineral oil on flesh, of hot nipple in mouth, of moist, inviting lips grasping his finger. He continued to suckle on her breasts as his fingers did their work, switching from one to the other with frequency. Stacy only moaned in pleasure, her fingers running through his hair, her hips slowly rising and falling upon his hand. And then suddenly, she pushed him off her, squirming out from beneath his body and standing up. He looked up at her guiltily, thinking that he had done something wrong or that she had suddenly realized what she was doing and was calling a halt to it. But she was doing no such thing. She shrugged her shoulders and the pajama tops fell to the ground. She gave a little push with her hands and the bottoms dropped as well, allowing him to finally see that wonderful pussy that he had just been groping. It was swollen and pouting almost angrily with arousal, the red hair matted with her secretions. He saw a swollen red bump near the top of it that looked almost like a small nipple. Was that her clitoris? He had read about such a thing in magazines but had never seen one in the wild before. "Lay down on the couch," she told him lustily, her eyes tracking up and down his body. Wordlessly he did as he was told, lying on his back before her with his feet up. Strangely enough he instinctively tried to hide the fact that he had an erection from her. Never before had such a thing been a source of pride to him in an encounter with a female and old habits died hard. He turned his hips slightly away from her but she reached down and turned them right back, her eyes glued to the bulge in his jeans. "Should we let him out to play a little?" Stacy giggled, running her hand over the denim of his crotch. He jumped uncontrollably at the contact, nearly falling off the couch. "Umm, sure..." he panted. She smiled down at him, her fingers going to the button of his pants. "Its okay that you've never done it before," she told him gently, her fingers popping the first button open. "It's kind of sexy actually. I get to be your first." Of course he had never told her that he was a virgin but it seemed that his secret was apparent. "I don't really know... uh... what to do," he said. "It's okay," she said, giving her belly a rub. "I do." She undressed him slowly, pulling off his pants first and then his shirt. His cock, once freed from its confines, stood up as rigid as a flagpole, pre-come dripping from the end like a leaky faucet. He had not quite finished growing yet and, as such, he was only about five inches long. But Stacy did not seem to mind. Her eyes drank in the sight of his manhood, her tongue licking over her lips. But she did not touch it yet, did not even get close to it. Instead, she picked up the bottle of baby oil that he had recently used on her and sprayed it all over his chest and stomach. "Jesus," he cried, jumping at the feel of the cold liquid upon his skin. "It'll get hotter in a minute," Stacy promised, sitting on the edge of the couch near his hip. "Believe me, it'll get a lot hotter." She began to rub the oil into his skin, her hands spreading it all over his torso, turning his body into the same glistening mass of flesh that hers was. She squirted some more on his legs and rubbed each one, her hands massaging the muscles, driving his arousal to the brink. Throughout this massage she did not touch his penis at all, coming no closer to it than the top of his pubic hair despite his many attempts to lift his hips into her hands and force the contact. "The time will come for that," she said, kissing his cheek softly as she continued to rub up and down his stomach. Just when he thought he couldn't stand it any further, just as his balls were aching like a rotten tooth from pent-up sperm and his dick felt like it was going to snap under the pressure, she leaned over the top of him, so her breasts were dangling over his cock. Her boobs were still quite oily from the treatment he had given them earlier, everywhere except the nipples. She took a breast in each hand and leaned down even further, capturing his cock between them. She then pushed them together and began to move them back and forth, sliding that smooth flesh all over the shaft of his erection. "Ohhhh," Jason grunted, his hands clenching into fists at the contact. Never had he felt anything even remotely like this. And then it got even better. Continuing to rub him between her tits, she craned her head forward and sucked the head of his cock into her mouth. He suddenly felt himself enclosed in a pleasing warmth, felt the tip of her tongue swirling around him, felt the teasing suction. "Gawwwwwwd!" he cried, his body spasming. He began to come, blasting a huge load of hot sperm into her sucking mouth. She swallowed frantically, continuing to rub at him with her tits, as he shot spurt after spurt between her lips. He was horrified to have come so quickly, almost at the first touch, but Stacy didn't seem to mind at all. On the contrary, she smiled at him while she continued to lick and suck at him. She released her breasts but continued her mouth action, licking up and down, gathering every last drop of his seed as it oozed out of him. She even dipped down and took his balls into her mouth, sucking them one by one while her hand took over the job of manipulating his penis. "You have such a beautiful dick," she said, lapping up the sides of it like a little girl with an ice cream cone. "And it's already getting hard again. Isn't that something?" Sure enough, she was right. Less than two minutes after firing off into her gulping mouth, he was once again becoming rigid as steel, his hips rising and falling in a gentle rhythm. She took the entire thing in her mouth now, deep throating him slowly and then rising back up to do it again. Jason groaned as he felt this, never having thought that a simple blowjob could feel so good. When he was nice and hard again she removed her mouth from him and slowly slid up his body, kissing her way over his stomach and chest until she got to his face. She began to kiss his lips, her wet tongue probing outward, licking his lips, trying to force its way in. Though he was very cognizant of the fact that he had just come in that mouth and though he had no desire to taste his own sperm, he nevertheless could not resist the insistent probing of that tongue. His lips parted and her tongue shot into his mouth, swirling together with his, tasting him, sucking on him. As they shared their first kiss she pulled her body off of the floor where she had been kneeling and onto the couch, climbing atop him, pressing her nakedness into his. Their chests slid together on a film of baby oil, her large nipples tracing racetrack patterns around his smaller ones. His hands came up and began to run up and down her back while hers slid up and down his flanks. Her legs slid sensuously over the tops of his, letting him feel the softness of feminine thighs against his own for the first time. She broke the kiss some time later, giving one last lick at his lips, and then she pulled herself upward, into a sitting position. His cock was pushing gently against the cheeks of her ass, the head nestled slightly between them. She raised herself up and little more and reached beneath her, taking his hardness into her hand. "I want you in me," she said, looking down at him, lust in her eyes. "Okay," he managed to say with a broken voice. She eased back a little and soon he found himself being rubbed through a delicious wetness. She moved the head back and forth a few times and then lowered her body, taking him inside of her. He slipped between her wet lips and into the tightness of her cavern. He felt himself being gripped from everywhere at once as she sank down upon him and buried his cock in her warmth. "Ohhh, sooo good," she sighed, twirling her hips around gently, her hands resting on his shoulders. She began to raise herself up and down, pushing and pulling, driving him in and out of her. Jason was in complete and total awe as he felt her gripping him and moving up and down upon him. He was actually fucking a woman. Fucking! And not a girl either, but a full-grown woman! And it felt so much better than he had ever thought it would. It was not just the experience of her pussy sliding up and down on his cock, although that was the centerpiece of the tactile sensations. He could feel her entire body moving against his. He could feel her swollen, pregnant stomach pressing into his. He could feel her soft thighs straddling his oily legs. He could smell that rich odor rising into the air around him. And he could touch her anywhere that he wanted! He could reach up and take her tits into his hand, even suck on them, and she didn't mind! He could touch her ass as it bounced atop him and she didn't mind! She was his and he was hers. Finally, at long last, he understood what all of the fuss was about. Unfortunately, despite the fact that he had already come once, he did not last very long within her. Less than two minutes after she took him into her body he felt the familiar spasms beginning in his lower regions. He tried to concentrate on something else, tried to think about anything but what he was doing, but it was to no avail. He was going to come and he was going to come hard. "It's okay," she told him, picking up the pace of her ministrations as she felt him start to buck uncontrollably beneath her. "Come in me, Jason. I want it. Come in me." She leaned down and began kissing him again, driving her tongue into his mouth. That pushed him completely over the edge. With another grunt and another explosion of pleasure, he shot his second load upward, into her clenching pussy. She moaned deeply as she felt his seed splashing her insides. Again he felt mortified that he had blasted off so quickly and again, she calmed his concerns, this time with gentle kisses and playful strokes. "It's okay," she whispered to him, licking at his lips between words. "Really, it is. I understand." "But you didn't... you know?" "I didn't come?" she asked. "Is that what you were trying to say." "Yes," he said. "No," she agreed. "I didn't. But I will. Would you like to help me?" "Help you?" "Help me," she said. "There's something you can do for me that will help me come." "What?" he asked, somewhat naively. She smiled and pulled herself off of him, his wilting dick popping free of her with a rush of juices. She pulled herself into a sitting position, so that her pussy was resting upon his abdomen. She then began to slide forward, towards his face. Jason looked at her swollen sex doubtfully. The lips were bulging outward and filled with blood, her clit pushing out of its hood and rigid. A mixture of white and clear juice ran out of her, dripping down her crotch onto his chest. "I'll understand if you don't want to do it," she told him breathlessly. "But if you just suck my clit for a few minutes, I'll come all over your face. Oh, Jason, please." She scooted closer, bringing herself to within a few inches. The odor of sex was now overpowering. "I neeeeed it!" Though he had not signed on for this kind of thing when he had agreed to walk her home, he rose to the challenge. He grabbed her thighs with his hands and pulled her forward, locking his lips onto the bump of her clitoris. He stabbed at it with his tongue and began to suck on it gently, as if it were a nipple. "Ohhh, God yessss!" Stacy cried, her hips grinding her into his face. "Just like that!" He knew he was getting some of his own sperm in his mouth but he didn't mind. He concentrated all of his energies upon giving Stacy the same kind of pleasure she had given him. He pulled her tighter against him and sucked harder, feeling her hard clit against his tongue. As she had predicted, it took only a few minutes before she began to slam herself uncontrollably into him. Her hands squeezed painfully upon his legs, which they were holding for support, and the bulge of her belly bounced up and down atop his head. She screamed loudly as her orgasm overtook her. Afterward, they cuddled together on the couch, their hands gently stroking each other's body. "Jason?" she said, her face nestled in his neck. "What?" he asked, trailing his hand over the rise of her stomach. That pregnant tummy fascinated him. "Will you move in with me?" ------- Chapter 6 "Oh come on," Brett chided, his words more than a little slurred, "put more than that in there!" Michelle giggled, upending the tequila bottle a tad more and letting another half ounce of the liquid run into the orange juice glass. "I don't weigh as much as you do," she said, her words considerably more slurred than his. "Don't you know that therapeutic," it took her three tries to spit this word out, "dosage is based on weight, goddammit?" "It sounds to me like you can't handle your booze," he said, picking up the two-liter bottle of warm Pepsi and opening the lid. About a quarter of the bottle was gone now. There was a hiss as the gas escaped. "I can handle anything you can throw at me," she declared, staring at him defiantly with her reddened eyes. "Pour the fuckin' soda." "Right," he said, pouring an equal amount of the soda into each glass, so that the total amount of liquid in each was about two-thirds. They then each picked up a small dishtowel, towels that were now damp and boozy smelling, and placed them over the tops of their glasses. "Are you ready?" he asked her. "Fuckin' aye," she said. "On three." They counted to three together and then slammed the glasses sharply onto the wooden crate that sat in front of them. They then removed the towels from the glasses revealing a foamy, fizzing concoction of soda bubbles and tequila. As quickly as they could, before the bubbles had a chance to begin to settle, they put the glasses to their mouths and sucked the contents down their throats. They were in what had once been an equipment storage room of the community center. Before the comet it had been where the athletic equipment such as basketballs and badminton sets had been kept. Now, in post-comet life, it had been converted to a different kind of storage. All of the alcohol, marijuana, pills, and other drugs stronger than Tylenol were neatly arranged on shelves. Paul, after having the need for a critical incident stress debriefing explained to him, had opened it up and allowed the two of them unlimited use of its contents for the night. Jessica and Dale had of course balked at this, as they did nearly everything, but Paul's insistence had eventually won out. They were sitting on the carpeted floor, their backs against the wall, their legs stretched out in front of them. The bottle of Jose Cuervo and the bottle of Pepsi rested on the small crate along with a small bag of potent marijuana and a disposable lighter. On the floor, directly between them, was a large ceramic water bong that appeared to have been made by a master craftsman at considerable expense. After every second or third shot of booze they would load its bowl up with the bud and add that chemical to their bloodstream as well. "Blaaaah," Michelle said, sticking out her tongue and taking a few breaths. "I don't care what you say, it's still gross. There's nothing you can do to tequila to make it taste good." "This is how I used to get drunk when I was kid," Brett told her, secretly agreeing with her. It did taste like shit. "Good old Alabama slammers. The fastest, most tasteless way to get hard alcohol into your system. When you're trying to drink some of your dad's booze without him knowing about it, it's the only way to go." She stifled a burp with her hand, fearing for a moment that more than gas was going to come out. "I was more into wine coolers," she said. "Remember those Bartles and James coolers? I drank so much of those once that I passed out in the toilet." They shared experiences of past vomitus drinking episodes for a few minutes, during which time they both had one more slammer. Since neither one of them had bothered with dinner on that night the booze went almost immediately to their heads, increasing their euphoria and making them forget about the tension they had experienced earlier along the wall. Brett picked at a loose strand of carpet with his fingers. "So what do you think?" he asked her. "Do you feel better about shooting that guy now?" Her face sobered a little as she was reminded of it. "I'm not shaking anymore," she said. "That's something, isn't it?" "Well, the booze is an artificial and temporary coping mechanism. It's easy to forget after you drink down a bunch of tequila. The trick is maintaining that coping after the booze wears off." "We'll just have to wait and see then, won't we?" He gave her a smile. "You'll do fine," he said. "You're a natural ass-kicker. I could tell that just from training." "So now my cherry's been popped, right?" she asked with a giggle. "Correct," he said, with a chuckle of his own. "You're a virgin no more." That declaration called for another drink. They poured the tequila, topped it off with soda, and then wrapped the glass in a towel. A count of three and a slam and the alcohol was fizzing away. They drank it and then set their empty glasses back down. The entire process took less than a minute. "I'm starting to get dizzy," Michelle said, wiping a thin layer of sweat from her forehead. "I haven't drank like this since... well, in a long time." "Me either," he said, remembering that the last time he had gotten good and drunk had been in a cop bar after work about a month before the comet. He had worked a patrol car that shift because the department's single helicopter had been down for maintenance. Spending ten hours on the ground as just another grunt, responding to family fights and domestic violence calls and false burglar alarms and making vehicle stops, had reawakened the camaraderie with his fellow cops that he was not usually exactly a part of anymore. And so he had gone to the 11-99 Club with them at end of watch. Loud music had been playing on the jukebox and the talk had been animated and profane, the way cops always talked when they were among their own kind. He had drank boilermakers until nearly closing time and had to be carried into the house when he finally got home. And Julie had been so pissed at him! He remembered the angry expression on her face as she yelled at him about his no-good friends and asked him if he had ever heard of a telephone before. He sighed a little now, finding the memory very painful to think about now. Michelle's face was a mirror of his own, telling him that she was recalling her last time with the same sort of agonizing nostalgia. Where had she been? With her husband? With her girlfriends? With a magazine editor? He did not ask her, not wanting to travel down the road that such thoughts would open up. "Did you notice that he wasn't starving?" Michelle asked him, apparently just as anxious to change the subject. "Yes," Brett said, not needing to know who the he that she was referring to was. It could only be the man she had shot along the wall. "I did notice that. It bothers me for some reason I can't quite put my finger on. I didn't realize that you had noticed it too though. Pretty good eye." "I'm a writer," she said, reaching into the marijuana bag and pulling out a pinch. She began to roll it between her fingers, compacting it into a ball. "Writers are observant by their very nature. We notice the small details of things. It's how we earn our living." "Cops too," he said. "So tell me, Ms. Observant, what do you make of it? Why would a man who has been eating fairly well try to sneak in here after he was already driven off once?" "Lots of reasons," she said, putting her small ball into the bowl of the bong. "He could be running out of food now and thinks he can get more in here." "He could be," Brett agreed. "But perhaps you noticed that he did not have a backpack or any kind of carrying device with him. What was he planning on taking his bounty out in? He wouldn't go through all the trouble of sneaking in just so he could grab a few cans and leave, would he?" "You wouldn't think," she said, picking up the lighter. "But then maybe he figured that he would be able to find something to carry it with once he got inside." She struck a light and began to suck on the mouthpiece of the bong. The marijuana turned orange and shriveled up, finally disappearing down the hole below it. "That doesn't make a lot of sense to me either," Brett said, grabbing a pinch of his own from the bag and beginning to roll it around. "An empty backpack or carry bag does not slow down your movements enough to justify leaving it behind in the hopes that you will find another one. And I can't buy the argument that he just didn't have one. If he's been eating, he would have had something to carry supplies in." She exhaled a plume of acrid smoke into the room. "That all makes sense," she said. "So what do you think he was planning on doing in here?" "I don't know," he said, shaking his head. He turned the bong towards him and began to stuff the hole. "It bothers me though. Anything that doesn't seem to make sense on the surface bothers me because usually it does make sense in some way that you can't figure out. Can I have that lighter?" She gave it to him and watched as he sucked up his own hit. "Do you think the committee will listen to you now and let you change the guard posts around?" she asked him. He exhaled, coughing a few times since his lungs were not used to such treatment. Nevertheless he felt the effects of the latest hit pushing his intoxication to a level approaching obliteration. It was not an unpleasant sensation at all. "No," he replied. "Even though that person did exactly what I warned them we were vulnerable to, namely people hiding along the wall, Jessica and Dale will not let me move the guard posts. They will say it is an isolated incident or a freak occurrence and that it won't likely happen again. Hell, I wouldn't put it past them to say that I bribed the guy to do that. That I found some outsider and gave him a week's rations to play hide and seek outside the wall and that I then had him shot dead to cover it up. After all," he said, mimicking Jessica's voice, "it was Chrissie that spotted him first, wasn't it? Isn't that just a strange coincidence? Little frail Chrissie being the one to spot the big, bag straggler?" "She does kind of live in a world of her own, doesn't she?" "She lives in an entirely different universe," Brett said. "And she's trying to drag all of us in there with her." As if speaking of her summoned her spirit, the sound of soft footfalls began to echo along the carpet outside. Both knew it was Jessica before her face even appeared in the open doorway. They stopped what they were doing and looked up as she looked down at them. Her sharp, vulture's eyes took in the companionable way that they were sitting together and her face twisted into an interested gaze. Already she was formulating the gossip she would spread. Did you hear? Michelle and Brett! I swear! You should have seen the way they were sitting next to each other. Mmmm hmmm. "What's up, boss?" Brett asked, unmistakable sarcasm dripping from that last word. Michelle began to giggle as she heard it. Jessica's expression darkened, immediately changing to disapproval. She looked at the tequila bottle and the marijuana bag. "You two certainly have helped yourself to quite a bit of our stock now, haven't you?" Brett shrugged. "Adequate payment for protecting the sanctity of this settlement, wouldn't you say?" "Stragglers are shot several times a week," she told him. "Do we invite every guard who does that in here to raid our trade goods?" "No," he said. "But then they usually don't have to go track them down and shoot at them in the open either. Why don't you cut us a little slack, Jess? Here," he held up the bong. "Let me load you up a nice bonghit. It'll mellow you out." "I do not take bonghits," she said with extreme distaste. "I don't know why we even kept that stuff. It's illegal. You of all people should know that." "I'll tell you what," he said, reaching in and pulling out another pinch. "When the federal government and the California state government gets its shit back together, reinstates civilization, reenacts the penal code and the drug control act, and gives me a new badge, I'll be the first to seize the supply, okay? Until then, I think I'll just burn it a little bit at a time." He stuffed his pinch in and picked up the lighter. Michelle giggled again, shaking her head at Brett's quick tongue. Jessica glared at both of them, daggers in her eyes. "In any case," she said sternly, "there is something going on tonight that I thought Brett should be aware of. It is potentially very scandalous and shocking." "Oooh, let me guess," Michelle said, holding up her hand as Brett took his bong hit. "Someone has snuck out to one of the guard posts to have unauthorized sex?" Though this was not particularly funny, Brett and Michelle both found it to be in their present condition. Michelle erupted into hysterical chuckles while Brett coughed out the carefully prepared inhalation he had just completed, and more than a little saliva. Michelle, still giggling, began patting him on the back. Jessica did not find this the least bit amusing. "No," she said huffily. "Although that subject is not something that should be laughed at." Brett got himself under control, his laughter reluctantly tapering off and dying away. "Of course not," he said, wiping a tear from his eye and giving a few more light coughs. "Forgive me. So what kind of scandal is going on that I should be made aware of during this official debrief session?" "It seems," Jessica said, her expression now taking on the barely repressed delight it assumed whenever she was sharing a particularly damaging piece of gossip, "that your young friend, Jason, was seen accompanying our kitchen server, Stacy, to the house that was assigned to her." Brett looked up at her, uncomprehending. "That's it? What's the big deal about that? They're friends. I see them talking together when I go in for early breakfast." "Jason does have the night off you know," Michelle, who had finally gotten herself under control, added helpfully. "He's not skipping out on his detail if that's what you're worried about." "She invited him inside," Jessica exclaimed. "And he has not come back out yet!" Michelle and Brett looked at each other for a moment and then back at Jessica. "How do you know that he hasn't come back out yet?" Brett asked. "Do you have somebody following them around?" "Well of course," she said, as if doing such a thing was by-the-book doctrine. "When I saw them leaving together I sent Maggie to see where they were going." She patted a walkie-talkie that was on her belt. "As of five minutes ago, he was still in there, no doubt being molested by that... that... bimbo!" Michelle's jaw dropped as she heard this. Brett's came close. "Are you telling me," he said slowly and carefully, "that you are using the security division's communications gear to keep track of the activities of two of the townspeople?" Jessica scoffed. "Stacy is no more a member of this town than you are," she said. "She worked making coffee before the comet. She's lucky we even let her stay here at all. And now look how she repays us. By corrupting your friend! I always knew she was a shameless slut!" "This is unbelievable," Brett whispered. "I'm glad you agree with me for once," Jessica said. "Now what are you going to do about it? Are you too drunk to take care of it yourself? I can get Paul and..." "You are the one that is unbelievable," Brett interrupted. "Where in the hell do you get off having people followed around like that? What the hell makes you think you have the right to do that?" "She is taking advantage of a young boy!" Jessica screamed. "Where do you get off not even acknowledging that fact?" "I hardly think Jason is in any danger," Brett said. "In fact, he's probably having the time of his life. If he and Stacy want to boff their brains out, what business is it of yours?" "He's fourteen years old!" she reiterated loudly. "Fourteen! Are you saying that you think its okay for a full grown, pregnant hussy like that to take advantage of him?" "It's okay for him to kill stragglers for you and protect you while you sleep, but it's not okay for him to get laid?" Brett asked. "I never wanted him on guard detail," she said. "And that is beside the point anyway. He is a child that needs to be protected. She is a corrupt woman without any sense of decency! Now, are you going to do anything about this, or should I go get Dale and Paul to do it instead?" "There is nothing to be done," Brett said. "Call off your nazi spy that's watching them and leave them alone. Put the communications gear back in the security room where it belongs and don't touch it anymore." "You do not give orders to me," she proclaimed. "I am in charge of security," Brett said, "and you, committee member or not, are abusing official security department apparatus. Call back your goon, put the shit away, and don't touch it again. You know as well as I do that it is well in my authority to tell you that. So do it!" "How dare you..." "And no one will bother Stacy and Jason," he added, standing up to face her. "I mean that, Jessica. Leave them alone." "Are you threatening me?" she asked, obvious fear in her voice as he towered over her. He did not answer her. "Leave them alone," he repeated. "I mean it. What they're doing is none of your business." She took a step backwards, her fist clenching in nervousness. "Paul and Dale will hear about this," she said with a voice that was not quite steady. "The committee will take action against you." "Groovy," he said. "We'll talk about it tomorrow, after everyone has had a chance to reflect upon the day's events, okay? In the meantime, why don't you do what I told you to and then go back to your house, fuck Dale a couple times, and then start planning your speeches for the meeting tomorrow?" "You'll be ejected from this town," she promised, pointing a trembling finger at him. "I promise you that." "Whatever will be, will be," he said. "Now, can me and Michelle get back to our debriefing? We still have a lot of tequila to get through until we put the painful episode behind us." She turned and stomped off, heading towards the main office. Brett watched her go and then sat back down. "So," he said, with a satisfied smile. "Where were we?" ------- It didn't take them long to blow off Jessica and her intrusion. All it took was another slammer, another bong-hit, and an animated discussion about Jason and Stacy. "You think he'll come out alive?" Michelle asked with a laugh. "I think he's a very happy man about now," Brett replied. "I'm surprised Jessica didn't have Maggie stick a video camera through a gap in the blinds so she could get a photo record of the corruption in progress." "How do you know she hasn't?" "True." He sighed a little, slumping downward against the wall a bit. "Why is everybody so wrapped up in all of this gossiping and scandal? Everybody does realize that a comet hit the planet and killed everybody, don't they?" "Of course they do," Michelle said, putting her hand on his leg. "They can't drive their Mercedes or get their hair done in the salon anymore, can they? They only get to take hot baths every third day now, don't they? They are rapidly running out of fingernail polish remover and Oil of Olay, aren't they? You have no idea the hardships these women are enduring. I mean, sure, you've been out in the wilderness fighting off starving outsiders, but they have not seen a new issue of Cosmo or had a decent latte in weeks." He eyed her hand for a moment, noting that it was resting about two inches above his knee, seemingly companionably. He then looked up at her. "I guess I just haven't appreciated all that everyone has been through in here," he replied. She inched a little closer to him, her hand sliding up a few more inches. It gave a little squeeze of his thigh, a squeeze that felt very good. "They're in a huge state of culture shock," she said. "Everyone is. You can't just live under one set of ideals all of your life and then change in a few days. Give them a while and they'll slowly start to come around." "I'll believe that when I see it," he said, starting to feel guilty now for enjoying her touch upon his leg and not doing anything about it. What would Chrissie think if she saw this or heard about it? Despite the estrangement between them, he did not wish to lose her. And though he could pretend that Michelle was just caressing his leg in friendship, he knew, even through his haze of drunkenness, that that was not really the case. As if to prove this point, she inched her hand even higher, so that it was about halfway between his knee and his groin. She edged her hips over a few more inches as well, so that their shoulders were touching. He could feel her warmth through her clothing. "I've become very fond of you these last few weeks," she said to him softly. "Have you?" he said, not looking at her, only looking at her hand, which continued to inch upward. "I didn't think I would at first," she said. "When you gave me that speech about my not having a chance with you, I thought it was funny. I never thought that I would be the least bit interested in someone like you. I figured that you were sort of a dull person. You know? Efficient at what you did, reasonably smart, but without much personality otherwise. That's how I always pictured cops, pilots, and soldiers. Whenever I wrote about one in a short story or one of my many failed novels, that's always how I portrayed them: serious but dull." "That sounds like me all right," he said weakly, his penis now hardening. "Give yourself a little credit," she said, leaning closer and whispering the words into his ears. He could now feel her breast pushing against his shoulder. "You're very witty, very funny, and very good looking. You care Brett. That's what really gets to me. You care about all of these shallow people you're protecting. You're not just going for free room and board." "Michelle," he said, pulling away from her and breaking the contact; everything except her hand on his leg, she refused to give that up. "This is a bad idea." "Oh?" she said pointedly. "And why is that?" "Because I'm in charge of the guard force and you're one of the guards," he said. "Chrissie is one of the guards," she said, "and yet you sleep with her, don't you?" He nearly choked as he heard these words. His erection wilted in an instant and adrenaline went shooting through his veins, sobering him up considerably. Michelle simply smiled at him. "Or at least you were," she continued, "until you had a fight on your fifth or sixth day here. You haven't been really speaking to each other or doing anything else since then. The fight was probably about what happened your first night with Mitsy. I imagine Chrissie told you what she heard and you didn't deny it. Am I right so far?" "How... how... how do you know this?" he asked numbly. "Did Chrissie talk to you?" She shook her head. "Chrissie and I talk a little bit, usually at breakfast and dinner, but she never told me that. She's keeping your secret." "Then who told you?" "You and Chrissie did," she said. "Although not with your mouths. Do you remember a little while ago when I told you that writers are very observant people? I wasn't kidding. If you just pay attention to people's body language, you can learn a lot about them. Hell, you should know that. Don't cops do the same thing?" He ignored her question. "Are you telling me that you just figured this out by watching us?" "Yep," she agreed. "When you two were first voted in, I could see that you and Chrissie were very close to each other. Much closer than a man and a platonic friend are. I could tell that you had great affection for each other but that you were restraining it when you were in public. You always made certain that you did not touch each other in any way, that your eyes never met with that teasing, knowing little smile that lovers share. But at the same time, when you thought that nobody was paying attention to you, you would share that look, just for a moment. You would pass a little telepathic signal back and forth with your eyes. She loves you, Brett, and I suspect that you love her as well." "Jesus," Brett said, thinking that Michelle was some kind of a witch. "It was also pretty easy to tell when you had your fight," she went on. "All of a sudden you weren't eating breakfast together anymore, you weren't looking directly at each other for any reason anymore. Although, if you watch, as I do, you'll see that both of you look at the other when you think they're not looking at you. If your eyes do happen to meet during such a look, you don't smile at each other. You look away. And then there's talking to Chrissie. It's pretty obvious that she's in the midst of a major depression. She hardly laughs anymore and her eyes have bags beneath them as if she doesn't sleep very well. You have the same thing, although your work keeps you a little busier than hers keeps her." Brett reached over and grabbed the bottle of tequila. He removed the cap and took a drink directly from the bottle. "Okay," he said. "So you know. What are you going to do now? Are you going to tell everyone?" She smiled sweetly, scooting back over to him. Her hand, which had never left his leg, suddenly moved all the way up to his crotch. "No," she said, squeezing and pinching his cock through the material, "I'm not going to tell anyone. That is not my place to do. What I am going to do is suck your dick. You could probably use a little relief after all those days of going without, couldn't you?" "Michelle," he said, getting hard despite the underlying tone of the discussion. "I don't want to do this with you. You just told me you know about Chrissie and me. I am asking you to respect that relationship." "Oh I do respect it," she said, continuing to squeeze and feel him, bringing him to a full and painful erection. "I respect it greatly. It's almost like one of those crappy romance novels I wrote. It really is a shame that the two of you are still fighting over Mitsy." He tried to remove her hand from his crotch but she gently pushed him away. In truth, he really didn't try all that hard. She had been entirely correct when she'd said that he had not had relief in some time. He hadn't even masturbated in nearly a week. She began to pop open buttons on his jeans, releasing each one with slow deliberateness. "Why are you doing this?" he asked, cursing himself for not having the willpower to make her stop. "Because I want to," she said. "Remember that I haven't had any since the comet either. Despite what I said about my research tools and my self-gratification know-how, that gets old really quick. I've come to the conclusion that a woman just has to have a nice hard, warm, live cock once in a while." She popped open the last button, revealing his bulging underwear. "And right here is such a thing. All ready for me." He made one last feeble attempt to stop her when she pulled his pants and underwear down. "Michelle, we're right in the community center in front of an open door," he said, watching as his cock sprang free into the air. "So keep an ear out for people coming down the hall," she said. With that she lowered her head into his lap and took him into her mouth. Her warm, wet lips closed around him and her tongue began to dance up and down the surface. She hummed contentedly as she tasted his member and he moaned in defeated arousal as he felt her go to work. Within a second or two he was completely lost in the sensation. Oral sex was something that his wife, as passionate a woman as she had been, had just not been too enthusiastic about. If he had been able to coax two blowjobs a year from her, he considered himself lucky. Nor had Chrissie been particularly fond of that activity either. She had mouthed it inexpertly a few times during foreplay once they'd moved into their home but she had never sucked it more than a minute or two and had never allowed him to ejaculate in her mouth. Despite her maturity in all other aspects of post-comet life and sexuality, she still considered sucking a cock to be somewhat "gross". He had never pushed the issue. But Michelle apparently did not think it gross. She sucked expertly, in the manner of a woman that had made cocksucking a regular part of her sexual repertoire for quite some time. Her brown hair, released from the ponytail it was usually tied up in, cascaded over his lap, tickling his bare thighs as her head bobbed up and down upon him. She would deep throat for several strokes, swallowing his six inches whole and then slowly bringing her head back up, and then she would lick and suck on the head while jacking his wet shaft with her hands. "Ohhh," he moaned, letting his head fall back upon his neck, forgetting about Chrissie, his conflict with Jessica, even the possibility of someone catching them in the act. This was, without a doubt, the best blowjob he had ever had in his life. He let his hand fall into her hair, his fingers running through its silky smoothness. The honeydew scent that rose up from it told him that she had probably had her bath recently. "Mmmm hmmm," Michelle hummed from around his cock. She began to deep throat less now and concentrate more on the classic motions of jacking and sucking. Her hand became a blur upon his shaft and her mouth became a soft, clenching orifice that tried like hell to suck the sperm right out of his balls. It didn't take long at this pace. As he began to spasm, his hips tried to rise up into the air, instinctively driving him in the age-old rhythm that accompanied orgasm. A wave of pleasure spread throughout him and, with a grunt and a groan, he exploded into her sucking mouth. She sucked frantically, her hands continuing their ministrations throughout, and she consumed every drop. She licked him completely clean and then slowly removed her head from his lap and looked up at him. She licked her lips once. "Did that feel good?" she asked him. "Yes," he admitted. "That felt absolutely divine in fact." "Glad to see I haven't lost the touch." She removed herself from his embrace. "My panties are completely soaked right now," she told him matter-of-factly. "Uh listen..." he started, reaching down and pulling his pants up. "I think that things got a little out of hand here tonight. Maybe we should..." "Go back to my place," she said, standing. She began gathering up the tequila bottle and the glasses and the other supplies they had used. She quickly stowed them back in their proper places. She did not seem all that drunk any longer. "No," he said. "That's not..." "Walk me home, Brett," she told him, not even looking at him. "I need you tonight. And I think that you need me." "But Chrissie..." "Don't worry about Chrissie for the moment," she replied. "You need to come to my place. Believe me, I'm acting in everyone's best interest here." "Michelle," he said. "I don't think that..." "Don't think right now," she said, walking over to him and giving him a teasing kiss upon the nose. Her breath was warm and smelled of semen. "Just come home with me. I've wanted to do what I'm doing for some time and tonight the booze has given me the courage to do it. Everything will be made clear soon." ------- Michelle, like the majority of the town women, lived in the same house that she had inhabited before the comet. Hers was one of the top-of-the-line models, not quite as much square footage and as many upgrades as Jessica's, but it was close. It was a tri-level located near the southern portion of the park that surrounded the community center. The walk to it was short but several times Brett tried again to bow out of what was to follow. "I can't, Michelle," he cried at one point. "I've already betrayed Chrissie once and look what that did to us. You know as well as I do that somebody is noticing us walking to your house. If I go inside, that's it. By tomorrow, everyone will be saying that you're the one and I'll lose her forever. She might put up with one betrayal, but she won't put up with two." "That depends on what you consider a betrayal to be," Michelle answered. "Trust me. I am well aware that our trip is being noted right now and it is part of my plan." "Your plan?" he said. "Just what kind of plan are you talking about? You're stealing me!" "I am doing no such thing," she said. "Now take my arm. Make it look good." "Michelle," he said, stopping in his tracks. "This is crazy." "Crazy or not, it needs to be done. Now do what I say. Everyone already will have an earful of you and I based on what Jessica will tell them tomorrow. That in itself will be enough to drive Chrissie away from you. I don't want that to happen, Brett. I really don't. If you want to keep her, you need to follow my lead and take me home." "Michelle," he said, "you sound like a defense attorney telling a murderer that he can escape the electric chair if he just kills a few more people." She laughed, slapping at his arm. "That's funny, Brett," she said. "Good analogy. You ever thought about being a writer?" "Michelle!" "Sorry," she said. "Listen, my plan may seem strange right now, but it will soon make sense to you. Just remember and try to accept that you and Chrissie are as caught up in pre-comet morality as everyone else in town. The difference with you two is that you try to honor it while the others only pretend to. You will have to come to some accommodations with some new realities here, just like everyone else does. In the meantime, what I'm doing will protect you and your lover as well as give me what I need. Everyone will win, okay?" "Now you sound like a used car salesman." "Saleswoman," she corrected, sliding her arm through his. "Now see me home, Mr. Most Eligible Bachelor and try to pretend that you don't think anyone sees us." She gave a tug and he started moving, propelled along more by his drunken lack of judgment than anything else. Soon, they reached her front door. She opened it with a key and led him inside. Like every other house in Garden Hill these days, Michelle's had a clothesline strung through the formal living room, attached by molly bolts into the plaster. Her shirts, pants, bras, and panties hung drying in the air in what had once been the room designed to impress visitors with a display of expensive, uncomfortable furniture, usually antique and usually the kind that no one was allowed to actually sit upon. In every other house that he had been in, despite the clothesline, the furniture had remained, as if the women needed to show that even though civilization had collapsed, they had possessed taste and money before. This was not so with Michelle. There was not a stitch of furniture in her living room, only other clotheslines with sheets and comforters hung upon them. They had to duck in order to get under all of it. "What's with all the linen?" Brett asked as she lit an oil lamp and led him through the maze. "It helps my clothes dry faster," she said. "And keeps the humidity down in the house." Humidity from air drying cloth was one of the scourges of Garden Hill life. It would peel wallpaper from the wall and make you sweat sitting still despite the chilly temperatures. "Say again?" "It's like hanging clothes that are still damp in your closet," she explained. "The dry cloth helps soak up the moisture. You'll notice that its quite humid in here but everywhere else in the house is quite dry. I've suggested the technique to some of the other women in town but they won't do it because it clutters up their living rooms." He followed her into the family room of the house and found that it was indeed quite dry in there. There was no thick haze of cold, muggy air pervading the atmosphere, making it feel like you were in a fog bank. The air temperature was actually quite pleasant in a relative sort of way. Over the past few weeks the ambient temperature outside had dropped by about ten degrees, making everyday life in a town without propane or electric service a challenge. But in Michelle's living room, it was almost comfortable. "My plants," she said, pointing around the room where sickly looking houseplants were everywhere. "They don't do all that well since there isn't any sunlight, but the firelight and the lamplight during the hours I'm home keeps them alive. They, in turn, generate a little heat for me and keep the air nice and fresh. Again, something I've suggested to the other women but it takes a little too much effort for them." "Amazing," Brett said, almost forgetting the circumstances that had brought him here. His respect for Michelle, which was already quite high, kicked up a few notches. She tapped the side of her head with her finger. "See what you learn when you read a lot," she told him. "Why don't you start us a fire? I'm going to go change." That suddenly brought him back to what he was doing here. "Listen, Michelle," he said. "Maybe we should talk about what this great plan of yours is first." "Maybe we shouldn't," she said, starting to unbutton her flannel shirt. "Start us a fire, Brett." With that, she disappeared into the bedroom. Left with nothing else to do, Brett picked up some dry kindling and newspaper from a stack next to the fireplace. Wood gathering and drying was a major consumer of daily labor in Garden Hill, not just for the personal use of the inhabitants but also for the three large fires at the community center that needed to be kept burning day and night to heat hot water for bathing and cooking. The wood was chopped from the many fallen trees around the perimeter of the township. Putting it near one of the fires dried it, although even this could not get all of the moisture out of the pine and sequoia. He arranged the kindling and the newspaper expertly and then put a log on. He lit the scraps of paper with a lighter that Michelle kept nearby and a moment later a nice blaze was beginning, providing both light and warmth. "Very nice," said Michelle from behind him. "Very romantic even." He looked up and saw that she was wearing a long white robe, tied tightly at the waist. It was not the most alluring thing that she could have used to tempt him but at the same time it was not a burlap sack either. The material looked very soft and warm and easy to remove. He could tell by the way her breasts moved that she had nothing on beneath it. Her hair had been combed out as well, making it smooth and silky and as she came closer he caught a hint of vanilla body wash. He started to rise, intending to go over to the couch but she waved him back down and sat next to him. As she eased herself down the hem of her robe rose up a little, displaying a good portion of her left leg to him. It was a very pretty leg, pale and smooth looking. "What now?" he asked a little nervously. She took his hand in hers and set it on her bare knee, allowing him to feel the warmth of it. "Now," she said, "we make love in front of the fire." "And this will help Chrissie?" he said, not moving his hand. She did it for him, pulling it a little higher, so that it was now touching the soft skin of her thigh. "It will help everyone," she assured him. She let her legs fall apart, which in turn caused the hem of her robe to creep higher. He was now able to see her inner thighs almost all the way to her crotch. He felt himself hardening again in his jeans, despite his best efforts not to. He felt his willpower to resist her draining away. "I don't want to leave her," he said, unable to take his eyes from her legs. "Like I said," she told him, opening her legs a little more now that she had his interest, "I don't want you to leave Chrissie." He could now see all the way to her crotch, although it was mostly hidden in shadow. He could just make out the darkness of her pubic hair. "I don't want to sneak around with you either," he said, unconsciously licking his lips. "Sneaking around would be impossible," she said, turning more towards him to improve his view. "I believe we have already established that. Our presence here in this house is already known." "But..." "Brett," she said gently, undoing the knot on her tie. She slowly opened the robe, displaying everything at once for him. "Don't talk so much. Just make love to me." The sight of her body vanquished the second thoughts he was having. It was truly a piece of work, much more impressive in the nude than the impression one got by seeing her clothed. Her breasts were not large but were nicely rounded and, unlike many of the women in town, natural. Her nipples were small and erect. Her stomach was smooth and very firm looking, as if she regularly did sit-ups. Between her legs was a neatly trimmed triangle of black hair. Her pink lips and erect clit showed prominently from the midst of this. She opened her legs even more and let her hand drop down to her slit. She began to rub herself up and down, back and forth. "You're not going to just sit there and let me play with myself, are you?" she asked him coyly. He didn't. He leaned forward and took her in his arms, his hands going around her back, his lips going to her mouth. They kissed softly, gently as she let the robe fall to the floor behind her. She lay back on the carpet, pulling him down with her as their tongues began to dance together. Her breath was sweet, as if she had just brushed her teeth, her kissing very erotic. He let his hand roam over her body, sliding over her breasts and toying with her hard nipples before moving downward. It passed over the firmness of her stomach, across her hip, and down to her upper thigh. Her legs were still wide open and he let his hand move between them, finding her wet pussy. He stroked the outside of it for a moment, feeling the velvet lips, before sliding first one and then two fingers into her. She was not as tight as Chrissie - nobody was that tight - but she was not loose either. She clenched hungrily at his probing digits, moaning into his mouth as he felt him penetrate her. Her juices ran over the back of his hand as he began to fingerfuck her in earnest. She broke the kiss and ordered him to get those clothes off and fuck her. He pulled his hand free, taking a moment to lick her fragrant juices from his fingers. Seeing him do this made her moan. "Now," she demanded. "Fuck me now!" He moved quickly, tossing his boots, socks, pants, shirts, and underwear up onto the couch as he removed them. He never left the floor. The moment his cock was exposed to the air her hand found it and began to stroke it up and down. Once he was naked she pulled him on top of her once again, pressing his bare flesh to hers. "Just hammer me," she told him, looking into his eyes with lust. "Forget that slow build-up shit. I need your cock pounding me!" He positioned himself between her legs and slid into her, her muscles almost pulling him in. For the first time since his fight with Chrissie he found himself enclosed in a tight, warm pussy and the feeling was very nice. Michelle was right; masturbation just didn't cut it. Her legs came up around his back and her hands went to his ass as he began to thrust in and out. "Faster! Harder!" she demanded. "Fuck me harder. Pound me!" He gripped her beneath her armpits, his fingers on her shoulders, and he used her body to give him leverage. He slammed his hips up and down, making deep, fast strokes. His pubis mashed forcefully into hers with each thrust, making a slapping sound. He felt his balls bouncing against her ass cheeks, which were wet with running juices. "Yes, yes, oh God, just like that. Fuck me hard. Give it to me!" Michelle yelled, her fingernails now biting into his ass cheeks. Her own pelvis was thrusting back at him, her own strokes timed perfectly to collide with his downstrokes. She ground herself a little bit each time he bottomed out, stimulating both of them. Since he had already come once he was able to last at this pace for quite some time. Their bodies quickly heated up and began to sweat, Brett's in particular. Like Chrissie, Michelle seemed to enjoy licking at his neck while he was perspiring. She also enjoyed biting at his neck, not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to arouse greatly. She had first one and then another orgasm, her bites and clawings becoming frantic during the spasms of pleasure. She was about halfway through her third when the clenching of her vaginal muscles on his cock finally became too much for him to endure. He exploded within her, kissing her frantically as he poured his seed into her body. Afterward they lay entwined together, his cock still inside of her, his arms still holding her shoulders. They kissed more gently now, just touching tongues and lips as the sweat began to dry upon them. The fire continued to crackle, occasionally popping as a knot exploded. "That felt soooo good," Michelle said at last, her hands still resting on his ass. "I never thought I would enjoy sex with another man besides Stan, but god help me, that was just incredible." He nodded, a little more sober now than he had been and feeling fatigue and guilt both pulling strongly at him. "Yes," he admitted nonetheless. "It was very good." "Human beings of childbearing age," she said, "are not meant to go without sex. We just aren't equipped to deal with it." He swallowed a little, letting his chin rest in the crook of her neck. "I think you're right," he finally said. "And that's a big part of our problem here in Garden Hill, wouldn't you agree?" "People going without sex?" he asked. "No, I'd say it's the opposite. People are having too much sex." She shook her head. "No," she told him. "That is the result of the problem, not the problem itself. Now granted, with a lot of these women in town, sex is not all they are after. Some of them don't even like sex I'm sure. They just feel that they have to have a man in their life, that they have to be attached. But with a lot of them, like Mitsy, like Cindy, like Maggie, they want sex and they don't have a man to call their own to give it to them. So therefore they go after the men who... let's say belong, for lack of a better term, to someone else. And men, they take almost any sex that is offered to them, especially in this environment. You are a perfect example." "Me?" "You," she said. "You are admittedly very attached to Chrissie and you try very hard to be faithful to her, don't you?" "I try," he said miserably, not failing to note the fact that he was lying naked atop another woman as he said this. "Paul is the same way," Michelle said. "He really does try to stay faithful to Janet. He loves her. I've seen them together and I know that they love each other, but even he can't resist it sometimes when one of these women throws herself at him. Just like Mitsy threw herself at you. Just like I did. If we know what we're doing, we can seduce you. Men cannot control their impulses. Men are not meant to be monogamous." "What?" he asked. "What the hell does that mean? Before the comet I never cheated on my wife, not even once. And believe me, I worked in a job where cheating on one's spouse was almost a badge of honor among your peers." "But you were tempted all the time, weren't you?" she asked. "Tempted," he said. "Of course I was tempted. But I never did it." "That is because you did not live in a society where women shamelessly threw themselves at you. You repressed your natural urge to couple with different women out of respect for your wife or fear of getting caught or whatever, but you did have the urge, didn't you?" "Yes," he said. "I did." "It's an urge that is biological and genetic in origin, so don't feel bad about it. Until the advent of modern religion and socialization, it was common for men to have multiple partners - harems if you will. The human male evolved with the urge to spread his seed and his genetic code to as many women as he could. That was how survival of the fittest worked. Those that were strong enough and powerful enough to amass enough women to breed with got to pass on their genes to the next generation. This was all very well documented. "Now over the years it has become socially unacceptable for a man to have multiple wives or partners - at least officially. The man's urge to couple with as many different females as possible was suppressed but it never went away. In fact, it never even faded. That was why we had a multi-billion dollar pornography industry that catered almost exclusively to men. That was why every city, every small town, every hole-in-the-wall shitbox that didn't even qualify as a town had some form of prostitution in it. That was why men were ten times as likely to routinely cheat on their wives than women were to cheat on their husbands. And that is why the men in this town are going completely apeshit now that they find themselves in a five to one woman to man ratio. It's a little like what they envisioned heaven being like I'd imagine." "Yes," Brett agreed. "I imagine that it is. But what does this have to do with you and me? I didn't want to cheat on Chrissie with Mitsy or with you." "Ahhh," she said, "but that's where you're wrong. You did want to cheat. You did want to have sex with us. This is evidenced by the simple fact that you did it. We may have seduced you to a certain degree, but you were a willing participant in both cases, were you not? Otherwise, you would not have attained an erection. It is not really possible for a woman to rape a man now, is it?" "Well... no. But..." "No buts," she said, giving his a playful slap. "You wanted to fuck me and you did it. I helped the process along but you went with it once I got you riled up. This doesn't mean you love Chrissie any less, it's just that you have the desire to be with other women and here in this town there are plenty of other women willing to give themselves to you. Under these circumstances I think that it's maybe a little naïve for a woman to expect her man to be completely faithful to her. I certainly wouldn't expect it of you. The best I could hope for is to control it to a certain degree, to make accommodations with it." "What kind of accommodations?" "I intend to continue having sex with you," she said. "I enjoyed it greatly and I do not wish for this to be a one time only thing." "What are you saying?" he asked. "I thought you didn't want to have an affair with me." "I don't want to have an affair with you," she said. "I want to be your woman. I want you to move into this house with me." "I can't do that," he said. "Didn't I make it clear from the start that I won't leave Chrissie?" "I'm not asking you to leave Chrissie," she replied. "I want her to move in here with us." That threw Brett for a complete loop. "You mean that you want to... share me with Chrissie?" "Exactly," she said. "That is my plan. We can work out the arrangements once we're all living together. Maybe I get to sleep with you one night and she gets to sleep with you the next. To tell you the truth, I'm not even opposed to us all sleeping together. I mean, what the hell, right?" He stared into her brown eyes for a moment, trying to detect signs of mental illness or comedy. He saw neither. Michelle was serious and sane. Or at least she thought that she was. "Well?" she said. "What do you think?" "I'm not sure what to think," he told her carefully. "Somehow, I just don't think that Chrissie would go for such a thing." "Not at first," she said. "But give her a little time and she'll see that it's the only way. If you two are left to your own devices, eventually your affair is going to be discovered no matter how secret you keep it. Like when she turns up pregnant for instance. Is that a distinct possibility at this point in time? I don't imagine that she was on the pill, was she? Nor do I imagine that you came hunting with a supply of condoms on you." "It is possible," Brett admitted. "Probable even. We really didn't think that we were going to live long enough to have to worry about that." "Understandable," Michelle said. "And even if she is not knocked up now, she will be eventually. And even if that doesn't happen, you won't be able to hide your relationship forever. When these women find out about it, Jessica will rile them up into a lynch mob that will run you out of town before the next sunset. You saw how she reacted with Stacy and Jason, and he's a boy." "And how does moving in with you prevent that?" he asked. "Are you saying that we should pretend that I'm with you and that Chrissie is just living with us? That doesn't help solve the pregnancy problem." "No," she said. "I'm saying that we should be open about what we're doing together. If I am a part of the equation that will help dampen the reaction of the other women from Jessica's influence. I'm certainly not as powerful a presence as she is in this town, but I do carry some weight and I am listened to. Most of these women saw me as somewhat of a celebrity before the comet because I used to write articles in their magazines. If I tell them that Chrissie is a woman capable of making her own choices, then they will be much more inclined to see reason than if you tell them that." "You really think that if you approve of it then they automatically will as well?" "Approve may be too strong of a word," she said. "Especially with the polygamy issue thrown in. It will be a lot for them to get used to in a short period of time. But I think that they will accept it enough to keep from throwing you out of town. You have to remember one thing, most of these women, be they shallow or not, don't like Jessica. They'll jump on her bandwagon if she's the only one that has one because jumping on bandwagons is what they like to do. I will provide an alternate bandwagon for them to jump onto, a much more sane bandwagon." "And what about the polygamy?" he asked. "What do you think they're going to do about that?" "They're going to have to accept it eventually if they want to survive," she said. "Polygamy is the only way that we're going to get the sex issue under control here. Now of course the women that have an official partner are not going to like it very much at all, but the women who do not, the women who are constantly sneaking around and having promises made to them and being humiliated time and time again - those women will embrace it enthusiastically. I guarantee it. And those women are, of course, in the majority. Now we cannot officially command polygamy in this town, you know that as well as I do, but we can keep anyone from being exiled for it as long as Paul maintains his dissenting vote. And I think he will. He's a man after all and I seriously doubt that he'll vote to banish anyone for that. So you, Chrissie, and I will have to be the first polygamous grouping. I'm hoping that the underlying discussion about the morality of Chrissie and you will help draw some of the fire away from the main issue of the three of us being together in the first place." "Wow," Brett said, rolling off of her and sitting up. His head was aching from the alcohol he had ingested and all of the information he was trying to ingest. "You certainly seem to have thought this all through pretty well." "Like I said," she told him with a smile, "I've been wanting to put this into motion for quite some time but I've been afraid to bring it up to you. After killing that guy this evening and then drinking all of that tequila, I finally found the courage. It was time to act." "So is all of this just a plan to help stabilize the town?" he asked her. "Because, quite frankly, I'm not too fond of being used as an example if that's the case. Nor do I think Chrissie would be terribly fond of it." She shook her head vehemently, her hand caressing his hair. "No," she said, "I'm not doing this only for the town, although I'll admit that's a big part of my actions. We must bring order to this place if we're going to survive. I'm doing this with you because I've got very strong feelings for you. I'm not sure if its love just yet, but at the very least it's a powerful infatuation. I like you, Brett. I enjoy being with you, talking to you, having sex with you. Tonight was the happiest I've been since the comet hit, and not just here in front of the fire either. While you held me outside the wall, while we spent time together in the supply room, those are cherished moments for me and they always will be no matter what happens." He leaned back against the wall, the heat from the fire caressing his naked skin. "This is too much to think about right now," he said. "I'm drunk, stoned, feeling like shit because I slept with you, and I'm not capable of making a rational decision at the moment." "You don't have to decide anything right now," she told him. "Sleep on it until tomorrow. But keep in mind that the wheels are in motion. No matter what you decide to do, everyone will know that you've been over here tonight. And also keep in mind that we have to switch over to a system of polygamy if we're going to survive. If we don't, everyone will perpetually be obsessed with sex and we'll screw ourselves to death." ------- He took a long walk around the town after he left Michelle's house, weaving in and out of the quiet residential streets, his way lit by the soft glow of firelight coming from the inhabited houses. It was very cold out, cold enough for him to see his breath. The rain pattered on the vinyl material of his rain slicker, some of it working its way to his face. He feet stomped through the perpetually flooded streets. The chill helped sober him completely up, clearing his head a little and allowing him to mull over all that had happened that day. He encountered no one on the streets as he took his walk, although twice he saw the perimeter guards making their rounds along the wall. He did not approach them and they did not see him, occupied as they were in talking to each other. He wondered what they were talking about. Him and Michelle? Stacy and Jason? Maybe a combination of both topics? That seemed entirely possible. Finally, close to 10:00, he made his way to the small house where he lived. He put his key into the lock and entered. The soft glow of the fireplace logs blazing away in the family room greeted him. He ducked under the clotheslines and made his way there, seeing that Chrissie was sitting cross-legged on the couch. She was dressed in her typical pajamas - a long flannel shirt that went to her knees - and it looked like she was crying. "Hi," he told her softly, making no move to approach her, very cognizant of the fact that he probably reeked of Michelle's body. She looked up at him but didn't say anything. "Is Jason still out?" he asked. "Yes," she replied. "I suppose you've heard about him and Stacy, haven't you?" "I have," he agreed. "Does it bother you?" "No," she said, seemingly disinterested in the whole subject. "Why should I care what he does?" She sniffed a little. "I'm happy for him." "Me too." Silence ruled for a moment; a very uncomfortable silence. Finally Chrissie broke it. "There are a lot of rumors going around tonight." "Oh?" he asked, knowing what she was going to say, seeing no way to avoid it. "Yes," she said, nodding sadly. "Stories about you and Michelle getting drunk in the supply room." "We did that," he said. "And that you went back to her house afterward with... with... with your arms around each other." He sighed, wanting more than anything to postpone this conversation at least twelve more hours. But that was not in the cards it seemed. "Yes," he said. "We did that as well." The tears began to flow again. "Did you... you..." "Sleep with her?" he asked. She nodded, unable to say the words. "Yes," he said, barely audibly. She began to tremble, her emotions flirting with a complete loss of control. Somehow she managed to maintain. "I guess that's it then," she said, wiping at a tear. "Chrissie," he said. "I'll move out as soon as they can find me my own house. Or are you going to move in with... with her?" "That's an option," he said. "There are others." "Just let me know when you figure it out," she said, a brief sob escaping from her. "Chrissie," he said. "I don't want to lose you. I want you to stay with me." "You sure have a funny way of showing it," she said, another sob exploding from her lips. "I'm not going to stay with you after what happened. How could you even say something like that?" "I love you," he said. "You're very special to me. We've been through hell together and I enjoy your company very much. I love you and I don't want to be without you." "Why are you saying this to me?" she yelled. "You go fuck some other woman and then you tell me that you love me?" He walked over at last and sat in the recliner across from her. "I've tried to be strong, Chrissie," he said. "I really have. After Mitsy that first night, I haven't touched anyone else. Nearly every unattached woman in this town has offered me her body and I didn't do it because of the way I feel about you. Now that probably wouldn't sound like much if we were back in civilization and everything was normal, but everything is not normal here. There are five women for every man in this town and every last one of them is attractive and looking for sex. I'm not sure you realize just what kind of pressure that puts on a mortal man like me." She was not impressed by this speech. "It looks like a little too much, doesn't it?" she said crossly. "Look, I don't know what you're trying to say here but it sounds a little like you want to keep fucking me while you fuck other women too. If that is what you're saying you can just forget it! I am not going to play that game. I will not live like that!" "Chrissie, I'm not able to withstand the temptation. I've tried as hard as I can, but I can't do it." "I'm not going to stay with you like that, Brett," she told him. "I won't!" "There is another way," he said. "Another way?" "We come to some sort of accommodation with it," he said, echoing Michelle's words from earlier. "Accommodation?" He took a deep breath and told her his suggestion. He explained about polygamy and how it was the only way to save the town from itself. He told how it would make their relationship a little more legitimate if Michelle were suddenly involved in it. He told how they could be out in the open with their love if only they allowed Michelle to be a part of it. She listened to his words, slack jawed, without interruption. And then, for the first time in her life, she slapped a man across the face. Following that she retreated to her room, slamming the door behind her hard enough to send a picture crashing to the carpet. Brett sat there after she left, his face stinging, his eye watering from the force of the blow. "Well," he said to himself. "That certainly went well." ------- Chrissie was assigned to guard position 1 the next morning, her shift to begin at 6:00 AM. She had been awake most of the night, alternately crying and fuming as she thought of what Brett had done to her and had suggested to her the night before. Of all the nerve! Had he really meant for her to take him seriously? Had he? Finally, exhausted, she had dropped into a troubled slumber at about 4:00 AM. At 4:45 the wind-up alarm clock she used began to deliver its obnoxious ringing to the dark room. She smacked it with her hand, silencing it, and then just lay there for a few minutes, feeling fatigue trying to pull her back down into the land of sleep. Why should she drag herself out of bed and go man a post for that cheating bastard? What did it get her? What had it done for her? She very nearly just let herself drift back to sleep but eventually her strong work ethic, instilled in her by her mother and father, forced her to put her feet on the floor and get up. Brett might be an asshole but the security division that he commanded served a much-needed purpose. The air was damp and chilly and she shivered as she put on a pair of jeans and a couple of heavy flannel shirts. She tied her blonde hair back in a loose ponytail and then strapped on the .45 pistol that she, like all of the other permanent members of the guard force, carried with her everywhere. She slipped on her boots and stepped out of her lonely bedroom, hearing the loud snores of Brett drifting through his own closed door. He was usually awake by now and he usually didn't snore when he was asleep. Looking down the hallway she saw that Jason's door was shut as well. So he had come back at some point during the night. Dismissing her roommates from her mind and stifling a yawn, she walked to the living room and pulled on her rain slicker. She buttoned it tightly and then slipped out the door into the pre-dawn blackness, her feet leading her to the community center by feel. Stacy gave her a plate of breakfast when she got there - corned beef hash and deep-fried potatoes - and a large cup of steaming coffee. Chrissie thanked her as politely as she could manage under the circumstances noting that the pregnant woman, though very tired looking, seemed to have a pleasant glow about her nonetheless. It was the glow of someone who had found a partner after a long time without one. Chrissie envied her. The two women did not talk to each other - Stacy nervous about what her new lover's sister might or might not think, Chrissie just too damn tired and upset. As she sat down at one of the empty tables her eyes found Michelle sitting three tables over, picking at her food more than eating it. Michelle, like Chrissie herself, looked a little worse for wear this morning. Chrissie had no pity for her. When their eyes met for a moment she glared at her until the other woman's eyes dropped in shame. Had she really considered that bitch her friend the day before? Had she really confided in her the story of her previous life and of the nightmares she sometimes had about the shooting on the other side of the bridge? She had trusted her and her trust had been betrayed in the most awful way. According to Brett, Michelle had known all along that the two of them were lovers. She had known that and still she had plotted to get Brett into bed with her. And now that she had had him she was offering to share him with her? To share? What kind of woman did she think Chrissie was? What kind of sicko was she? As far as Chrissie was concerned, that sick bitch could just have Brett. And good riddance! She ate all of her food and drank down her entire cup of coffee, feeling the caffeine take a little of the edge off her fatigue. She gave one last glare at Michelle, who refused to look back at her, and then carried her plate over to the cart. "Do you want some more coffee, Chrissie?" Stacy asked her hesitantly. "You look like you could use it this morning." Chrissie looked at her, knowing that Stacy was violating a rationing rule by offering a second cup. But she also knew that Jessica and Dale routinely helped themselves to as much coffee and other items from the kitchen as they pleased. "Sure," she said, grabbing her cup back off the cart and handing it to her. "Thanks." "Just be sure to bring the cup back at dinner. And don't rat me out." "I will and I won't," she promised, waiting as she waddled around the corner. A moment later she returned with a steaming cup of Starbucks house blend in her hand. She took it, thanked her, and then gave her a small smile of her own. "I heard about you and Jason," she said. Stacy gave her a nervous look. "Word travels fast, doesn't it?" "It certainly does," Chrissie said, knowing just by looking at her that Stacy knew about Michelle and Brett as well. "Is it serious?" "I think so," she said. "I asked him to move in with me. He told me that he would." "Good for both of you," she said, extending her hand and giving her a hug. "I guess that kind of makes you my sister-in-law now, doesn't it?" "I guess it does," she said, returning the hug. "I'm glad you're not... you know... mad or anything. You know, with me being so much older than him." "He's a big boy now," Chrissie said. "And I'm not his mom. What he does is none of my business." She gave a sour look. "I only wish the rest of the town felt that way. I envision some serious shit hitting the fan this morning over this." "I wouldn't worry too much," Chrissie said. "I mean, who gives a damn what people think?" "Not me, that's for sure," she said bravely. "I just get a little bummed about how self-righteous they all are, you know? Why should they care about it? What possible difference does it make to them? So he's fourteen. He's a very mature fourteen and I like him a lot. And its not like the rest of the men were beating down my door anyway, were they? This is a bad place and time to be a girl. There isn't much for a pregnant twenty year-old from out of town around here. You need to take what love you're offered and Jason offered." Chrissie looked at her carefully for a moment and then said her good-byes. As she left the community center and headed for her post, Stacy's words were echoing in her mind. ------- "This meeting is hereby called to order," Jessica said in her loud, nasal voice. She then rapped the gavel she insisted on utilizing in meetings upon her desk, sending sharp sound waves across the room. It was 8:30 AM and Brett was hungover. His head ached dully, pulsating in sickening waves that came and went with the beating of his heart. Despite the two liters of water that he had swallowed down before leaving the house, his mouth was dry as a desert and craving more. His stomach was perhaps the worst. He had drunk all of that tequila the night before on an empty stomach and now his stomach was making him regret it. It rolled and rolled in a sea of nausea, constantly threatening to either rebel upward or downward but never quite following through. For perhaps the hundredth time in the twenty years that he had been drinking, he gave a solemn vow that he would never do it again. "Mr. Adams," Jessica intoned sharply, noting that he was looking very intently at a spot upon his desk. "Are you with us this morning?" "Yeah," he said, looking up at her with his reddened eyes. "But could you chill with the gavel? Just for this meeting?" "It's not my fault you were drinking up all of the stores in our supply room last night," she told him. "Now, can we commence with the topic of the meeting?" "Sure," Brett mumbled, wishing he could go back to bed. "Fire away." Dale and Paul, both of whom were at their own desks, also gave their consent to begin. "Very well," she said. "The reason I called this emergency meeting has probably already reached everyone's ears by way of the rumor mill. I know that Mr. Adams has heard of it since I personally informed him last night. Of course he chose not to do anything about the matter and he even threatened me if I tried to put a stop to it. I would like to address that issue as well after we address the main issue." "Jess," Paul said. "Could we just get to the point here? Are you talking about Stacy and Jason?" "Yes I am," she said, leaning forward. "It came to my attention last night that the two of them were seen leaving the community center after dinner clean up and that they went back to Stacy's assigned house." "It came to your attention because you had them followed," Brett said. "And that is an issue that I would like to address later." Jessica ignored him and went on. "Now we have no way of knowing exactly what went on behind those closed doors," she said. "But I think we all have a pretty good idea of what it was. Jason did not emerge from that house until nearly 11:30 last night. He..." "I thought I told you to call off your spy last night," Brett interrupted. "You were in no condition to give such orders," she said. "You were drunk and not using good judgment. I used my own judgment and kept watch." "Jessica," Paul said. "I don't think you should be following our citizens around and spying on them. That is very secret police kind of stuff." "I was trying to prevent a potential crime," she said. "A crime?" Paul said. "Having sex with a minor is a crime!" she nearly screamed. "For goodness sake, am I the only one who knows this?" "I know it," Dale said. Nobody acknowledged or even looked at him. "It is my proposal," Jessica said, "that we bring that hussy in here and that we bring that young man in here and that we interrogate them to find out exactly what went on in that house last night." "Interrogate them?" Brett said, looking up at the ceiling pleadingly. "Oh please." "How can you not be concerned about this?" she demanded of Brett. "He's living in your house. You're the one that's closest to him!" "If you can tell me what kind of harm has come to him as a result of Stacy boffing him, then I'll be glad to be concerned about it." "He's a fourteen year old boy," she said. "He needs to be protected from sluts like her." "Why?" Brett asked. "Like I told you last night, Jason is old enough to man a guard post and kill intruders when he has to. I see no reason why we should concern ourselves with his sex life." "He's not supposed to be having a sex life," Jessica said. "He's not old enough to understand the ramifications and complexities of it." "Are you afraid he might knock her up?" Paul, who was smoking a cigarette, asked seriously. "Don't downplay the seriousness of this," she told him, pointing an angry finger. "He's not old enough to make the decision of whether or not to have sex. What that woman did is statutory rape!" Brett sighed, sipping from the coffee cup in front of him. He set it down. "Perhaps you've noticed Jess, that we don't really live in a perfect world anymore. In a perfect world, or even in an imperfect one similar to the one we had a few months ago, I would tend to agree with you. I would probably find some fault with a twenty-year-old woman seducing a fourteen-year-old boy. But we had civilization then, didn't we? We had police and courts and armies and navies to keep everything civil. Boys Jason's age didn't have to kill people in order to survive. They didn't have to watch their parents murdered right in front of them and then leave them where they lie for the scavengers to eat. They didn't have to learn to be infantry soldiers in a hostile environment in a matter of two days just so they could keep drawing breath. Am I starting to make a point to you here?" "Just because he's been through a lot," she said, "does not make him a man." "Actually," Paul said, "I believe that it does. I go to sleep at night and I feel secure because I know that Jason is watching over this town for me. He is one of the best guards we have here. I've seen him work. He is a man and it is my opinion that he is able to make decisions like a man. If he wants to have sex with Stacy or with any other woman in town that offers it to him, than I certainly am not going to try to stop him." "Nor will I," Brett said, "take any security measures to prevent him from doing as he pleases in this relationship. It is his choice and his choice alone and frankly, we have no business putting our noses into it." Jessica ignored what they were saying, not wanting to hear it. She had made up her mind that something needed to be done and it was going to be done. "There's a motion on the table," she said, pounding her gavel again. "The motion is whether or not Stacy and Jason should be brought in and subjected to interrogation regarding what may have transpired in her assigned house last night, the purpose of which is to determine whether or not a crime has been committed. I vote aye on the motion." "As do I," Dale said, as automatically as a computer program. "Nay," Paul said in disgust. "It's two to one," Jessica said. "The motion passes. Brett, will you bring them in please?" He rubbed his temple for a moment, trying to will the headache away. "If we conduct this interrogation," he said, trying a new tack, "what rules are we going to use?" "Rules?" she said. "What if they don't want to answer any questions?" he asked. "Do they still have Fifth Amendment rights? What if they want a lawyer? Are we going to provide one for them? If we do, what are we using as law? Are we talking about the California State penal code here, or what?" "They will answer any questions that are posed of them," Jessica said. "That's how it will work." "And suppose they don't? How are you going to force them? Surely you're not suggesting that I torture them, are you?" "No, but..." "And what if they do confess their sins?" he asked next. "What if they do that? What if they say, yes, we fucked our goddamn brains out all night long. What then? Are you going to try to expel her?" "Of course," she said. "That would be the punishment for statutory rape." "Paul?" Brett asked, "Would you vote to expel Stacy for that?" "No," he said. "I am in agreement that what goes on between those two is none of our business." "The vote to exile someone has to be unanimous. Paul will vote no. So she cannot be expelled from the town for this," Brett said. "We know that going in, don't we? So what the hell is the point of interrogating them if nothing can come of it?" "If we can't agree to exile her," Jessica said, "we can at least order her to stay away from him." "And what if she doesn't?" Paul asked, picking up the thread of where he was going. "What are you going to do then? Assign her to kitchen duty? You can't, she's already on it permanently. Are you going to confine her to her house? That will just give her more time to meet with him, not to mention that the kitchen won't run very well without her. Don't you see what Brett is saying, Jess? There is nothing that can be done about this! Whether you agree with it or not, you cannot stop it!" This seemed to get through to her a little bit. For the first time her face showed doubt. Since she was in doubt, she returned to a track that was very much loved by her. "Well if Paul would just vote to exile her, we wouldn't be in the quandary that we're in now. The same goes for the other fornicators in town!" "I'm not going to resume that argument," Paul said tiredly. "I will not vote to exile someone for sexual impropriety. Period! That includes Stacy for allegedly having relations with Jason, which, I would like to state one more time for the record, I do not believe is something we should concern ourselves with in the first place." "Nevertheless," Jessica insisted, "a vote has been taken and a resolution has been passed. The committee has ruled that they will be brought in for interrogation and that needs to be done. We will discuss what action to take after." "Yeah," Dale said, nodding strenuously. "So bring them in, Brett." "Jesus fucking Christ," Brett exclaimed. "What are you two doing here?" "We are conducting town business," Jessica told him. "Now will you carry out the resolution of the committee and go get them or should we relieve you of your duties for insubordination?" "Jessica, Dale," he asked, fighting to keep his voice reasonable. "How much food do we have in this town?" "I don't see what..." "How much?" Jessica clucked a little bit. "You know as well as I do that we have about two months worth." "And what are you and your committee doing about this problem? How much discussion time have you dedicated to solving this impending shortage?" "What?" "I'll tell you how much," he said. "I listen to these meetings every goddamn day and you have dedicated less than twenty minutes since I've been here discussing the food shortages. Less than twenty minutes! And have you found a solution to this problem? No, you have not. Every time it comes up you vote to shelf the discussion after a preliminary review of it and then you move on to some aspect of the townspeople's personal lives. You sit in here and argue about fornication and bath rations and clothing distribution and who deserves to be placed on wood gathering detail because they've offended you and a hundred other things that are completely inconsequential to our survival. Do you realize that we're all going to starve to death if we don't find food pretty soon? Do you fucking realize that?" "You are out of line," Dale said, leaning forward threateningly. "I agree," Jessica said, pointing her finger again. "It is not your place to tell us what to discuss in the committee meeting. You are only here as a courtesy. Now I'll ask you once again to go get Stacy and Jason and bring them here. Do it now or you will be relieved of your duties." "Christ," he muttered, standing up. "All right," he said. "Let's get this shit over with." They were brought in one by one and sat down in chairs before the committee. Jason was first. Brett told him on the way over to tell the truth and answer all of their questions. He did this, speaking nervously and avoiding any graphic detail but telling the basics of what had transpired the night before. Jessica tried to pry at him a few times to elicit more detail but Jason balked when things got too personal, telling her that it wasn't her business. Strangely enough, she seemed to respect this. With Stacy she was much less restrained. Her questions were biting, bordering on outright abuse. Several times Brett and Paul had to gang up on her to get her to tone it down a little. The interrogation almost reduced poor Stacy to tears but she answered the questions as truthfully as Jason had, confirming completely that, yes, sexual relations has occurred, and that yes, they had every intention of continuing to make them occur. "Did you realize that you were committing statutory rape?" Jessica asked her, glaring at her like a veteran cop questioning a murderer. "Did you realize you're violating child labor laws by having him work as guard?" Stacy shot right back, increasing her respect level with Brett and Paul considerably, but infuriating Jessica. "You are not the one asking the questions here, little missy," she told her. The interrogation of Stacy was followed by a committee vote on her fate in her presence. Jessica moved that they exile her from the community but this was defeated by Paul's nay vote failing to make it unanimous. Jessica then moved that they order her to cease and desist all contact with Jason on threat of banishment. This was voted in successfully since majority ruled but Stacy defiantly told them that she would not abide by it and that furthermore, Jason was going to be moving into her house. "He will do no such thing," Jessica told her angrily. "If you caught in the presence of that boy one more time, you will be banished!" "No she won't," Paul reminded her. "Because I still will not vote for it." "You won't have to," Jessica said. "We won't need a vote since we have already voted that the punishment for violating the order is banishment." This led to a lengthy and often angry discussion on whether or not Jessica and Dale were allowed to circumvent the system in that manner. It was an argument that Paul eventually won when he threatened to enlist the aid of the rest of the township. "Do you really think they'll support this hussy for violating Jason?" Jessica asked when he first brought this up. "Do you really?" "Maybe not in this particular matter," Paul said. "But when I explain to them that this same technique, once a precedent is set, could be used against anyone in town, they might have different ideas. Remember all of those women you threatened to banish for fornication? The ones that were saved by my one vote? How do you think they'll feel when I tell them that if they support you on this that they'll be next?" Again, Jessica's will was outmaneuvered. Stacy was released with a stern warning that her activities with Jason were expressly forbidden and that she was not to continue with them. But she had also been as much as told that there was nothing the committee could do about it if she elected to keep seeing him. As she went out the door Brett, unable to help himself, called to her. She turned to look and he asked: "Do you think Jason will need some help moving his things over to your house tomorrow?" She smiled, giving him a look that told him he had an ally for life. "He might," she said. "He's accumulated quite a bit from what I hear. We're planning on getting him moved in during my break between lunch and dinner." "I'll help him carry things then," Brett said. "See you then." "I'll help too," Paul replied. "Now wait just a minute!" screamed Jessica. "Bye, Stacy," Paul said, waving at her with his fingers. "Thank you for your cooperation." Over Jessica's continued protests, she walked out the door and disappeared. "What in the hell do you two think you're doing?" Jessica yelled, turning on them. "How dare you mock a ruling of this committee like that! Especially you, Paul. You're a member of it!" "I'm just doing what I think is right," Paul told her, lighting another cigarette. "That's what I always said I would do when I took this job." "How can you think encouraging rape is right?" she demanded. "Are you sick?" "We've already had this argument, Jess," he said, bored with the whole thing. "I'm not going to rehash it anymore." "Well we'll just see what the community has to say about all of this," she told him. "I'm going to talk to every person in town and tell them what happened between those two. My guess is that they'll demand her exile by the end of the night. You've used that very argument with me when it came to this man." She pointed at Brett. "Let's just see how you like having the same thing happen to you." She turned to Dale. "Come on," she told him. "Let's get started." They got up and headed for the door in a huff, slamming it behind them as they left. "So I guess the meeting is adjourned then?" Brett asked. "It would seem so," Paul answered, taking a particularly deep drag of his smoke. Brett looked at his watch, a trusty Timex that had managed to outlive the civilization of Earth. "Two hours we've been in here," he said wonderingly. "And what have we accomplished? Nothing. We have no plans to get more food or beef up defenses or make our overall operation more efficient. We've spent two hours making a worthless ruling that cannot be enforced." Paul smiled. "Welcome to Garden Hill," he said. "That's what we'll be telling the invaders when they come," Brett said, standing up. "I'm gonna go get some water and then I'm gonna go make my check on the guards. The one I should've done more than an hour ago." "Enjoy yourself," Paul said. "I'm gonna sit in here and smoke cigarettes and wait for the next fight to erupt." ------- Brett, on the maps that he had made of the surrounding area, had named it Hill 1557. The number, in military mapping tradition, he had assigned based upon the altitude of its summit above sea level expressed in meters instead of feet, a figure he had discovered by using an altimeter accessory from one of the SUVs in town. It was the hill that he wanted to utilize to guard the north and east sections of town, the one that Jessica and Dale had voted down. As Brett walked from the community center to the current guard posts one by one, he was in plain view of the two observers that were atop the hill. They were hiding behind the very outcroppings of rock that Brett had wanted to dig a guard bunker next to, only they were on the opposite side, looking towards town instead of away from it. They were dressed in thick hunting clothes patterned with forest camouflage colors and they were armed with hunting rifles and pistols. Neither one of them was starving or even particularly hungry. They each had a pair of high power binoculars that they used to examine the Garden Hill suburb and the activity within it. "That's the guy that was with the bitch that shot Ken," one of the men said, his binoculars showing just enough of Brett's face to make the identification. "Yep," said the other man, who was also examining him. "Sure looks like him." "That's him. I wonder where he's going." They continued to watch as Brett walked through the streets of town towards the wall, making left turns and right turns, occasionally disappearing for a few moments behind one of the houses and then reemerging on the other side. "He looks like he's heading for that guard post on the east side," said the first man. "The one in that two-story." "Looks like it," the second agreed. "But he ain't got no rifle. Just a pistol and a radio." "I haven't seen that many rifles," the first said. "Maybe they ain't got that many." "They had a fuckin M-16 to kill Ken with, didn't they? And that guy was packing a goddamn AK." "True," the first said, concentrating deeply. "They must just keep them in the guard posts. If so, that'll make things real easy for us." "Yep." They watched. The first man was John Kramer. He was thirty-two years old and had made his living before the comet by being a hunting and fishing guide in the high Sierras. For a fee he would lead groups out into the woods and guarantee them a deer or a bear or whatever else it was that they were trying to bag (even if it meant straying a little bit into the National Forest area). His customers had mostly been city folks with more money than brains, people who would get lost if they were allowed to wander more than a hundred yards off the road without supervision. He had been leading such a group - seven men from Santa Rosa - when the impact occurred and had been more than twenty miles from the small cabin fifteen miles east of Garden Hill where he had lived. That he had been away from his home at the time of impact was somewhat of an irony, an amusing one even depending upon who you talked to. John had been a survivalist, a man who had prepared all of his adult life for the impending collapse of civilization. His cabin had been built ten years before on a carefully chosen five-acre plot. Beneath it had been a bomb shelter capable of housing him for more than a month in the event of nuclear fallout blowing over from the Sacramento area. He had considered minimum stock of food and water supplies to be a thousand cans of various meats and vegetables and sixty gallons of fresh drinking water. He had had more than twenty guns of varying caliber and size, and enough ammo to fight off a battalion of infantry. And he had not been home when the comet had hit. By the time he and his ragtag group of city hunters had made their way back to his cabin they had found it occupied by another group of hunters. From the dead and rotting bodies scattered around out front and the multiple bullet holes in all of the windows and in much of the wall surface, it was apparent that the cabin had been the scene of many vicious gunfights. How many times it had changed hands before John made it back there, he would never know since none of the hunters inside survived his group's attack to retake it. When they made their way inside and took stock of what was left they found less than a hundred cans of food and less than two hundred rounds of ammunition. The booze that he had stockpiled carefully over the course of several years had all been gone as had his stock of dried deer jerky. But, as much of a blow as losing his food and ammo had been, at least he was back in possession of the cabin itself. He had quickly organized his hunting group into a fairly efficient security force capable, under his direction, of holding off any more such attacks and even, eventually, of carrying out raids of their own. Though John did not particularly like having to attack others for food and needed supplies, he did not shy away from doing it. Nor did his team members when it was explained to them that it was either do that or die. They had forged out into the surrounding mountainside day after day, attacking bands of other hunters or raiding houses that were still standing and occupied. Though this portion of the mountains was not heavily populated, there had been people living there. One by one, day-by-day, John and his men had picked the area clean. Along the way they had met up with another group of eight hunters and a guide, a man that John had known and respected, if not exactly liked, for quite some time. That man was Bill Blades, the man next to him on the hill. When it had come down to a choice between fighting each other or merging their efforts, they had wisely chosen the latter option. Bill too had been out with a group of hunters, though in a different section of the mountains, when the impact had occurred. Unlike John however, Bill had not lived in the mountains, instead choosing the flatlands outside of Loomis down in the valley to call home. As such he was glad to take the second-in-command slot when John offered it in exchange for stable shelter. Bill, like Brett and company, had discovered that sleeping outside every night was not terribly fun. Since joining forces the group of seventeen had been the terror of every small group of survivors within thirty square miles. They had ranged further and further from the cabin that they used as base, attacking any group smaller or less formidable looking then themselves, and taking whatever supplies, no matter how small, they happened to have. Though they had managed to keep themselves fairly well fed up until now, things had finally reached the point where there simply wasn't anyone else to attack. All of the spare food in all of the standing houses had been consumed. All of the hunters and other folks in the woods without a means to acquire more food had died of starvation. That was what finally forced them to Garden Hill. The group had known about the survivors of Garden Hill for quite some time of course. It could hardly escape their attention that a large group of people was sequestered inside the walls of the fancy subdivision. The problem with trying to attack Garden Hill was that there were just too many people in there to make such an attack worth risking. Or at least that had been the argument used when there had still been other, less protected pickings to go after. But now, with their rations down to less than a week's worth and nothing else in sight, John and Bill had made the decision that it was time to give it a go. They had watched the town for a day or two, trying to learn the routines within it before they made a move. Unfortunately they had watched from the edge of the hilly ground in front of the north wall instead of climbing the hill that they were now on. After noting that those who approached the wall were driven off with gunshots, they had probed the defenses using their own people, deliberately approaching the wall at various points to both identify the guard positions and to try to find holes in the coverage. They had thought that they'd found such a hole. Two times in two consecutive days one of the group had been able to walk right up to the northern wall on the western side of it. There had been no gunshots, no challenge, no apparent detection of any kind. Though they had marveled that the Garden Hill people would be so dumb as to leave this section open, they had counted it as a blessing and made plans to exploit it. And then things had gone wrong. They had sent Ken Staten - a CPA from Santa Rosa who had turned into quite a mountain man since the comet - to the wall to try to get inside. The plan had been for Ken to hide along the wall until dark and then to slip inside and do a quick recon of their community center defenses. He was then supposed to slip back out again before sunrise and report what he had found so that they could plan a full-scale attack for the next night. But Ken had been seen somehow as he had been crouched in his hiding place and the rest of the group had watched from the hills three hundred yards away. A man, the man that they were now looking at walking towards the wall, and a woman, both armed with assault rifles, had appeared less than ten minutes after Ken had positioned himself and they had shot him dead where he stood. It had been much too quick and they had moved much too carefully to have been a routine patrol of the outside perimeter. Besides, there had been no previous patrols of the outside that they'd seen. Someone had spotted him. Somewhere was a guard position that they had not seen. Where was it? And why hadn't it spotted the earlier probes? They could have no way of knowing that their earlier probes had not been spotted because the guards that had been responsible for spotting them had either been having sex or just plain not looking. "Look at that," John said, watching as Brett entered a two-story house near the northwest corner of the wall. "He's going in there. Do you think that's the guard position?" Both men watched the house intently for a few minutes. Now that attention had been called to the structure, they noticed that the upstairs window was open and unscreened. Looking closer they were able to make out shadows of several people inside, moving about and conversing with each other. "Son of a bitch," Bill said, continuing to watch. "That is a guard position. That has to be where they spotted Ken from. He wasn't more than a hundred yards or so from it when he made his move." "I think you're right," John agreed sadly. "I wonder if there's any more." "Why don't we watch 'em for another day or so and try to find out." John thought this over. "We'll do it for one more day," he finally said. "We'll get someone up here from first light to dusk. But we have to hit them pretty soon if we're gonna do it. We don't have enough food left to be fucking around watching them for days. They look pretty soft as long as we can get in and take them by surprise." "Hit 'em at breakfast?" Bill suggested. "Most of 'em will be in the community center where we can keep 'em under control." John nodded thoughtfully. "I like it," he said. "If those two guard positions on the north are all there is for this side - and I suspect that they are - it'll be easy to take them out. Sneak inside at night when they can't see us and divide into two groups. We can synchronize our watches and hit both of those northern guard positions at exactly the same time with Raid-bombs before they can call for help. Then we'll be able to get to the community center in force without being detected. If we can get the whole group there intact without them knowing about us, we can take it without firing a shot. Get a couple of those big-ass trucks that they drive here and load up as much food as we can carry. Then we scoot the hell out of there." "What about the women?" Bill asked. "There's a lot of 'em in that town. It's been a long time since we've had any women." John smiled. "I don't think they'll miss 'em if we take one woman for each of us. I don't think they'd miss 'em at all." They continued to watch. ------- On the west side of the subdivision, across the highway and about two miles north of the bridge, was a hill that Brett had also pegged as an ideal guard position. Hill 1519 it was called on Brett's maps and it commanded an impressive view of the entire western wall and a good portion of the northern. Had the three men atop it been members of the Garden Hill guard force and facing to the west, they would have been able to spot anyone approaching the town from that direction before they could get closer than half a mile away. But the three men were not looking west, towards the town approaches, they were looking east, towards the town. They too had noted Brett's entrance into the guard position. They also noted it when he came back out fifteen minutes later. "There he is," Stu said, peering with his own pair of binoculars. "He's coming back out." "I see him," Lieutenant Bracken replied, staring through his own set of binoculars as the man began heading south down the street outside the house. He took a good look and then handed the glasses to the man next to him, a man that Brett, Chrissie, and Jason had once given two cans of turkey chili to. "Take a look," he told him. "Is that the guy?" He took the binoculars nervously and peered through them, trying to get a good look at the man's face as it moved slowly away. Hill 1519 was much closer to Brett than the other hill and therefore his view was much better than John and Bill's had been. "That's him," he said confidently. "That's the guy that gave us the food. He cut his beard off but I'd recognize that face anywhere." "Are you sure?" Bracken said. "Tell me if you're not." "I'm sure," he said. "He was the one with those two kids." "And they had M-16 rifles with them?" Stu asked. "You're sure about that?" "Well I guess I am," he said, irritated. "When someone points a fuckin' rifle like that at you it's something you kinda tend to remember." "Then that's the guy," Stu said. "That's the motherfucker that took out four of my guys. It has to be. No other way that group would've had three M-16 rifles unless they took them from my guys." Bracken wasn't completely sure that they weren't mistaken, but he kept his opinion to himself on that matter. "I thought you said he'd be smart," he told Stu. "This defense they got set up around here sure don't look very smart to me. In fact, it looks pretty fuckin' pathetic. They should sittin' on this hill right here." Stu had to admit that he had a point. "You ain't shittin, boss," he said. "Keeping your lookouts inside the wall is a good way to get buttfucked. Maybe he ain't as smart as I thought. Maybe he just got lucky with my guys." "Maybe," Bracken said. "In any case, he's just making our job easier. It should be a pretty easy to take this town when the time comes." "Why don't we just do it now?" Stu asked. "We have a platoon here. Shouldn't be too hard to do." Bracken considered this for a few moments. "No," he finally said. "We're in no hurry. We stick with the plan. We'll watch them for a few days and see how they operate. Then we'll go back to Auburn and bring a whole company when its time to attack. That's how you win battles; with numerical superiority and superior planning. There's no sense rushing and taking casualties. Remember how we took Colfax? Not a single man hurt." "I suppose," Stu said, watching as Brett disappeared behind a house. "But the sooner that man is gone, the better for all of us. Remember, he's dangerous." ------- Chapter 7 Just across the road from the main gate of the Garden Hill subdivision was the hilly, wooded area where the community gathered most of its firewood. Many of the trees here had been knocked down by the high winds that had occurred the first few days after the impact. Every day a work crew of five or six people, mostly women but always with an armed man to guard them, spent a few hours hacking away at these trees with chainsaws and axes. Though the women had protested vehemently at first that such a thing was "man's work", they quickly warmed to the idea when it was realized that the average shift of a wood gatherer was only about three hours in length. About an hour after the meeting in the community center broke up, while Brett was marching from guard post to guard post to check on the state of his people, this day's crew was in full operation. A Dodge Ram pickup that had once belonged to Brenda's husband was parked with it's nose facing back towards the gate and chunks of pine were being loaded into the back of it, piece by piece after they were cut. There were five women today pulling the duty, all of them town women, and one man, who sat behind the truck and kept an eye on things. Jessica was also out there, a rare appearance since she made it a point to never venture outside the walls. She was talking to the three women who were carrying the chunks of wood from the pile to the truck, following them from one place to the other but not offering to don a pair of work gloves and lend a hand. "I'm telling you," she told them, "that hussy actually admitted she was having sex with that poor boy. She confessed it to us right there in the meeting. Can you believe that?" They could believe it. "I told you," one of the women said knowingly to a companion. "That little bitch is shameless. Absolutely shameless." The companion shook her head sadly (although secretly wondering just what it would be like to have sex with a fourteen-year-old). "I knew she was a slut," she said as if in disgust. "But I didn't think anyone was that slutty. Shocking." There were some more comments tossed back and forth between the four of them, all of them disapproving at what Stacy had done. The word "bitch", "slut", "hussy", and even that most hated word among those of the female species: "cunt" were used with increasing frequency. Finally Candice, or Candy as she was known, broached the subject that Jessica had really wanted addressed. "So what are we going to do with her?" she asked. "Is she going to be exiled?" "I would certainly hope so," one of the others put in. The rest then echoed this sentiment. "She will not be banished, or even punished for that matter," Jessica said sadly, shaking her head as if a great travesty of justice was taking place. "She won't?" they cried. "What do you mean?" "Paul won't vote to exile her," she said. "I tried and I tried to get him to see reason but he just won't do it. I tried to explain to him that this was a crime. That it was rape. He just kept saying he didn't see anything wrong with it and he wasn't going to do anything about it." "Unbelievable," Candy said. The rest of the group agreed with her. "He's been influenced by Brett too much," Jessica told them. "I'm telling you, Paul does whatever Brett tells him to do and votes however Brett wants him to vote. Brett may as well be the one who is on the committee, that's how much influence he has over him. So anyway, Paul kept us from being able to exile that bimbo like we all know she should be, and now she's going to walk away scott free and be allowed to just keep molesting him all she wants." This declaration caused a fresh outburst of anger. "Do you mean that nothing is going to be done about it?" someone asked. "Nothing at all?" "Nothing," Jessica confirmed. "There's nothing that we can do. We can't very well put her on kitchen duty, can we? Of course I moved that we at least order her to stay away from him." "I would hope so," Candy said righteously. "And of course Dale and I both voted yes, which means that she has a committee order telling her to stay away from that young man. But she told us herself that she won't do it and there's nothing we can do to stop her. Paul said he won't vote to exile her no matter what and there isn't anything else we can do to her for punishment. Not that anything less than exile would be acceptable anyway." "So you can't do anything about it?" the woman next to Candy asked as she dropped a log into the truck. "We just have to put up with her doing... doing that to him?" "It looks that way," Jessica agreed sadly. "Unless..." "Unless what?" they all wanted to know. "Well this is just an idea," she said mysteriously, as if it wasn't something really worth mentioning. "What?" they all demanded of her. "Well," she said, speaking slowly as if this was just occurring to her that moment. "It seems to me that the will of the community should take precedence over a committee meeting, shouldn't it? I mean, that's how Brett and his friends got to stay here in the first place. The committee voted that we wouldn't let him stay, but we put it to a community vote and the ruling was changed. Why shouldn't that same thing apply to banishing that slut? If the community agrees that she should go, then she should go, right?" This darkened the expressions of three of the women present. These were three that had been either caught at or suspected of fornicating with an attached man - an offense that Jessica wished people expelled for. But before the thought that what she was suggesting could one day be turned against them was even fully formed, Jessica covered that particular loophole. "Now you'd have to understand," she said, "that it should take more than a simple majority vote to overturn a committee decision. Particularly for something as drastic as exiling someone. I would think that nothing less than a two-thirds majority would do for something like that." "Two thirds?" "Two-thirds," she said. "Like when they tried to impeach Clinton, remember? If two out of every three people of voting age in this town say that that pregnant hussy should be exiled for what she's doing, then that should be what happens." There was a momentary pause as everyone went over this thought in their head, their minds doing some quick addition. Though there were probably enough people against what Stacy had done to get her thrown out of town using that rule, the same ratio would not hold up when it came to simple fornication. The people most against the act of sleeping with another woman's partner were the women who had the partners, or roughly, twenty-one of them. Twenty-one was not even a simple majority, let alone two-thirds. There did not seem to be any danger involved in supporting this plan. "That sounds like a pretty good idea, Jess," Candy said carefully, still trying to find the hidden loopholes that Jessica was so famous for. "Yes," one of the others put in. "I think the town would go for something like that." "It gives us a little more power," said another. Jessica smiled, knowing that she had them. "I think it's a good idea too," she said. "I'm going to propose this amendment at the next committee meeting tomorrow morning. Now I don't know how Dale or Paul are going to vote, but I'm certainly going to say aye to a rule allowing the community to overturn a decision." "And what if it passes?" Candy asked, already knowing, as did everyone else present, that it was as good as passed as long as it was only a majority committee vote and not a unanimous one. "Are you going to use it to throw her out?" "You bet your butt," she said. "We'll have a community meeting at dinner tomorrow night and have a vote on it. If two-thirds of the people want her out, then she'll be walking across the bridge the next morning." They all grinned as they thought of this, as they envisioned Stacy waddling across the canyon out into the forest beyond the bridge. They all thought that would be a sweet sight to see, that hussy being ejected from their town, although none of them could have told you just why that would be a sweet sight. Jessica left them to their work a few minutes later, knowing that those five women would vote the way she wanted them to. With a smile she reentered the subdivision and found her way back to the community center. Outside was a work-crew of four, also staffed exclusively with town women, that was tending the fires that heated bath and cooking water. "Hi, Jess," they greeted with mixed levels of enthusiasm. Though she was valued as a gossip source and a leader, they did not like her personally. "Hi, girls," she said, putting back on her solemn expression. She gathered them around her and then began to speak, her topics neutral at first. Within two minutes however, the subject of Jason and Stacy was brought up, giving her an opening. "It's interesting that you should mention that hussy," she said, putting her angry expression on. "We had a meeting about that just this morning." "You did?" she was asked. "Of course," she said. "After I found out that that young man had been in the hussy's house half the night, I certainly wasn't going to let the issue drop." "So what happened?" they inquired. "Well," she said, settling down into storytelling mode, "we brought the two of them in for questioning about just what happened in there. And guess what they said?" "What?" And so the story was told again, to the shock of the latest bunch. Just like with the wood-gathering crew before, they fumed and cursed about the outrage of Stacy's actions and then asked what was being done about it. When told that nothing was being done about it, they demanded to know why. When told why, they ranted for a few more minutes about the injustice of it all and then Jessica slyly slipped in the suggestion about the two-thirds majority rule. As before, after a few uneasy worries were soothed, the idea was embraced with enthusiasm. From the fire-tending crew, she moved on to the childcare crew. From there, she moved on somewhere else. She figured that she would be able to talk to every woman in town by 2:30, which would give her more than enough time to catch her afternoon nap. ------- Guard position 4 was located in the top story of one of the abandoned houses in the southeast corner of the subdivision. Except for the bridge lookout, it was the most isolated of all the posts, far away from any of the occupied houses. It watched over the rough hills between the eastern wall and the sheer impassible cliffs beyond them. It was a post that would have been obsolete had Brett been allowed to station guards on Hill 1557, but for now, it was manned and on this day Michelle and Maria Sanchez had the duty. At 3:30 Brett made his visit to the post after making the twenty-five minute walk to it from the community center. He found Maria and Michelle seated before the window in card table chairs, a pair of binoculars, their walkie-talkie, and a game of gin rummy laid out on the end table between them. Leaning against the table was the high-powered rifle that every guard position had and one of the AK-47s. "Good afternoon," Brett greeted them as he entered the room and sat down on the bed. "Hi, Brett," Michelle greeted, offering him a friendly smile. Maria too gave him a semi-cordial greeting. Unlike many of the town women, Maria, who was Hector's official woman, was used to hard work and didn't complain much about being assigned to the detail. As such she did not seem to have as many hard feelings for Brett as others did. He made small talk with them for a few moments, asking them how their shift was going. They reported that they had not seen a single person all day, making it nearly two straight weeks since a straggler was last spotted from this particular position. Soon Maria, who had heard the rumors about Brett and Michelle, sensed that her presence was not exactly wanted at the moment. She announced that she was going to go out on the front porch for a cigarette and got up, disappearing down the stairway. "So how are you feeling today?" Michelle asked once she was gone. "Like shit," he said honestly. "My first post-comet hangover. A historical moment indeed." "Me too," she said. "I forgot how miserable I felt after drinking until this morning. Now I remember. But what I meant was how do you feel about what happened last night? And what we talked about last night?" "Oh," he said with a sigh. "That how do I feel." "That's the one." "I don't really know," he told her after a moment. "My mind is having a hard time convincing me that you were serious about what you suggested." "I was serious," she said. "I suppose I could now tell you that it was the alcohol talking, but it wasn't. The alcohol just gave me the courage to bring it up. The idea itself was conceived and perfected while I was cold sober. And I still think that it's the only way." "It just seems so... strange. I could understand if you were trying to steal me away from Chrissie, but to share." He shook his head a little. "That's the bizarre part." "But you mentioned it to Chrissie?" she asked. "How did you know that?" he asked. "She gave me a look at breakfast this morning that spoke volumes about how she felt about me. It was more than just the look that she would have given had she merely heard the rumors about you and I. I was pretty sure that you told her my suggestion. Did you do it while you were still drunk?" "Yes," he said. "She was waiting up for me when I got home. The subject was kind of forced upon me. As you guessed, she didn't react very favorably towards the suggestion." "I told you that she wouldn't at first," she reminded him. "It is quite a shocking suggestion to have to deal with. I think she'll come around though. There's not really anything else for her to do." "She slapped me across the face," he said. "And it hurt. I don't think a woman who reacts with physical violence to a suggestion is going to work her way around to accepting it." Michelle shrugged. "Maybe, maybe not," she said. "Time will tell. But you never answered my question. How do you feel about it? Besides thinking it's bizarre and strange that is?" "I'm a man," he said. "If two beautiful women want to share me with each other, I'm certainly not going to say no. Does that answer your question?" "It does," she said with a smile. "And don't worry too much about Chrissie. I'll talk to her at dinner tonight after shift." "I don't think that's a real good idea," he said, thinking instantly of the gun that Chrissie carried on her hip. He had a frightfully clear vision of Michelle lying dead on the gym floor beneath the table, a large bullet hole in her forehead, and Chrissie being marched across the bridge the next day, exiled for murder. Michelle could tell what he was thinking. "Don't worry," she said. "She won't hurt me and I won't hurt her. If she reacts too strongly to my talking to her, I'll just leave and try again tomorrow. I have patience." He gave a very doubtful look but offered no further protests. "Have you heard about Jason and Stacy?" he asked her. She nodded. "Maria filled me in on the latest when she came on shift at twelve. Quite a powder keg brewing, isn't it?" "To say the least," he said. "Did she tell you what Jessica is up to now?" "About the two-thirds community vote?" "Yep." "Yes, she told me about it. Jessica caught her before she came out here and gave her the spiel. It sounds like she is being very persuasive. Maria is not even a town woman and she hates Jessica with a passion but she came in here spouting about that hussy and that bitch and using phrases that I know she could have only been fed by Jess. If she can rile up Maria like that, I can only imagine how riled up the town women are getting." "They're pretty riled all right," he said. "You should've heard some of the things they were saying to us while we were moving his things over there this afternoon." "He still moved in with her huh?" "He did," he confirmed. "He wasn't going to be talked out of it. He told me that if they throw Stacy out of town then he'll be going across the bridge with her." "You have to admire his devotion," she said. "It's too bad that this hen party we call a citizenry doesn't see that. He's much more dedicated to his woman than any other man in town, isn't he? Do you think Dale would walk across the bridge with Jessica if we threw her out?" "I'd sure like to make the experiment," he said, making both of them laugh. "Will what she's trying to do really work?" she asked him. "Yes," he said. "I don't see any way to stop it. At tomorrow's committee meeting Jessica will propose that a two-thirds vote of the entire community can override any committee decision. She'll vote for it and so will Dale and that means it will pass. At the community meeting that night, she'll move that we vote on overturning the committee's decision not to exile Stacy for statutory rape. I've sampled the mood of those women out there. She won't have any problem getting a two-thirds majority, even if all of the men vote no." "Great," Michelle said, slumping a little in her chair. "I'll try talking to some of them after dinner tonight and at dinner tomorrow. Maybe I can swing some of them over to my bandwagon. It can't hurt." "Why don't I just give you the day off tomorrow and you can spend all day doing it?" he suggested. She shook her head. "Not a good idea," she said. "It would be counter-productive if you had to assign someone to my position so I could go politic for you. It would look rather shady, especially in light of the rumors that are already floating around about the two of us." He sighed. "I guess you're right," he said. "Now I know why Paul told me the first night that living in a town full of women was a pain in the ass." ------- At 5:30, just as the unseen sun was nearing the horizon, John Kramer and Bill Blades had one last conference. They, as well as all of their men, were sequestered behind the last group of hills before the open ground along the northern wall, almost exactly halfway between guard positions two and three. The recon they had done had convinced them that these were the only two posts on this side of the subdivision. The time had come to stop watching and to start attacking. "We ready to get into position?" John whispered to Bill. "I think so," he replied. "Is everyone's watch synchronized exactly?" "I've checked my guys three times," he said. "They're all tuned exactly to my watch and my watch is tuned exactly to yours." "Good enough," John told him. "Remember, we move into position at two in the morning and hide ourselves. You can fudge a little on that time, but not on the attack time. At eight o'clock sharp we strike. No more, no less. It's vital that we take out those guards before they have a chance to call in. Don't shoot unless you absolutely have to. Make those Raid-bombs do the job. I don't think they'd be able to hear gunfire all the way over at the community center with this rain, but you never know." "We'll do it," Bill assured him confidently. "Two o'clock we penetrate, eight o'clock and the Raid bombs go in. Once the guards are down, we meet in the middle and move on the community center." "If we do this right," John told him, "We'll be sinking into some nice juicy pussy in about fifteen hours. Tell your men that. It'll pep 'em up." "Already did it." "Okay. It's time. Get your people into position and I'll see you tomorrow morning." The two men each joined their group. Bill's group, which was tasked with taking down guard position 3 (although they did not know that was the name of it) consisted of Bill and seven of the hunters, all of them armed with their rifles and plenty of ammunition, two of them armed with the special "Raid-bombs" that they had devised and found so effective in quickly taking out people in enclosed places. John's group was tasked with taking down guard position 2 at exactly the same instant. His group also consisted of seven hunters in addition to the leader, two of whom also had the Raid-bombs. While they still had some daylight left, the two groups moved in opposite directions, staying behind the concealment of the hills but paralleling the wall. Each leader would periodically check position by peering carefully around a tree or over the top of a rise to see how close to their targets they were. When they found themselves to be almost exactly across from the guard positions, they stopped and hid themselves carefully in the foliage. They had just enough time before it got completely dark to make one last check of their supplies and ammo. Everything was as it should be. The sun deserted them and so did the light. They settled in and waited, knowing it was going to be a long night but anxious for the rewards that awaited them on the other side of it. ------- Chrissie was mostly picking at her dinner instead of eating it. She pushed it around with her fork and occasionally took a small nibble, but her stomach, which was tied up in knots due to all the worries on her mind, did not embrace the offerings she gave it. As if the problems with Brett and Michelle were not enough, now she had her brother to worry about as well. He had relieved her at her post less than an hour ago and had told her his plan to walk across the bridge with Stacy if it came to that. She had argued and pleaded with him for nearly ten minutes, trying to get him to change his mind. Although she liked and respected Stacy much more than she did any other female in town, she did not want to lose her only brother when she was kicked out. And she had no doubt in her mind that kicked out was exactly what was going to happen. Jessica had visited the guard post that day while she had been on duty and in the space of less than five minutes had been able to whip Brenda, her partner, into a seething fury at Stacy's "crime". "Do you realize that if you vote to kick her out, you'll be sentencing her to death?" Chrissie had asked Brenda after Jessica's departure. "No," Brenda answered indignantly (the way she always talked whenever she addressed Chrissie) "We'll be exiling her, not executing her." "Don't kid yourself," Chrissie responded. "If you send a pregnant women across that bridge, she's as good as dead. You just won't have to have to watch it." The conversation had deteriorated from there, eventually ending with Brenda storming out of the room and going downstairs for the rest of her shift. Chrissie was glad to be rid of her. Now, as she forced herself to swallow a small portion of canned peas, she wondered if she should just go with Jason and Stacy when they left. Why not? If they could talk Paul into giving them a couple of guns and few days worth of food, maybe they could live for a while. Maybe they could make their way to Auburn eventually and see what life held for them down there. A figure approaching her in the nearly empty gym distracted her from these thoughts. She looked up and at first couldn't credit what she was seeing. Was it really Michelle, the woman who had aspirations of sharing Brett, coming over to her? She wouldn't be that crass, would she? It seemed that she would. As she got to within ten feet it became obvious that she was heading for Chrissie. Chrissie shot her the glare that had cowered her so well that morning, warning her to stay away. This time however, the glare did not work its magic. Michelle stopped directly across from her, holding her own plate of food, and looked down. "Can I sit with you?" she asked. Chrissie looked up at her in disbelief. "I don't think so," she said, venom dripping from her words. "You are the last person that I want to eat with." Michelle didn't move. "Even worse than Jessica?" she asked. Chrissie didn't smile. "Go away," she said. "We need to talk, Chrissie," she said. "I have nothing to talk to you about." "But you do," she said. "You have a lot to talk to me about and I have a lot to talk to you about. So why don't you behave like the adult I know you are and give it a shot, huh? That's what adults do when they have a conflict with each other." It was her tone that did the trick. It was not the least bit condescending, not even when she said "adult". It was so rare that someone talked to her that way that she found herself responding to the words. "All right," she said, waving to the seat across from her impatiently. "Sit down. Talk." "Thank you," Michelle said, setting her plate down. She eased herself into the seat and looked across the table, making no move to pick up her silverware. "I talked to Brett today," she said. Chrissie shrugged. "So you talked to him. So what?" "He told me that he brought up the uh... suggestion that I had about you, him, and I." "You mean sharing him?" she said, hissing a little but keeping her voice down. "Yes, he brought it up. Did he tell you what I did?" "He said you slapped him," she said tonelessly. "Damn right. And I oughtta do the same thing to you too." Now it was Michelle who shrugged. "And what would that accomplish? It would hurt my face, it would probably hurt your hand, and nothing will have changed. We would still be sitting here with the same problems that we had before." Chrissie did not know how to respond to that. She simply continued to stare. "Tell me something," Michelle said. "Why is it that you are so opposed to what I have suggested?" "Why? Are you serious? Because it's sick!" "Why is it sick?" Michelle wanted to know next. "What?" "I believe you heard me," she said. "Why do you think that two women sharing a man is sick? I will admit that it is somewhat unconventional to our upbringing, and that it is something that I never considered before the comet fell. I will even admit that it is far from ideal from our perspective. If it were up to me I would much prefer having one man to myself. But that is not the reality we live in anymore. You think it is sick because it goes against the values that you were raised with, right?" "Of course it goes against them," she said. "Doesn't it go against yours? Or did your father have two wives?" "My parents divorced when I was young," Michelle said. "But that is neither here nor there. I too was raised to believe that monogamous relationships were the way things were supposed to be. Everybody was raised to think that, whether they did it in practice or not. But then everybody was also raised in a world where there was an equal amount of men and women, weren't they?" "That doesn't matter." "It does matter Chrissie. That's what I'm trying to tell you. We have five women for every man in this town. Five to one. Would you agree that that ratio is creating problems in this town?" It seemed like a trick question and she hesitated for a moment. Finally she reluctantly said, "Yes. It is creating a big problem." "We don't live in normal times anymore," Michelle told her. "The civilization we grew up with is dead and most of the values we were raised with cannot apply anymore. Do you agree that you should be allowed to sleep with Brett in the first place?" "What?" "Should this town allow you and Brett to sleep together? Should it allow your brother and Stacy to sleep together?" "Well... yes," she answered. "What does that have to do with anything?" "Because it's a value that has been changed to suit the situation. Would you have slept with Brett if you had met him before the comet?" "No," she said slowly, seeing where this was heading. "I would've told my dad and had him call the police if he would've tried." "And how about Stacy and Jason? If you would've found out that a twenty year old pregnant woman had seduced your fourteen year old brother before the comet, what would you have done?" "Told my dad and had him call the police," she said. "Exactly. Yet now, after the comet, you accept Brett as a lover without question, don't you? You accept Stacy as your brother's lover, don't you? I saw you hugging her this morning. So that must mean that you have changed your value system a little bit to accept these new realities." Chrissie shook her head. "You're talking about apples and oranges," she said. "My brother and I are adults now because of the comet and what happened. All that has changed is that we're trying to be treated like adults and given the rights that we deserve. That is not the same thing as changing my values to accept another woman into my relationship. I won't have any part of that." "But you're already a part of it, whether you like it or not," Michelle said. "You are one of the women in this town where men are an endangered species. We are the glut here, Chrissie, and the men are the demand. It's going to come down to either sharing what's available or going without." "I'll go without then," she said defiantly. "For how long? Forever? That's real easy to say right now. But what about later, when you need him." "I don't need him." "And what about Brett himself?" she asked. "What about when the town finds out about the two of you and Jessica riles them all up to exile him for having sex with a minor. I don't even have to convince you that she can do that, she's already doing it with Stacy." "How will they find out about the two of us if we're not together anymore?" Chrissie asked. "I think you maybe know the answer to that," she said softly, leaning forward a little. Chrissie became very uncomfortable all of a sudden. "What... what do you mean?" "How late is your period, Chrissie?" she asked her. Chrissie paled as she heard this. How had Michelle known? How could she possible have known? She had not even told Brett about that! She had hardly even told herself about it, not wanting to face what it meant. "How late?" she repeated. "How did you know?" she whispered, trembling a little. "Elementary," she said. "I mentioned this possibility to Brett last night and it got me to thinking. This morning, before I went out to my position, I took a look at the supply room log. In the entire time you've been here, you have not signed out a single box of tampons or pads. You should have had at least one period in the time you've been here; maybe even two if the timing was right. And you don't seem the type that would've gone in and taken them without signing for them. So how long?" She continued to look at the woman across from her, feeling a reluctant respect for her deduction skills. "Almost three weeks," she finally admitted. Michelle nodded. "A little too long to blame on stress, wouldn't you say?" Chrissie felt herself starting to cry as the very excuse that she had been giving herself all of this time was thrown back at her. In her mind it had seemed a reasonable explanation. Spoken aloud by another person, it sounded ridiculous. "You're pregnant, Chrissie," Michelle said gently. "You're carrying Brett's baby in you. Even if you don't want to keep it, which I doubt, there is no way available here to put a stop to what's going on inside of you. We don't have any doctors or medical equipment here. The best we can offer is Paul, who was an EMT on a fire engine and who is equipped with the basic first aid kits that came with it. He's real good at putting ice on sprains and bandaging up cuts, but I don't think he knows how to abort a pregnancy." "Oh God," Chrissie said, fighting not to face the facts and losing miserably. More tears began to fall, dripping from her face into her food. "It's okay," Michelle said gently, reaching across the table and taking one of her hands. Chrissie did not protest. "It isn't anybody's fault, it's just the way that things work. You didn't think that you'd live long enough to have to worry about this. But, thanks to Brett bringing you here, you have lived that long. Why not be grateful that you're still around to cry about it?" "How can I bring a baby into this world?" Chrissie asked. "What kind of life is it going to have?" "The kind of life that we provide for it," Michelle answered. "And in a way, that's what I'm trying to improve by having this talk with you right now." "What?" she asked, sniffing a little. "Let's take things one step at a time, shall we?" Michelle told her. "In the first place, there's the pregnancy itself. What's going to happen when you start to show, when it becomes obvious that you're expecting? Who is the first person they're going to look at?" "Brett," she said, seeing the point immediately. "And what do you think they're going to do to him?" "You know what they'll do with him," she said. "They'll exile him." "Right," Michelle said. "They'll exile him for statutory rape, just like they're planning to do with Stacy. So what we have to agree upon here is the fact that there is no way that your relationship with Brett can be hidden from the town forever. They are going to find out about it. All we can hope to do is control the manner in which they find out about it." "And how does sharing him with you help with that?" she asked, some of her previous bitterness coming back. "Because I am a respected member of this town and I am somewhat of a trendsetter. Now I don't know for sure if my involvement in the relationship will be able to counter Jessica's opposition to you and Brett, but I know for damn sure that without it, all hope is lost." "Why do we have to share him?" she wanted to know. "Why can't you just give us your support from the sidelines? Or are you trying to blackmail us?" "I want to share him," Michelle said. "I need a man to hold and to have sex with just as much as everyone else in this town and, to me, Brett is the most desirable we have. Those are my main reasons for suggesting this arrangement. If it doesn't work out that way for whatever reason, then I will still give my support to you and be a voice against Jessica. I will do that, Chrissie, no matter what. However, I think my words will carry much more power with the other women if I am actually a part of a relationship with you. My arguments will seem more legitimate to them and there will also be the side-issue of the polygamy to take a little of the heat off of the under eighteen issue." Chrissie shook her head, not understanding. "Look at it this way," Michelle explained. "Most of the women in town do not have an official man and they desperately want one. They will embrace the polygamy issue the same way that I do; by concluding that it is better than what they have, which is nothing. They will side with me on sharing men. I have no doubt about that. So if they side with me on that against Jessica and the other women who have official partners, they will be hard pressed to side with Jessica against you being with Brett in the first place. They will not be able to jump on both bandwagons at the same time. By tackling both of these issues in one single battle, we will be able to prevail with both of them." "This is just too much," Chrissie said, realizing almost belatedly that she had been giving serious consideration to what Michelle was saying. "Too much has happened today. I can't think." "But you have to," Michelle said. "Time is running out. You don't need to make any decisions right now, but you will have to make one soon. And as you're mulling all of this over, try to think about that baby in you. You mentioned what kind of world you would be bringing it into. It won't be the world that you were brought into, that is a given. But it would be nice if it were a world with some sort of order to it. Sharing men is not perfect, but if we start the ball rolling, it will catch on and it will bring order to this chaos that we have here. And maybe someday that baby's children or grandchildren will be able to go back to the values we used to have." "That would be nice," Chrissie said. "It would be, but... I don't think that I could share a man with someone. I just can't see myself doing that. How could we live with the jealousy?" "It will take some time," Michelle said. "I suspect that we would probably fight with each other quite a lot at first and we would have to change and rearrange how we would go about certain... things. It won't be a cakewalk. The only way it would work would be if we were friends with each other. And, Chrissie, despite what has happened, I do consider you to be my friend. I like you a lot and I care about you. And most of all, I would be honored to share a man with you." Chrissie left a few minutes later, without a decision made one way or the other but with a lot on her mind. She walked slowly home and entered the house, seeing that Brett was lying on the couch, reading a paperback novel from the supply room. He looked up at her anxiously, not saying anything. "Hi," she said softly. "Hi," he replied back. Instead of retreating to her bedroom as she usually did, she stayed at the end of the couch. They continued to look at each other and then they began to talk. They mentioned nothing about Michelle or polygamy. She said nothing about the near-certainty that she was pregnant. Instead they talked about Jason and Stacy and the possibility of her being voted from town the next night. He vowed that he would do everything in his power to prevent that, both before and after the vote. He told her that Paul was going to try to enlist the aid of the other men in town in support of Jason; a prospect which might be promising if they pressured their official women to vote nay and try to convince others to do so. He did not mention that Michelle would try to talk to some of the other women, not wanting to bring up her name. She told him that she was keeping her hopes up, that things had a way of working out. And then she said goodnight and went to her room. It was not exactly a mending of the relationship, but it was the most that they had said to each other with civil tongues since the day he had told her about Mitsy. ------- At precisely 2:00 AM, Bill gave the order to his men. It was time to move in. They stood shoulder to shoulder, moving slowly so their equipment would not clank or make any other sort of noise. They linked arms so that no one would stray off in the wrong direction in the darkness. They then began to move forward, towards the wall. Each step was made carefully and slowly, the ground beneath their feet being tested before the weight was shifted onto it. It took them nearly twenty minutes to cross the fifty yards of open ground but finally Bill, who was on the end of the line of men, felt wet concrete against his outstretched left hand. We whispered the word "wall" to the man next to him. That man whispered it to the man next to him. Within three seconds the message had been passed to everyone and they came to a complete stop. They unlinked arms and everyone reached out to touch the wall. "I'll go up first," Bill said to the man next to him. "Once I'm over, you come up. We do it one by one that way." "Right," the man replied. He then passed the message on to the man on his right. "Give me a boost," Bill said. It took a few moments of fumbling in the darkness but finally he was able to insert his muddy boot into the clasped hands of the man next to him. His rifle and pack over his shoulder, his hands touching the wall, he pushed upward with his foot, elevating his head above the top of the wall. He could see nothing on the other side except a distant faint glow from an occupied house. The guard position, he knew, was in front of him and to the left. There was no light coming from it at the moment and it was therefore invisible. He pulled himself completely atop the wall and then, moving with extreme caution, slid his feet over to the other side while continuing to hold to the top with his hands. There was a small clank as his rifle shifted but not loud enough to be heard more than ten feet away. He eased downward until he was dangling from the top by his hands only and then, with a deep breath, he let go. He had worried incessantly that there might be a hole or a bush or a sprinkler head beneath him that would cause him to land badly, injuring himself and creating noise, but this worry turned out to be groundless. He landed in soft, spongy mud where grass was currently dying from the lack of sunlight and excessive watering. He sank about six inches into it but was able to easily pull himself free. He stepped a few paces away and waited for the next man to come over. Now that someone was safely on the other side, it became much easier to get the rest over. As each man swung his way over the wall, the man before him would grab him around the waist to help him down. The second to last man remained up for a moment to give the last man a hand to the top. Then they were both helped down. Less than ten minutes after Bill's hand first encountered concrete, all eight of his group was inside the subdivision less than a hundred feet from the guard position. There was no indication of any kind that they had been seen. They moved on to the next phase of their insertion. As Brett had done when he had penetrated the town by using the bridge, Bill used his extensive recon knowledge to get himself and his group to safety. Though he could not see a thing, he knew that he was directly across the street from the single story house that was next door to the guard position. He also knew that that house, like many of the others in Garden Hill, had lost a good portion of its perimeter fence to a combination of the windstorms and the earthquake. It was a collapsed mess of wooden planks and posts lying along the western side of the house. The group once again linked arms and spread out into a line. Slowly, deliberately, they walked step by step across the street, up over the gutter, and onto the house's driveway. When Bill's fingers encountered the metal of the garage door, they stopped. One by one, moving by feel, they then moved around the corner of the house to the side yard, placing the bulk of the house between themselves and the guard position. "Okay," Bill whispered once they were all safely there. "I'm gonna turn on the light now." With that he activated a small penlight that ran on AAA batteries. The illumination it provided was scant indeed, but it was enough to allow them to move into the backyard without stepping on any of the fence debris. They made their way onto the patio, which was covered with a roof and took shelter there between the wall of the house and a dead hot tub. "Good job, everyone," Bill said once they were in position. "Now we wait until morning." Three quarters of a mile to the west, at the house next door to position 2, John and his team had found even better luck. They had found that the house had actually been unlocked and they settled down to wait in the darkened living room behind closed blinds. At position 3, Jason and Tim Harding, a former PG&E electrical worker, were on duty. Tim, who had come on at midnight, was in the walk-in closet with the door closed, using his flashlight to read a Penthouse magazine he had found in the former grocery store. Jason, who had long since given up trying to keep his partners alert to their duty, was looking out the window into the darkness. He had seen nothing although he had been looking almost directly at the spot where the men had penetrated. Nor had he heard anything. At position 2 Mitsy and Laura Lewis were pulling the duty. Neither one of them had been looking out the window when the penetration occurred. Instead, the two women were gossiping about Stacy and Jason and wondering just what Brett was going to do when that bitch got voted out of the town. Mitsy was of the opinion that he wouldn't have the balls to say or do anything. Laura, on the other hand, thought he might try something dramatic, although just what that might be, she couldn't say. When one of John Kramer's men lost his grip on the wall as he came over and fell to the ground, a loud clank was clearly heard as his rifle barrel hit the concrete at the base. "What was that?" Laura asked, taking a careless glance out into the darkness. "I don't know," Mitsy said, shifting herself in her chair. "Probably something falling over. There's all kinds of weird noises out there." "Oh, okay," Laura replied and there was no more discussion on the matter. A second later they went back to gossiping in the darkness. Twice between the time the invaders hid themselves and dawn, the night perimeter patrol passed by the houses they were in or behind. Though they had heavy-duty flashlights they did not shine them on the houses, let alone notice anything amiss. When the first touches of daylight came to the sky at 5:45 the next morning, Bill's group left the shelter of the patio and eased over alongside the eastern fence of the backyard, where a lengthy section was still standing. They knew that the guard posts changed crews in fifteen minutes and they wanted to make extra sure that a random sighting by the oncoming or offgoing crew as they entered or exited did not give them away. It was a small chance at best that anyone would have noticed them on the patio but it was best not to take chances. If living in the wilderness had taught them anything, it had taught them that. ------- At guard position 2, Michelle and Brenda, the assigned crew for that first portion of the day, arrived promptly at 6:00 AM, relieving Mitsy and Laura. As was normal when one female crew relieved another, the offgoing lingered for a few minutes to share the latest gossip. Michelle took up her position near the window and listened for a few minutes as the three of them began talking about the latest developments in the Stacy and Jason saga. All three were of course of the opinion that she would be voted out of town by the end of the night, and good riddance. "What do you think about this, Michelle?" she was asked at one point, as she had known she would be. And so, attempting to utilize every ounce of influence she had, she began explaining to them that there was absolutely nothing wrong with Stacy and Jason living together as lovers. "What?" they asked, taken aback. She did her best but, as she had discovered the previous night after her conversation with Chrissie, her influence in this matter was not quite as strong as she had thought it would be. They listened to her respectfully and even agreed with many of her points but they were completely unwilling to concede that a fourteen year old, even under the extreme circumstances found in the world these days, was a suitable sexual partner for a pregnant twenty year old woman. All declared that they would be shouting out ayes when Jessica put the matter of ejecting Stacy to vote. "It would set a horrible precedent if we let her stay," Mitsy said, using the exact phrase that Jessica had used when they'd talked the day before. "Yes," Laura added. "Imagine what would happen if we did not respond forcefully to this. Think of what would result in the future." This too was a verbatim quote from Jessica's speech. Brenda then put in her own two-cents worth by borrowing yet another Jessica-ism that had to do with protecting the morals of the young. By the time that Mitsy and Laura finally left at 6:40 (Mitsy heading off in a different direction than her partner), Michelle was seriously worried about what was going to happen at dinner tonight. She of course could not know that less than a hundred feet away were eight men determined to see to it that she did not have dinner that night, or any other night ever again. ------- At guard position 3, crew-change actually took place at 6:10 that morning since Jeff and Lenny Long, a former grocery store courtesy clerk, were late arriving. This was not an uncommon occurrence at the Garden Hill guard posts and it did not even draw a snide remark from Jason or Tim. Tim headed out the door the moment the relief crew entered the house, not even pausing long enough to say hello to either of them. Jason tried to give a pass-on report as he had been taught by Brett, but neither one of the two men wanted to hear it. They simply waved him away, although they did offer him their best wishes in the upcoming Stacy vote. "I think it's totally bogus," Jeff opined. "I mean, how dare they try to vote someone out for giving up the puss. What kinda shit is that?" "Yeah," Lenny agreed, sitting on the bed and lighting a cigarette. "Even if you are just a kid, if you're able to score it, that's one for you. I'm voting nay on that shit tonight, that's for sure." Jason, whose stomach was tied in even worse knots than his sister's, thanked them kindly and then made his leave, heading slowly towards the gym to have breakfast. Once he was gone Lenny and Jeff settled themselves in by rearranging their chairs further away from the open window to avoid the damp breeze that was blowing in. They would have shut the window completely had they not tried such a thing in the past and incurred the furious wrath of Brett on one of his unannounced visits. Neither one of them gave so much as a passing glance out the window. Nor did they check their weapons to make sure they were locked and loaded. The only thing that they did by the book was call Brett on the walkie-talkie to report that they were in position. "Another fucking six hours in this hellhole," Lenny complained, leaning back in his chair and putting his feet on the end table, knocking the walkie-talkie to the floor. He didn't bother picking it back up. "It won't be that bad today," Jeff said, pulling a joint out. "I've arranged for a little entertainment for us." "What, the joint? All that does is makes the time pass slower." "Not that kind of entertainment," he said, stuffing it behind his ear for later. "I'm talking about real entertainment. Mitsy's gonna come over. She just got off shift at position 2 and she's gonna skip breakfast today so she can visit us." "Mitsy," he said, shaking his head. "That doesn't do me any good." "Dude," Jeff said slyly, "have faith in me. I'll set you up. You'll see." "Set me up?" "I'll set you up. This'll be a shift to remember." ------- It was 7:05 when Bill, who was looking through a knothole in the fence towards the guard position's front yard, saw someone coming. It was hard to tell much detail because of the rain slicker but he was pretty sure it was a woman. He signaled to his men to settle down and be alert. They all gripped their rifles a little tighter and made themselves as small as possible. The woman didn't even glance in their direction. She walked right on by and cut across the soggy lawn of the guardhouse, disappearing from their view. When she didn't come back after a moment, they were forced to conclude that she had gone inside. "What the hell?" one of the men asked Bill nervously. "I don't know," he said. "It wasn't the leader that always checks on them, it was a bitch." "What's she doing in there? Is this going to fuck up the plan?" "Not as long as she's in the room with them at eight o'clock," he replied. "We go ahead as scheduled. I don't see any reason to abort." "All right," the man said doubtfully. "Should I start arming up the Raid-bombs now?" "Yeah," he said. "Get it done." While Bill continued to watch through the knothole, two of his men removed the partially assembled bombs from their backpacks. Each bomb was a rather simple device, though very deadly within a confined space like a bedroom. They consisted of standard-sized cans of Raid industrial insect killer, the contents of which was nothing more than pressurized organo-phosphate poison, basically a crude form of military nerve gas. Attached to the side of the can with super glue, primer side up, was a single 12-gauge shotgun shell containing .00 buckshot. To arm the bomb, an ingeniously designed firing mechanism needed to be attached. It was a three-inch length of 3/4 inch PVC pipe with a halfpenny nail connected to the spring from a rattrap. When the spring was pulled back, it would seat the head of the nail a half an inch above the shotgun shell's primer. When it was released - and it took nothing more than the impact of the bomb landing on the ground to cause this - it would drive the nail into the primer, firing the shell directly into the can of raid, causing it to explode spectacularly. The men carefully fitted these mechanisms over the shotgun shells, not activating the springs just yet. They would do that only as they were moving in on the target. ------- It was 7:35 and they had just finished smoking Jeff's joint. Mitsy, her eyes reddened both from fatigue and the pot, sat on the edge of the bed between the two men. Jeff was resting his hand high up on her blue-jean clad thigh. "Why don't we go check out the other bedroom, Jeffy?" she asked coyly, giving his hand a sensuous squeeze. "I got something I really need to talk to you about." She giggled at her own euphemism. "We can talk in here, baby," Jeff said, letting his hand slide a little higher. "Lenny don't mind, do you Lenny?" She giggled again. "This is kinda personal," she said. "I really think we should be alone." He leaned in and began kissing her neck, right at the junction of the shoulder blade. His hand slid firmly into the junction of her thighs, moving so fast she didn't have time to close them. "It's okay, baby," he said. "I think Lenny would like to talk too." "Jeff," she said, trying to pull away from him but he was holding her with his free hand. "I want to... you know?" "So do I, baby, so do I," he said. "I want to do it alone," she told him. "Come on." Jeff nibbled at her ear, his tongue swirling over the diamond earring in the lobe. "Don't be such a prude, baby, we both want a little action this morning." "What?" she said, wondering if we were joking or not. One look at his face told her that he wasn't. "No, Jeff," she said firmly. "I don't do things like that. That's sick." "What's sick about it?" he asked, standing up and facing her. "I'm horny, you're horny, Lenny's horny, and we're all three here together. Why not take care of everything at once. Right, Lenny?" "Well... uh... yeah, I guess so," he stammered, unsure what to say, though very erect inside of his jeans just at the thought of a little double-team action with Mitsy. "You see," Jeff said, reaching down and fondling her left breast through her sweater. "Even Lenny agrees." "I'm not gonna do it," she said firmly, pushing his hand away. "If you want me, I'll do it with you in the bedroom like always. But I'm not gonna do both of you. I'm not that kind of girl." "You'd better learn to be," Jeff said threateningly. "If you expect me to leave Gina and move in with you, I expect you to do the things that I want to do. If you don't want to play the way I want you to, then just get on out the door and I'll be seeing you around." "Jeff," she said, her eyes pleading. "That's not fair. That's blackmail." "That's the way life is now, baby. Now you gonna play, or what?" She lowered her eyes and slumped her shoulders in defeat. What else could she do? She didn't have a man of her own and it was starting to look like she might be able to wrangle Jeff away. She was too close to blow that now, wasn't she? "I'll play," she said quietly. "What was that?" Jeff asked, twisting the knife a little. "I said I'll play," she said defiantly. Jeff grinned, slapping Lenny, who had watched the entire exchange in fascination, on the shoulder. "Come on, Lenny, she's gonna play for us. Stand on up here and let's start out with a blowjob. She gives the best fucking blowjobs you've ever had." Lenny, despite his discomfort with the manner in which Jeff had manipulated her, still had a raging hard-on. He knew he should not be taking part in something like this but he couldn't help himself. Mitsy was a hot looking piece. He stood next to Jeff with his crotch right in Mitsy's face. "Come on, baby," Jeff told her. "Take 'em out and get to work." Feeling humiliation unlike anything she had ever experienced before, Mitsy reached out and unbuttoned first Jeff's pants and then Lenny's, pushing each pair down so their hard cocks were sticking in her face. She gave Jeff one last pleading look but saw no hope for reprieve in his face. With a sigh she leaned forward and took him into her mouth. "Ahhh yesss," Jeff said happily, grabbing a handful of her hair and guiding her motions. "Use your hand on Lenny while you're sucking me." She reached over with the hand that was not jacking up and down on Jeff and began to listlessly jack off Lenny's cock. Lenny didn't care that it was listless. Her hand around his organ, no matter how unenthusiastically she moved it, felt great. He began to piston his hips in and out of her fist. "Feel her titties," Jeff suggested to his partner. "She likes that. They're kinda small but they're nice." Lenny reached down and grasped her right breast roughly through her sweater, making her wince a little. She never broke stride however. He began to squeeze and knead it, moving it up and down, back and forth. Jeff let her suck him for about five minutes and then he abruptly pulled himself from her mouth. "It's Lenny's turn," he told her. "Give him your best." "Jeff, really," she pleaded. "This is humiliating." "But it's your lot in life now, baby," he said toughly, pushing her head towards Lenny's crotch. "Now do what you're told." Obediently she took Lenny into her mouth and went to work. Lenny found out in short order that she was every bit the cocksucker that Jeff had promised she was. ------- Bill checked his watch. It was 7:55 AM. Almost time to strike. He turned to the two men who were the designated bombers of the guard post. "All right, you guys," he said. "Are you ready to move in?" They both told him that they were ready. They were obviously nervous about the prospect of attacking such a large settlement, but they were also full of confidence as well. "Okay," Bill said. "Start moving in. Remember the plan and remember not to throw them until 8:00 and zero seconds. Got it?" They told him that they had it and moved in. They left the backyard by retracing their steps from how they had entered it. Keeping close to the side of the house, they edged over the lumber of the fallen fence and worked their way out into the driveway, keeping their backs as close to the garage door as they could get them without actually rattling it. The window that served as the guard post was less than fifty feet away from them but they were confident that they could get over there without being seen as long as one of the guards did not actually stick his or her head out of the window and look to the left. They continued to edge along the wall of the house until they were near the front porch, well back from the sightline of the guardhouse now. They then trotted over until their backs were against the two-story house itself. They crept along the side of this house until they were at the corner, near the garage door. The open window from which the guards operated was directly over the garage and the driveway. They paused at this corner, waiting for it to be exactly 8:00 AM. When the appointed time came they would have to do nothing but pull back the springs on their bombs, take six or seven steps out onto the driveway, and toss them inside. It was an easy shot through the window but they were using two bombs in case, for whatever reason, one of them missed. "Remember not to shoot unless we have to," the first man whispered to his companion. "I won't," he said, checking his watch again. It read 7:58. ------- Mitsy was now completely naked, her impressive body on hands and knees on the bed. Jeff was standing on the floor in front of her, his dick in her mouth, enjoying her wet blowjob. His hands were squeezing her small breasts roughly, his fingers occasionally giving the nipples a strong tweak. Lenny was behind her, driving his dick in and out of her pussy from behind. He was holding onto her hips hard enough to leave marks upon her flesh. "Doesn't she have a nice, tight pussy?" Jeff asked with a grin, looking at the rapturous face of his partner. "Yeah," he moaned, feeling the clenching of her muscles upon his cock. Though she was not really any tighter than Carla, his official woman, or Barbara, his main piece on the side, there was something intrinsically nasty and arousing about double-teaming Mitsy at the guard post. This was the best sex he had experienced since the comet, and he had experienced a lot of it since that fateful day. "Put it in her ass," Jeff told him. "She loves that." Mitsy took her mouth off of his cock and looked up at him. "Jeff," she said, appalled that he would suggest something like that. Jeff took his hand off of her tit long enough to backhand her sharply across the face. "Shut up, bitch," he growled at her, grabbing her by the hair. "When I want you to talk, I'll ask you something. Now get back to work." With that he pulled her to his cock again. Lenny was somewhat shocked by the violence the former Mormon had just displayed. "Are you sure she really wants me to do that?" he asked timidly. "I told you, Len," he said, driving his hips in and out of her mouth now. "She fuckin' loves it. Now stick it up her ass and give it to her." That was enough encouragement for Lenny. He had been looking at that puckered anus longingly the entire time that he had been fucking her. He pulled his cock from her semi-dry vagina and spit in his hand, rubbing more lubrication on it. He then placed the head against the bud of her asshole and began to push. "Yeah, Len!" Jeff said enthusiastically as Mitsy grunted in pain around his dick. "You the man, motherfucker. Give it to the bitch!" He gave it to her, pushing as hard as he could until he was buried to the hilt in her ass. It was the tightest orifice he had ever been in in his life, so tight that it was difficult to move in and out of it. Nevertheless he gave it the old college try. Mitsy grunted with each thrust and after a few moments, she loosened up a little and got somewhat used to his presence. He began to pick up the pace as it began to feel better. He was actually fucking Mitsy up the ass! That very thought started the wheels of orgasm into motion. Just as the sensation of inevitable blast-off started to hit him, he saw something come flying through the window out of the corner of his eye, something that looked strangely like a red and black spray can. Before that even registered completely, another one followed it. Jeff, who was facing the window, saw it too. Mitsy, who had her eyes closed and her mouth full of cock, did not. Nobody had time to even become alarmed. The cans both landed just to the side of the bed and both exploded less than a second apart with sharp cracks of surprising loudness. Shrapnel from the aluminum that made up the cans sprayed everywhere and Lenny took the brunt of it. Razor sharp shards sliced into his back, his legs, his neck, and the side of his face. His left eyeball was ripped right out of its socket and a large flap of his cheek was peeled away with almost surgical precision. Another piece sliced neatly through the carotid artery on the left side of his neck before cutting his trachea neatly in two. He fell to the floor in a bloody heap, his consciousness fading away before the poison that had been released into the room could even affect him. Mitsy and Jeff were not so lucky. Though both of them were peppered with shrapnel - Mitsy all over her left hip and flank, Jeff all over his chest and stomach - and although Mitsy in reflexive surprise had bitten down on Jeff's penis nearly hard enough to sever it, neither had been hit in a vital area. Mitsy, dazed and bleeding, fell to the right on the bed. Jeff, holding his injured and hemorrhaging dick with both hands, fell backwards. By the time it occurred to them a few seconds later that they were under attack, it was already too late. The pesticide fumes filled the air in the small bedroom and penetrated their lungs, entering the bloodstream via respiration. It was also soaked in through their very pores, the process made even easier by the fact that they were naked and bleeding. Both of them tried to crawl to the radio. Neither of them made it more than a foot before their parasympathetic nervous systems rebelled in a big way causing them to simultaneously vomit, defecate, and urinate uncontrollably. They began to choke on their own vomit and a few seconds later, they began to convulse, their bodies flopping around where they lie like fish out of water. It was an agonizing death but thankfully it was a quick one. Less than a minute after the cans had flown in the window, while Bill and the rest of his men were kicking in the front door to clear the building, both of them were dead. ------- Michelle heard the small beep come from her wristwatch, indicating that it was the top of the hour. She was looking out over the wall, tossing a few ideas - none of which seemed to have much merit - about the Jason and Stacy problem around in her head. Brenda was sitting on the bed behind her, painting her fingernails and chattering on and on about Hector and how she was beginning to suspect that maybe - just maybe mind you - he was leading her on. Michelle was about to offer a mildly snide comment about Brenda's powers of deduction when her eyes locked onto a sudden movement directly below her window. Someone had just been right beneath them and was now stepping out into the open. Brett, in their firearm training outside the wall, had made them work extensively with the pistols they carried. He had done to his guards what the instructors at the San Joaquin County Sheriff's Academy had done to him over the course of his tenure there. He had made it an instinct to draw their pistol whenever danger presented itself suddenly from close quarters. Michelle's .45 was out of her holster and pointing out the window before she even realized what she was looking at. All she saw was a dirty, bearded man, which meant he was a straggler. He had somehow gotten inside the wall and right up to her position, which meant he was dangerous. He had something - she did not have time to identify it - in his hand and he was cocking his arm back to throw it at her. Her brain quickly processed all of this and came to the firm conclusion that she was in mortal danger. Without pausing to send this information to her higher brain, where it could mulled over and completely analyzed before a decision was made, the lower part of her brain, the part concerned with basic survival instincts, commanded her to fire the gun. She pointed it at the center mass of the man and began pulling the trigger. Brenda screamed behind her as the gun in Michelle's hand began to explode with noise and expended shell casings began to fly around the room. Michelle had no idea how many times she shot him but she clearly saw bullets impacting his chest and spraying blood out behind him. Just as he started to drop, just as the object that he had been about to throw fell from his hand, another figure emerged right behind him. He too had an object in his hand and he too quickly turned and prepared to hurl it. Before she could shift her fire to him or even properly process the fact that he was a new threat, the Raid-bomb from the first man hit the driveway and detonated. Some of the shrapnel and the fumes managed to blast upward towards Michelle. She felt a sting in her right arm as a piece of aluminum sliced into it. The gun dropped from her hand and clattered to the ground below. But the majority of the blast hit the two people on the ground. The one she had shot was falling forward at the time and took much of it in the chest. The one about to throw the second bomb felt metal slice into his ankles and thighs. His arm was halfway through the throwing motion when the explosion occurred but it was just enough to throw his aim off. His bomb flew upward and struck the side of the house two feet to the right of the window, exploding almost harmlessly ten feet up. ------- John Kramer, who, along with the rest of his force, was positioned thirty feet away along the fence line to the side of the house, watched helplessly as his carefully formulated plan began to fall apart. First that idiot falling off the wall early that morning when they had penetrated, almost giving them away, and now this. How had that guard in there shot so quickly? How could anybody react that fast? Now one of his men was dead on the ground and the other was already starting to choke and gag from the effects of the insecticide cloud that was enveloping him. And the two armed guards in that house were still alive. They would be calling in to the community center any moment on their walkie-talkies. "Shoot them through the wall," Kramer barked at his men. He pointed to the side of the house above the garage. "They're right behind that wall! Everybody! Start shooting!" With almost military precision they swung their hunting rifles upward, knowing that the .30 caliber, high velocity bullets would punch through the thin layer of plaster and sheetrock as easily as a BB fired from a child's gun would punch through a sheet of paper. They began to fire. ------- Brenda was still screaming as the noxious fumes of the pesticide started to penetrate through the open window. Michelle yelled at her to shut the fuck up (which she did not do) and took a moment to look at her wrist. There was a piece of thin, black metal protruding from the side of it, about half an inch sticking out. Blood was oozing slowly around the sides. She moved all of her fingers and found that they still worked as they were supposed to. She pulled the metal free and threw it to the floor, an act that caused the bleeding to increase. Outside, the second attacker, the one who had thrown the can against the side of the house, had fallen to the ground and was convulsing rather grotesquely. Even from fifteen feet away, even over the odor of the pesticide itself, she could smell the sharp stench of feces rising up. Nerve gas of some kind, her well-read mind told her. That was what they had tried to attack with although both of the bomb throwers also had rifles. Who the hell were these people and how many of them were out there? Dripping blood on the floor, she picked up the M-16 from its place with one hand and the rifle with the other. She tried to hand Brenda the rifle but she was in complete hysterics and wouldn't take it. "Brenda, goddammit, someone's trying to attack us! Take the fucking rifle!" "Ahhhh, ohhhh Goddd, ohhhh Goddddd!" "Shit," Michelle muttered, throwing the rifle to the ground and starting to head for the radio. Just then there was a pop from behind her and something whizzed over her shoulder. It was quickly followed by five or six other pops and whizzes and holes began to appear in the ceiling and the upper part of the wall. Just as this registered, the sound of gunshots from outside reached her and she realized that she was being shot at. Terrified, but still acting instinctively, she threw herself to the carpet. "Brenda," she yelled, seeing with horror that she was still standing and screaming. "Get down!" Brenda got down, but not because of voluntary action. Though the first volley of shots from the outside missed her cleanly, the second volley did not. Two of the high caliber bullets hit her, one in the chest, the other in the throat. She fell to the ground in a heap, gagging and gurgling. "Brenda!" Michelle yelled, knowing by the way that blood was pouring onto the carpet that there was nothing to be done. "Shit!" The gunshots continued to echo from outside and the bullets continued to fly through the plaster and whiz through the air above her. How many fucking people were shooting out there? She needed to get the hell out of the room but first she needed to report what was going on. She began to belly-crawl over the carpet towards the window, where the walkie-talkie was, dragging the M-16 behind her. As she reached up to grab it, one of the bullets whizzed so close to her hand that she was able to feel the wind of its passage. "Jesus," she said, bringing her hand back down and instead rocking the table until the radio fell off. She picked it up quickly, fumbling with it for a moment and trying to orient it towards her face. Just as she was about to key up, the gunfire abruptly stopped. It did not taper off, it just stopped instantly, as if a switch had been thrown. ------- "Hold your fire!" John had yelled at his men an instant before. Used to following orders from him, they had done just that, lowering their weapons a bit. "We probably hit them," he said, projecting more confidence than he felt. Though logically the bullets should have hit anyone in that room at least once, he was smart enough to know that once things started to go wrong, the trend usually continued. "But we need to be sure. Main group, reload as fast as you can. Jed," he said, pointing at one of the better men of his group. "Get your pistol out and let's clear that house! We're moving in!" They pulled their sidearms, letting their rifles hang from their shoulders, and started to move in. ------- Meanwhile, at guard position 3, Bill had already determined that all three of his targets were down. One quick glance inside the upstairs bedroom had been enough to convince him, which was a good thing since one quick glance was all he could take, so strong were the odors. By the time they made it back down the stairs and outside, the sound of gunfire from the west reached their ears. It was very faint, barely audible over the constant sound of the rain, but it was unmistakable. There was shooting from the first guard post. Shooting meant that something had gone wrong. We need to get over there as fast as we can," Bill told his men as he shouldered his rifle. "Follow me. Keep a sharp eye out and make triple time. Let's go!" They began to run through the streets, their feet splashing through the puddles. ------- Faintly, over the sounds of the rain, Michelle heard a male voice yelling something, the tone that of an order. Only three words were clear from the entire statement: "We're moving in." Though not a military expert by any means, Michelle knew what that phrase had to mean. They were going to attempt to storm her position. She leapt to her feet so fast it looked like she had been burned. Moving at a speed she would not have thought possible, she dove through the bedroom door and tore around the corner of the hall, the M-16 in one hand, the radio in the other. She threw herself back to the carpet next to the staircase, pointing the rifle between two slats of the railing. She now had a clear shot of the front door, the most likely avenue of entry. It was still closed and locked, just like it should be. If they came through the back instead this was still the ideal place since they would have to pass in front of her before they could mount the stairs. Keeping one hand on the rifle, she keyed the walkie-talkie. "Brett," she yelled into it, "this is position 2. We're under attack!" Before he could answer her, the front door was kicked violently open. Two men with pistols in their hands tried to rush through it. She let the radio drop from her hands and gripped the M-16. It was currently set on single fire but that was not a serious disadvantage. She began to shoot, pulling the trigger as fast as her finger could perform the motions. The two men were both killed before they made it more than two steps into the house. They dropped in the entryway, spilling blood on the marble tile. Michelle, who had no idea she had just killed the leader of the attackers, kept the rifle trained out over the doorway, waiting for more to try their luck. From the radio next to her, Brett's voice was asking her to repeat what she had just said. ------- "There's someone still in there!" one of the hunters outside yelled as he heard the gunfire. "Shit," someone else put in. "They must've got John and Pete!" "John!" another began to scream, hoping for an answer. "John, you all right?" Silence was the only answer and the men, now reduced to four in number, shifted their rifles back and forth uneasily, not knowing what to do next. John had been their leader! Though they had turned into fairly accomplished fighting men since the comet, none of them had the ability to lead and make critical fighting decisions. John and Bill had deliberately withheld such training and practice from them in fear of having one of the underlings try to take over. Not knowing what to do next, they did nothing, simply holding in place. Bill would come soon, they knew. Bill would be able to tell them what to do. ------- Brett, like most people in town, had been eating breakfast in the gym. He was sitting at a table with Paul and Matt, who had taken his mental health night off the previous evening and was therefore enjoying the novelty of eating breakfast with everyone else. The three men had been quietly discussion the possibility of organizing the other men in defiance of voting Stacy from town. Though they agreed that it would segregate the town along gender lines and send a message that they, as men, had the power to veto any decision by mere women, they really didn't see any other avenue to choose. "I don't want that," Paul was saying. "I want every person in this town to be equally represented in voting, just like it should be, but goddammit, these women are proving themselves unworthy of that right. They're allowing themselves to have their opinions molded by an egocentric bitch who's not just locked up in pre-comet attitudes, but pre-twentieth century attitudes as well." "It's a drastic step," Matt, the historian, said. "We have to ask ourselves if we're willing to set such a precedent for this one person. What we do here will have ramifications that stretch far into the future. Now I like Stacy a lot and I like Jason too, but there is more than just their fates at risk here. Do we really want to set up a society where the men have the power to disregard the majority's rule just because we're men?" While that point lingered in the air, Brett's walkie-talkie, which he carried with him everywhere, night and day, suddenly came to life. "Brett," came Michelle's excited voice from the speaker. "This is position 2. We're under attack!" "Did she say attack?" Paul asked as Brett frantically pulled the walkie-talkie from his belt. "Michelle, this is Brett," he said into it. "Repeat your message. Confirming you're under attack?" By now several people around them had heard her voice and Brett's reply. They all stopped what they were doing to stare. "Michelle!" Brett said into the radio when he didn't receive an answer. "Michelle, are you there? Give me an update!" Still there was nothing. "Shit," Brett muttered. He looked up at Paul. "Get the armory open right now and start loading guns." "Right," Paul said, leaping to his feet. "Matt, go help him," Brett said. "Grab a few people on your way out and have them help too. This is the big one until proven otherwise. Start preparing for a full-scale invasion for now. I'll start sending people in to you in a moment. Get a good sized squad ready and then get outside with a radio and take up defensive positions around the building." "Right," Matt said, jumping to his feet and rushing over to several people he knew to be reliable enough to help. He grabbed them and followed Paul out the door. By now an excited murmur was racing around the room as the word was passed. Brett tried to get Michelle on the radio again and again she didn't answer. He began to get a sinking feeling in his gut. He keyed the radio again. "Positions 1,3,4, and 5, check in right now and in order," he barked. Chrissie's voice immediately answered back at him. "Position 1 here," she said. "We're okay, nothing happening." "Copy, Chrissie," he said, "keep a sharp eye out and stand by. Something's going on. Position 3, are you there?" Nothing. "Position 3," he repeated. "Jeff, Lenny, answer the fucking radio if you're there. This is an emergency!" Still nothing. Were they just screwing around in another room, as those two were known to do, or were they dead? He had to assume the worst. Before he could check with position 4 or 5, Michelle's voice returned. "Brett, this is Michelle, are you there?" With a silent sigh of relief, he keyed the microphone. "I'm here, Michelle. What's going on?" "My position had been attacked by at least six people, maybe a lot more. They're inside the wall, Brett and they have rifles and pistols. They tried to throw some sort of nerve gas canisters in through the window!" "Nerve gas?" several people who were listening in said in fear. "Oh my God." "I dropped two of them outside the window of the post and their canisters exploded outside. Then they opened fire on us from the west side of the house, shooting through the wall. Brenda is down and probably dead. I repeat, Brenda is down and probably dead. I dropped two more in the doorway when they tried to storm the house. I haven't seen or heard anything since then." "Your status now?" he asked her. "Are you injured?" "I have a wound on my arm from shrapnel and I'm very sick to my stomach, probably from inhaling some of the gas that drifted up. But I can hold on." "Are you sure?" "Affirmative," she said confidently. "I'm at the top of the stairs covering the entrance to the house." "Okay," he told her. "Hold in place. We're assembling people right now and we'll be out to you as soon as we can. Keep in contact." "Copy," she said. Now that he had some hard information, he tried once again to get hold of position 3, again without response. He found their failure to answer a particularly ominous sign now. He checked with 4 and 5 and both of these positions answered right away. He repeated the order for them to hold in place and then put the walkie-talkie back in his pocket. He looked around the gym at all the anxious faces staring at him. "Listen up!" he shouted, loud enough for everyone to hear. "Everyone who can shoot a gun, move to the armory and get one. We're under attack, people and we need to fight them off." An excited babble began although no one made any move to leave the room. "This is not the time to talk!" Brett yelled. "Get to the fucking armory now! People are dead and there is going to be a lot more if we don't do something about it. Now move!" They moved, responding to the tone of command in his voice. While they were doing that, Brett rushed out of the room through another door and pounded up the stairway to the office. He rushed through the door and found Jessica and Dale, who preferred not to eat with the common folk, sitting at their desks with food trays before them. They looked up at him curiously as he rushed to his desk and began pulling out his maps. "Why are you in such a tizzy?" Jessica asked him. "We're under attack," he told them. "Someone tried to take out position 2 with nerve gas canisters. Brenda is dead but Michelle is still holding the position." "Attack?" Jessica said, looking at him as if he were mad. "Nerve gas?" asked Dale, giving the same look. "Did you say Brenda was dead?" Jessica put in. "You mean... dead?" "I mean dead," he told her viciously. "And there's still an unknown number of people inside the wall with guns. Position 3 is not answering hails on the radio and I think they might be dead there too." Now they looked completely bewildered, unable to process what he was telling them. He gave a very brief summary of what he knew as he stuffed his maps into his pocket and pulled on his rain slicker. "How could something like this happen?" Jessica, who was quite pale, demanded of him. "I don't know right now," he said, "and finding out isn't the issue at the moment. Surviving is the issue. We have no idea how many of these people there are. Why don't you two get downstairs and get armed up. We're gonna have to fight, I think." Like the people in the cafeteria, Jessica and Dale responded to the commanding tone in his voice. Without giving their customary arguments, they got up and headed out the door. ------- "What the hell happened?" Bill demanded of the remnants of John's squad when he found them. He had a pretty good idea of course. He had seen the two bodies and the debris from the exploded Raid-bomb in the driveway. He and his men had in fact stepped over it in order to take up position along the house next door. One of the men explained the sequence of events that had led up to them cowering there without a leader. He started with the guard shooting from the window, passed through their attempt to silence the post by shooting through the walls, and ended with John's ill-fated attempt to clear the building. "He thought we got 'em when we shot into the bedroom," the man, who was near tears, explained. "He was just checking to make sure." Bill shook his head a little, wondering if fatigue had made the former hunting guide make such a stupid error. Everyone had been awake for more than twenty-four hours now. "What do we do now?" Bill was asked. "There's still someone with a gun in that house. Should we go in through the back?" "Maybe we should just leave," another suggested. "Try again another day." "No," Bill said in answer to both questions. "We can't leave. This place is our only hope for food. We need to move on to the community center and try to take it down. We don't have to worry about this guard post anymore because they've probably already radioed that we're here." "Won't they be getting ready for us if they know we're here?" someone asked. "As much as they can," Bill said. "But I don't think that will be enough to stop us. This was a snooty-ass town before the comet. How many guns could they possibly have? Probably most of their firepower is at the guard posts. We need to get to that community center before they think to move the guards in to protect it." "Are you sure they won't have guns?" he was asked. "They'll probably have a few," he said confidently. "So we'll have to move a little more carefully once we get close. The important thing is that we get there before the guards are pulled in. We can still do this if we act now. So let's go! Follow me!" He began to lead them around the front of the single-story house, avoiding crossing into the line of fire from the guard house itself. They went to the end of the street they were on and then turned left down Sycamore Avenue, one of the main roads of the subdivision that led south to the park and the community center. As they made the turn and formed up into a loose diamond shape, no one happened to look towards a row of dying bushes in front of the porch on a corner house. Since no one happened to look there, no one saw Jason crouched behind this row, watching their every move. ------- Though the community center itself was too far away for the sounds of gunfire during the battle for position 2 to reach, Stacy's house, where Jason was now living, was not. Located out as far as anyone had been settled so far, the pops and crackles of the various weapons had been audible enough to bring him out of the restless, worried half-sleep he had been engaged in. Thoughts of the impending showdown tonight had been driven out of his mind in an instant as he realized that a much more important issue was now taking place. Though he couldn't be completely sure, the shooting had sounded like it was coming from the guard post, which could only mean that the town was under attack. He had jumped up and donned his clothing as quickly as possible, threading his pistol through his belt and putting his boots on without bothering to tie them. He had no radio so he did not know exactly what was going on and he had no rifle since they were all in the armory or at the guard posts. His first thought was to get to the community center where Brett was and where the defenses would be assembling. But the community center was much further away then the guardhouse was. Shouldn't he get over there first and see what was going on? Maybe somebody was injured there and needed help. If nothing else, there was a radio there and he could use it to get hold of Brett for instructions. He exited the house, not bothering to lock it, and began heading north, staying off the main streets and sticking to the less traveled routes, which tended to wind back and forth. He knew exactly where to turn and where to go straight. A big part of Brett's training had been map reading and memorization skills. He knew every one of the sixty plus streets and avenues in Garden Hill and could tell you where they went. He reached the corner of Sycamore and Blossom, which was about two hundred yards from position 2, just as Bill and his men had come trotting up from their attack on position 3. Luckily he spotted them before they spotted him and he took refuge in the row of bushes he was passing, his pistol in his sweaty hand, his mind wishing desperately for a pair of binoculars. From where he was sequestered he was able to see a few lumps on the driveway that looked like they might be bodies on the ground but he couldn't be sure. The eight men that had prompted his refuge here all disappeared between position 2 and the house next to it on the west. They stayed in there for nearly five minutes. When they finally emerged, Jason saw there were now more of them. Eight had gone in, but twelve came out. Every one of them had a rifle held at port arms position. They crept around until they were out of the sight line of position 2 and then they began jogging right towards him. His grip tightened on his pistol as they approached and he wondered just how many of them he could shoot before they gunned him down like a rabid dog. He was putting his money on three, but thought that four was maybe possible. When they passed him without even a glance in his direction, he breathed a quiet sigh of relief and wished to have an M-16 in his hands. With the automatic rifle he thought that maybe he would be able to take all of them out. Well, if wishes were horses, etc, etc... As the invaders moved further down Sycamore Avenue he took a moment to wonder if they had left anyone behind to keep an eye on the guard position. Logic told him that they wouldn't do that so he got up and dashed quickly across the street. Moving carefully in case logic happened to be wrong, he advanced house by house, his gun still in his hand, until he was standing against the garage door of the house next door. By now he was clearly able to identify the two lumps in the driveway as human bodies, and those of invaders at that. Their rifles were still lying next to them and the sharp smell of urine and feces was powerful enough to reach him even there. He wondered what the hell had happened. What were all of those metal fragments and what was that sharp, chemical odor that was almost strong enough to override the other stenches? Putting these speculations out of his mind, he returned to the task at hand. As Brett had taught his students during the training, he stepped slowly up the corner of the building so he could see if anyone was still over there. His pistol was pointed downward, not upward, as television cops liked to do. Though pointing up looked more dramatic to a viewing audience, it was much faster and more natural of a motion to bring a weapon to bear by raising the arms up from the waist then bringing it down from the shoulder. He poked his head around the corner and saw nothing but a bunch of empty shell casings along the wall. He took a deep breath and then dashed across the open space to the guard post's driveway. Over here the chemical and biological odor was much stronger, almost sickening. He could now see that the metal fragments that littered the driveway were from a can of insect spray. He could also see the .45 pistol lying broken in two pieces on the ground. He knew that pistol. It belonged to Michelle. Its presence on the ground was a very disturbing sight. Anxious to get away from the choking pesticide and bodily secretion fumes, he continued to creep along the garage door until he was able to peer around and look at the front door. He saw that it had been opened and that two more bodies, invaders by the looks of them, were lying in the entryway. So nobody had made it into the house, or had they? Knowing he was taking a chance but confident in his ability to get away if the occupant turned out to be an invader, he called out. "Is anyone in the house? This is Jason!" It took a few seconds but finally a female voice answered back. "Jason? Is that really you?" "Yes," he answered. "Are you okay in there?" "I'm holding," she replied. "Who is with you?" "No one," he said. "I came from my house. I'm coming in, don't shoot at me!" "All right." Slowly, his pistol still in his hand, he trotted to the front door and stepped over the bodies that were lying there. "Where are you?" he asked. "Step all the way inside first," she said from somewhere above him. "I want to make sure you're not a hostage." "Right," he told her, coming towards the staircase. "I'm all alone. They're all gone." "Are you sure?" she asked. "I watched them go," he said, mounting the stairs and reholstering his pistol. "They're heading for the community center. Where's your radio?" She finally stood up, or at least she tried to. She was very wobbly on her feet. Jason was able to see a large stain on her shirt where she had thrown up. He was also able to see, though he didn't really want to, a dark patch in the crotch of her jeans where she had urinated on herself. She sat back down, leaning against the wall. "I got gassed a little when they hit," she said. "Some kind of nerve gas or something. I think I'll live but I'm pretty sick right now. I keep throwing up and... you know?" "It was Raid," he said. "I saw the cans outside. What the hell is going on? Where's Brenda?" "She's dead," Michelle said. "They shot her through the wall in the bedroom. Are you sure they're all gone?" "Yes," he said, holding out his hand for the radio. "Give it to me, I need to talk to Brett. He needs to know they're coming." She handed it to him and he keyed it up. "Brett," he said, "this is Jason at position 2. Are you there?" It took about fifteen seconds but finally he replied. "Jason?" he asked. "What are you doing there?" "I heard the shooting and I came to see what was happening," he said into the radio. "I saw them, Brett. They've left the guard position and they're heading down Sycamore right towards you, moving fast. There are twelve of them and they are armed with rifles and pistols. They left here less than five minutes ago." ------- Brett had, by that point, made his way out into the parking lot of the community center, where Matt was slowly assembling troops. After hearing Jason's report he took a look at the map he had spread out on the front seat of the fire engine, putting his finger on Sycamore Avenue. Adding five minutes to the corner of Sycamore and Blossom, accounting for a reasonably fast pace, he figured that he had three minutes, maybe four before the invaders arrived at the north end of the park. He took another look outside and saw that fifteen people, mostly women but a few men, were armed up. Only one or two of them looked like they might be halfway competent with the rifles they had been given. Most were fumbling as they tried to put ammunition in. "This is not good," he muttered, cursing Jessica and Dale for overriding his suggestion some weeks before that all guns be stored loaded, with the safeties on, in case of attack. He put the two council members out of his head and picked up the radio again. "Chrissie, are you there?" "Chrissie here," her voice responded immediately. "Have you been listening to Jason's traffic?" "Affirmative," she told him. "I copy twelve armed men heading down Sycamore Avenue towards the community center." "Good," he said. "I want you and Maggie to take your weapons, as much ammo as you can carry, and get to the corner of Manzanita and Sycamore as fast as you can. Hole up over there where you can see what's going on and report to me when they pass by. You should be able to get there before them. Hold your fire until you're told. Report only for now." "Copy, Brett," she said. "We're on the way." "Jason," he said next, "are you still with me?" "I'm here, Brett," his voice said. "Take the 16 and the radio and go as fast as you can to the corner of Cypress and Manzanita. Find yourself a place to hole up there. Take any extra ammo you have as well. Wait for orders there." "Got it," he said. "Is Michelle still okay?" "She's sick but she's chillin'," he answered. "Good," Brett said. "Tell her to keep chillin'. We'll send someone to get her as soon as we can. Position 4 and Position 5, you guys just keep your eyes out. I'll call you if I need you." He stuffed the radio back in his pocket and stepped down from the fire engine, grabbing the AR-15 he'd taken from the supply room and slinging it over his shoulder. Jessica and Dale, both with shotguns in their hands, were standing directly behind him, listening to everything he did. It seemed like Jessica wanted to say something to him but he pushed by her, going over to Matt. "Matt," he said. "We got about three minutes or so until they're here. There are twelve of them, armed with rifles and pistols, and they were last seen moving south down Sycamore. I'll take the people you have here and deploy them over on the far side of the parking lot, by the playground. You go inside and get another group together. Get yourself a radio and stand by for orders. I'll probably have you firm up the far side of the building. You'll be able to find reasonable cover behind the cars and trucks parked out there. Don't come out with less than ten people though and whatever you do, don't let anyone else out of that building until I say so." "Right," Matt said, turning and running back towards the door. Brett then turned to the motley collection that he had. "All right, people," he said. "Get your weapons locked and loaded and follow me. We got twelve armed men heading our way from the north." ------- Bill called a sudden halt to his eleven troops. "This road here," he said, pointing at a side street that went off to the east. "It leads to that other road that goes along the east side of the park." He turned to Glenn Paxton, who he figured was the least incompetent at command. "Glenn," he told him. "You take Mike, Steve, and Lou and keep moving south, until you get to the last row of houses before the park. Find cover there and start shooting at anyone out front. If no one's out there, shoot a couple rounds anyway to try and draw any fire they have." "What are you gonna do?" Glenn said, terrified at the thought that he was being put in charge of something. "I'm gonna take the rest of the guys and hit them from the east. While you're keeping them occupied, we'll move in. Be careful not to shoot us." "But..." "Just do it," Bill yelled. "Now." He slapped him on the back to get him in gear. Glenn reluctantly gathered his task force together and led them down Sycamore. Once they were on their way, Bill and his group began heading east. When they got to the corner, they hooked back to the south. ------- Brett was finally getting his own troops into something approximating good positions. He had then deployed on their bellies behind the wooden planks that made up the large sawdust pit within which the jungle gym was contained. He himself was lying in the middle, directly between Jessica and Dale, who were both trembling like paint-shakers. "Maybe I should go help Paul," Dale said suddenly. "He doesn't know the store room as well as..." "Shut up," Brett told him. "Don't be a fucking pussy. If you run, everyone else will run too and we'll all die. You're supposed to be a leader here, goddammit." "I wasn't trying to run," he said, near-tears from fear. "I was just thinking that..." "Don't think," Brett said. "It's not your strong suit. Just stay there in that position until I tell you to do something. You too, Jess. Remember, you two have shotguns, not rifles. Shotguns are only good for close-in defense. Unless someone gets within ten yards of us, you shouldn't have to shoot at all." "And what if they do?" Jessica asked. "Then point it at them and shoot," he said. "You have double-ought buck rounds in there. It's like a hand grenade, it doesn't have to be aimed exactly on target, just close, okay?" "Like a hand grenade," Jessica said talismanically. "Like a hand grenade." "Brett, this is Chrissie," barked the walkie-talkie. "Are you there?" He picked it up and keyed it. "I'm here." "We're in position now and they just passed us," she said. "But there was only four of them." "Confirm only four?" he asked. "That is affirmative. Only four. Moving south at a good clip in a line formation. I can still see them now in fact. They should be near the front of the park in less than a minute." "Copy, Chrissie," he said. "Hold tight and stand by for further orders. Chances are we'll be needing you." "Copy." "Four?" Jessica said. "What happened to twelve? Was that boy exaggerating?" "I don't think so," he said, keying the radio. "Matt, are you there?" It took a moment but finally he answered. "Matt here." "Do you have a squad ready to go?" "You could say that," he said doubtfully. Brett understood. "Get over to the east side and deploy where I told you to before. It sounds like they sent eight of them around that way to flank us. The four heading our way are probably for diversion and cover." "Moving now," Matt responded. "Flank us?" Dale asked. "What does that mean?" "It means they're trying to send a group of them around to the other side to attack us from that direction. Matt and his people should be able to prevent that." He keyed the radio once more. "Jason, you out there?" "Almost in position," he answered. "I copied Chrissie's traffic. You want me to cut over to the east a block or two?" "You read my mind," Brett told him. "Take position at Elm and Manzanita instead. If we drive them back, they're gonna be coming right at you so keep your weapon on automatic and leave yourself an escape route." "Right," Jason told him. "Jason is out there?" Jessica asked. "What is he doing out there?" "He's the spring on the little trap we're setting," Brett said, dropping his radio and picking up his rifle again. "But he's just a boy. Are you deliberately putting him in harm's way?" "That's where he belongs," Brett said. "I trust him a lot more out there than I would trust anyone else in this group." "But..." "Quiet," he barked at her. "It's almost time." They were quiet but very restless, not just Jessica and Dale, but his entire group. A few of them had pulled guard duty before, a few had even shot at stragglers, but this was the first time that any of them had been in close combat where people were going to actually be shooting back. He could sense the fear and near-panic radiating off of them. It was like a stench almost. He hoped they would hold when the time came. If they held, there was no way that the four men approaching would be able to defeat them. If they panicked however, it was all but assured. He spotted movement near the front of the park and a moment later two figures darting from the side of the street and heading for cover behind a large brick planter in the front lawn of a house. "They're here," Brett told his troops. "About two hundred yards north, right along that green and brown single story. I only got two of them so far. Hold your fire until I tell you to shoot." His intention was to let the enemy make the first move. He wanted to spot where their fire was coming from before he wasted precious ammunition returning it. But Dale apparently had different thoughts on the tactical situation. "I see one," he screamed, leveling his shotgun in the general direction and pulling the trigger. The 12-gauge boomed as the shell was fired, sending ten pea-sized pellets flying downrange on a gout of flame. The pellets spread out rapidly as they left the barrel, flying in a very un-aerodynamic fashion, and dropped harmlessly to the ground sixty yards short of their target. But before they did so, the sound of the shot reached the enemy, giving away the position of the defenders and destroying any chance of an ambush. The two men reacted quickly, diving to the ground behind the planter. "You fucking idiot," Brett yelled as two muzzleflashes suddenly winked at them as the men Dale had shot at shot back. Two more flashes followed a second later twenty yards to the left, both from the corner of the house across the street. Bullets came whizzing in, sounding like angry insects buzzing over their heads. There was a loud ping as one of them struck the jungle gym. "They're shooting!" Jessica yelled just as the sound of the gunshots reached them. She too, contrary to two different sets of orders, unleashed a round from her shotgun. This threw the rest of the group into a general panic. Guns began to go off one by one and bullets began to fly towards the two houses from which the shots had come, most of them badly aimed and nowhere close to target. A window shattered and a large chunk of a chimney was chipped away. Jessica and Dale both fired their shotguns again, prompting Brett to scream at them to knock that shit off. "Aim for the muzzleflashes," he told the rest. "Use your scopes if you've got them." He himself popped five rounds from his AR-15 at the spot where he'd seen a gun go off. The hunters returned fire again and more bullets began to whiz by them. One thunked loudly into the wood just eight inches from Dale and this was just a little too much for him to take. His fear boiled completely over. "They're gonna kill us!" he screamed, leaping to his feet and preparing to bolt. "Dale, get the fuck down!" Brett shouted, dropping his rifle and trying to grab him. Just as he got his hand on Dale's leg there was a whiz and a meaty thud. Brett felt him jerk and looked up to see a hole in his back, just above his beltline. He gave a pull and Dale fell to the ground next to him. "I'm shot!" Dale yelled. "Oh god, I'm shot!" Since Dale was now lying on his back, Brett could see where the bullet had exited. It was not an encouraging sight. Blood was welling from a hole the diameter of a silver dollar. Muscle, fat tissue, and even a small coil of intestine, torn and shredded by the chunk of lead, were clearly visible protruding from the wound. "Jessica," he yelled at her as three more bullets crashed into the wood or whizzed overhead, "Dale's hit! Get over here and put some pressure on this wound. Use a piece of his shirt!" Jessica, who was now cowering against the wooden planks, hugging the ground like she thought she might spin off, raised her head up just enough to take a quick look. She hiccupped once and then vomited up the small amount of breakfast she had managed to eat all over Brett's outstretched leg. She then turned and began scrambling to her feet. "Jessica, goddammit, get down or you'll get shot!" Brett yelled at her, trying to grab hold of her. He missed his grip and she began running towards the community center as fast as she could go. Four other members of his group, two men and two women, seeing her flee, lost the thin margin of control they had been hanging on to. They too jumped up and tried to make a break for it. "Stay down and fight, you assholes!" Brett screamed at them. "Don't you dare abandon me!" They ignored him and began to run after Jessica. Just as they started to pick up speed, another barrage of bullets came flying in and two of them were hit. Rick Stanton, a former gas station attendant at the Garden Hill Shell station, was struck in the back of the head, snapping it forward and throwing a sizable portion of his brain out onto the ground in front of him. He dropped instantly, falling face-first, and did not move. Sherri Philo, who had been married to a gynecologist before the comet and who was one of Jessica's closest gossip cronies, took one high in the back of the leg, shattering her femur. She staggered forward two more steps and then fell screaming next to Rick. Jessica and the other two who had bolted never looked back. They made the hundred-yard dash to the community center as if they were on fire, throwing themselves through the doorway. Two other people had been set to bolt until they saw what fate awaited them if they stood up. They dropped back down just as the next volley of fire came rolling in. "Shoot back at them!" Brett yelled. "For God's sake, shoot back at them!" He then poked his head up long enough to unleash six fast shots towards the invaders. Finally, left with nothing else to do, his remaining people began to shoot back once more. ------- Meanwhile, two hundred yards to the east, on the far side of the community center parking lot, Matt lost two of his group before contact was even made with the enemy approaching them. They heard the pops of gunfire coming from the other side of the building and, despite Matt's pleas and threats, dropped their weapons and ran. Though Matt himself had never been in any sort of combat situation, had never even had opportunity to fire at a straggler outside the wall, he held firm, encouraging his remaining troops to hold in place the best he could. With his heart hammering in his chest, he pointed his AK-47 out over the hood of a Ford F-150 and kept his eyes peeled for the invaders. The rest of his group were spread out behind the engine compartments of the other vehicles parked there, two per vehicle. Just as the volume of fire from Brett's position began to pick up after a long, discouraging period of non-response, he spotted them. They were spread out and crouched low, darting from the cover of a house on the far side of the park towards a group of trees about twenty yards inside the perimeter. "There they are," he called, feeling a strange calmness overtake him now that moment was at hand. "Hold your fire until I shoot. Let's let them get closer in." "Closer in?" someone, a male, asked with a trembling voice. "I thought we were trying to drive them away." "We're trying to kill them," Matt said firmly, watching as the continued to draw closer. "That's what this is about. We'll chop them up when they get halfway between." "But..." "Shut up," Matt barked. "Get ready." He tightened his grip on his weapon and began to track the lead man across the top of his sight. "Those of you with shotguns, hold your fire unless they get close in. Everybody else, be sure to use your sights if you can. Don't just fire randomly." "Aren't they close enough?" someone else, a female, asked this time. "Matt, they're almost on top of us!" "Not yet," he said, his breathing slowing down and becoming more regular. The group made it to the trees and took cover behind it for a moment, temporarily disappearing from view. That was okay. He knew they would reappear in a few moments. To his left, the sound of gunshots from Brett's group continued, mostly rifle shots but with occasional cracks from the AR-15 thrown in. He could also hear at least two people screaming, one, it sounded like Dale, yelling over and over that he was going to die. "What the fuck is going on?" someone asked, her voice wavering on the edge of control. "What are they doing?" "Patience," Matt said. "They'll head for us in a moment." ------- "Keep shooting," Brett told his people, who seemed to have settled down just a bit. "Move a few feet to one side each time you shoot so they don't sight in on you. Take aim at their muzzleflashes through your scopes and try to hit them the next time they pop up. Remember that it takes the bullet a second or two to get there!" More bullets plinked in, kicking up splashes of the water that was contained in the sawdust in front of them or flying over the top of them. Occasionally one would hit the wood that was providing cover for them and blow off a chunk of it. Brett fired a few times whenever someone was reloading his or her weapon, just to keep the pressure on, but otherwise conserved his ammo. He knew that these four were not going to rush them. They were just the diversionary group. Behind him, both Dale and Sherri were still screaming in pain and fear. He could do nothing but ignore them for the moment since he had no one to spare to offer first aid. "Fuck yeah! I got one!" Steve Enders, the former pool man, said excitedly. "I hit him in the fuckin' face!" "Good," Brett said, popping off a few more rounds while the woman next to him shoved a few more shells into her gun. He mentally subtracted one from four. "Do it again with someone else now. We can take these fuckers, people if we keep working together. Keep the pressure on them!" He sensed some sort of teamwork and camaraderie at work now as battle-lust took over. He was glad for it but could not allow himself the luxury of becoming a part of it. He was responsible for much more than what was going on here. He put his head down and picked up his radio for the first time since the battle had begun. "Matt, this is Brett, what's your status?" he asked into it. "We have them in sight in the trees near the northeast corner of the park," was the reply. "We're gonna hit them hard when they try to move in. Be advised that two of my people have deserted." "Copy," he said. "I know the feeling. Let the rest of yours know that I got two people hit because they broke cover. They need to stay where the fuck they are when the shooting starts!" "They copied you," he said. "I'll keep them here." "Right," Brett replied. "Kick some ass. Take out as many as you can. No fucking mercy for these people. Chrissie, are you with me?" "I'm here," she said immediately. "We're still holding in place." "Move in," he told her. "Steve dropped one of our guys but I've still got three people holed up at the north end of the park, directly across Cypress. There are two covering to the west side of the brown and white house on the corner and one covering behind the brick planters in front of the green and brown house. We've got them pinned down right now but we're gonna start getting short on ammo here pretty soon. I want you to drop down south to Cypress and then move east until you have a shot at them. Be careful, they're pretty good with those rifles. Once you have a clear line of sight, either take the motherfuckers out or drive them out of cover so that we can. Got it?" "We're on our way," she said. "Moving double time." "Good girl," he told her. "Let's kick some fuckin' ass, baby." ------- "Shit," Matt said, seeing only four people emerge from the trees. They were still in a crouch, weapons held ready, moving quickly towards a grassy knoll about sixty yards from where they had started. The other four enemies, he knew, would be in the trees to cover their advance. Now what? "Where are the rest of them?" he was asked. "Matt, they didn't all come out!" He thought furiously for a moment, his brain working on overdrive, weighing the various options that he had. Should he attack the ones on the move, therefore alerting the ones in the trees to their presence or should he wait until such a time as both were in the open? But what if both never came into the open? What if by the time they did, they were too close for his un-trained and undisciplined troopers to hit them all? "Matt?" the voice was now frantic. "What do we do?" "Open fire on them," he said. "Take 'em down." "But..." "Now!" he yelled, sighting on the closest one and pulling his trigger three times. His aim was true and the man spun to the left before falling in a heap. Just as that stricken invader's companions started to react to this, the rest of Matt's troops, including those with the shotguns, opened fire as well, drilling the man behind him full of holes. The other two dove into the grass and began to fire back at them. At the same time, from the trees, four more guns began to shoot. Within a second or two, glass was shattering on the windows of the cars they were using for cover and bullets were slamming into the metal bodies. "Get the two on the ground first!" Matt yelled, wincing as safety glass from the shattered windshield sprayed in his face. "Take them before we worry about the trees!" Obediently, his men (and women) kept their fire concentrated on the two men left stranded in the open. Though they had made themselves as small of targets as possible by lying on their bellies facing the threat, it was only a matter of ten or fifteen seconds before shots from the scoped rifles and the AK-47 found them. Though they were small targets, they had no cover to hide behind. "They're all down!" Matt yelled to his men after the last one's head snapped back in a spray of blood and dropped to the grass. "Shift fire to the trees now. Keep them from moving!" ------- Chrissie, running with the M-16 in her hands and her radio in her back pocket, moved closer and closer to the popping of rifles. Maggie, a town woman who was a little more competent than most, trotted right behind her, carrying the Winchester hunting rifle. Both of them had ammunition stuffed into every available pocket and both were nearly out of breath from the running. "We're getting close," Chrissie said, slowing her pace a little. "Let's cut over along the houses so they don't spot us." "Okay," Maggie panted, following her across a soggy lawn without question. Though normally she was just as condescending to Chrissie as everyone else, she instinctively knew she should follow the young girl's orders now. The confident way she moved and the unmistakable tone of command in her voice were impossible to ignore under these circumstances. "We need to stay as close to these houses as we can," Chrissie told her. "Jump over bushes if you have to, but don't get more than five feet away from the wall." They began to move again, their pace now little more than a trot, Chrissie staying in the lead. Her blue eyes were alert and peering forward, towards the sound of gunfire, searching for the flashes. Soon enough she spotted one. It came from about two hundred yards in front of her, from the side of the house on the north side of the street, right where Brett had told her it would be. Once she spotted that she was able to make out the figures of two men hiding along the wall. They were taking turns firing their rifles towards the community center. The first would fire and then duck back to put in a fresh round while the second took his turn. "Get down!" Chrissie barked, diving to the soggy grass on her stomach as she said it. Maggie hesitated for the briefest of instants, not very keen on the idea of lying down in the wet, muddy grass, but finally decided that when it came down to a choice between being muddy and being dead, she would have to go with the mud. She splashed down next to Chrissie. "You see them?" Chrissie asked. "I got two along that wall." "I see them," Maggie said, watching as they went through a cycle of shooting. "Sight in on the one on the right," Chrissie told her. "Aim for his body and take him out." "Take him out?" she said nervously. "I don't think..." "Do it," Chrissie yelled, sighting on the left man. "As soon as you drop him, I'll take the other one with the 16." "Maybe you should take the first one," Maggie said. "I'm not sure..." "Do it," Chrissie repeated. "I've seen you shoot at stragglers from further away then this. You can do it. Wait until he's standing still. It'll take a second or so for the bullet to reach him." "Chrissie," she pleaded. "I... "You can do it, Maggie," Chrissie said firmly. "I need your help here. Now aim at him and take his ass out." Slowly Maggie put the rifle to her shoulder and looked through the scope. She was trembling so badly that it took a moment for her to be able to steady the weapon enough to get a sighting. Once she did, she had to move back and forth for a moment until she saw the target. "I got him," she said slowly, hardly noticing that her trembling had stopped. "He's shooting again." "When he steps back to let the other one up, nail him," Chrissie said, her finger tightening on the trigger. In her sight Maggie saw him unleash a shot towards Brett's position. He then raised up the rifle and stepped back three steps while the second man stepped up. He paused there to put in a fresh round. Just as his hand started to work the bolt on his rifle, Maggie fired, continuing to watch through the scope. The bullet reached him as he was halfway through the motion of pushing the bolt back. It struck him right in the center of the chest, causing him to drop his rifle and stumble against the wall. "I did it!" Maggie squealed excitedly, raising her head up. "I hit him!" Before he even began to drop, Chrissie opened up on the other one, firing two quick three-round bursts on automatic fire. He was just starting to turn towards the sound of Maggie's shot when four bullets struck him in the chest and head. He was dead before he hit the ground. She shifted her sights to the first man, who had slumped down into a sitting position against the wall of the house. He was probably dead - the rifle had fallen from his hands - but she fired a burst into his chest anyway, just to make sure. "That oughtta do it," she said, raising her head a little. She pulled out her walkie-talkie and keyed it up. "Brett, Chrissie here. We just dropped the two against the house. They're out of it!" "We saw one of them go down, Chrissie," he answered. "Glad you got the other one too. Good shooting. There's one more over there behind the planter. Do you have a visual on him?" "It's out of my sight line," she said. "We'll move out a little and try to get some fire on him." "Be careful, Chris," he told her, his voice taking on a tone other than that of command for the first time. She felt a smile forming on her face. "I will," she told him. "I've been taught well." She shoved the radio back in her pocket and turned to Maggie. "Let's see if we can get the other one now." "Where is he?" she asked, not having heard the radio traffic. "Brett said he was across the street, behind a brick planter. Let's move out to the right, real slowly, and see if we can pick him up. Be careful and keep down. He knows we're here now." Chrissie, without waiting to see if Maggie was going to follow, began to belly-crawl to her right, moving herself further out onto the lawn and widening her view of the target area. Just as the corner of the planter in question came into view she saw a flash from it. She rolled sharply back to the left a half-second before the bullet slammed into the mud where she had just been. She did this instinctively, without a thought, and only after the incident was over did she realize how close she had just come to dying. "Christ," she muttered, her heart hammering in her chest. "Get back, Mags," she warned. "Don't come any further out." "What are you doing?" Maggie asked with alarm as Chrissie stood up. "I know where he's at now," she said. "I'm gonna flush him out of there." "How?" she asked. "You're gonna get yourself killed." "I won't," she said, taking a deep breath. She sidestepped to the right three steps and fired a burst at the planter. As soon as the bullets left the barrel, she dove back to the left, out of the sightline once again. The bullets were not aimed very well - they had not been intended to be - but when they slammed into the bricks of the planter and the stucco of the house, they completely unnerved the single remaining hunter that was cowering back there. He fired a single shot back at the girl, knowing even as he pulled the trigger that it wasn't going to hit her. What the hell had happened? Things had seemed to be going so well for the first minute or so of the battle despite the fact of there being more guns than they had thought. They had clearly seen two of the defenders flee in terror and three of them fall to the barrage of fire they had put up. Victory had seemed assured. But then things had taken a turn for the worst. In the last three minutes, all three of his companions had been killed. First Glenn, the man Bill had put in charge of this ill-fated diversionary force, had taken a shot right between his eyes as he popped up to fire his rifle. And then, out of the blue, Steve and Lou had been mowed down by automatic gunfire coming from another direction. It had to have been the guardhouse personnel. How had they forgotten about them? The girl popped out again and her rifle flashed. Again, he pulled the trigger on his rifle, trying to put a bullet in her before she could duck back out of sight, but this time the trigger didn't move and the gun didn't fire. As four more rounds came flying in, chipping bricks and smashing the small window that looked in on the garage, his nerve broke. Without even realizing that he had forgotten to chamber a new round, he discarded the rifle and stood up. His intention was to flee back the way he had come, running as fast as he could until he reached the wall and was able to get himself out of this place, but he only made it two steps. Had he been more coherent, he might have noticed that the volume of fire from the community center had slacked considerably off once he started getting shot at from the other direction. This was because Brett had ordered all but two of his people to cease fire and wait until someone popped up. The moment his head became visible over the top of the planter, three rifles and an AR-15 opened up on him. Two bullets hit his chest, driving him down to his knees. Two more hit him in the head, finishing the job of killing him. ------- "He's down!" Brett yelled, seeing him drop. "Cease fire!" His group was completely in the battle mode now - or at least as in the mode as untrained, undisciplined people could get - and they obeyed him instantly. From the other side of the community center, the sound of a drawn-out fight was still echoing. From in front of them and to the left, came another burst of M-16 fire as Chrissie, not realizing that her target was down, fired again. "Chrissie," Brett said into the walkie-talkie, "he's down. You drove him out of there and we dropped him. Hold your fire." It took her a moment to answer. "I copy he's down," she said. "Move in and secure that area. Remember, keep your guard up until you know they're all dead." They were all dead. It was confirmed two minutes later when the two women advanced in and visualized the carnage they had helped cause. While Maggie stared in awe at the dead bodies, Chrissie gave the all-clear signal to Brett over the radio. "Copy, Chrissie," he said. "Stand by. Paul, are you there?" Paul had been monitoring the battle from inside the community center, feeling about as helpless as a man could feel, listening to the gunfire rattling back an forth, hearing bullets hitting the side of the building, and hearing the screams of those that had been hit every time Brett keyed up his radio. "I'm here, Brett," he said. "We're secure out here now but we've got two wounded that need to be taken care of. Dale and Sherri have been hit." "I'm on my way," he said, picking up his first aid bag. "You'll need some people to help you," Brett said. "If Jessica's in there, why don't you have her do it? She should see what she helped do out here." Paul looked over to where Jessica was sitting against the wall. She was trembling wildly, her face ashen, her hands wringing nervously. She had vomit stains on her rain slicker. "I don't think she's in any kind of shape to do that," he replied. "I'll find someone else." "Tell her thanks for the help she provided," Brett said icily. "We really appreciated it out here." ------- "Matt, what's your situation?" came Brett's voice. As Brett's had done before it, Matt's group was now performing as a fairly well disciplined team. They kept up the volume of fire on the trees, exchanging shots at a controlled pace with the group hiding within. So far, though the cars they were hiding behind were riddled with bullet holes and leaking various engine fluids onto the ground, no one had been hit. As far as they knew, none of their enemy had been hit either. They were just pinning each other down. "Still in position," he told Brett as another volley of fire came rolling in, punching more holes in the cars. "They split into two and tried to advance. We took out four of them. The rest are hiding in the trees near the southeast corner of the park." "So you have four left?" "Affirm. Eight entered the trees. Four came out to advance. I don't know if we've hit any of the remaining ones or not. We're somewhat at a stalemate here." "And your people?" "No one is hit but we're starting to get low on .30 caliber ammo. I still have two more clips of 7.65." "Slow down your rate of fire a little," Brett told him. "We don't have any way of getting someone out to you without putting them at risk. The other group is down now so I'll get you some help." "We'd surely appreciate that," Matt said, signing off and putting his radio back in his pocket. He told his people to ease up on the ammo consumption a little and then sighted in on the trees and squeezed off another two rounds. ------- Brett was elated to hear that Matt, who had not been tested in combat until now, had managed to wipe out half of the force attacking him. With his elation came a plan. He directed Chrissie around to the north and then the east, telling her to link up with Jason at his position to augment his automatic rifle with her own. Maggie went along for the ride in case her long-range scoped rifle was needed. Once they made the link-up, he told them to move south until they had the trees in sight and in range. While they were making the trip, and while Paul and several of the women from inside the community center came out and began tending to Dale and Sherri, Brett led his group back to the supply room (all of them giving contemptuous looks at Jessica as they passed her) where they quickly grabbed extra ammunition. "Okay, guys," he told them. "It's time to end this thing. Follow me." He led them out a side entrance and pointed across the park, towards the flooded baseball diamond. "We need to get over there," he said. "We can put some fire on those assholes if we can get in the dugout." "The dugout?" someone asked. "How are we going to do that? They'll see us when we cross the parking lot and the grass." "No they won't," Brett said, "because we're not going to cross the parking lot and the grass, at least not from this direction. Come on." He began to head off to the west, away from the diamond, keeping the community center between his group and the trees where the enemies were located. He moved at a fast pace, not quite a full-out run, but a little more than a simple jog. His group of recently popped cherries consisted of seven women and three men. They ran single file behind him, their weapons clanking and their extra ammo rattling. He led them out of the park and into the residential area, down a street where many of the town residents, including Dale and Jessica, kept house. They went down one block and turned left, to the south, keeping up the pace they were setting for two more blocks, at which point Brett hooked back towards the park. When they reached the street that ran alongside of the park, the wooden backstop of the baseball diamond was now standing between them and the trees, keeping the enemy from spotting them. "Move up to the backstop," Brett told them. "Keep low as you move, so your heads don't show on the other side." He then led by example and did exactly as he had told them to do. It was a rather tense dash but a minute later all eleven of them hunched down against the painted green wood. They took a moment to catch their breath. "Good job," Brett told them. "Now let's get into position." The dugout was just that, a pit dug out of the ground and lined with concrete where the baseball players that had once romped here sat awaiting their turn to bat or take the field. It was about four feet deep and twenty feet long and, since it was a low spot in the park, it was about half filled with rainwater. "Keep your weapons out of the water," Brett told his troops as he made the five-yard dash from the back of the backstop, across the muddy first-base line, and into the dugout. He made a splash in the water and his legs were instantly chilled to the bone. He ignored it, submerging his hips and lower stomach as well as he crouched down to keep his body covered. He kept his rifle and the radio carefully out of the wetness. "Come on," he told the next person. "Get the hell over here." One by one they followed his lead, stomping through the mud and then splashing into the water. Brett kept expecting the gunfire from the trees, which was still popping, to turn towards them at any time since the dash from the backstop brought every person that did it briefly into the view. But apparently the tree people were a little too busy exchanging shots with Matt's people to notice that. It would be their undoing. "Perfect," Brett said, once all of them were in. He set his radio down on the ground in front of him and trained his rifle towards the trees. He could see two of the invaders without even looking through a scope. From his angle they were perpendicular to the trees instead of behind them. "Those of you with scopes," Brett said, "find a target and get ready to shoot. Once we start shooting, keep it up and keep the pressure on them. We're going to drive them right out of there and into a trap." There were some murmurs of agreement and they took aim. Brett picked up the radio and called Jason and Chrissie. "We're in position," Jason told him. "We have good cover and an escape route if we need to pull back." "Copy that," Brett said. "Get ready to rumble over there, we're gonna drive 'em right into you. Hold your fire until they break cover and come at you. Matt, when you hear us open up over here, you do the same. Pour fire on those motherfuckers and we'll do the same." "Ready when you are," Matt assured him. "Okay, let's do it." ------- Bill was doing all he could to keep his people in position. Their ammunition was getting short and with each bullet that thunked into the tree trunks opposite of where someone was hiding, their sense of panic and doom grew. It was now apparent that a big mistake had been made in attacking this town, had been apparent from the moment that four of them were cut to pieces out on the grass by the group that was now firing at them, but there was nothing that could be done about it now. He was trying to figure out a way to get his people out of here so they could live to fight another day but he saw no escape. If they went back the way they had come, they would be mowed down in the open ground. If they went forward, they would be mowed down from there. If they went sideways, towards the houses on the far side of the park, they would be mowed down by the group that Glenn's group had been exchanging shots with (an exchange which had come to an abrupt end a few minutes ago) or by people inside the community center itself. They were trapped like rats. So far no one had been hit by gunfire but how much longer could that last? Just when he thought things couldn't get worse, they did. Bullets began to fly in from the left of them. A lot of bullets. They slammed into the trees and whizzed through the air. There was a scream as one of the men was hit and fell to the ground. Bill looked just for an instant, just long enough to see flashes coming from the baseball diamond. Instinctively he tried to edge around the tree he was using for cover to get away from this new threat. As he did so, he edged right into the line of fire from Matt's group. Before he had a chance to realize his mistake, he felt something strike him in the chest. It felt like someone had punched him while holding a roll of quarters. Suddenly his legs would not hold him up anymore and he was falling, pitching forward. He landed in the mud, unable to move because the .30 caliber bullet had cut his spinal cord as it had passed through his body. He found it difficult to even breathe, since it had passed through his right lung on its way to the spinal cord. As his consciousness began to fade he was cognizant that his two remaining men were fleeing in terror. One of them stepped on his head as he tried to make his escape. ------- That was the end of the battle. The two men managed to get across the field without getting hit by any of the fifty some odd bullets that Brett and Matt's group fired at them, but the moment they reached the street, they ran smack into Jason, Chrissie, and Maggie. The trio had hidden themselves in a row of bushes that separated two houses, their guns pointing outward through the dead leaves. They held their fire until the two men were less than forty yards away and then they opened up. A hail of lead smashed into them, killing both of them before they even had a chance to realize they were under attack. ------- It was quite some time before things settled down. The immediate worry was the two people left in the trees. Though two people, one from Matt's group and one from Brett's, thought they had hit someone in there, they weren't sure enough that Brett felt comfortable just walking in to look. Instead he had all three groups of combatants - his, Matt's, and the Jason, Chrissie, Maggie combo - converge upon the area at once, their weapons ready. They did in fact find someone still alive in there, but he wasn't in good enough shape to put up a fight. Ten feet away from the dead body of Bill, the leader of the ill-fated attack upon the community center, they found a man writhing in pain in the mud and leaves, a bullet through his pelvis. Brett searched him thoroughly, removing a pistol and two hunting knives, and then ordered his group to drag him back to the community center. "Put some bandages on that bleeding," he told them. "I don't want him to bleed out before I have a chance to talk to him. Stick him in one of the empty storage rooms and keep him under guard." They dragged him off, not being particularly gentle with him as they did so. Brett turned to Chrissie, laying eyes on her for the first time since early that morning. She looked back at him, the hood of her rain slicker pulled back, her blonde hair drenched and dripping, her rifle pointed at the ground. They shared a smile with each other. He wanted to tell her that she had done a good job, that he had worried about her, that he was proud of her. He didn't, not wanting it to seem like he wasn't worried about and proud of the rest of those around him. All the same, she got the message. ------- From atop hill 1519, Lieutenant Bracken and Stu had watched the entire battle unfold, from the time the first Raid-bomb was tossed to the time the last shot was fired at the escaping tree people. Stu, when things had seemed to be going well for the invaders, had urged Bracken to take the platoon down to join the battle. "We can get fresh recruits down there and we can capture our pick of the women!" he'd pleaded. But Bracken insisted upon watching only, seeing how things unfolded. The entire battle, from start to finish, had lasted less than thirty minutes and Bracken was somewhat confused on just what he should think about it. On the one hand, the town had been taken almost completely by surprise. The invaders had already been inside the wall when the sun came up, something that should never have been allowed to happen. But on the other hand, the guards at the near position had reacted well to the attack, preventing their position from falling and, obviously, getting the word out to the community center that an attack was underway. "This entire thing," he told Stu now, watching through binoculars as Matt's group emerged from the community center and began heading west, towards the wall, "was a case of two different extremes." "What the fuck does that mean?" asked Stu, who, while clever, was not blessed with a terribly large vocabulary. "It means there was a mixture of some pretty hideous discipline - such as when the defenders broke and ran from four people shooting at them - and some rather brilliant defenses. The flanking maneuvers were first-rate, performed with precision in exactly the right places at exactly the right times. That final maneuver, flushing those people out of the trees by shooting at them from the baseball diamond, that was planning and execution at it finest. I couldn't have done it better myself. I just don't understand how someone, probably your friend with the kids and the M-16s, could be so smart about these tactical decisions, but so dumb about the basic defense arrangement." "Who knows?" Stu asked, watching as another group started piling into the truck they used to gather wood with. It was one of the few that had been undamaged in the battle. Three got in the front of it and four got in the back. It started up and began heading towards the northeast corner, probably to check on the guard position that had been struck in the opening moves. "Listen, Bracken," he said, "this is the perfect time for us to strike. They're all in disarray from the first attack. It will be the last thing that they're expecting. We could go in from the north before they have a chance to replace their guards. We stay off the main road and work our way south and I bet we can be on top of that community center before they even know we're there." "No," Bracken said without hesitation. "We can take them!" Stu said. "I'm sure we could," he replied. "But how many would we lose doing it? Ten maybe, perhaps fifteen if our friend rallies quickly enough. Not only that, we would end up having to kill a lot of the women since they seem to be using them as soldiers." "That's the cost of war," Stu said. "Yes, but there's no sense paying it if you don't have to. We'll take this town, and soon. But we're not going to do it with a platoon. Tomorrow at first light, we're gonna head back to Auburn. When we come back here, it will be with a company at least. As incompetent as they look on the surface, I don't think we should take any chances with them. When we strike, we'll strike with overwhelming numbers." ------- Chapter 8 It was nearly two o'clock when a weary and sore Brett found Paul in the community center. Paul had converted one of the empty conference rooms into a makeshift hospital to house the wounded. Dale, Sherri, and Michelle were lying on cots in the room, all of them covered with blankets, their various injuries bandaged up as best as possible. None of the three were conscious when he came in. The wounded prisoner had been bandaged up as well, but he was not housed with the others. He was housed in an empty supply room down the hall, two armed guards out front. Paul was kneeling next to Dale, examining the wound beneath the trauma dressing. He put the bandage back into place and stood up, stripping off the pair of latex gloves he'd donned and dropping them into a garbage can. He waved Brett over to a small desk, out of earshot of the patients. They sat down. "The town is secure," Brett told him. "We've checked everything from one end to the other and there's no sign of any further invaders. Of course that doesn't mean there isn't a force holed up in an empty house or something, but I talked to the prisoner before we went out and he told me that there was only sixteen of them that came in. We have sixteen accounted for; fifteen dead ones and one injured one. They've been watching us for a few days - from the hill overlooking town no less - and they moved in early this morning by scaling the wall across from the guard posts. Their plan was to take out the guard positions quietly with those pesticide bombs and then hit the community center while we were at breakfast. They were going to load our supplies and enough women for all of them onto our vehicles and then head out." "Ambitious plan," Paul commented sourly. "It would've worked if Michelle hadn't spotted them." "That's a little too fine of a margin for comfort." "My feelings exactly," Brett agreed. "Are you sure the prisoner is telling the truth?" Brett gave a strange little smile - a smile that told Paul he didn't want to know. "Oh, I'm pretty sure he is," he said. "I see," he said, saying nothing further on that subject. "What else?" "I've got the guard positions up-staffed again, although I'm using untrained people at the moment. I thought I'd give all of my people and everyone who participated in the battle and the clean up the night off. It seems the least we can do. Especially after... you know... the bodies." Paul nodded understandingly. He had been monitoring the progress of the goings-on since the battle on his radio. He had heard about the grisly discovery of Mitsy, Lenny, and Jeff in guard position 3. "Pretty bad, huh?" "It almost made me sick," Brett told him. "It was cans of Raid insect poison exploded in the room with them, just like they tried to do to Michelle and Brenda. I'm a veteran cop that has seen some serious shit over the years and I almost puked when I saw and smelled what had become of them. We haven't been able to move the bodies out of there yet; the fumes are still that strong. We've opened all the windows in that house and hopefully it will be aired out enough to make a recovery tomorrow." "I take it that you're not using that house as position 3 anymore." "No, that's impossible. I've got it located four houses over now, in another two story. I thought under the circumstances I could make such a move without committee approval." He spat these last two words out. "Now now," Paul said wearily. "It's not the time for that yet. It's coming soon, but not yet." Brett nodded and went on with his report. "Brenda was DOA, as you know. We've recovered her body. It's now in the supply room off the downstairs hallway with Rick's body. As soon as we can get Mitsy and the others, we'll put them in there too and wrap them up in blankets for burial." "What about the invaders' bodies?" "I've got them stacked in the back of the wood gathering truck right now. With your permission I'll grab a crew and take them out to the bridge and toss them over. I don't see any reason to waste effort burying those assholes." "I agree. Get it done as soon as you can." "How are things in here?" Brett asked. Paul shook his head, his eyes showing helplessness. "Dale is going to die," he said. "Probably within the next twenty-four hours. He's bleeding internally at a slow but steady rate. I have no way to replace blood or repair the damage the bullet did to him. Even if I did, he would only get peritonitis. His small intestine is pretty ripped up. I can see that just by looking from the outside. That means his large intestine and probably his stomach took a hit as well." "What a waste," Brett said, not being the least bit sarcastic. Though he had not liked Dale, not in the least, he had no desire to see one of the townspeople perish. Especially not when it was such a worthless and unnecessary death. "Does anyone know?" "Not officially," he answered. "I'm sure that anyone who has looked at him has a pretty good idea though." "What about Jessica?" Paul made a snort of disgust. "What about her?" he asked. "Does she know?" "She doesn't know shit," he said. "She hasn't been in here to see him a single time. I have no idea where she is right now. I saw her earlier talking to some of the other women about something and she was making the same old gossip motions, riling them up about something or other. She doesn't change." "Oh well," Brett said with a shrug. "Let her rant. She ran away when the shit hit the fan out there. Fucking ran away. What about Michelle and Sherri? How are they doing?" "Michelle will probably be all right," he said. "She was pretty sick when they brought her in. She got a good snootful of that pesticide but if she were going to die from it she would've already done so. She's probably already purged most of it from her body. She's just going to feel sick for a while. Sherri, on the other hand, is a different story." "She just has a leg injury, doesn't she?" Brett asked. "What's lethal about that?" "Nothing if this were civilization," he said. "But since it isn't, things are a little different. In the first place, she has a broken femur. The bullet tore right through it. I don't know how to set femurs and get them to grow back together right so there's a good possibility that even if she does live, she'll never be able to walk right again. But that's not the main concern here. The main concern is infection. She had a dirty bullet pass through her body. She'll be prone to blood poisoning or some other infection from that. I cleaned the wound out as best I could and I gave her a big dose of penicillin from the supply we have, but I just don't know if its going to be enough to counter something like that. In a hospital, she would've been given a big dose of intravenous antibiotics. Here, I have nothing but Keflex and Amoxicillin that people used to use to treat freakin bladder infections and strep throat. If she does get blood poisoning, what am I supposed to do about it? Do I cut off her leg? I sure as shit don't know how to do that without killing her." "You're doing the best you can, Paul," Brett told him. "That's all that you can do. You can't help it that you're not a doctor or that you don't have the right supplies. You work with what you got." He nodded, still frowning. "I know," he said. "It just makes me feel so helpless. I've got two gravely wounded people here and one that has been poisoned and all I can do for them is dope them up with Valium and Vicodin and give them some low grade antibiotics in the hope that will work. Strangely enough, Michelle would've been the easiest one to treat if I just had the supplies. Paramedics carry atropine as part of their drug inventory. Atropine counteracts the effects of organo-phosphate poison. But I don't have any of it. All I have is the first aid supplies from the fire station and the drugs we got from people's houses." "Nobody will fault you, Paul. They know you're doing the best you can. Don't be so hard on yourself." "I'll try," he said, looking at his three patients sadly. "I've just never felt as uncivilized as I do right now. Back before the comet when me and my fire-crew responded to shit like this, they didn't die. We just called for the medivac chopper and flew them off to Sacramento or Reno. They went into a nice trauma center and had their injuries patched up and then they went about their lives. They didn't die from peritonitis or blood poisoning because they couldn't get to a doctor or decent medicine." "Nope," Brett said. "And they didn't get nerve gassed or shot in a battle over cans of corned beef hash and ravioli either, did they? We live in an uncivilized world now. If anybody in town needs any more proof of that, they can just go look in the supply room around the corner." ------- Brett had given firm orders to both Chrissie and Jason to go home and get some rest. For that reason he was somewhat surprised to find both of them in the armory when he went there after finishing up the distasteful task of dumping the fifteen bodies of the invaders over the railing of the bridge. He had come in to make an inventory of their remaining ammunition supply so he could see how much the battle had consumed. When he entered the room Chrissie was leaning against a bank of lockers, sipping from a can of warm soda and Jason was curled up on the locker room bench, snoring softly. "I thought I told you two to go home," he said, walking over and sitting on the bench across from Chrissie. She shrugged, giving him a tired smile. "We figured that you would want an ammo count done as soon as possible," she said. "So we came in here to do it. I guess Jason didn't realize how tired he was. He laid down there to take a break and never got back up." Brett looked at him affectionately. "Poor guy. He did all this after working the night shift. I'll wake him up and send him over to his house in a few minutes. First, I can use a break as well. Did you finish the inventory?" "I finished it after he fell asleep," she said. "I don't know how many unfired rounds there are floating around outside this room, but there are 330 less .30 caliber rounds, 212 less 5.65s, and 118 less 7.65s." "Is anything approaching critical levels?" he asked. She nodded. ". 30 caliber is down to less than 500. That's what most of the hunting rifles fire." "Great," he sighed. "More good news." He gave her a smile. "Thanks for taking care of that for me." "Sure," she said. They sat in silence for a few moments. "How are the wounded?" she asked at last. He gave her the update that Paul had given him. She frowned as she heard that Dale was for sure going to die and that Sherri was possibly going to. "Those poor people," she said. "I mean, Dale was just Jessica's little puppet and Sherri was almost as bad at talking shit about me as Jessica, but I didn't want this to happen to them. It's horrible." "I know. I didn't want it either, but we have to deal with what happens, don't we? There's no way to change the past." "No," she said. "I guess there isn't." Another silence developed, this one a little more uncomfortable than the first. Brett sensed that she wanted to say something important to him and was working up the nerve. He gave her the time. "I almost died out there, Brett," she said at last, her words barely audible. "Oh?" She nodded. "When I was trying to flush that last guy out of the planter, he took a shot at me. I saw the flash and I rolled up onto my side. I didn't think about it, I just did it." She took a deep breath. "And the bullet hit right where I had been lying; right there where I'd been less than a second before. If I wouldn't have moved..." "But you did," he said. "You did and you're still alive because of it." "I almost wasn't though," she said. "I can't get that out of my mind. I could've died out there and it was only a simple little roll that saved me. I could've died." He slid down off the bench and joined her on the floor. He put his arm around her, pulling her against him. She didn't protest or pull away. "We all could've died, Chris," he told her gently. "We were in a war. That's what happens in war. People die. This time we didn't. Thanks to you and Jason and Michelle and Matt, we were able to rally these people into something approximating an army. It was crude and it bordered on a complete clusterfuck, but we won. We lost five people and we may lose two more, but we won this one. You should be proud of yourself. I certainly am proud of you." She snuggled up a little to him, acknowledging for the first time that he was holding her. "You have a way of making me feel better," she said. "You always have." He held her tighter, knowing that he probably didn't smell very good at the moment, but Chrissie didn't seem to mind. After all, she had smelled him under much worse conditions. They simply sat there for a few minutes, enjoying the closeness after so long without it. Brett did not think ahead to what their embrace symbolized. He just enjoyed the now. "I'm pregnant," she said at last. He felt no particular surprise at her words. Though it was somewhat of a jolt to have his suspicions concerned, he had long since realized that it would have been a miracle for her to not be pregnant after all of the unprotected sex they'd had. "I see," he said slowly. "And how does that make you feel?" "It makes me feel attached to you," she told him. "I love you, Brett. I've loved you since maybe our second or third day together. This just makes me love you even more, makes me want you even more. I've been in denial about it for the longest time. I've been telling myself that I was just under stress and that's why my period hasn't come. I've been telling myself that getting sick in the morning is just because I have to get up so early. I've been telling myself that my boobs are sore all the time because of the damp air. But then Michelle talked to me last night and just laid it out for me." "Did she?" he asked, wondering in the back of his mind how Michelle had known. Certainly Chrissie had not told her anything. Chrissie nodded, her head bobbing up and down against his shoulder. "She's pretty smart," she said. "She checked the sign-out logs in the supply room and saw that I haven't been using tampons or pads." Brett ginned. "She is very perceptive, isn't she?" "I can't compete with that," she said. "I just can't." "There's nothing to compete about, Chris," he told her. "I love you too and you're carrying my baby inside of you. Like I told you the other night, I don't want to lose you." "But you don't want to lose Michelle either, do you?" He sighed. "I like Michelle a lot, Chrissie," he said. "I don't know if I love her but I probably could. Would I love her more than you? I don't know, I'm not a psychic. If I had to absolutely choose between you and her, I would choose you. But Chris, I can't promise to be faithful to you under these... circumstances that we have here. That is really too much to ask of someone." "I know," she said. "I've been thinking a lot about what Michelle told me last night, about this... sharing thing." "And?" "And it makes a lot of sense I guess. I didn't want it to at first. I just wanted things to be the way they were between us. Remember? When we were out in the woods, just you, Jason, and I?" "I remember." "But we can't be like that anymore. Things are different now. And we can't be like a normal couple in the old world either. Like Michelle said, women are the glut here and men are the demand. If I want to keep my man, I'm going to have to share him. I didn't want to accept that at first, no matter how much sense it made, but after what happened today... well, things look a little different now. Almost getting your head blown off does a lot for giving you a reality check, you know?" "That it does," he agreed. "So what are you saying?" "We'll give it a try," she said quietly. "I don't know if its going to work or not, but I'll try to make it work if she will." "Wow," Brett said after a moment. "I'm not sure what to say, Chris. What's the proper response when your woman agrees to share you with someone else?" She laughed a little. "You say you'll do it," she told him. "I'll do it," he said. "And as of this moment, our relationship is no longer going to be a secret. I've had a few revelations of my own today and one of them is that I shouldn't give a flying fuck what other people think. If they don't like the fact that I'm with you, they can just kiss my ass and find someone else to help save their town when someone attacks it." "Do you mean that?" she asked. He took her face in his and kissed her on the mouth. It was a long, drawn-out kiss. "I mean it," he said. "No more hiding. Everything's in the open now." "Let's go home," she said a little breathlessly. "I think we should officially make up with each other before dinner tonight." "I think you've got a workable plan there," he said. ------- They walked through the community center hand in hand, looking like lovers. They passed no less than ten people, most of them women, before donning their rain slickers and exiting the building. No one said anything to them as they passed, but their affection was duly noted and the expected barrage of shocked looks and whispered comments followed in their wake. "Did you see the way they were walking?" "You don't suppose that they're... that he's actually..." "I just bet he is. I bet he's been doing it this whole time." "What about Michelle? I thought she was the one?" "Apparently he liked little girls instead." "Mmmm hmmm." Though everyone knew that it had been Chrissie and Jason who had reported the movement of the enemy that morning and allowed Brett to set a trap for them, though they also knew that Jason and Chrissie had been the ones to gun down the final two invaders, these points never once came up in the conversations. It was almost as if they did not equate the young girl on Brett's arm (and yes, it looks like they're going back to their house together!) with the woman who had performed those feats of heroism. Within minutes of their passage, the Brett and Chrissie story was actually able to surpass the invasion story as the main topic of conversation. After all, talking about death and nerve gas and lost friends was depressing. Talking about a sexual scandal, on the other hand, was what they lived for. One person who took particular note of the pairing was Jessica. She had been making the rounds through the community center, talking to all of the women she could find to explain her version of the events that had taken place earlier. She downplayed the story about her breaking and running when the gunfire started, not denying it since there were multiple witnesses who had seen her do it, but rationalizing it as a run to go get help for Dale. As for the invasion itself, it was her view that a criminal lapse in security had been what had allowed it in the first place. And just who is in charge of security? Since most of the women had no idea how many of Brett's strategic suggestions had been voted down over the weeks, they had little problem assigning blame to him. Sure, he had acted heroically and quickly when it became apparent that an invasion had taken place - even Jessica gave him that - but had he paid more attention to his job in the first place, there would have been no invasion and there would not be five people dead. Now, as she saw Brett and Chrissie heading towards their house, hand in hand, she smiled in a predatory manner. She now had even more ammunition to use against him. Here, at last, was her chance to get rid of that meddling interloper who was constantly trying to upstage her and usurp her position in the town. At dinner tonight she would be able to rally the women into a lynch mob and Brett would be lucky if banishment was all that he ended up with. ------- It started out tender and slow, the way reconciled lovers usually approached the first lovemaking. They undressed each other piece by piece, kissing softly, their tongues barely touching. But by the time they were both nude, passion took over, pushing tenderness to the side. They clutched at each other desperately, their hands moving up and down each other's body, their tongues dueling in each other's mouths. After less than ten minutes of foreplay, they could take no more. He put her down on the bed and she spread her pretty legs for him. He slid into her familiar tightness and began to thrust. She came first, but only by a margin of seconds. After, as they lay entangled in each other's arms, the bedcover pulled over them to combat the chill, she asked, "Are you sure that letting everyone see us was the way to go about letting them know? Jessica has probably got a spy out there right now." "I'm sure she does," he said, his fingers playing with her hair. "I don't care though. My days of caring what these people think are over. As a matter of fact, I intend to give her a lot more to think about before the end of the day." "What do you mean?" He told her, making her smile wickedly. "You're flanking her," she said, giggling. "Well, I wouldn't exactly say that," he replied. "I'm just giving her some rope so she can hang herself." He let his hand slide down to her ass, where it began to stroke. "However, I wouldn't mind flanking you one more time before we head back." She giggled again, kissing him. "We do have a lot to make up for, don't we?" ------- They made their way back to the community center at 3:30, once again holding hands like lovers. They passed through the same sets of disapproving eyes, neither one acknowledging the glares that were being thrown at them. They went directly to the hospital room where Paul was still watching over the wounded. Michelle and Sherri were both awake when they came in, Michelle sitting up and trying to eat some chicken broth, Sherri moaning pathetically in pain. Dale was still quite unconscious, his skin pale, his forehead bathed in sweat. "How is he?" Brett asked as Paul met them at the door. "Fading," he answered. "His blood pressure is dropping and his pulse rate is up. I can hardly wake him up anymore. I don't think he'll make it through the night." Chrissie shook her head sadly as she looked at him. "I wish it could've happened differently," she said. Paul nodded in agreement. "Sherri is stable for the moment, though in a lot of pain. I'm using up a good portion of our Vicodin trying to keep her comfortable. Michelle however, seems to be a lot better. As you can see, she's sitting up and eating now. I can only take that as a good sign." Michelle, hearing her name spoken, looked over at them. She smiled as she saw her visitors. "We've been hearing about you two in here," she said, her voice just loud enough to carry to them. "Hearing?" Brett said. "Oh yes," Paul agreed. "Jessica was up here a few minutes ago. Obstinately she came to check on Dale but she only gave him a quick glance before she started going on about how the two of you were seen walking hand and hand to your house. Of course she didn't hesitate to speculate on just what that meant." "I'm sure she didn't," Brett said. Paul looked at him seriously. "Is it true?" he asked. "I don't care myself, but you know how the attitudes in this town are." "It's true," Brett said. "Chrissie and I are lovers. We have been since before we even got here." "Jesus," he said. "Couldn't you have... you know... kept that under wraps for a little while longer? At least until the mood settles down?" "Nope," Brett said. "I'm done hiding things. If the town doesn't like it, they can kiss my ass." He walked over to Michelle, leaving Paul to stare after him and wonder if he was mad. Chrissie, still holding his hand, followed. "You two certainly have this town in an uproar," Michelle said lightly. She spooned another load of chicken broth into her mouth. "We thought that under the circumstances, it was time to come clean," Brett told her. He sat in a stool near the edge of her cot. "So how are you feeling?" "Better," she said. "I haven't puked in almost three hours now. I can tell you that I now have sympathy for all of the bugs I sprayed with that shit over the years." "You saved everyone, Michelle," he said seriously. "If you wouldn't have spotted them and got the word out, they would've hit us while we were eating breakfast. That was their plan. They were going to steal our food and take enough women for each of them to have a playmate. Because we were ready for them, we were able to kick their asses. If we had a Medal of Honor, I'd see to it that you were awarded one." "I was doing what I was supposed to do," she said, shrugging off his praise. "I only wish it would've been enough to save Brenda and the others." "That wasn't your fault," Chrissie said. "That was nobody's fault but their own. You heard how we found Jeff, Lenny, and Mitsy, didn't you?" She nodded. "I heard they were naked." "They were," Brett confirmed. "They were screwing each other on guard duty. They chose not to take their duties seriously and they died for that. You chose to take yours seriously, and you're alive. You should feel proud of yourself and this town should thank you." "No, they should thank you," she returned. "You're the one that engineered the battle." He nodded. "Yes, I did. Unfortunately, all that people can seem to talk about now is Chrissie and I. That will change tonight at dinner. In the meantime, how about we give them something else to talk about?" She looked at the both of them. "Are you saying what I think you're saying?" she asked. Chrissie nodded, not quite smiling. "It looks like we're co-owners of this man," she said, squeezing his hand. "God help us." Michelle put her soup bowl down on a small table next to the bed. She sat up straighter. "Are you sure about this Chrissie? I know I tried to push it on you in the first place, but don't do this unless you think we might be able to make it work." "I'm as sure as I can be," she said. "Like I said before, it's not what I always dreamed of when I was growing up, but it'll have to do, won't it? I'll give it a shot, the best shot I can." "That's all I ask," Michelle said with a grin. She held out her hand. "Friends?" "Friends," Chrissie said, ignoring the hand and leaning in for a hug. "Or maybe sisters would be a better term." Paul, who had been lingering nearby pretending that he wasn't listening to them, suddenly could hold his tongue no longer. "Are you three talking about what I think you're talking about?" he asked. Brett looked up at him. "Yes we are," he said. "Paul, you have the honor of witnessing the first polygamous grouping in Garden Hill." "May there be many more," Michelle added. Paul just looked at them, stunned. "Oh my God," he said at last. ------- While Chrissie remained in the hospital room with Michelle (they had a lot to talk about), Brett went out in search of Jessica. It didn't take long to find her. He simply looked for a gathering of women and there she was right in the middle of it. In this case the gathering was outside the women's locker room, where, despite the tragedy that had occurred that day, women were still waiting their turn at the bathtub. "So you can see that allowing someone like him into this town was probably the worst mistake we ever made," Jessica was saying as he approached. "I mean, first he gets Paul to change his votes on everything and then we get invaded! Five people are dead because of..." she cut herself abruptly off as she suddenly saw him standing there. There was a murmur from the other women standing around, half embarrassed that they had been caught gossiping, half angry that the demon they had been discussing was standing there. Brett pretended not to have heard what was being discussed. "Jess," he said politely, "can I talk to you upstairs for a moment? There's some paperwork that I need to have changed around." "Paperwork?" she asked coldly. "I don't really have time to handle paperwork right now." "Okay," he said, as if it didn't really matter. "I'll just grab it myself. I know where it's kept." That had the desired effect upon her. Jessica's files were sacred to her and the thought of someone, especially Brett, going through them, was enough to change her mind. "No," she said suddenly, "that's okay. I'll help you. What is it that you need to do?" "It's a private matter," he said quietly, as if he knew that he could trust her to keep whatever it was a secret. "I see," she said. The crowd parted for her and she walked through them, passing in front of Brett and leading him through the community center towards the stairs. They did not talk. When they got to the office she sat down at her desk and looked up at him. "So what is it that you need done?" "I need you to change my address in the files," he said, keeping his voice level. "I'm going to be moving in with Michelle tomorrow morning." "Moving in with Michelle?" she asked, making no move to open her desk drawer. "That's right," he said. "We're somewhat of an item now as you might have heard." "I've heard a lot," she said shrewdly. "I've heard that you and that young girl you live with are somewhat of an item as well." Brett nodded. "Yep," he said, his voice no different than if he was confirming that they were having tuna casserole for dinner that night, "we are. She's going to be moving over there with us too. And since Jason has moved in with Stacy, that means the whole house will be empty." Jessica simply stared at him, certain that she was either not hearing correctly or that he was joking with her. "Oh, and by the way, Chrissie is pregnant," he said next. "At least we think she is. We'll probably sign out one of those home tests from the supply room and confirm it. Is that something you keep track of? Who's pregnant?" "I don't think you're very funny," Jessica spat. "I wasn't trying to be," he told her. "If she is pregnant, we'll sign out some of those over the counter vitamins for her. Isn't it a shame that the grocery store didn't have a pharmacy in it? Wouldn't that have..." "What are you doing?" Jessica interrupted, her voice low and bordering on dangerous. "I'm not doing anything," he said. "I'm just informing you of a change of address since you're in charge of keeping track of that sort of thing. As of tomorrow, Michelle, Chrissie, and I will be living at Michelle's house." "Are you admitting to me that you have sex with that young girl?" He nodded. "Yep. She's really good at it too. I can't wait until she starts to show. I've always had kind of a thing for pregnant women." Jessica's face was now starting to turn red. "And does Michelle know about this?" she asked. "Uh huh," he said. "It was Michelle that suggested we move in with her. Of course it took a while to convince Chrissie to go along with this. I mean, a man having two official women is kind of strange. But gradually she came around to seeing how much sense it makes." "Are you telling me that you think you're going to be allowed to continue to sleep with that child? And that you think you're going to be allowed to sleep with Michelle as well?" "Allowed?" he asked. "I wasn't aware that I had to be allowed to do anything. What business is it of yours or anyone else's who I sleep with, or how many I sleep with?" "I don't know what kind of game you think you're playing here," she said, pointing her finger at him. "But I can assure you that it will not be tolerated. You are a sick, perverted, lecherous man and you will be out of this town by nightfall. I promise you that!" With that she stood up and headed for the door. "So does this mean you're not going to change the paperwork?" he asked as she stormed out. ------- Jessica did exactly what Brett had known she would do. She stormed down and began telling the entire story to every person she encountered. By the time the dinner hour rolled around, the town's women were in a fury about it. The fact that they had been invaded that morning and that five of their number were dead was almost forgotten. ------- At dinner that night Brett sat with Chrissie at a table near the front of the room. He made sure that Jason, who wanted nothing more than to sleep the night away, was sitting there as well. Even Michelle, who was not quite recovered from her pesticide exposure, dragged herself into the gym and had a seat. The four of them ate in silence, with no other people seated at their table. They ignored the stares and the pointed fingers that were directed their way. Though official community meetings usually were begun after everyone had finished eating, Jessica started this one early. It was obvious that the events of the day had wrecked havoc on everyone's appetite. Most of the food went untouched. She mounted the small podium that had been extricated from another part of the center and turned on the battery powered public address system that was used for such things. After tapping the microphone a few times, she began. "This meeting is hereby called to order," she said, pounding her gavel on the podium (Brett wondered for the hundredth time where she had even found a gavel. Had it come from some judge's house?) The murmur of conversation died down much faster than it normally did at such times. "I'd like to begin by explaining the events of this morning to you in as much detail as I've been able to gleam," she said. "By now I'm sure every last one of you knows that an armed force entered the town at eight this morning and caused the deaths of five people and the wounding of three. I will relate what I know as was told to me by our so-called security chief, Mr. Adams." There was somewhat of a titter at her words. Brett didn't mind. He had expected no less from her. "As best we can tell," Jessica went on, "a group of sixteen men climbed over the wall near guard positions 2 and 3 at some point early this morning, before sunrise. They moved into position near those posts and, at eight o'clock this morning, they attacked the two guard positions. At position 2, they managed to throw pesticide bombs in through the window. This caused the death of Mitsy Black, Jeff Hollister, and Lenny Long. At position 3, Michelle Westover and Brenda Callahan were able to see the invaders before they managed to throw their bombs in. The bomb throwers were killed but the remaining team fired upon the position and killed Brenda. Michelle was able to get the word out that an invasion was taking place and that is what prompted the response you saw this morning. "As you are aware, the invaders joined up and began moving towards the community center. Their goal, again this is according to Mr. Adams based upon a discussion he had with a captured invader, was to take over the community center and steal our food supply. At some point between the guard positions and the community center, the group broke up into two again, one approaching from the west and one approaching from the east. Now Matt Engle took charge of the group defending us from the east. His group suffered no casualties of any kind and managed to kill all of the invaders. On the west however, I'm sad to say that the group led by Mr. Adams suffered one dead and two wounded fighting a group of four people. Eventually these invaders were all killed as well." She paused for a moment while everyone discussed what she had said among themselves. When they finally piped down, she gave them a concerned and hurt look, one that seemed to be, to each individual watching, directed at them. "This is a very tragic event that has taken place here today," she said. "Words cannot even begin to describe how it feels to know that the town I am a part of was attacked and that friends of mine - Mitsy, Brenda, Jeff, Lenny, and Rick - are no longer with us because of it. Like you, I wanted to know how such a thing as this could have been allowed to happen in the first place. Who is responsible for it?" She let that linger in the air for a few moments. "I'll tell you," she went on, "we don't have to look terribly far to find the answer to this question. The party that needs to answer for this gross lack of security is the man that we, inadvisably it seems now, put in charge of that security in the first place. That person, as you all know, is Brett Adams." There was an angry babble of voices and all eyes turned to Brett, who simply sat there, looking up at Jessica with a blank expression on his face. "This is a man," Jessica went on, "that has brought considerable turmoil to this town since he came here. He snuck in here one night under the cover of darkness and managed to sweet talk and charm his way into your hearts. With the assistance of our so-called committee member Paul..." she shot an angry look at him, letting him know that she was going for his blood as well, "... he was voted into our town by popular decree, despite a committee vote barring him. Now I do not blame you good people for giving him your support in the beginning. Not at all. He was a handsome, virile looking man in a town where men are scarce. He seemed friendly and knowledgeable and he led us to believe that he would be a valuable asset. It is perfectly understandable that he led many of us in. "But now, after all that we know about him, especially after this fiasco that has resulted in the deaths... the deaths... of five of our friends, I think it is time to reevaluate Mr. Adams' welcome among us. Now had the criminal lack of security that he was responsible for been the only thing, I believe that we might have found it in our hearts to allow him to remain a citizen - although not a security chief. But this is not the only character flaw we have found about him, is it?" Another angry murmur went up. Brett again continued to look passively forward, not reacting to her words. "No," she said, answering her own question. "It is not. There have been charges of vote influence against him in the shameless way he gets Paul to vote his will each and every time. There have been charges of reckless use of supply room stocks such as ammunition and even alcohol and marijuana. There has even been some evidence of improper sexual behavior with that young boy he shared a house with." "I hadn't heard that one," Brett whispered to Michelle, still keeping his face neutral. "And now," Jessica continued, her voice raising dramatically, "I have discovered even more despicable acts that he has committed. This very afternoon he admitted to me in person that he has been having sexual relations with Chrissie, the sixteen-year-old girl that has been living with him. He admitted this to me! And that is not all either. He also told me that the young girl is now pregnant, and that he thinks he should be allowed to continue to live with her. This man is a common rapist! He has usurped the morals of that poor young girl and now he wants to live with her!" She shook her head in bewilderment. "Well I for one am here to tell you that I am beyond shocked. I know that you, the good people of this town, have no intention of letting this menace stay here for another night. "Now as you all know, the attack this morning gravely wounded Dale, my dear companion and a committee member. That leaves us without a full committee and without the ability to obtain a clear majority on any matter until such time as Dale gets better or, God forbid, we are forced to replace him. However, there are still important decisions that need to be decided upon, most critically at this moment, what we should do about the criminal that walks among us." Some cries of "yes", and "that's right" came from the audience. "It is my suggestion," Jessica said, "that in the interim, critical decisions such as this should be made by a vote of the entire community. Unless there are any objections..." she looked at Paul and Brett as she said this, her expression daring them to object, "... I think that it would be appropriate to make and vote on motions right here, right now. I believe that a simple majority for routine matters would suffice, and a two-thirds majority for such matters as exile." The crowd obviously liked this idea. Neither Paul nor Brett nor anyone else had any objections to it. Jessica looked at them a little suspiciously - she obviously had a speech planned in the event that that happened - but they simply stared back at her. "Okay," she said, throwing off her suspicions, thinking that maybe they realized their number was up. "Let's vote this in and make it official. I move that that the community, in the absence of a full committee, should have the power to vote upon issues at hand during that time period. A simple majority for routine matters and a two-thirds majority for issues involving exile. Do I have a second for the motion?" Dozens of cries of "I second" were shouted out. "Then let's vote on the matter. All in favor say aye." The ayes were so loud that it almost hurt the ears. "All opposed?" Jessica asked snidely. A few nays were meekly offered, mostly from the men or from those at Brett's table. Brett himself did not vote. "The motion is clearly passed," Jessica said, pounding her gavel. "This community has just empowered itself to vote on these issues. And now that it has done so, I move that we vote on the exile of Brett Adams from the town of Garden Hill on charges of gross negligence and various sex crimes. Since this is exile, two-thirds must vote in favor. Do I have a second?" "Brett," Michelle whispered frantically, as dozens more people seconded her motion, "they're about to vote you out of town! Isn't it about time you did something?" "Yes," he said, cracking his knuckles. "It's about time." "There is a motion on the floor," Jessica, almost giddy now that she sensed her moment at hand, told the crowd. "The motion is whether or not to exile Brett Adams from the town of Garden Hill. All in favor..." "Wait," Brett said, standing up, his voice easily carrying throughout the room. People began to catcall to him, telling him to sit down. "There is no waiting, Mr. Adams," Jessica told him, a smile upon her face. "We are in the midst of a vote." "Are you going to vote me out of this town without even giving me a chance to defend myself against your charges?" he asked her. "That's not very democratic, is it?" "I hardly think you have a defense that we would want to listen to," she said. "But nevertheless," he said, turning to look at the sea of hostile faces, "is that not my right? Were we not once Americans? Will you sentence me to death out there without even hearing what I have to say for myself? Surely you people are not that callous, are you?" There was a confused muttering of voices at his words as they tried to find fault with them and failed. He had struck a chord with them, that was plain to see. Jessica, no slouch at reading the mood of crowds, could see this as well. "I think we've heard enough lies from this man," she told the room. "I see no reason to hear any more. Now, back to the motion. All in favor..." "No," a voice called. It was Paul, who was standing up on his seat. "He has a right to be heard. Let him talk." Michelle was the next. "I agree. If we're going to send someone out there, we at least have the responsibility to hear his side of the story first." "Unless," Brett, seeing his opening, put in, "Jessica is afraid to let me speak. Maybe she's scared that I'll say something to cut her influence down." There was an excited babble this time. Jessica's face reddened in anger. But still, he had neatly trapped her. "Very well," she said, feigning disinterest. "Go ahead and have your little speech." "Thank you," he said, walking over to the lectern and taking his place behind it. Jessica reluctantly gave him space. He looked out over at the crowd, seeing hatred for him in most of their faces, hatred that Jessica had placed there. They were expecting him to beg for mercy, to throw himself upon them. He did no such thing. "You people out there," he said, his voice tough, the voice he had used when addressing suspects, "are pathetic." An angry outburst followed these words, an outburst that caused both Michelle and Chrissie to bury their faces in their hands and wonder if he knew what he was doing. Brett, ignoring the outcry, simply went on. "Look at yourselves," he told them. "Look at what you're doing, look at who you're following. You people are being led by the nose like fucking sheep by this manipulative bitch." While the latest outburst sounded itself, Jessica stepped up towards him. "That will be quite enough," she told him, grabbing at his arm. "No," said Paul, grabbing at her arm and pulling her back. "Let him speak." "But..." "Let him speak," he repeated, loud enough for everyone in the building to hear. "It's about time someone told the truth around here." "Here, here," said Michelle. "I'm not here to apologize for my actions," Brett went on, his voice booming through the speaker. "I'm not here to beg for mercy. If you people want to vote me out of this town after I've had my say, then you're a lost cause anyway and I'll be glad to go. You'll all die soon and the human race will be better off without you." That got their attention. The voices quieted down so quickly that it was almost as if a switch had been thrown. "People," Brett said. "I've got some news for you all. Perhaps you haven't noticed this, but a fucking comet has struck our planet and wiped out almost everything. We are all that is left here, do you understand that? We aren't simply hanging in there until the National Guard gets its shit together. We're not just biding our time until the President diverts some relief funds in our direction. This planet is dead. The civilization that we grew up with and worshipped is dead. There is nothing left but us and the society that we make here. There are people out there that would like to kill us, that would like to take the meager food reserves we have left, but that is it. All we have is what we can make or find. There is no help coming here. We are alone and we are in the direst of straights imaginable! "And what do you, the survivors of this disaster, the future hope of the human race, what do you spend your time doing? Do you spend it trying to figure out ways to get food so we can survive until the sun comes out? Do you spend it trying to figure out ways to protect yourselves from those that are starving and desperate? No, you don't. You spend your time trying to pretend that you are all still high society women and looking down on others. You spend your time screwing each other at every turn, both literally and figuratively, and then criticizing those who do the same thing. We don't have that many people in this town yet you have somehow managed to perpetuate the petty prejudices that we used to hold so dear. For God's sake people, what the hell are you doing?" He looked at them all, disgust clearly evident upon his face. No one answered him or made a noise. Not even Jessica. "Do you people realize how stupid you look from an outsider's perspective? Do you realize that you've empowered a woman to lead you that has a clear-cut psychological problem? Why do you follow her? Why do you listen to her? I've heard you talk about her ever since I've been here. You call her a bitch, you deride her for her superior attitude towards you, you agree among yourselves that she is a callous, calculating person who is only out for herself, but you follow her! You cluster around her and try to impress her because she comes across like she's better than you are. And worst of all, you listen to her. You know she's untrustworthy but you listen to her and you pretend to agree with everything she says because everyone else is doing it. She has been playing you for fools probably since long before the comet impact. Look what you were just about to do because she riled you all up. You were just about to vote me out of town, to exile me to death out there in the wilderness, and you were willing to do this without even hearing my side of the story. Everybody knows that Jessica exaggerates and twists everything to suit whatever her viewpoint happens to be, yet you were about to yell out aye to her vote, weren't you? Weren't you?" Brett could now see doubt showing on many faces before him. "Shall I tell you my side of the story now?" he asked them. "Shall I? Would you like to hear a different version of how this attack came to take five lives? Would you like to hear a different version of how I molested that young girl that lives with me? Or should I just leave right now? If you are so led by her, if you are so convinced that I'm bad man that you don't want to hear my side, just say aye. If more than ten people say it, I'll leave here right now, in the clothes that I'm wearing. If just ten say it! So how about it?" Not a single person said anything. Not even Jessica, who was staring at him in fear. "Okay," he said, his voice dropping a little bit of the roughness. "I can see that I have your attention. So let's talk. Let's start with the attack, shall we? Now Jessica had the basic facts fairly accurate, but she left out a few pertinent points. The attackers came over the wall at two o'clock this morning after they had observed our actions for the last few days from the hill overlooking the northeast side of town. Now I don't know if any of you have ever bothered to go climb this particular hill, either before the comet or after, but the view from up there is quite impressive. You can see almost the entire northern wall. You can see the freeway approaches. You can see damn near the entire subdivision itself. And most important of all, you can see all of the ground between the freeway and the point where those invaders made their entry. These invaders found that a particularly fine place to observe us from. It allowed them to gather the intelligence that they needed to stage their attack. "Now, it may interest you to know that I spotted this hill on my second day here and that I identified it as the perfect place to move a guard position to. From atop this hill, our guards could not only engage any invaders long before they reached the wall, they could see any invaders approaching long before they got close enough to spot the wall. I made a strong recommendation that we construct and man a guard position there for that very reason. You see, I entered this town on the premise that I was knowledgeable in security matters such as this and that my expertise would be helpful. I was under the impression that my suggestions would be taken seriously. However, Jessica voted down this recommendation. Dale, who as you know, votes however Jessica does, added his vote to the tally and the suggestion was defeated." "Dale does not vote the way that I do every time!" Jessica shouted. "Don't think that trying to shift blame to someone who is wounded and unable to defend himself in front of you is going to help you." "Do you deny that you controlled Dale's votes?" Brett asked her. "Of course I deny it!" she yelled. "Dale voted however he wanted." "And strangely enough," Brett said, "the way he wanted was always the same way that you wanted; in every single case since the committee was formed. Don't bother trying to say differently, I've looked through the minutes of every meeting that you've held. 268 times a vote has been called on a matter, and 268 times, Dale voted exactly as you did." Jessica was stunned again, unable to think of a way to counter what he was saying. It had not occurred to her that she was dealing with a man who was very familiar with courtrooms and testifying, a man who knew how to sway a group of people sitting in judgment over to his side. That lack of insight was now biting her in the ass. "And such was the case with the matter of Hill 1557," Brett went on. "Jessica and Dale voted it down. Why? Because Jessica didn't think it was wise to put the guard force outside of the wall. Jessica has no military training of any kind, but she didn't think it was wise. I explained to her that the basic principal of defense is to occupy the high ground around your position, but she didn't change her mind. I tried to be as persuasive with her as I know how to be, but she refused to vote for my suggestion because it was my suggestion and I am someone she doesn't like. And as such, Hill 1557 was unoccupied when our attackers decided to use it to learn about our community. "Nor was this the only matter that Jessica and Dale refused to vote for when it came to security. In all, and you can check these figures in the minutes if you'd like, I requested a total of thirty-three separate improvements to the community security apparatus. Thirty-three times since I've been here, I've asked to change something or improve something because, as I told you before, that is supposed to be my job. Thirty-one times Jessica and Dale voted no. These were not piddling things that I was suggesting either, but basic improvements that would have prevented the invasion we experienced today. That is not speculation on my part. I can say with certainty that if I had been allowed to do my job, those invaders would never had been allowed to even attempt a reconnaissance of our town, let alone invade it." "That is a lie!" Jessica shouted, standing up and pointing at him. "Is it?" he asked. "If you'd like, I can provide a list of each suggestion and we can go over them one by one. I'll hang a map up here on the board so that everyone can see exactly what I'm talking about. Would you like me to explain to them Jessica, how I suggested weeks ago that we occupy Hill 1519 on the west side of town and how I showed you exactly why we needed to do that? Should I explain to them how such an occupation would prevent anyone from approaching us from the north or the west? I can go get the maps and minutes right now if you'd like." She said nothing, slowly sitting back down, her eyes daggers. Brett turned back to the crowd, seeing that they were all staring at him in shock. "I don't like to lay blame," he told them. "I really don't. My motto is to fix the problem, not the blame. But if Jessica is going to accuse me of dereliction of duty, I am going to see to it that you people have the facts before you cast judgment. And the fact is that if I had been allowed to place guards on those two hills as I wanted to, those invaders wouldn't have tried us in the first place because they wouldn't have been able to get close enough to even see how to go about an attack. But let's move on to the battle now, shall we? "The penetration did take place and the invaders were able to get inside of the wall at approximately 2:00 AM. They hid alongside the houses next door to the two guard posts and they planned to make their strike at 8:00 AM, while we were all at breakfast. Their intention was to take our food and to kidnap at least one woman for each of them, and then leave." He let that point sit in the air for a moment. "They were not able to do that because of one person. Michelle Westover, at guard position 2, spotted the attackers before they were able to throw in their weapons. She drew a sidearm and shot the first one, which in turn caused his bomb to go off on the ground. This, in turn, caused the second one to miss and resulted in the deaths of both of them. Since Michelle did not allow her position to fall, she was able to radio ahead to me in the community center and I was able, with the help of Matt and Paul, to get somewhat of a defense together. "Unfortunately, the guards at position number 3 were not so lucky. I am sure that rumors of what was going on in that position at the time of the attack have reached you by now, but allow me to confirm them for you. Jeff and Lenny, who were supposed to have been watching out for intruders, were engaged in a sex act with Mitsy when the bombs came flying through the window. All three of them were found naked and dead of organo-phosphate poisoning - perhaps one of the most horrible ways on this earth to die." He stared at them all, looking from face to face as he said the words. Most showed horror at the thought, particularly those who were regularly assigned to guard duty. "I don't like to talk ill of the dead anymore than I like to lay blame," Brett continued. "But those people died of stupidity. They were having a goddamn orgy while on guard duty. They were doing this because they didn't think that anybody was going to really attack us. Many of you out there, despite repeated pleas and threats from me, have done the same thing. That could just as easily have been you out there and don't for an instant try to convince yourself that it couldn't have been. It wasn't just that they were fucking each other, don't try to say that it was just because of that. It was because they weren't paying attention to what they were supposed to be doing." "You folks that are regular guard duty draftees thought I was an asshole. You used to call me names, deride me, sabotage my efforts. When I would walk up and try to instruct you on how to keep watch, you wouldn't listen to me, you would flip me off behind my back, you would grab your crotch to show your contempt for me. Well Jeff, Lenny, and Mitsy used to do those things too. They thought I was an overbearing asshole too. And now look at them. They're still in the room where they died, covered with puke, urine, and shit, and we're unable to move their bodies out because the fumes are still too strong. "I have stood on my head to try to get you people to take security seriously, but you have consistently refused to do so. I have begged and pleaded with Jessica to try to improve security arrangements around here, and she has consistently refused to do so. And now that an attack has occurred, an attack that I have been warning everyone about ever since I got here, you want to believe that it is my fault? You listen to Jessica when she tries to pin the blame for it on me?" He could sense a softening of their hatred for him now, a certain shame in the tone of their murmurs, in the casting down of their eyes. "Three people were shot in my group," Brett said next. "Jessica took a delightful glee in mentioning that a few minutes ago and comparing it with the fact that no one was shot in Matt's group, who was battling twice as many people. Again, she implied that this was my fault somehow, that I wasn't a strong enough leader during the battle. And again, she is distorting the facts and twisting them to suit her need. "Those of you that were in my group, why don't you stand up right now." There was some tittering but no one stood. "Come on," Brett said, making get up gestures, "you ten that stood with me this morning, that helped take out those assholes, that helped flush those other assholes out of the trees, stand up. You have a lot to be proud of and I want the community to see you." Gradually, one by one, they stood up, the seven women and three men of squad Adams. They looked nervously towards him, uncomfortable with being singled out. "Dale broke and tried to run when the shooting started," Brett said. "That was how he got shot. You ten out there saw this as well as I did. Do any of you disagree with that statement?" None of them disagreed with it. "Jessica also broke and ran. Now I've heard her telling people that she ran to go get help for poor Dale, who she was so concerned about, but that's not what happened. She panicked and she ran despite my repeated yells to stay down. Does any one of you disagree with that?" Again, though Jessica cried out in protest, none of them disputed this. "The woman who is supposed to be a leader broke and ran from a fight with four people," Brett said sadly. "The leader of the community did this. So is it any wonder that three other people, as soon as they saw her fleeing, tried to do the same? Not at all. The thing is, Jessica escaped unharmed from this cowardice act of panic. Rick Stanton and Sheri Philo were not so lucky. Rick was shot in the back of the head. He died immediately. Sheri was shot in the back of the leg. She is now upstairs with a broken femur and she may never walk again. Those of you who did what I said and stayed down are all here with us tonight, a little bit older and wiser, but alive and uninjured. Tell me," he asked his ten squad members, "do any of you have any criticisms or problems with the way I directed that battle this morning?" None of them did. "Does anybody out there, anyone besides Jessica, have a problem with the way I responded to the situation? Does anyone think that they could've done a better job of it?" Nothing but shamed silence from the crowd. "And yet," he said, "you were all just about to throw me out of town, weren't you? My knowledge and training, my leadership abilities, saved this pathetic town this morning, and you were going to throw me out of here. And for what? Because I sleep with Chrissie, a sixteen year old girl? Because you find that act immoral? Is that the reason?" Some more titters from the crowd as they found themselves back on firmer ground. "I will gladly admit to you that I sleep with her," Brett said. "Chrissie and I are lovers! Chrissie is now carrying my child in her! It's true and I am not ashamed of it, in fact, I'm proud to say it. Now, I can hear you out there calling her a child and damning me for being in a relationship with her, but that child was an integral part of defending this town this morning. She killed two of the invaders herself and assisted in the final trap that killed the last two of them. She was the one that was able to spot the fact that they had split into two groups and relay that information to me so that I could respond to it. I think that many of you out there are displaying somewhat of a double standard towards Chrissie and Jason, her brother. You will allow them to stand watch for you and work twice as many shifts as any of you do, you will allow them to carry guns and kill for you, you will entrust them with your lives, but you don't want them to have sexual relations? What right do you have to deny this to them? Chrissie and Jason are both adults and they have both proven themselves time and time again. They have developed the maturity to make their own decisions and it is not your place to dictate what they can and cannot do with their lives or their bodies." He softened his voice a little. "Folks," he said, putting a pleading expression on his face, "I'll go back to the first point that I made. The world is dead. This town is all that we have left. If you want your children to grow up to be adults, if you want your grandchildren to be the ones that build a new world, you'd better get your shit together right here and right now. If you keep obsessing about morals that are no longer applicable and about rules of etiquette that don't matter any more, and about social conventions that don't have any place any more, then you're all going to die. Because while you're going on and on about who is sleeping with who and about how you don't think you should have to stand guard duty, our food is running out and there are people out there with guns that would be more than willing to come in here and take what they want. "I am a survivor and I can help this town stand if you will listen to me and follow my suggestions. I can't guarantee that I'll bring us through and that we'll all live another year, but I can assure you that I am an asset towards that goal, not a liability. If you don't think that is so, if you don't think that you can live with my choice of sexual partner or partners, then vote me out of here. I'll leave and I'll find someplace else that will appreciate what I've got to offer. "That's all I have to say. Take your vote now and send me on my way if that's your wish." With that he dismounted the podium. He did not look at Jessica as he passed. He merely walked back to his seat and sat down. Chrissie and Michelle each took one of his hands in theirs. "That was an awesome speech," Chrissie whispered. "You never fail to amaze me, Brett," Michelle put in. Jessica, not quite as confident looking as she had been a few minutes before, mounted the podium once more. "Well I'll certainly give the man credit for being dramatic," she said into the microphone. "But that does not change the central issue that we were talking about. The fact remains that he is a scoundrel that has abused our trust ever since he's been here and that is a menace to our morality. Keep in mind that..." "Jessica," Paul said, standing up and walking over to her. "I think that is quite enough." "What?" she said, looking at him furiously. "Call the vote," he said. "Don't bother trying to rile them up again, I think they're beyond that now and all you're doing is making yourself look like an idiot." "How dare you talk to me like that," she said, turning on him, almost forgetting that she was in front of the entire community. He didn't answer her; instead, he pushed her to the side, taking her place in front of the microphone. "There's a motion on the floor, people," he said into it. "The motion is whether or not to exile Brett Adams from this town. I hope you'll vote wisely on it. All in favor, say aye." "Aye," yelled Jessica, loud and clear. She was the only one. She looked at the crowd in disbelief. "What is that matter with you people?" she screamed at them so loudly that she didn't need the microphone. "This man is a child molester, a thief, and a sneak. He does not belong here!" Nobody said anything, they simply looked at her, their eyes open for perhaps the first time. "I would say that that does not constitute a two-thirds majority," Paul said lightly. "There will be no need to poll those that are on guard duty at the moment." He picked up Jessica's gavel. "The motion is defeated." He gave a whack on the podium with it and then tossed it over his shoulder. "Now how about we take care of some real town business for once? While we're making motions up here, I'd like to move that Jessica Blakely be placed on suspension from the town committee until such time that an investigation into the charges of gross negligence can be completed." "What?" Jessica yelled, grabbing him by the shirt and turning him towards her. "What the hell do you think you're doing? You can't make a motion like that!" "Oh but I can," Paul said, springing shut the trap that Brett, the master trap-layer, had set for her. "Didn't this community just vote upon and approve a resolution that allows them to vote upon and approve resolutions? Didn't you just use that resolution to ask for a vote of exile against Brett?" "You can't use that against me!" she said. "Actually," he said, "I can. However, like the exile clause, I'll make it a two-thirds majority, just to be sure, okay?" She looked at him in horror, feeling her world slipping out from underneath her. She could think of no way to counter what was about to happen. "People," Paul said into the microphone. "We have a motion on the table. Do I have a second?" The entire room, almost as one, cried out "second". "The motion is seconded," Paul said. "All in favor of suspending Jessica Blakely from the town committee pending an investigation of gross negligence, please say aye. Two thirds majority will be required for passing." There was no point in doing a count. The ayes were overwhelming. "The measure passes," Paul said, looking at her. "Jessica Blakely, you are hereby suspended from the committee until such time as an investigation into your actions is completed." "You can't do this," she hissed, glaring at him with a hatred rarely seen. "I didn't," he said. "The community did it. But even that isn't completely true. The fact is, you did it to yourself." ------- Jessica stormed out of the room a minute later, her face red with anger, her hands clenched tightly into fists. More than a little laughter and more than one derisive comment followed her out. Paul continued to chair the meeting after her departure, utilizing the handy decree that she had had voted in to get a few more things done. In the space of twenty minutes he managed to pass every security suggestion that Brett had made since arriving and authorized him to raise "whatever work force is necessary" to initiate it. He also empowered a panel of three people: Matt, Maggie, and Michelle, to perform the complete investigation of Jessica's activities in regards to her responsibility for the attack upon the town and to report the results at a future community meeting. "People," he told them just before calling an end to the meeting, "five people died today in the attack upon our town. Let's not let their deaths be in vain. As Brett told you a little while ago, we need to start concentrating our energies on survival. We need to stop worrying about fighting with each other over men or work positions and start worrying about how to get more food. We need to stop wasting our time playing these endless little games that we play and bothering ourselves with petty preoccupations and start shoring up our defenses so that no one else dies a needless death here. Let the events of this morning be a wake-up call for us and let's get our shit together, shall we?" ------- Michelle accompanied Brett and Chrissie back to the house that they shared, Brett walking between the two women, their arms interlinked. Though they would not be moving in to Michelle's house until the following day, all three had agreed that it was important for them to show unity in the decision they had made. From now on they would all sleep under the same roof. They would be a triple. Once inside the house, and once the lamps and the fire were lit and the rain slickers were neatly hung up, they sat down on the living room couch. "Chrissie and I had a long talk up in the hospital room today," Michelle said. "And we came to a few decisions about how we could work this relationship. Why don't we throw them by you?" "Uh... sure," Brett said, looking from one to the other. He could hardly believe that he was about to hear two women tell him how they had worked out how to share him. "The most important thing is that we treat this as a marriage," Michelle explained. "We have to vow to honor and respect each other, through sickness and health and all of that. The only way that this can work is if there's a mutual respect and affection between us, between all of us. That includes between Chrissie and I as well as between you and each one of us. Just like married couples, we should vow that we never go to bed angry with each other. If we have a problem, and I imagine we will have them while we try to get used to this, we work it out even if we have to stay up all night. How's that for a start?" "I agree," Brett said. "Julie and I had that same rule in our marriage. We stayed up all night a few times, but we always kept that promise to each other. I think it helped ease a lot of what could have been nasty battles over the years. The urge to put it behind you and get some sleep instead of letting it linger eases negotiations." "I've never been married before," Chrissie said timidly, "but it sounds like a good idea to me. Brett and I just had a long fight with each other and it wasn't fun at all." At Michelle's prompting, they all three officially made this promise to each other, all three saying it aloud just like a marriage vow. They then, at Chrissie's suggestion, made a similar vow that they would always discuss problems with each other as soon as they became problems, getting them out in the open before they could fester. Other such things followed. The vowed loyalty to each other, they vowed to always work towards common goals, they vowed to treat all children that the union produced as part of the union, not as the daughter of Chrissie or the son of Michelle. There was surprisingly little argument or disagreement during the discussion, at least not until the subject of future members of the union was broached. "What?" Chrissie said, perhaps a little sharper than she had intended, when Michelle first mentioned this. "What do you mean, other women? Where did that come from?" Brett wisely decided to keep a low profile during this particular portion of the conversation, although the idea had already occurred to him. Since Michelle had brought it up, and since she seemed to be in reluctant favor of such an idea, he let her handle the job of convincing Chrissie. "I'm not saying that we should go out and pick up another couple of women to join us," Michelle said, "but you have to keep in mind the simple math of this town. There are five women for every man. It is simply inevitable that these polygamous relationships we are spawning here are going to quickly grow to three and four women per man. If we are to achieve stability and relieve some of the sexual tension that exists here, I'm afraid that that is the only way to do it." "Four women?" Chrissie cried. "We should share Brett with two other women?" "If," she said, "we think that they will fit in with us and will maintain the harmony of our family group, yes, I think we should. I would think that we would have to. Of course Brett has got to have feelings for them and of course you and I have to be able to get along with them." Chrissie shook her head in bewilderment. "I'm still trying to get used to the idea of sharing him with you," she said, "and now you're talking about adding two more? That's too much to take right now, Michelle. We don't even know if what we have now is going to work." "It's just something to think about, Chrissie," she said. "We'll take this thing one step at a time. I just wanted to bring up the fact that we may have to come to terms with this at some point in the future." Chrissie massaged her temples for a moment, as if trying to drive those thoughts from her head. "The possibility is noted," she said. "Let's worry about it in the future, can we? I don't even want to think about it right now." "Fair enough," Michelle said with a smile. They went over a few more minor points, such as division of labor in housework and childcare, quickly reestablishing the harmony that had existed prior to the additional members discussion. Once the mood seemed about perfect, Michelle then got to the meat of the matter. "Now," she said, "why don't we talk about the sleeping arrangements." "Here comes the good part," Brett said with a grin, prompting both women to give him playful slaps on the arm. "We talked for a surprisingly long time about this earlier," Michelle told him. "Not just the actual sleeping arrangements but the sexual aspects of the relationship as well." "And?" Brett said with anticipation. Michelle and Chrissie shared an amused look. "Men are pigs," Michelle said lightly. "Yep," Chrissie agreed. "Okay," Michelle said, "first the sleeping arrangements. We both agreed that we want to have equal opportunity to sleep in a bed with you at night. We both enjoy the closeness of having our man in bed with us. Now we discussed various ways to ensure equal billing in this department, as it were, and we came to a few conclusions. First of all, neither one of us liked the idea of Chrissie having one bedroom and me having the other one and you changing from one to the other from night to night. In addition, the bed in my spare bedroom is not large enough for two people anyway. At the same time, neither one of us are quite ready to climb three into a bed at night either." "Bummer," Brett said, feigning disappointment. This prompted a few more playful slaps to the arm by his women. "So what we will do for the moment," Michelle went on, "is put you in the King-size bed in the master bedroom. You will sleep in this bed every night. Chrissie and I will alternate nights sleeping with you. It will be a night-by-night thing. I get you on Monday night and she gets you on Tuesday night and so on and so forth. Jokes aside, does this sound like a workable thing to you?" "Yes," he said, putting the jokes aside as requested. "That sounds like the best way to go about it." "Now the spare bedroom," she said, "will be just that. It will be where the woman who is not sleeping with you spends the night. But remember, we are a triple, and we should otherwise act like one. The master bedroom belongs to all of us. That will be where we all keep our clothes, do our hygiene, our dressing and undressing. We need to drop the modesty around each other just like a married couple would do. We need to be able to be perfectly natural around each other. We are a triple, remember that." "A triple," Brett repeated, trying to keep a serious expression on his face while he contemplated the thought of two naked women walking around the house at the same time. "That's gonna be kind of weird," Chrissie said. "I mean, what about going to the bathroom and stuff?" "It'll be just like being newlyweds at first," Brett said. "When I first moved in with my wife, it took a while before I was comfortable taking a leak without closing the door first. She was the same way. Eventually, you just get used to it, or you don't. I mean, I got over the peeing thing, but I never could take care of the other business without closing and locking the door first. If you don't want to pee with the door open, nobody's forcing you to." "Exactly," Michelle said. "You do what you're comfortable with and what the other people are comfortable with. I myself would prefer it if Brett continued to take care of 'the other business' with the door closed. I honestly have no desire to see him in action for that particular activity." "This conversation has taken a turn towards the disgusting," Chrissie said with a scowl. "Sorry," Michelle said, "but the whole point was that we should learn to be comfortable around each other. It doesn't have to extend to watching each other defecate, but we should at least be accustomed to seeing each other naked and getting dressed in the morning. We should be accustomed to seeing each other in our nightgowns and with our hair uncombed and with our legs or faces unshaved. You take the bad with the good, right?" "Right," Brett said. "Believe it or not, there's something undeniably sexy about seeing the woman you live with in a ratty nightgown or a pair of sweats, her make-up off, her hair all messed-up. You're seeing her as no one else does." Chrissie looked at him in abject disbelief, but said nothing. Michelle however, took that as her opening to bring up the next subject. "Which brings us to the matter of sex," she said. Right on, Brett did not say. He simply assumed a politely interested expression, as if he had not been waiting for this subject to come up all night. "Now the simple fact of the matter," Michelle said, "is that while this is going to be the easiest aspect of the relationship for you Brett, it is going to be the hardest for Chrissie and I. All of these other things are almost inconsequential when it comes to jealousy and envy and all that. But with sex, that is where the problems are going to rear their heads I think. It's going to be hard for both of us to know that you are having sex with the other one since that is, whether we women want to admit it or not, a major basis of any relationship." "So what is the answer?" Brett asked. "Does only the woman whose turn it is to sleep with me that night get to have the sex for that twenty-four hour period?" "That is one solution," Michelle said, "but Chrissie and I both agreed that it probably wouldn't work very well and would possibly make the problems worse. What if you aren't horny on the night that it's my turn? That kind of stuff happens. And what if you are horny the next night and have sex with Chrissie. That could very well lead to feelings of insecurity on my part. Why is he sleeping with Chrissie and not with me? Does he like her better? That equation could work both ways. What if Chrissie is not in the mood when it's her turn and then I'm not in the mood the following night when it's my turn but Chrissie is? So then you'd have Chrissie in one room wanting some love and Brett in another room wanting some love and Michelle next to Brett not wanting to give any up. If we start trying to structure our sex lives, we're going to have trouble." "Okay," Brett said. "I agree with your reasoning. But you haven't told me what the answer is." "There is no answer," she said. "That is what the answer is. Sex is supposed to be a very special thing in a relationship and it should occur when it occurs in whatever manner the participants want it to occur. Chrissie and I agreed that we should not put any rules or restrictions on the sex part. Whenever you and one of us decide that sex is the thing to do, than do it, no matter whose turn it is to sleep with you." "So whatever feels good, do it?" Brett said, liking that idea a lot. "Basically," Michelle said. "There should be a few - let's not say rules, but guidelines." "Guidelines?" Brett asked. "For lack of a better term," Michelle said. "First of all, you, as the man, should try as hard as you can not to favor one or the other of us. I'm not saying that you should keep careful track of how many times you make love to each one of us or anything, but do try to spread it out." "You've got two women to satisfy now," Chrissie said, nudging him a little. "Don't forget about one of us." "I can handle that," Brett assured them. "And another thing," Michelle went on, "is that the sex that takes place should not be secretive. Remember that we're a triple and we should not be ashamed of what we do. We should try to be open about what we do in here, especially among ourselves. Both of us girls are going to have to get used to sharing you and perhaps the best way to do that is that it not be hidden." Now Brett was a little confused. "So are you saying that we... uh... do it in front of each other?" This was not a particularly unpleasant thought. "Well... I'm not saying that you should throw Chrissie down on the coffee table right there in front of me and start putting it to her, at least not at first. However, if I need to come in and get my pajamas out of the bedroom and you two are in there making love, it shouldn't be a problem. Or if we're sitting here after dinner and you and I suddenly have the urge to make love, Chrissie shouldn't have a problem if we just kind of get up and go find a place to do our business. I suspect that as this relationship goes on, we will probably shed a lot of our inhibitions and work our way to the point that we will be making love in front of each other without embarrassment. In fact, if the truth be known, I find the very thought to be somewhat exciting." Chrissie said nothing but blushed furiously, indicating that she found that thought exciting as well. "This is going to be quite an experiment," Brett said, looking from one of his women to the other. "What happens," Chrissie asked Michelle, "if both of us... you know... want some at the same time? I'm sure that will happen from time to time." Michelle smiled. "That's one we'll just have to work out when it comes up, won't we?" ------- Dale died at 7:30 that night. There were no dramatic last words, no brief instant of awareness, he simply died, his breathing coming to a halt as his body, suffering from severe hypovolemic shock, finally gave up the battle to keep delivering oxygen to his brain. Paul watched him go, feeling helpless and impotent at his inability to do anything to prevent it. He covered him up with his sheet and then simply sat there, staring at the covered corpse while Sherri snored away behind him. He did not know how long he stayed that way but finally Janet's voice, gently calling his name, stirred him from his trance. He turned and beheld her standing in the doorway, her pretty face framed by her short black hair. "Hi, babe," he said softly, standing up and walking over to her. "Is he gone?" she asked, casting a look over at the bed. "Yeah. Just a few minutes ago. He never really had a chance." "You did what you could," she said, putting her arms around him, offering him what comfort she could. "Which wasn't a lot," he said bitterly. They held each other in the doorway for awhile, neither one speaking. Gradually, he began to feel a little better. Just a little. "Are you going to sleep here tonight?" she asked him. "Yes. Sherri might need me. I'm the only medical person we have. Never thought that me and my EMT card would be able to say that." "Do you want me to stay with you?" she asked. "I can go get us a couple of cots out of the supply room. Maybe give you a hand if you need it?" He smiled at her, giving her a kiss on the nose. "That would be nice," he said. "I could use a little company. You get the cots, I'll move Dale into the supply room." Thirty minutes later, the cots had been moved in and placed on the far side of the room and Dale was zipped into a sleeping bag and in storage. When Paul returned from washing up he found Janet had spread two sleeping bags out and was lying atop of them. They held each other, enjoying the closeness, and whispered back and forth, talking of the events of this most amazing day. She told of how terrified she had been, cowering with children in the breakfast room while the sound of gunfire popped continuously from just outside. He told her of his horror when he saw the condition of the wounded for the first time, as he realized that he was not equipped to deal with what had happened. Gradually, after exercising the demons of the day (partially anyway), their talk turned to the meeting that night. "I feel ashamed of myself now," Janet told him. "I can't believe that I was just as ready to vote Brett out of town as everyone else was. I let myself be led by Jessica. Just like Brett said, I was a fucking sheep." "Don't feel bad," he told her. "You weren't the only one. Jessica is an expert at twisting people's opinions to match her own. Especially when it's something that we were all taught to be opposed to in the first place." "I'm still not sure how I feel about it," she said. "I mean sixteen is awfully young. But I can also see Brett's point. Who are we to let Chrissie kill for us and then turn around and tell her she's not allowed to have an adult relationship with someone? After all, she was out there fighting for us and I was in here huddled with a bunch of kids and peeing my pants." "Brett does have a way of convincing people when he wants to, doesn't he?" "He has a way of making us take a look at who we are," she corrected. "At least he does if we bother to listen to him. What do you think is going to happen to Jessica now?" "She'll be kicked off the committee," he said without hesitation. "I've been complaining about her vote stacking this entire time..." "I know you have." "Yes, I guess I did dump that on you a lot, didn't I. But anyway, now that it's become an official issue, now that there is something tangible, like deaths and invasions, to hang upon it, she's gonna go down. When everybody gets a good look at all of the things she's voted against just because she didn't happen to like Brett, or because of some other petty issue... well... we're talking about Watergate here. She's finished." Janet smiled a little. "I can't say I'll be sorry about that." "Me either." Silence ruled for the next few minutes as they continued to lay there with their arms intertwined. "Did you hear the latest?" Janet finally asked. "No, what might that be?" "Well, the rumors about Brett and Chrissie moving in with Michelle were apparently correct. They all three went back to Brett's house together, walking arm in arm no less." Paul sighed, wishing for a cigarette. "I wish they would have given everyone a few more days before they sprang this. Freakin' polygamous relationships? Can you believe it?" "Actually," she said slowly, "I can. I'm afraid that it makes a lot of sense given the circumstances." He looked at her as if she was mad. "What?" "Surprised I would say that huh?" she said, a strange smile upon her face. "Believe me, I never would have thought I'd ever speak in favor of such a thing. It goes against everything I believe in about marriage and relationships. When I first heard that they were intending to do that this afternoon, I was outraged. Two women living with one man? Absurd." "But you don't feel like that now?" "It's better than the alternative that we are living with," she said. "The alternative?" he asked, feeling he was treading on shaky ground. "Let's speak freely, Paul," she said, pulling back from him a little and giving him a serious look. "You're a good man, a caring man, and I love you a lot, even more, I think, than I loved my husband before the comet. But I know that I'm not the only one that you've slept with." Paul looked at her aghast. Had he really thought that she knew nothing about his little trysts? He really had. And did assuming that seem a ridiculous notion now? Yes it did. "I understand," she said. "Really, I do. I don't think that a normal man was meant to withstand the kind of pressure that we have in this town. It hurt a little, knowing you had done that, but, strangely, in a way it made me love you even more." His jaw dropped a little more. "Uh... how is that?" "Because you try not to," she said. "You give in to the temptation on occasion, that is true, but you're not like most of the other men in town. You don't have three other women that you're stringing along with promises that you're going to leave me soon. You haven't dumped me and made someone else your official companion. You try to be faithful in an environment where it's probably impossible. But you see, it does hurt to have you sneaking around on me. That will always hurt any woman no matter what the circumstances." "What are you saying?" he asked her. "I'm saying that maybe Michelle and Brett and Chrissie have the right idea. Maybe having more than one woman would keep you from straying and sneaking. Now I'm not saying that you should go out and drag someone home right now, but... well, if there was someone that we both could get along with... I would rather we... you know... have it official and in the open than have you seeing her on the sly." Paul looked at his woman in amazement. He had thought that the day had given up all of the surprises that it had to offer. Apparently he had been wrong. ------- A candle burned on each side of the bed, imparting a soft, romantic glow upon the bedroom. Brett was naked, his erection sticking out rigidly before him, his hands sliding over the soft firmness of Michelle's breasts. "Mmmm," she purred, her hands covering his, her lips kissing his neck. Moisture dripped from her sex, the odor permeating the air. The trio had decided, after an absurdly long conversation in which both women tried to out-kind the other, that Michelle would have the honor of sleeping with Brett on this first night. Chrissie had finally demanded it. "Let's just get this over with," she'd said. "Brett, take her in there and fuck her right now. Then this will all be real, then I'll have to accept it." And so he was doing what he had been told, with Michelle's enthusiastic cooperation. It felt very strange to be naked with Michelle, in the same bed that he had shared with Chrissie, while Chrissie was in the very same house and not only knew about it, but had told them to do it. The knowledge was strangely arousing in a way that was part guilt, part glee. "Suck them, Brett," she moaned, moving her hands from his up to his head. She gently pushed downward. "I love my titties sucked." He kissed his way down her neck and across her shoulder, his tongue tasting her salty flesh. He moved down, burying his face in the valley between her twin globes, feeling the firmness enfold his cheeks as her fingers twined through his hair. Finally he circled in on the target, sliding his tongue around the aureole of her right breast a few times before capturing the rigid nipple between his teeth. He began to suckle. "Ohhhh, yesss," she moaned, her hands dropping down to his back, enjoying the delicious sensation coursing through her. From her position on the bed she was able to see the door to the bedroom, which she had purposely left slightly ajar. She could see nothing on the other side of the small gap since the rest of the house was darkened, but she had a feeling that someone was there all the same. ------- Chrissie sat on the couch for as long as she could stand, thinking about what was going on in the bedroom just fifteen feet away. She did not know how she should feel. Her emotions were locked in a turmoil of shame, jealousy, disgust, and sharp, undeniable sexual arousal. She could not deny this last sensation, could not even pretend that it was something else. Her nipples were hard little points against her shirt. Her vagina was leaking so much lubrication that it almost felt like she'd peed in her panties. "My God," she thought breathlessly, wondering if she was perverted or not, "I'm getting turned on thinking about Brett and Michelle making love." This realization only served to arouse her more. Her arousal served to make her feel guiltier, and more disgusted with herself, which in turn served to accent the jealousy. Never in her life had she experienced such a conflicting mix of feelings. Never had she even imagined such a thing. She stared from the darkness of the couch towards that small glow of light coming through the crack in the bedroom door. She heard Michelle say "suck them Brett, I love my titties sucked," and she couldn't stop a groan from leaving her mouth. She began to twist and squirm on the couch, crossing and uncrossing her legs, her fingers twining together restlessly in her lap. She let her index finger slide slowly across her crotch and she felt heat and dampness emanating from the blue jean material that covered it. Finally, she could take it no more. Maybe it meant she was sick, maybe it meant she was a disgusting peeping tom, but she had to see what was going on in there. She had to. She got up slowly, her breathing heavy, her nipples aching, and made her way through the darkness towards that small strip of light that marked the doorway. Why had that door been left open? Why were there still candles burning in the room? Didn't Michelle and Brett have the decency to close the door while they were... while they were... making love? Especially if they were going to leave the lights on? Had it been deliberate? Had they wanted her to hear them, to see them? And if so, why? She crept quietly, feeling like a criminal, telling herself to just keep walking until she got to the spare bedroom, to go in there, slam her door, and put a pillow over her head. Intellectually she knew that she should do just that. But she didn't. She was drawn towards the door like a magnet. When she reached it, she peered through the four-inch gap, at first seeing nothing but the dresser and the nightstand. A slight adjustment of the angle however, and she was looking at the bed and the two naked bodies upon it. Michelle was lying on her back, her brown hair cascading over a pillow, her feet facing towards Chrissie. Brett was lying partially atop her, on his stomach, his mouth fastened to her right breast, his tongue and lips working it over. His right hand was between Michelle's widely spread legs, the fingers probing through her black curls, sliding slowly in and out of her vagina while her hips moved gently up and down to the rhythm. It was an act of foreplay that Brett often did to her when they were making love and she knew how good it felt, how crazy it could drive her. Seeing it done to Michelle now, looking at it from the perspective of an observer instead of a participant, made her draw in a sharp gasp of air. She stared at his fingers going in and out of her, watching as her glistening lips pushed and pulled with the intrusion and retreat. She felt a fresh pang of jealousy stabbing through her heart. At the same time, she felt a fresh gush of moisture between her legs, felt the hardness of her clit pushing against the cotton of her panties. When Brett left Michelle's breast behind and began to kiss his way down her stomach, Chrissie's knees began to tremble. Suddenly his head was between those well-muscled legs as he began to eat her. Michelle moaned loudly at the first contact, her hands pulling forcefully at his head, drawing him in tighter. Chrissie moaned as well, unaware that she was even doing it, unaware that Michelle had clearly heard her. Though Chrissie had never before masturbated outside of the privacy of her own bedroom with the door locked, her fingers reached for the buttons on her jeans. She practically ripped them open and shoved them down to mid-thigh, pushing her panties down with them. She was able to smell the odor of her own musk, a sharp, wet tang that made her nostrils flare. As she continued to watch Brett orally pleasuring another woman, she put her fingers on her wet slit and began to rub, moaning again at the contact. By the time that Michelle began to buck up and down on the bed and cry out in orgasm, Chrissie was panting, her fingers drenched in her own juices, waves of pleasure spreading throughout her body. When her own orgasm hit her - striking with the speed and force of a lightening strike - her knees buckled and she nearly fell down. "Now fuck me," Michelle demanded, pulling Brett upward. "Oh God, fuck me now!" Chrissie moaned again, her fingers continuing to move, starting another wave of pleasure in motion. She watched Brett push Michelle's legs back, watched his buttocks sway back and forth as he positioned himself against her. Her hands grabbed those buttocks, her nails biting into them, and suddenly, he sank down upon her, both of them groaning in sheer pleasure. His ass, the ass she loved so much, began to rise and fall, slowly at first, but rapidly picking up the pace, a wet squish reaching her ears with each motion. Chrissie's fingers became a blur once more, her juices running over her hands and she dropped to her knees next to the door, no longer able to hold herself up. She did not miss so much as a stroke as she fell, did not take her eyes off the action on the bed for so much as an instant. ------- Brett was thrusting in and out of her, feeling the exciting clench of her muscles against his cock, touching the softness of her skin anywhere that his hands could reach. He was panting as he kissed her neck, her shoulder, occasionally dipping down to give a nipple a wet slurp. He became reacquainted with the fact that Michelle, somewhat in contrast to Chrissie, had a very vocal and profane tongue during sex, particularly when she neared orgasm. "Yes, yes, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me harder," she nearly shouted into his ear between licks and bites at his earlobes. Her fingernails scratched almost painfully both upon his ass and his back. He pounded in and out of her with increasing force, grinding his pubis into her. And then he heard a distinct moan coming, not from Michelle, but from behind them, from the other side of the doorway, audible even over all of the noise that Michelle was making. Was Chrissie watching them? He had noted that the door had been left slightly ajar, had been about to close it in fact, while he and Michelle had been shedding their clothes. In the excitement of the initial touches he had put it out of his mind, but now it came back to him. Michelle had deliberately left that door open, had purposely kept the candles lit, and now Chrissie was watching them in their act of copulation, was moaning as she watched. He had a sudden mental image of her standing back there playing with herself, putting her fingers in and out of her pussy. Was she really doing that? Was she? Why else would she have moaned? That had not been a moan of pain or anguish, it had been of pleasure. "She's watching," Michelle whispered breathlessly, just loud enough for him to hear. "She's back there watching us." She did not seem the least bit bothered by this. In fact, it seemed to drive her on. Her hips began to push back against his thrusts with a little more power. Her hands moved back and forth upon his sweaty back with a little more speed. And, though he wouldn't have thought it possible, her pussy seemed to get a little wetter around his cock. "Uhhh," Brett grunted, incapable of speech. "It's exciting," she whispered, her wet tongue sliding into his ear. "Isn't it?" "Yesss," "Oh yesss," she said, now biting at his neck. She came a minute later, screaming out guttural profanity at the ceiling, her fingers raking scratches in his back. He was right behind her, his lower regions exploding with pleasure for the third time that strange day. As he poured himself out into Michelle's body he heard the high-pitched squeals of Chrissie from the doorway, squeals that he knew intimately meant she too was coming. ------- As Brett and Chrissie collapsed into a naked, sweaty heap, as they shared the deep, loving kisses that men and women shared in the afterglow of lovemaking, Chrissie slowly pulled her fingers from her slit. She too was panting and slightly damp from perspiration, her heart hammering in her chest, her muscles twitching from the effects of three rapid orgasms. Slowly she got to her feet. With shaking hands she pulled her pants and underwear back up, not bothering to refasten the buttons. Shuffling along in the darkness, she made her way to the spare bedroom, where she removed all of her clothes and lay down in the bed. She thought that it would be a long time before she would get to sleep. She thought that she would lay awake most of the night being tormented by the thoughts of Brett and Michelle, being wracked by guilt and self-disgust for having watched them in their intimate act. So thinking, she drifted almost immediately to sleep, her nipples still hard, her sex still leaking moisture. Her dreams were filled, not with images of death and destruction brought on by the events of earlier in the day but of erotic images of pleasure brought on by the events of later. ------- Brett, in contrast, thought he would go immediately to sleep once he rolled off of Michelle and cuddled up in her arms. Fatigue pulled at him strongly, both from his bout of sexual congress and from the many and varied stresses of the past day. Indeed his body desperately wanted to go to sleep, but his mind stubbornly refused to let him. This might have been understandable had he lay awake agonizing over his new relationship with two women, or over the deaths in the town, or over the possibilities of future invasions. But that was not what he kept thinking about. For some reason that he could not put his finger on, he could not get the image of Paul out of his mind, specifically Paul as he had looked at that moment after the battle when he had first been given report that the town was secured. He would try to shut his mind off, would try to think of something else, but again and again, he would see Paul in the make-shift hospital room, agonizing over the three victims he was caring for. He would hear Paul express his hopelessness at the situation and at the fact that he was all that they had for a doctor. "Back before the comet when me and my fire-crew responded to shit like this, they didn't die," he heard Paul say again and again. "We just called for the medivac chopper and flew them off to Sacramento or Reno. They went into a nice trauma center and had their injuries patched up and then they went about their lives." Why was this seemingly meaningless moment in time coming back to him again and again? Why, while he was laying against a naked woman on his first night of a polygamous relationship, were these words haunting him? He didn't know, could not figure it out. Eventually, more than two hours after the sweat dried on his skin, while Michelle was breathing the deep and regular pattern of solid sleep, fatigue got the upper hand and he started to drift off. It was as the last vestiges of consciousness were slipping away, as the final power plug of waking thought was being pulled, that it hit him. In a flash, his eyes flew open and he sat up, moving so abruptly that Michelle groaned and thrashed for a moment next to him. "Son of a bitch," he whispered, wondering why he hadn't thought of it earlier. Could it be possible? Could it? Probably not, he was forced to conclude. He was probably chasing a pipe dream at best. But if there was the slightest possibility... He tried for a few minutes to go back to sleep, intending to talk to Paul first thing in the morning, but now that the thought had entered his mind, he could not get it out, would not be able to until he knew the answer. A moment later he was up and putting on his clothes in the darkness. Paul would be over at the community center, caring for his patients. He would just go ask him. He nearly sprinted the short distance, his feet splashing through puddles, his breath tearing in and out of his throat as he followed a flashlight beam through the streets. At the front door of the community center the night guard, Mike Harris, nearly shot him when he saw an unexpected figure approach. "Sorry, Mike," Brett told him excitedly. "Didn't mean to scare you." "It's not too hard to do after today," he said, reholstering his pistol with a shaky hand. "What are you doing out here this late? Is there trouble?" "No trouble," Brett said, walking past him and opening the front door. "I need to ask Paul something. Is he still in there?" "Yeah, or at least he hasn't come out this door." "Cool, I'll just be a minute." He rushed into the darkened building, his flashlight illuminating his path, his feet squeaking. He made turns and went down hallways until he reached the opened door of the supply room where the patients were being kept. As he entered it, a part of his mind noted that Dale was no longer there, which could only mean one thing. He dismissed that for the moment, his concern with other things. Sherri was still deeply asleep and didn't so much as stir when his light invaded the darkness, but Paul, and Janet who was sleeping next to him, both jerked up in alarm. "What? Who is it?" Paul barked as Janet clutched at him. "It's Brett," he said, lowering the beam so it wasn't shining directly in their eyes. "Sorry to wake you up." "What's wrong?" Paul asked fearfully. "Is something going on?" "No," Brett replied. "No trouble, nothing like that. I just needed to ask you a question." Paul looked at him as if he were insane. "You came barging in here in the middle of the night to ask me a question?" "Sorry," he said, walking over and sitting on a chair near their bed, "but it's a very important question potentially. Something you said earlier today has been nagging at me all night and I just figured out why. Now that I figured it out, I have to know. I won't be able to sleep until I know." "Until you know what?" Paul asked, quite exasperated. "I have no idea what you're talking about." "No," Brett said, calming himself a little, "I guess you don't." He took a deep breath, now afraid to ask because he might get an answer that he didn't like. But he had to. "Earlier today, when I was in here talking to you right after we finished securing the town, you told me that when you had people injured like that, you used to just fly them to a hospital in Reno or Sacramento." "Well... yeah," he said. "We're way out in the middle of nowhere here, at least as far as hospitals are concerned. The closest trauma center is either Roseville Community outside of Sacramento or Washoe Medical Center in Reno." Brett shivered a little in excitement. "Where," he asked carefully, "was the helicopter that flew them based at?" ------- Chapter 9 It had been twelve days since they had observed the strange battle for Garden Hill and Lieutenant Bracken's platoon was now nearly in sight of home. Weary from more than three weeks out in the field, they emerged from the heavily wooded hills above town and onto the black surface of Interstate 80, near an exit sign for Bell Road, which skirted the edge of the foothill community. Less than a mile ahead of them was the outer defensive perimeter for the town, a perimeter that was aligned along the Foresthill Road exit, which led to the strategic bridgehead that they held. Bracken, lingering in the rear as he usually did, knew that the guard positions ahead had probably already sighted his men. "Keep it slow up there, Stu," he said into his radio, talking to the sergeant of the squad that was on point. "We wouldn't want to get shot at by our own sentries, would we?" "Slowing up," Stu's voice answered back a moment later. This had been a good trip in many ways, not the least of which was the discovery of the vulnerable and seemingly rich Garden Hill community. It had also given Bracken more opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of Stu and his people. There had been some doubts raised about how the former convicts would fit in with the militia's operations. Though he was perhaps overly aggressive on certain matters, and though his squad, which was made up of the ten best of his men, were constant disciplinary problems, Stu had kept them under control and had followed the commands that were given to him. In all, he seemed a satisfactory leader with a fairly keen sense of tactics and strategy. He had performed well in combat conditions when they'd taken Colfax prior to this deployment, and he had done equally well on the long-term recon mission they'd just finished. "I'm switching over to the hailing channel for a minute," Bracken radioed to Stu. "Stand by for movement orders." "Standing by," Stu replied. Bracken dialed in the switch on his short-range radio to channel five, which was dedicated for communications between approaching friendly troops and the guards. He keyed up. "Auburn perimeter, the is third platoon, reporting in from Interstate and Bell." "Ten-four, third platoon," came a voice back. "I see you out there. Who am I talking to?" Of course corporal Hansen, who was in charge of the eastern perimeter force, knew exactly who he was talking to, but procedure was procedure. He had to establish that it was his own troops approaching and that they were not under duress of any kind. Failure to do so would have earned Hansen three days in solitary confinement for a first offense, banishment for a second. "This is Lieutenant Bracken here. All members of the platoon are present and accounted for. No prisoners or supplies." "Understood, Lieutenant," Hansen replied. "What is the password you were given upon departure?" "Hydroshock," Bracken replied. It took a moment for Hansen to look that up in his codebook but finally he confirmed it. He gave third platoon the go-ahead to come in. Bracken thanked him and then switched back to his tactical frequency. He gave Stu the order to move in and a moment later all forty men started walking down the blacktop. They came to the main line of defense ten minutes later. The Interstate passed between two rolling hills before descending into the town. Atop of each of the hills were sandbagged emplacements where two-man teams of guards armed with rifles and automatic weapons kept watch on those approaching. The rifles had come from either personal stocks or from the town's gun and bait shop. The automatic weapons had been taken from the Placer County Sheriff's Department building (more than one of the militia members had once been with the PCSD). At the narrowest point of the road itself, the way was hampered by an extensive maze of sandbags and barbed wire. Stu's squad entered the maze and worked their way through it in less than three minutes, the rest of the platoon following. It was relatively easy to walk through the maze and get to the other side as long as nobody was shooting at you from the hillside above. Had the platoon been hostile however, not a single man would have made it through alive. Once on the other side of the maze they continued down the Interstate. The town of Auburn had once been much bigger, both in geographic size and population. Like so many other mountain or foothill communities, the bulk of the male population had been down in the valley when the comet had struck and the bulk of the town itself had been either washed away or flooded. A little bit of the downtown district had survived but virtually everything north of the Interstate, which included the ritzy Auburn Gully area, had been buried for all time. What survived had been the lower rent district on the south side of the freeway, which consisted mostly of smaller houses, a few apartment complexes, and several strip malls. As they entered the town itself teams of women could be seen moving here and there, performing their daily chores. In Auburn the women, who outnumbered men by approximately four to one, did all of the day to day chores such as wood gathering, food gathering, and, of course, laundry, childcare, and cooking. This left the men free to handle such duties as guard detail, weapons maintenance, and militia operations. This division of labor was not just a matter of the townspeople following traditional gender roles, it was a law, handed down by Colonel Barnes himself, and it was strictly enforced. In the new world that followed this one women would know their place and would be kept in it. Third platoon marched to Auburn High School, which stood on a small hill overlooking the canyon, and assembled on the soggy soccer field, all of them standing at rigid attention. Bracken put them at ease and then gave a short speech lauding the success of their mission. He then ordered them into the gym for weapons cleaning and storage. This took the better part of an hour to accomplish. Once all of the ammunition was accounted for, all of the rifles and pistols stripped, cleaned, reassembled, and placed in locked storage, Bracken dismissed them, telling them to get themselves cleaned up. Most went with enthusiasm, anxious to wash the mud off of their bodies and find their women. Being out in the field for three weeks without any females made one extremely horny. And many of the men had negotiated trades of one wife for another while they were gone and were anxious to try out their new acquisitions. Such trading of women had evolved in the town over the past two months and was now the most popular subject of conversation, at least among the men. Colonel Barnes, who had initially been somewhat reluctant to allow such a thing, had finally seen the wisdom of it and given the go-ahead. Since then, some women had been traded four or five times, being passed from one male to another like a baseball card. For their part the women were learning to live with it. After all, what else could they do? Where else could they go? It was the Auburn way or starvation. Bracken took another hour to clean himself up and change into fresh clothing (as well as assure his four wives that he had not traded any of them on this trip). One he was presentable he donned his rain jacket and ventured outside, making the short walk back to the high school. Two armed guards stood outside of the administration office, the interior of which blazed with electric light that was provided by the diesel generator at the back of the building. The guards, a private and a corporal, both straightened up and gave him a sharp salute. "Good afternoon, lieutenant," the corporal barked with crisp military courtesy. "At ease," Bracken said after returning the salute. "I'm here to see Colonel Barnes for mission debrief." "Yes, sir," the corporal replied. "I'll pass your request along, sir." With that, he picked up a portable radio and keyed it, talking to Sergeant Lovell, who was Barnes' assistant. A few minutes later, Bracken was given permission to enter the building and go to the main office. "Thank you, corporal," Bracken said, snapping off one more salute in return to the two that were offered him. He then mounted the steps and went inside. Colonel Gregory Barnes was fifty-three years old and had been both the founder and the leader of the pre-comet Placer County Militia Group, an organization that been very high on the FBI's "keep-an-eye-on" list. A West Point graduate from the Class of 1969, Barnes had cut his teeth leading platoons into battle in the dying days of the Vietnam War. Following this he had been first a company commander and then a battalion commander in the 7th Light Infantry Division. Though his tactical thinking and his leadership ability had been top-notch throughout his military career, his political savvy had not. He had stagnated at the rank of Major, finally forced to retire in 1992 in the wake of the Persian Gulf War and the resulting downsizing of the military. Using his military pension he had opened Auburn Bait and Guns in his hometown, taking on the role of small-town businessman. A staunch supporter of Second Amendment rights, Barnes had slowly turned from the blind patriot he had been his whole life to an anti-government militia organizer. His views were fueled both by the year by year crackdowns on the weapons he sold and by the strong-arm tactics employed by federal forces at such places as Ruby Ridge and Waco. He became convinced that a revolution would soon occur in his country - a forcible return to the traditional values that made the country great - and that the feds, in an attempt to derail this revolution, were conspiring to deprive all Americans of their right to bear arms. The PCMG, founded in 1996, had been his response to this, and there had been no shortage of volunteers to join in such a town as Auburn. And now, though the revolution had never materialized, its evolution interrupted by the chunk of ice from space, its ideals were needed more than ever. America would have to be rebuilt and this time, Barnes vowed, it would be done right. Maintaining control of the town after the impact and the disaster that followed, had not been difficult. He and his militia members had already been the second-best armed group of people in town, the first being the Placer County Sheriff's department. While the various members of the sheriff's department had been out trying to deal with the catastrophe or return to their houses to check on their loved ones, he and his men (many of whom had been "between jobs" on the day in question) had simply assembled and seized the building, capturing all of its weapon stores without firing a shot. Following the seizure eight of the fifteen deputies that had worked there on that day had joined his ranks voluntarily. The rest had been shot and tossed into the canyon to keep them from organizing a competing group. The townspeople of Auburn, most of whom were women, unemployed men, or small business owners, had fallen right into line after that. What choice did they have? Barnes and his group offered safety and stability; they offered food and shelter. The only alternatives were death or the unknown fate that awaited those outside the town. Barnes was a harsh disciplinarian but he liked to think that he was fair. Everyone, men and women alike, were expected to pull their weight for the food they consumed. There would be no welfare in his new society. And, though women were not allowed to work at male oriented jobs and though men were allowed to trade them back and forth, it was against the town's law to rape or to beat a woman without just cause. What could be fairer than that? Everyone had his or her role in society and as long as they played by the rules, everyone got along and was treated well. Those who did not play by the rules - those who were lazy, who were rebellious, who complained about his laws - were dealt with harshly, in a manner that would serve as an example to others. It was the only way to keep order in this new reality. Barnes' office was on the top floor of the administration office, where the heat provided by the propane-fired system was greatest. When Bracken entered he was sitting behind his oak desk going over some inventory figures on a computer terminal. "Lieutenant Bracken reporting for mission debrief," Bracken said, giving a salute. Barnes returned the salute almost absently, without even standing up. "Have a seat, Lieutenant," he said. Bracken took the chair in front of the desk, setting down a digital camera he had used to snap shots of Garden Hill and a folder full of maps that he had made. The debriefing began. Barnes listened carefully, not asking many questions, as his subordinate described his mission in chronological order, sometimes using his maps or photos of the area that he put into the computer. He nodded from time to time but his face did not change expression at all, not even when the battle with the group of hunters was described. Only when Bracken was finished did he show any interest at all. "So you think that there are how many people in Garden Hill?" he wanted to know. "We couldn't get an accurate count of course," Bracken replied. "But maybe two hundred adults, mostly women. I don't believe that there are more than thirty men there, even before the attack killed some of them." "And the women are attractive?" "From what we could tell by looking through the binoculars." Barnes nodded thoughtfully. "More breeding and trading stock," he said. "We can always use that around here. What about food stocks?" "Impossible to tell. It looks like they have all of it stored in the community center. They always gathered in there to eat and we never saw anyone carrying food over there from elsewhere." "But they sent out no hunting parties, no gathering crews?" "Not a single time," Bracken said. "The only time anyone left the walled portion of the town at all was when they manned the defenses near the bridge." "They must have a full cupboard indeed," Barnes said. "It sounds like Garden Hill will be a worthwhile target for our attentions. You think a company of troops will be needed to take it?" "I think so," Bracken said. "As I told you, their defensive positions are a joke. If not for a little bit of good luck, those untrained barbarians that attacked them would have taken the town themselves." "But you also say that their commander, this man our convict friends are acquainted with, was able to rally the people into a formidable defense?" "I'm only assuming that it was him that did it," Bracken said. "We have confirmation that he was there but I don't know who is leading them. In answer to your question however, they were able to put up a well-executed defense of their community center. It was obviously coordinated and the groups were put in exactly the perfect places considering the terrain they had to work with." "And how does this factor into your estimation of force needed?" "That is why I want a complete company to make the attack," Bracken said. "Good defensive execution or not, I don't believe they'll be able to stand up to 160 armed men. Of course, ideally, I will be able to make contact with them and convince them to surrender to us like we did the convicts at Foresthill and the people at Beacher's Grove." "Yes," Barnes agreed, "that would be best for all concerned. Especially since they are using their women as soldiers. It would be a shame to have to kill good females just to take the town." "And I think that this man the convicts told us about, this man who probably coordinated the defense, would be a valuable asset to us as well. If he could be convinced to join our side he may eventually rise to command a platoon or a company in the militia." "Oh, I think we could convince him," Barnes said. "A man like that would understand power, and we are the power in this region. And when he considers the alternative to joining, why wouldn't he?" Bracken gave a doubtful look. "He might be like those men in Colfax and Georgetown." At those two towns, after their surrenders, a handful of the men had chosen death rather than the militia way of life. Though it was common for the women to protest their new reality at first, the fact that men would do so was perplexing to many of the militiamen. Wasn't it the ideal world they were being offered? A world in which men were the kings and women were the property? "If he's like them," Barnes said coldly, "then we'll just have to do without him. If he doesn't realize the opportunity we represent, then we're better off without him anyway." "Yes, sir," Bracken agreed. "Okay," Barnes said, cracking his knuckles. "We have 2nd and 4th platoons out hitting Grass Valley right now. They left three days ago so we can probably expect them to return in about two weeks. As soon as they get back and get rested up, I'll assign them to you, add 1st platoon, and put you in charge of the Garden Hill operation. I'd like to see detailed plans by day after tomorrow for your assault on the town if such a thing becomes necessary." "I'll have them to you by tomorrow," Bracken said. "With those pitiful defenses they have, its no more than a matter of pouring fire on their guard positions with one platoon while the rest breach the wall." ------- The lean-to's had been built and the light was rapidly fading from the sky. Brett, Michelle, Jason, and Matt had just finished their dinner of canned pork and beans and were sitting in the relative dryness of the shelters they had constructed. Their weapons were within easy reach and their flashlights had just been energized with fresh batteries. It was their eighth night in the wilderness, twenty days since the bloody attack on Garden Hill by the hunters. "So you think we'll get there tomorrow?" Matt asked hopefully as he puffed on a cigar. He, like Brett, had developed a considerable growth of beard since their departure. Unlike Brett however, it made him look disturbingly Manson-like. "If I'm reading these maps right," Brett answered, "and if we keep up the pace we're maintaining, we'll get there by late morning or early afternoon." "Thank God for that," Michelle said a little sourly. She was not enjoying her little adventure outside the walls of Garden Hill. The "there" they were referring to was the town of Cameron Park, or specifically, the Cameron Park airport. It was there, Paul had told Brett on that fateful night, that the California Highway Patrol had kept and maintained H-22, the patrol and medivac helicopter assigned to the northern mountain division. Though H-22 had not been the primary helicopter that CDF fire station 2417 had used to air-lift patients, nor had it been the closest, Brett had chosen to make the effort to recover it instead of the closer Cal-Star bird that had been based in Auburn. The reasoning behind this was twofold. First and foremost was the fact that Cal-Star was not very likely to be intact or recoverable. The Auburn Airport, where the chopper was based, had been located right next to the Auburn town reservoir according to the maps. It seemed almost a given that the airport would now be under no less than six feet of floodwaters. By contrast the Cameron Park airport was located atop a plateau that stood nearly two hundred feet above the town itself. Though Cameron Park was probably buried under tons of mud and water, there was a better than even chance that its airport was still standing. In addition to the likelihood of H-22 still being there, it was also a more desirable chopper to have. Though the Cal-Star bird was bigger, that was not necessarily an advantage. Helicopters were very high maintenance machines and there were no helicopter mechanics in Garden Hill; Brett, who was not the most mechanically inclined person in the world, would have to do it himself. As such, he would be much more likely to be able to keep the single engine on the CHP helicopter running for any length of time than he would the two engines on the Cal-Star helicopter. Brett, upon hearing about the possibility that there might be a running helicopter within reach of Garden Hill, had been very anxious to set out and find it. With a helicopter at their disposal, gathering food, hunting, and defense would all became much less of a challenge. Only the pressing need to boost up the town's defensive plan while public opinion had been in his favor had kept him from setting off the very next morning. As it was, he was glad he had taken the time to do so. It made him much more comfortable leaving town with a squad of his best warriors. In the twelve days between the attack and his departure, he had run sixteen volunteers through his two-day training program and had another sixteen scheduled to go through upon his return. Though, due to shortages, they had not been able to expend as much training ammunition as he would have liked, his first group had shown considerable promise and a willingness to learn that had been unheard of prior to the attack. There was nothing like the shock of an armed invasion to jolt people into action. Seeing the grisly display of burying the bodies of their dead had added an additional jolt, particularly the corpses of Mitsy, Jeff, and Lenny. Not only were the townspeople more eager to sign up for guard duties now, they were considerably more alert during them, even on the night shift. The static defenses had also been greatly improved prior to his departure. While it was true that there were still quite a few things that needed to be done, the basic upgrades had been constructed and were in full operation. On the hills overlooking the town, four large emplacements had been dug and surrounded by sandbags full of dirt and then covered with mud and pine branches to camouflage them. Each emplacement was strong enough to withstand a close mortar round hit and was capable of housing six people, their weapons, and their ammunition, although typical staffing was only two at a time. Carefully constructed ports in the sandbags were used both for lookout positions and to fire through without danger of being struck by return fire. Each position was equipped with a radio, one of the automatic weapons (except for the bridge approach, it was only given an AR-15) and two hundred rounds of ammunition. This was in addition to the standard issue of a scoped hunting rifle for long-range shots. So far, with sixteen more people trained up, he was able to keep at least one in each guard position at all hours. In addition, those of his trained force who were off duty at any particular time were given both a rifle and a pistol to keep in their houses. They would be a fast-action team, their instructions to report quickly to the community center for deployment in the event of another attack. Their call to arms would be the wailing of the fire engine's siren, the sound of which all sixteen lived in range of. From the community center they could be moved to wherever they were needed, either as reinforcements for the guard positions or as a mobile force to block a penetration attempt. Brett thought the town would now easily be able to handle an attack up to twice the size of the one that had already hit them without allowing the attackers inside the wall. Jessica, during all of this frantic digging and building activity, had been strangely quiet with everyone, not trying to regain the favor she had lost, not trying to reestablish her place in the town. The investigation into her activities had been put on hold for the time being so that more important things could be taken care of, and she remained on suspension from the town council, but she did not protest this either officially or in a gossip circle. She had been assigned to digging detail both for the bodies of the dead and for the defenses and she had done these jobs unprotestingly and well, not quite being a part of the camaraderie that developed between the other workers, but not being a nuisance either. Brett, as well as several others, found themselves vaguely uncomfortable with this new Jessica. It was too out of character for her. The general consensus was that she was up to something, although no one could hazard a guess as to just what that might be. He supposed it was possible that the attack had had the same effect on her that it seemed to have on everyone else. Anything was possible. If the other women could go from demanding Brett's or Stacy's exile one day for corrupting minors to demanding the public hanging of the captured prisoner the next, why couldn't Jessica? If the other women could go from disdaining any work in which they might break a fingernail to enthusiastically digging trenches in the side of hills or crawling around on their bellies in the mud as part of Brett's training, couldn't Jessica make a similar transformation? Was she completely beyond redemption? Brett didn't know. Neither did anyone else. He vowed however, to keep an eye on her as time went by. She might be playing nice now, but he didn't trust her. As had been the case during their previous trek through the woods, Jason was the first to undress and climb into his sleeping bag. Before complete darkness could envelop them, he was snoring away contentedly, his AR-15 next to him. Michelle and Matt watched this with envy. They were both having considerable trouble sleeping at night, unaccustomed as they were to the hard ground and the cold, damp air. "It's amazing how fast he can fall asleep," Matt said, shaking his head a little. "And he sleeps like that all night long. I know, because I hear him snoring while I'm laying awake." "Little bastard," Michelle said jokingly. "If I can get two broken hours a night, I consider myself lucky." Brett, who did not have a lot of trouble sleeping outside, kept mute. He yawned and stretched a little, shifting the AK-47 on his lap. Another thing that the attack on the town and his follow-up speech had accomplished was to take the pressure off of Jason and Stacy. They had been living together in apparent harmony, sharing the same bedroom, walking hand in hand on the streets in daylight, and nobody said a thing about it, not publicly, or even, as far as Brett had heard, privately either. Not only was he left alone to pursue happiness, as it were, he was treated with considerably more respect. Most of the townspeople had ceased treating him as a child to be coddled, protected, and sheltered from the unpleasantness of the world. They stopped calling him "hon" and "sweetheart" and "little dude" and started calling him by his name. He had even told Brett that his guard duty partners - all of them men much older than he (for the time being, the same sex on guard detail rule remained in effect) - were even asking him serious questions about tactics and deployment. With a woman in his life and newfound respect from those around him, Jason seemed to be quite happy these days. The only sour part in his life had been the extended fight he had had with Stacy about coming on the helicopter acquisition mission. He had been the first to volunteer and he had done so without consulting his better half first - a common mistake made by those new to intimate relationships. For three days prior to the departure it seemed that two lovers were not speaking to each other much. But things seemed to have worked out in the end. As they had assembled on the bridge to begin their trip eight days ago, Stacy had been there right alongside Chrissie and Maureen, Matt's official woman, tears in her eyes. She had given him a big hug and a kiss, telling him to be careful and to come back safe. He had promised that he would. "I really hope we find that friggin' chopper when we get there," Matt said, his hand massaging the part of his shoulder where his heavy pack bit into it. "I'm not too keen on marching back another eight days." "Actually, it would be more like twelve days," Brett felt compelled to point out. "Remember, we've been going downhill. Gravity has been working for us. On the way back, it would work against us." "Well you're just Mr. Silver Lining, aren't you?" Michelle asked with a groan. "Sorry," Brett said, anything but. "I just feel so far from home out here," she told him. "And some of the things we saw." She shook her head, trying to keep the images from taking her away. "I can't believe how lightly we took the thought of exiling someone before. I can see why you said it was a fate worse than death." Yes, there had been some very disturbing sights seen on their eight-day trek through the woods, things that had the power to rob sleep. Unlike when Brett, Jason, and Chrissie had been out before, there were now dead human bodies littered throughout their path. These bodies were found singly, in pairs, once in a group of five. They were in various stages of decomposition, some relatively fresh, some more than a month into the process. Not all of them were the victims of starvation either. The group of five had been particularly upsetting. It appeared that they had all died from a single gunshot to the back of the head. They had been dead maybe a week, maybe more. It was hard to tell because their bodies had been neatly skinned and stripped of muscle tissue, leaving little more than skeletons. It was not the sort of stripping of meat that animals would have done. The cuts were too even, too smooth to have been made by anything other than a knife. The thought that there was a group of survivors subsisting by organized cannibalism made everyone, including Brett, shudder. And then, two days later, while traversing a rise, Matt, who had been on point, had spotted a group of men picking their way through the woods. The four travelers hid themselves for nearly an hour, guns trained outward as the twelve scraggly, bearded, filthy men, all armed with rifles, made their way past them and disappeared up the hill. Had they been the cannibals? There was no way of telling for sure without making contact - there was, after all, still the occasional deer or bear to be found - but everyone strongly suspected they were. "We really have it soft in Garden Hill," Matt said, thinking of all he had seen. "I always knew that intellectually, but until I saw what others are doing to survive..." "That's hideous," Michelle said, not wanting to discuss it. "Eating human flesh. Killing people in order to do it. What have we come to, us humans? What have we come to?" "We've come down to basic survival," Brett said. "And hopefully our group will come out on top of the chain." "I would kill myself before I would eat another person," Michelle said sternly. "I just couldn't do it. I think my soul would die." "You never know what you're capable of until you're faced with it," Matt said. "What about the Donner Party or those rugby players that crashed in the Andes?" "I would still rather die," Michelle told him. "But in any case, that's different. They didn't go out hunting for people and shoot them in the back of the head so they could eat them." "At least not as far as we know," Matt said. "Truth be told, I'm not quite sure what I would do if I was faced with either starvation or cannibalism. I hope I never have to find out." "Amen," Brett said, finding the entire discussion somewhat disturbing. "And if we can get that chopper tomorrow, hopefully we won't ever be faced with that choice." The last of the light left the sky, signaling bedtime for those still awake. Matt and Jason shared one lean-to and Michelle and Brett shared the other. Everyone stripped down to their underwear and climbed into their sleeping bags. In the case of Michelle and Brett, they both climbed into one large sleeping bag that had been formed by zipping two together. "Keep me warm," Michelle said with a shiver, pulling her body against his, sharing her warmth with him. As had been the case before with Chrissie, neither one of them smelled particularly good after eight days out, and Michelle's legs were quite scratchy with stubble, but the pleasure of touching flesh to flesh made the aesthetics of the situation a secondary concern. "Mmmm," Brett whispered to her, his hands on her bare back. "This is the advantage of taking your woman with you on an expedition. Guaranteed warmth." "Is this how you and Chrissie used to sleep?" she whispered back, pressing herself even tighter against him. "Pretty much," he agreed. "We would usually end up with her cuddled up on top of me by the end of the night." "She told me that you used to make love every night while you were out there. Every night?" Brett shrugged in the darkness. "What can I say?" he asked lightly. "You haven't done me a single time out here," she said next. "What's up with that?" "When I was doing it with Chrissie," he replied, "I didn't know that others could hear us. Now, thanks to some straight talk by Jason, I do know that. It's not that I don't want to." "I can feel that," she said teasingly. "I feel you get hard against me every time we lay together." She slid her hand down and grasped his erection through his underwear. "Like right now for instance." "Michelle," he said, making no move to stop her as she squeezed and kneaded him. It felt so damn good. "We can do it quietly," she told him, kissing his ear. "And if they hear us, so what? I want you, Brett. I need you inside of me." He gave in, as she had known that he would. Over the past twenty days she had come to know his triggers fairly well. She slid her hand into his BVDs and began to fondle him in earnest. His own hand found its way under the elastic band of her panties at the crotch. She was very wet and slippery, her clit a hard little bump. He pushed his underwear down to mid thigh and climbed slowly on top of her, taking care not to rustle the sleeping bag too much. She spread her legs for him and pulled the crotch of her panties to the side, giving him the access he needed. He put the head against her slit and slowly pushed forward, sinking into her warmth inch by agonizing inch until he was buried in her body. Her hands on his butt pulled him tightly against her. "So nice," she said softly into his ear. "Eight days is too long to go without." "I agree," he said as he slowly began to move in and out of her, his hips rising and falling carefully, silently. In truth, going eight days without had been almost akin to torture after the pace of his first twelve days as part of a polygamous marriage. All three of them had been swept up in an almost honeymoon-like atmosphere and if Brett was called on to perform his husbandly duties only once a day, it was a slump. Usually he would make love at least twice, sometimes three times; something he would not have thought himself physically capable of. Having two women to pleasure and be pleasured by did wonders for the libido it seemed. Though no firm rules had been set, as had been agreed upon from the beginning, a pattern of sorts had developed nonetheless. Typically he would make love in the morning to whichever of the two women he had not slept with the night before. This would usually take place on the marital bed in the master bedroom, and usually the other woman was in the bathroom at the time, getting cleaned up and ready to face the day. As Michelle had predicted, they were rapidly losing their modesty around each other and, while making love to one woman while the other was combing her hair and putting on her deodorant was still very exciting, it no longer seemed strange or perverted. And though both women never discussed these things openly, it was quite obvious that both of them enjoyed surreptitiously watching the other in the act. At night, when they went to bed, another session, a more private one, would typically occur with whoever's turn it was to sleep with him that night. These sessions tended to be longer, more drawn out, more intimate and loving. It was during such sessions that new things were tried, that new techniques were explored. It was during such a session that Brett learned of Michelle's affinity for anal sex. She loved it when he slid it in and out of her in the missionary position long enough to get both of them thoroughly wet and then slid his cock down to her other hole and used this natural lube to put it into her tight back passage. It was during the night session that he learned that Chrissie loved to straddle his head, her wet and dripping pussy on his face where she could rub it back and forth over his tongue. Chrissie was also quite fond of being taken from behind, in the doggie-style position, while Brett grasped her roughly by the waist and pounded her with all of his might. So far, though the two women had seen each other in the act many times, and though they walked around naked in front of each other without a second thought, they had shown no leanings towards touching each other or even sleeping in bed with him at the same time. Though having two women at once was every man's fantasy, Brett was a glass is half-full kind of person and was therefore quite pleased with the fact that he could simply have two women separately. In other aspects of the relationship, things were going better than they had had any right to expect. So far there had been a few minor squabbles over things such as who was in the bathroom first or whose turn it was to do the laundry, but no major battles of any kind. They were in a discovery phase of their new relationship and all three were making an impressive effort to make things work out. So far, things seemed to be working well and the two women seemed to be becoming best friends with each other. Like with Jason and Stacy however, the subject of the trip to Cameron Park had created the most turmoil in the relationship to date. Chrissie had wanted desperately to be the one to accompany him, making the argument that she already had experience outside the walls and was therefore more qualified than Michelle. Strangely enough, that very argument was the exact reason that he wanted to take Michelle and leave Chrissie behind. Chrissie had already done her time outside the wall and he wanted Michelle to gain the experience that moving a long distance as part of a squad offered. Chrissie had pouted about this for a few days but had eventually seen the wisdom of his decision. The blow was eased further when Brett put her in charge of the security division in his absence. He was interested to know just how she was doing in that capacity and just how the members of the detail and the rest of the town were taking being directed by a sixteen-year-old girl. "A little harder," Michelle whispered excitedly, thrusting her hips up at him. "I'm almost there." "I'm going as hard as I can without making noise," he whispered back, already cognizant of the thick smell rising around them and the distinct squishing noise that accompanied each thrust. Nevertheless, his instinct was to please. He put just a little more power behind his thrusts, twisted his hips just a little bit more to grind into her clit. This did the trick. He felt her pelvis bucking beneath him felt her nails tightening on his ass, felt the spasms of her vaginal muscles around his cock. She bit into his shoulder to keep from crying out as she peaked. "Your turn now," she told him, pulling him still harder against her. "I want to feel you come in me." It didn't take him very long at all, so pent up was he. He released the mental block that had kept him from blasting off prior to this and within seconds the waves of pleasure were spreading from his groin outward. His muscles clenched almost painfully and he could not help but let a small groan escape as he began to shoot his seed into her receptive body. "Very nice," she said when he was done. "I knew you had it in you." "Actually, I had it in you," he said, giving her a kiss. "Hopefully we'll be in our own bed tomorrow night and we'll be able to do it right." "I can't wait," she said. "Let's get some sleep." "Right." They rearranged themselves slowly, still trying to avoid making noise, not knowing that they needn't have bothered. Both Matt and Jason had heard the entire thing. ------- The next morning, back in Garden Hill, Chrissie was out in the rain near the old grocery store with a group of seven women. These women were not part of the Garden Hill guard force. They were mostly wood gatherers, children watchers, or fire tenders. Chrissie was teaching them the basics of the firearms the town possessed, showing them how to load, unload, shoot, and clean each variety. She had just finished with her last demonstration of the lesson - the shotgun. "So you see," she told her students as she held up a Remington model for their perusal, "the shotgun, for our purposes here, is a weapon of last resort. It is good only for close in fighting at less than ten yards or so. And while we hope that any combat we find ourselves in doesn't degenerate to the point that we're that close, if it does, this could very well be our saving grace. This weapon, when loaded with the double ought buckshot rounds, packs quite a punch and will easily mow down any person within its range with a minimum of aiming." Maggie, the woman that had stood by Chrissie during the battle, raised her hand timidly. "So all you have to do is point it and shoot?" she asked. "That's right," Chrissie said. "You'll see what I mean when we shoot it. You just point the barrel at your target and fire. The ten pellets in the round will do the rest." For the next half-hour they all took turns examining the shotgun and learning to take it apart. They all practiced loading it, unloading it, and clearing chambered rounds. Chrissie watched over them like a mother hen, occasionally stepping in to demonstrate if someone was having trouble. It had been Brett's order, approved overwhelmingly by a community vote, that every person in town learn to shoot, whether they wanted to or not, whether they were a part of the guard force or not. Though the guard force would serve as point defense in any battle, Brett had argued - quite successfully now that he didn't have Jessica countering his every word - that if push came to shove, every person in town would need to know how to fight. "We might never be faced with such a situation," he had said. "And God willing, you folks may never have to use this knowledge, but if we need it, this basic firearms training just might make the difference between us standing and us falling." Brett, after running the first sixteen guard force volunteers through his two-day regiment, had trained up many of the non-guards himself. But now that he was off in the wilderness looking for a helicopter, the responsibility for training up the rest of the town had fallen on the acting security chief. At first they hadn't wanted to listen to her. Several of them had even refused to show up at their assigned times, forcing her to enlist the aid of Paul and his threats of house arrest to bring them to her. But once they were there, once she went into her lecture, their condescending attitudes had gradually changed to respect. Chrissie had a gift for coming across like she knew what she was talking about, especially when she did know what she was talking about. She laid down her instructions in simple, easy to understand terms and utilized a lot of hands-on training. So far, not a single person had walked away thinking that her class had been a waste of their time. Like with Jason, she had proved herself well enough that they stopped calling her by cute little terms of endearment and started calling her by her name. "Okay, girls," she said when they had all finished handling the weapon and were all reasonably competent with its mechanics. "Let's go to the firing line, shall we? You're gonna fire three rounds apiece from ten yards at the body silhouettes." She opened a box of .00 buckshot shells and took three out. "Any volunteers to go first?" "I will," Maggie said, standing up and taking the rounds. She grabbed the shotgun in her other hand, carrying it, as she had been instructed, with the barrel pointing up and the action open. "Very good," Chrissie said. "Let's get it on." The firing line was the open space against the eastern wall of the grocery store. The wall of the store was pockmarked with hundreds of bullet holes from previous training sessions. Chrissie hung up one of the silhouettes on the wall with a nail and a hammer and then showed Maggie where the ten-yard mark was. "Got it," Maggie said, sliding the three rounds into the magazine. Her manicured hands worked the pump on the weapon and jacked one into the chamber. "Now point and shoot," Chrissie said, putting her fingers in her ear to muffle the gunshots. "Remember, this is a weapon of last resort. That man is charging your position and you need to stop him." Maggie, who was a shorthaired blonde with surgically enhanced breasts, socked the gun into her shoulder and pulled the trigger. She did not flinch or squeal as the sound of the shot shattered the quiet and the weapon kicked harshly against her. A spray of six holes appeared in the silhouette's chest. "Not bad," Chrissie said. "Again." She jacked the next round into the chamber, the expended casing flying out and dropping to the ground at her feet. She sighted quickly and fired again. This time all ten of the pellets found their mark. Her third shot also hit the mark. "Very good, Mags," Chrissie said, offering her a smile. "You killed him deader than shit, as Brett would say." "That's what it's all about, right?" Maggie responded, obviously quite pleased with Chrissie's praise. "Right," she answered, looking at her. It was very strange to see this cultured woman striving for her respect. Before the attack on the town, Maggie had been on her top ten list of most irritating women in town. Not quite a crony of Jessica's, she had always tried her damnedest to gain her favor, adopting whatever opinion happened to be tossed around in any particular week, and spreading Jessica's gossip with the zeal of one who strives to be accepted. However, after being in combat that day, after shooting that man with her rifle, she had changed somehow, in some fundamental way. It was almost as if someone had slapped the shit out of her and made her realize what the important things really were. Though many of the townspeople had been similarly affected by the battle and by Brett's speech, Maggie was perhaps the most extreme example. In the battle and the aftermath, Maggie seemed to have found some sense of purpose. It was after all of the other women took their turns with the shotgun - their success with it ranging from horrid to not bad - and after Chrissie had dismissed them to go back to their duties, that Maggie approached her. "Do you really think I did good with the guns today?" she asked her, lending a hand piling the weapons and ammo boxes into the back of the Land Cruiser that she had used to transport them out there. "You did real good," Chrissie assured her. "Better than any of the other non-guard women so far." "Good enough for the permanent guard force?" she asked slyly. Chrissie gave her a shrewd look. "Brett turned you down in the first round, didn't he?" she asked. She shrugged. "I think he had some questions about my loyalties," she said. "I used to be... you know... kind of friendly with Jessica." "You used to try to be Jessica," Chrissie corrected. "You used to go directly to her with every new piece of gossip that passed your way." Maggie didn't deny this. "I was dumb," she said. "Like Brett said, I was stuck in a different life and I followed different ideals. I was a follower." "And now you're not?" She shook her head. "Not like I was before," she said. "Chrissie, you know me. We fought together during the battle. I killed one of those men myself. I want to be on the permanent force. I can do it." "You also were one of the women that was ready to vote Brett out of here for sleeping with me," Chrissie told her. "I heard you passing the word that day, and that was after the battle." Maggie looked shamed at her words. "I'm sorry," she said softly. "I was wrong, as wrong as someone can be. Don't you believe that people can change? That they have a desire to make up for their past mistakes? Don't you realize that a big part of the reason we were so against Brett on that day wasn't anything personal against either you or him, but was a desperate attempt to try to pretend that things were still civilized after what had happened? It wasn't so much Jessica that turned us against him but our own minds trying to pretend we were still in a society with the same morals we used to have." Chrissie looked at her in surprise. "That's some pretty deep shit you're spouting there," she said. Maggie smiled. "I have a bachelor's degree in psychology," she said. "Going to UC Davis was a good way to snare the appropriate husband, wasn't it?" "I guess you learned a few things there, didn't you?" "Yes, mostly how to psychoanalyze myself. Look, I'm being sincere here. I was wrong before, about you, about Brett, about your brother, and about how desperate our situation really is. The battle opened my eyes. We live in a hostile world now where pampered rich women like I used to be don't have any place. I want to help us survive. All I'm asking for is for you to put in a good word for me with Brett. You've seen me on guard duty; you've seen me trying to learn out here. Won't you at least talk to him? Please?" Chrissie, who had become fairly attuned to the moods and motivations of the Garden Hill women in her time there, could sense no deceit in Maggie's words. She seemed to be sincere enough. "I'll put in a good word," she said at last. "The rest will be up to you." ------- "Son of a bitch," Brett said, looking through binoculars at what remained of the Cameron Park Airport. They were on a small hill overlooking the town, or what was left of the town anyway. Cameron Park, once a booming residential and commercial center along Highway 50, was now nothing more than a flooded mud pit, buried under the eroded hillside that had once been poised above it. The trunks or branches of trees stuck up here and there, but other than that, there was nothing. The airport, on the other hand, as had been predicted, was still recognizable. All the same, it was in no shape to conduct flight operations. All over the tarmac was the wreckage of planes - mostly single engine private aircraft - that had been flipped over and tossed around by the high winds that had followed the impact. Those same winds had knocked flat a good portion of the hanger complexes on the south side of the property. The runway was full of potholes and cracks from the earthquake. Still, about a third of the hanger space was still standing. It was technically possible that the helicopter they sought was still in there. "What do you think?" asked Matt, who was lying on his belly next to him, looking through a pair of his own binoculars. "It's pretty trashed," Brett said doubtfully. "But all hope is not lost just yet. We need to at least go take a look." "How do we get in?" Michelle wanted to know. "There's no way we can move through all of that mud on the hillside." "We'll have to go north for about a mile and then cut over," Brett told her. "It looks like we can work our way down that hill over there to the perimeter fence." "No sign of people?" Jason asked, thinking about the cannibals and just where they might be based. "Not that I can see," Brett replied. "That doesn't mean that nobody is there though. Let's keep a sharp eye out as we move." It took them the better part of two hours to march over to the north side. On the way they passed through an abandoned residential area, half of which was nothing but rubble. They saw no signs of current human habitation but it was clear that the houses still standing had been poked through many times since the impact. A few bodies, all long dead, were rotting in front of some of them. They stayed in position by the perimeter fence for more than thirty minutes, hidden carefully in the dead brush, watching the airport and looking for signs of life. There appeared to be none but the airport was nothing but flat, open ground - killing ground if it were being defended - and Brett did not want to take any chances. At last, with nothing to gain by waiting further, he ordered Jason and Michelle forward to penetrate the fence. They used a set of bolt cutters that had been taken from Paul's fire engine, making a neat hole in the chain link. Then, while Brett and Matt covered them, they went through it, keeping low as they dashed to the wreckage of a Piper about fifty yards inside the fence. Once they were in position, Brett and Matt made their own dash, diving through the fence and moving quickly to another wrecked aircraft in front of the first one. In this manner, leapfrogging past each other, they moved across the airport until they were near the still-intact hangers. Nobody shot at them or otherwise made their presence known. If anyone was there, they were keeping well hidden. The hangers were shed-like buildings constructed of corrugated steel. They were of rather flimsy design and it was only because they were on the leeward side of a hill that they had been spared from the wrath of the hurricane winds that had accompanied the initial rainstorm. Brett gave hand signals to Michelle and Jason, telling them to hold in place and keep them covered. He and Matt then made the last dash across the open ground, ending up safely in front of the first of the hangers. Its large, roll-up door was open, its interior empty except for standing water and a few engine parts. They moved on to the next, which was closed and locked. Five minutes of work with a pair of channel-lock pliers and a screwdriver took care this problem, but opening the door revealed nothing but another empty space. "Shit," Brett muttered, stashing his tools back away. "I was hoping this would be the one." "Let's try the next one," Matt suggested. He was standing with his back to Brett, his weapon trained out over the tarmac. "It looked like it was open." "Right," Brett said. He gave a signal to the cover troops, letting them know they were on the move again, and then they made the dash. The roll-up door was indeed partially open by about two feet. While Matt took up a firing position to cover the inside, Brett grasped the bottom of the door and heaved it upward. It went reluctantly, screeching out a shrill protest as its un-lubricated mechanism was forced to move. As soon as it was high enough, Brett stepped back and pointed his rifle into the interior. "I'll be goddamned," he said as he saw the inside. "Will you look at that," Matt echoed beside him. Inside of the hanger were two aircraft sitting side by side. The first was a Cessna 150 with black wings and a white body. The emblem of the California Highway Patrol was prominently displayed on its doors. The second aircraft was a McDonnell-Douglas 500, single engine helicopter, its doors marked with the same symbol. "Paul was right," Brett said. "Goddamn if it's not here." "Will it fly?" Matt asked, looking at it almost as a religious object. "I'll have to look it over to tell," he answered. "And before I can do that, we need to make sure the rest of this airport is secure. Let's get it done." "Right," Matt said. With that, they moved to the next hanger, and then the next. They found two more Cessnas and a Piper parked in them, one of the Cessnas an impressive twin-engine model capable of carrying ten passengers. They found no people, nor did they find any signs that people had been there recently. At last, Brett waved Michelle and Jason forward, giving them the all-clear signal. "Is it there?" both asked in unison as they came close, their faces strained with anticipation. "It's there," Brett told them. "Now let's go have a look at it." It was the classic teardrop shape that was associated with McDonnell-Douglas light helicopters. Mostly black, with white trim, its high clearance skids sat atop the ground handling wheels that allowed it to be pushed in and out of the hangar. It's four-bladed rotor stood idle, the blades hanging down with an almost imperceptible droop. Paul, when describing the helicopter to him, had told him that it was "one of those quiet ones that don't make any noise". Brett saw now that he had been entirely correct. It was a NOTAR model, meaning it had no tail rotor. Instead of a propeller to counteract the torque from the main rotor, it blasted air out of a port on the back of the tail. Since the distinctive chopping sound of a helicopter was produced by the collision of air from the main rotor hitting the tail rotor, this aircraft would be almost silent when it was in flight. Mounted on its belly were a high intensity spotlight and a forward looking infrared pod, or FLIR, which would be able to see in the darkness. Its doors were standing open and it was obvious that someone had rummaged through it at some point, looking for useful supplies. But it did not appear, at least at first glance, that any damage had been inflicted upon it. It still had the two helmet headsets sitting on the front seats, still had the removable patient litter and the medical supplies neatly stored in its cabinets. "Darling," Brett said, stepping forward and putting a kiss upon its windshield, "you are the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life." ------- The first thing Brett checked, before he even went into the hanger, was if there was a fuel supply for the helicopter. Without fuel to run it, the chopper was about as worthless as tits on a bull. He walked over to the fueling area and found the pump where jet fuel, which the turbine engine ran on, was dispensed. Though the pump itself could not operate without electricity, it was still possible to siphon the precious liquid out of the tank with a hose inserted into the vent cap if there was any fuel in there to be sucked and if it wasn't completely contaminated with rainwater. Their luck was in it seemed. Using the measuring stick he found near the destroyed fueling shack, he determined that there was more than two thousand gallons available for plunder and that there was only about a half an inch of water resting on the bottom of the tank. "If we get this thing running," Brett told his companions, "we're going to have to fly a squad out here to secure this area and then transport this fuel back to Garden Hill and store it." "Transport it back?" Jason asked. "How would we do that?" "A little bit at a time," Brett said. "It will take a while to get it all, that's for sure. And we'll have to come up with something to store it in back in town." "Like what?" Michelle wanted to know. Brett shrugged. "That one is going to take a little thought. But why don't I see if the damn thing will even run before we start thinking that far ahead." While Jason and Michelle kept watch outside, Brett and Matt searched through the hanger and the small office that was in the back of it. Brett had extensive experience flying the Apache, the Blackhawk, and the Bell that the San Joaquin Sheriff's Department had owned, but he had never flown an MD 500 before, with or without a tail rotor. He wanted to find the spec and maintenance manuals to help familiarize himself with the aircraft systems, capabilities, and limitations. Ordinarily a three-day training program was required for a pilot to be checked out on a new type of aircraft. Brett would have to figure it out on his own. The manuals he sought were found easily, as was a fairly good supply of basic maintenance parts like fuel and oil filters. That was about all that was useful in the hanger though. If there had been weapons, ammunition, or food, they had all been carted off by those who came before. Brett sat down in a chair and used his flashlight to read through the maintenance record. "All right," he said. "We're in luck. This thing was last given a routine servicing on September 28. That's just two weeks before the comet. As long as nobody's messed with it, it should be in fairly good shape." "What about the next time it needs work?" Matt asked. "Will you be able to do it?" "I think so," he said a little doubtfully. "These manuals are not as detailed as I'd like, but I think I'll be able to figure out the basic stuff. With any luck we won't need any parts that can't be found here for more than six or seven months. After that, who knows?" He set down the maintenance manual and picked up the flight manual. He opened it up and began to page through the specifications for the model. "Okay," he said, "here's the meat of the matter. That chopper has a range of three hundred miles carrying a pilot and four hundred pounds of fuel." "How much is four hundred pounds?" Matt wanted to know. "About sixty-four gallons. Pretty shitty gas mileage, isn't it?" "I'll say. So that means that we can go up to a hundred and fifty miles to find supplies?" "Well, not exactly," Brett told him. "The three hundred mile range is just with the pilot and the fuel. Let me see what the weighted range is." He ran his finger down the columns of numbers and specs, finally finding what he was looking for. "Here we go," he said. "This thing can carry fifteen hundred pounds of internal cargo, or two thousand pounds hanging from the hook on the bottom. However, that cuts the range down to about a hundred miles." "A hundred miles?" Matt said, dejected. "That's not even enough to carry something back from Reno." "Actually, it is," Brett said. "Remember, we're talking about how the crow flies, not the distance on the road. Now Reno is seventy miles from Garden Hill by driving on Interstate 80, but keep in mind that the Interstate twists and turns up the mountain passes and back down the other side. I'll have to look at the maps, but I don't think its much more than forty miles in a straight line. And even if we have to go further away to find things, we can either make extra fuel part of the cargo or reduce the weight of what we carry. There are conversion tables in this manual that will let me calculate just how far with how much I can go." Brett spent another thirty minutes going over the flight manual carefully, familiarizing himself with the various features of the aircraft before he even walked over and had a look at it. Finally, though far from checked out to his satisfaction, he knew that it was time to get moving if he hoped to get the thing in the air by nightfall. Taking the manual with him, he began a complete inspection. He poked about in the cockpit, in the engine compartment, and along the tail, paying particular attention to the air intake system for the NOTAR, which he was completely unfamiliar with. He found a ladder and climbed up to have a look in the rotor housing. He checked fluid levels, finding all of them to be within specifications. Finally, with everything checked that could be checked without power, he flipped on the battery, expecting that it would be flat as a pancake after sitting idle for so long. It wasn't flat, but it wasn't fully charged either. The ready lights glowed brightly but the power gauge was well into the red zone. He turned off every unnecessary component to conserve the juice, hoping that it would be enough. "Come on," he told Matt as he stepped out and shut the pilot's door. "Let's push this thing outside and I'll see if it will fire up." "Push it out?" Matt said doubtfully. "Can just the two of us do that?" "Easily," Brett assured him. "It's lighter than a car." They put their hands on the back of it and started pushing. Slowly the helicopter rolled across the cement surface of the hanger and out onto the asphalt of the tarmac. Michelle and Jason, seeing this, immediately came over to help but Brett told them to maintain their positions. "That's good," Brett said when they were about thirty feet from the hanger. Michelle and Jason, unable to contain their curiosity, walked over despite his orders. "Will it run?" Michelle asked. Brett let her insubordination slide. "That's what I'm about to find out. The battery is a little low but everything else seems to be in order. Everybody stand well back while I play with it." They all stood back about fifty feet and Brett climbed into the cockpit, sitting in the right hand seat where the controls were. He opened the flight manual and, using the checklist inside of it, performed the start-up procedures. This took about two minutes to do. Finally, the moment of truth arrived. With a silent prayer, he engaged the starter. It was a very near thing. It turned over very slowly, very sluggishly and seemed about to peter out for a moment but it hung in there and, after a brief hitch, the engine caught and began to emit the distinctive turbine whine. The cockpit lights flared brighter and the gauges all shot up as it cycled higher. "Yes," Brett said with a sigh of relief. He left the rotor disengaged and the engine in a low idle. He began to check the gauges, looking for any errant reading. Everything seemed to be within parameters, except for the fuel tank, which had less than a hundred pounds in it. That would need to be rectified before they tried to depart. He flipped a page in the manual and began going through the pre-flight checklist while the engine warmed up to optimum operating temperature. It took him about five minutes to run through it completely and he then took another couple of minutes to familiarize himself with the controls, which were marginally different than what he was used to. Once he thought he had the layout memorized, he looked out the window, which the wipers were keeping clean, towards his three companions. They were all standing there anxiously, watching his every move. He waved at them to get under cover, not wanting them in the open when he tried to lift off for the first time. They passed around a worried look and then trotted over to the corner of the hanger. "Okay," he said to himself as he clipped on his harness and put the helmet on his head. "Let's see what this thing feels like." He powered up just a little and engaged the rotor, lugging down the engine momentarily as its workload was suddenly increased. Out the window the blades began to spin, slowly at first, but rapidly picking up speed until they were moving at full idle. He checked the last few items on the pre-flight list, finding nothing amiss, and then, with no more excuses to delay, he began the take-off procedure. The engine wound up and the entire vehicle began to hum with vibration and noise. The rotor blades became a blur and water sprayed all over the tarmac from the downdraft. Slowly the downward thrust from the rotor blades overcame the force of gravity and the helicopter rose into the air, only a few feet at first, well within the ground effect. "Jesus," Brett said as he felt the tail sweeping back and forth. He flirted with the edge of control for a moment as his feet worked the pedals, which controlled the amount of anti-torque thrust being delivered by the tail. It seemed the NOTAR system was a little touchier than a conventional tail rotor. Finally, after nearly thirty adrenaline filled seconds of wagging his tail back and forth in twenty degree arcs, he began to get the feel of it and was able to keep it from drifting. Once he had firm control of the bird, he started experimenting a little bit. Staying in the ground effect about six feet off the asphalt, he moved forward slowly, practicing his maneuvering. He found that the MD reacted more quickly to control movements than did the larger Bell helicopter that he was used to. It lifted quicker, dropped quicker, and changed forward speed quicker. Using the anti-torque pedals to steer with, he moved further out onto the tarmac and then turned around, heading back. He set it back down on the ground momentarily to get the feel of landing. Finally, convinced that he was competent enough at maneuvering at a low hover, he lifted up again and continued to climb. The ground dropped away beneath him and the altimeter - which had rested near 2300 feet on the asphalt, began to wind upward. He took it up eight hundred above the ground and then began to move forward, slowly picking up speed until he was moving at about fifty knots. Below him he was able to see the mud pit that Cameron Park had become and the broken ribbon that had once been Highway 50 stretching off towards the sea that the Sacramento Valley now was. For the next ten minutes he circled around the airport, turning, hovering, starting and stopping, familiarizing himself with his new machine. He could see the tiny figures of Matt, Jason, and Michelle below, looking anxiously up at him. Once he got over the fear of trying to control an unfamiliar aircraft without formal training, he found himself exhilarated. He was flying again, something he had loved to do since he was a child. He had thought those days had ended with the comet strike but here he was again, feeling the controls in his hand, feeling the responsiveness of his machine, looking at everything on the ground from far above. Flying was what he had been born to do, what he had geared his life towards, and it felt divine to be in the cockpit once again. He made one more circle around the airport and then brought the machine down to a gentle landing next to the fuel pumping equipment on the far side of the tarmac. He disengaged the rotor, letting it wind down and then shut down the engine. As soon as he opened the door to get out his three companions were there, their faces excited and relieved. "You did it, Brett," Michelle cried, hugging him. "You flew it!" "That was awesome," Jason added. "It looks like we're in business," Matt put in. "Hey," he said, grinning at them. "Was there ever any doubt?" ------- It took almost two hours to get the tank of the helicopter topped off. Brett cut off a long piece of the hose that had been connected to the pump and inserted it through the vent cap in the ground. After nearly ten minutes of frantic, nauseating sucking on the other end, the pungent fuel began to trickle out. Brett held his thumb over the end of the hose until he could put it in the chopper's fuel port. It ran in at a steady but agonizingly slow rate. "I wonder if Paul has got some sort of portable pump we can use to make this a little easier," Brett wondered aloud after an hour had gone by and the tank was still only half full. "I would hope so," Matt said. "If not, it's gonna take us a year to get this fuel back to town." At last the process was finished and Brett removed the hose and allowed the residual fuel in it to run back into the tank. He stored the length of hose where it could easily be found later and then looked at his troops. "Shall we blow this scene?" he asked them. They all enthusiastically agreed that that would be a fine idea. "How long will it take us to fly home?" Jason asked. Brett chuckled a little bit. "Maybe fifteen minutes or so." All three jaws dropped in surprise. "Do you mean," Michelle asked carefully, "that it took us eight fucking days to walk here, but that it will only take us fifteen minutes to get back?" "Isn't modern technology wonderful?" Brett replied. "Come on, let's climb aboard." Michelle, executing her privileges as Brett's wife, claimed the passenger seat. She strapped herself in and put on the helmet. Jason and Matt, on the other hand, were forced to cram themselves into the small cargo space in the back, both sitting atop the patient litter. None of the three had ever flown in a helicopter before and Jason had never flown in anything before. Their enthusiasm changed to quiet nervousness as they looked at the cramped confines of the small space and as they watched Brett going through the start-up procedure. It was as the engine wound up and the rotor started to spin above them that Matt finally expressed this nervousness. "You're sure that this thing is safe, right?" he asked with a broken voice. "It's safe as long as we don't crash," Brett said mildly. "That's comforting," Matt replied, gripping the handhold on the wall a little tighter. Brett put on the power, spinning the rotor up to take-off speed and the aircraft shuddered as it left the ground. Though the noise made conversation impossible (except between Brett and Michelle, who were plugged into the intercom system), there was a distinct groan of fright from Matt as the ground dropped away beneath them. Jason, on the other hand, seemed to be thrilled with the sensation. Brett took them up to about two hundred feet above the ground and then, using the anti-torque pedals, spun the nose around until his compass read 045, or northeast. He began to move forward, picking up speed as he continued to climb into the sky. The windshield wipers flapped steadily at the raindrops and the scenery, such as it was, opened up below them. He leveled off at 2000 feet above the ground and ninety knots of forward airspeed. His passengers seemed to relax a little once the alarming jerks and jars of lift-off were over with. "Look at that down there," Michelle said, peering out the window. Brett saw immediately what she was referring to. From this height, through the rain, they could see several miles in all directions. Below them they could see that every un-vegetated hillside that had existed before the comet had collapsed into huge piles of mud and debris. Every low-lying area was flooded. Cameron Park was only thirty miles from Sacramento, well within easy commute distance, and most of those hills had had expensive homes upon them. Most of those low-lying areas had had trailer parks or apartment complexes. Had all of those people that lived there perished in the mudslides? Or had they lived long enough to die of starvation or to be eaten by cannibals? And the highways and roads that criss-crossed through the area. Huge sections of them had been washed away as well. Power lines, which had once traced across the landscape in every direction were now nothing more than collapsed towers. Seeing these sights from ground level did not convey the sheer scale of things like seeing them from the air. It wasn't just the area around Cameron Park that had been washed away or buried; it wasn't just the hillside along the canyon edge in Garden Hill. It was everywhere. "That is some shit," Brett said softly. Behind them, though they couldn't talk, Jason and Matt seemed to be having the same thoughts. They were staring out the side windows at the passing landscape, their mouths hanging open, their eyes wide. As the land around them rose in elevation, Brett climbed gently with it, keeping the helicopter at a more or less constant 2000 feet above the ground. It took them about six minutes to come out over the rain swollen Auburn Ravine. Had he turned left, to the southwest, he would have been over the town of Auburn in less than two minutes. Instead, more interested in getting safely back to Garden Hill than exploring the surrounding landscape at the moment, he turned right, to east-northeast, and began following the canyon towards home. "There's the bridge," he said to Michelle about seven minutes later. She looked and, sure enough, the ghostly specter of the Garden Hill span was materializing in front of them through the haze of rain. "I just can't believe how fast we got back," Michelle said in wonder. He slowed a bit and made a pass directly over the span. Looking to his right he was able to see the sandbagged entrenchments that had recently been built on the hill across the canyon from town. By now, if the guards were alert (and they probably were these days), they would have been spotted and the word would have been passed to Chrissie. He banked to the left, skirting the eastern side of the subdivision, between the wall and the cliffs beyond them. He bled off more speed and dropped altitude down to less than a thousand feet as he headed for the community center. Already he could see people emerging from the building, most with guns in their hands in case, by some fluke, this chopper turned out not to be the one they were expecting. He could not see well enough to identify individual faces, but he knew that Chrissie would be one of the gun carriers. He circled twice around the parking lot, checking to make sure that nobody was near his landing site. Finally he eased down, coming to a gentle landing about eighty feet from the front doors. As he shut down the engine he saw that the townspeople were crouched behind cars in the parking lot, their weapons trained on the chopper. He beamed with pride as he saw this. Chrissie was leading them well. "Let's not make any sudden moves," Brett told his crew as he pulled off his helmet and dropped it to the floor. "They're covering us with guns." "Right," Michelle, dropping her own helmet, replied a little nervously. "I hope they're careful out there," said Matt, who still sounded a little shaky from the flight. "It would be kind of ironic to come all this way and then get shot in the community center parking lot because someone's a little loose on the trigger." Brett slowly opened his door and, keeping his hands high in the air, stepped out. On the other side Michelle did the same. As soon as they were in the open and recognizable Brett yelled out, "It's okay, it's Brett, Michelle, Jason, and Matt. We're back and we're safe." Chrissie was the first to emerge from cover. She had an AK-47 in her hands and a broad smile on her face. She shouldered the weapon and came running over to them as the rest of the gun toting townspeople came out. She slammed forcefully into Brett, her arms going around his neck, her face showering him with wet kisses. "You're back!" she squealed happily. "God, I was so worried!" She let go of him with one arm long enough to pull Michelle into the embrace as well. "I'm so glad to see you guys! Is everyone all right?" Before anyone could answer a complete crowd was around them, a thousand questions being asked at once. "How was it out there?" and "Did you find any supplies?" and "Did you see any other people?" and many other inquiries about the trip. Stacy, who was wearing her dinner preparation apron, pushed her way through the crowd and found Jason just as he pulled himself free of the helicopter. She slammed into him so hard that he did fall over. Maureen, Matt's significant other, hit him with a similar force. It was a good ten minutes before the excitement died down enough to hold a coherent conversation. Each of the expedition members gave a brief summary of the trip to those around them, all of them, for the moment, leaving out the unpleasant details about the cannibals or the widespread destruction. It was Chrissie who made perhaps the keenest observation. After holding Michelle and Brett closely, after kissing both of them on the cheeks, she could contain herself no longer. "My God," she said, wrinkling her nose. "You guys really smell bad." Though this could have been taken as an insulting statement, laughter was the only response. ------- Jason and Matt, more disgusted with the grime clinging to them then concerned about hunger, headed off to the bathing area to clean themselves off. They flipped a coin to see who would go first (which was about the only thing a coin was good for anymore) and Jason won. Stacy, who had been excused from dinner detail for the night (thanks to Paul, she and Tina now had an additional staff of two town women to help on kitchen detail - one of them none other than Jessica) joined him in there to "help with the filling". They were in there considerably longer than was probably necessary for strict bathing and they went immediately home afterward. Matt didn't mind the wait however. Maureen helped him fill the tub when it was his turn. Michelle and Brett took the opposite approach. They were more anxious to get their teeth on some real food for a change then they were to get immediately clean. Only Chrissie was brave enough to sit with them (and even she had to sit two spaces over). Just as the meal was finishing up - and as Michelle and Brett were working on the second helpings that they had been granted as a reward for their mission - Paul got behind the podium and flipped on the PA system. He publicly thanked the expedition crew (two of whom were conspicuously absent, but this was not commented on) and invited Brett to come up and give a general briefing on the mission. Brett swallowed down the rest of his tuna salad and canned corn, drank the rest of his powdered lemonade, and then walked to the front of the room. He was cheered as he made the trip but more than one person was forced to hold their breath as he passed, so powerful was the odor of him. "First of all," he said into the microphone, "I'd like to promise everyone here that I'm going to bathe just as soon as I'm done talking to you all." This statement was greeted with a burst of playful clapping and laughter. "It is rather difficult to keep yourself clean out there," he said. "It seems all the decent motels have gone out of business." He let the smile go from his face, putting a serious expression on. "Let me begin by telling you what you probably already know. We have managed to recover a highway patrol helicopter from Cameron Park Airport. As far as I can tell, it is in fairly good shape, there are some basic spare parts and maintenance supplies back where we found it, and there is about two thousand gallons of fuel there as well." A prolonged burst of applause greeted this statement. "Now this helicopter is a McDonnell-Douglas model 500. It had a range of about 300 miles with only a pilot in it, and a range of about a hundred miles full of cargo. What this means to our community is that, if I can keep this thing running, we'll be able to search for supplies or even game from the air and bring them back here to Garden Hill. We'll be able to recon the surrounding area to try to determine if there are any friends or enemies out there. As a defensive tool, this helicopter will also serve an important role since attackers will be able to be spotted from the air and even engaged from where they least expect it. With the forward-looking infrared pod that's installed in it, we can even see people at night. This aircraft is quite possibly this town's saving grace." More applause echoed through the room. "But there is going to be some more work involved before we can start using it for this purpose," he said next. "First of all we're going to have to figure out a way to get that two thousand gallons of fuel from Cameron Park to Garden Hill and we're going to have to figure out a way to safely store it. We're also going to need to get all of the spare parts and maintenance supplies over here. What that means is that I'm going to have to fly enough people over there to secure that airport long enough to make ten or fifteen trips back and forth." Though he had yet to ask anyone, dozens of volunteers immediately stood and offered their services. Many of them were the newest members of his guard force. "We'll figure out who is going to do it once we have the logistics of it down," Brett said, waving them back to their seats. "But before everyone get too enthusiastic about this, I think that maybe I should explain just what kind of thing we're up against out there." They all quieted down and he told them, using his no nonsense, this-is-the-absolute-truth, courtroom voice, about the destruction of the land, the dead bodies, and the evidence that cannibalism was taking place outside their walls. Almost everyone winced as he described this last bit. "Now what I just told you should serve to clue you in to the danger out there before you volunteer," he said. "It should also serve to clue you in to the danger that just might show up on our doorstep one of these days. So think carefully about it before you put your name up for consideration of this mission. You'll probably have to spend at least one night in Cameron Park, well armed but beyond the reach of help from the rest of us. Keep that in mind." Some murmuring rumbled through the room as people discussed what they had just heard. "And there's one other thing I'd like to say before I let you get back to your business and I get on with my much needed bath. One of my first priorities with this helicopter will be to teach a few other people to fly it. If, for some reason, I meet an untimely demise, I want this town to be able to continue to utilize this gift that has come our way. Now flying a chopper is a difficult task and I will be a very strict and unforgiving instructor. But if you're interested in learning, start thinking about letting me know. I'll consider each person's request on an individual basis and I will retain the right to have the final say on who is taught and who is not. Are there any questions?" There were many, most having to do with the cannibals or the flight training program. Brett answered them the best he could, as quickly as he could, but it was still nearly 7:00 PM before the meeting came to an end and people started to drift away. Paul, who had yet to talk with Brett since his return, saw his opportunity and stepped in before he could get away. Brett dutifully sat back down, Michelle and Chrissie at his side, and spent another half-hour giving a more detailed debriefing of his mission. "So that's pretty much how it is," he said wearily when he finally finished. "I figure that we can transport the fuel over 250 gallons at a time, maybe 300 if we use the outside hook. So we need to figure out first of all, what to store it in and second of all, what to transport it in. There's also the matter of how to pump it efficiently, both there and here. Any ideas?" Paul scratched his head for a moment, thinking. "The water tank on the grass fighting rig we have," he said at last. "It holds 250 gallons. We can take it out, reinforce it a little bit with some steel straps, and rig it so it can be carried levelly underneath the chopper. Would that work?" Brett thought that over. "I don't see any reason why it wouldn't. Is it a steel tank?" "Aluminum," he said. "If it was plastic I wouldn't have suggested it." "Good enough." "As for the pump, the fire station had an electric powered evacuation pump that we used to get water out of a flooded house. It doesn't pump very fast, but it would be faster than siphoning. All you'd have to do is get a vehicle operating that has an inverter or get a generator running. Do you think the airport has either one of those?" "I don't know about the vehicle," Brett said, "but I'm sure they have a generator at the airport somewhere. Question is, will it still have fuel and will it still work?" "You'll just have to find out." "What about storage?" Brett asked next. "That's the big one. Do we have anything around here that we can use to store two or three thousand gallons of jet fuel in?" Paul thought long and hard on that one, turning every possibility over in his mind. He drew a blank. "Sorry," he said, shaking his head. "Nothing that I can think of off hand. We'll have to work on that one." Brett nodded. "No real hurry. I'd suggest that we take out that carrying tank tomorrow and get it ready for transport. If nothing else, it gives us a 250-gallon reserve that we can store here. That's enough to fill the chopper's tank almost four times." "Sounds like a plan," Paul said, lighting one of his cigarettes and taking a puff, more to drown out the smell of his companions than out of any real desire to smoke. "And I'll put on my thinking cap about the long-term storage." "How have things been going here?" Brett asked. "Pretty good," he said. "As Chrissie probably told you, she's run ten more women through the basic gun training class. Most of them did well enough so we shouldn't have the problems we had in the first battle." "Meaning they probably won't break and run," Chrissie said sourly, "or shoot shotguns at people two hundred yards away." "It's a start," Michelle said cheerfully. "How about Sherrie?" Brett asked next. "How is she doing?" "Still bedridden," he said. "But no signs of infection or blood poisoning yet, and I've got her off the narcotic pain killers and onto strict Tylenol for the pain. I think the worst danger is over for her now as far as infection, but there's still the danger of pulmonary embolism." "What's that?" Brett wanted to know. "It's a common thing that happens when people have bone injuries and they're bedridden. Little clots form on the bone ends. If they get big enough, they can break loose and travel through the blood stream to the lungs. Once they get there, they block the pulmonary arteries and keep the oxygen exchange from taking place. The person suffocates to death in a matter of minutes." Brett winced a little. "Is there anything you can do to prevent that?" "Blood thinners," Paul replied. "They keep the clots from forming in the first place. Fortunately there were a couple of bottles of Coumadin in storage." He smiled a little. "They used to belong to Jessica's husband. He had a heart condition. Kind of funny that something from her house may be what saves Sherrie's life." "That is pretty funny," Brett agreed. "And speaking of Jessica, how have things been with her? I didn't see her here tonight. Any problems?" He shook his head. "She's been keeping to herself, just like before you left. Doesn't have much to say to anyone, not even if they say something to her. She does the kitchen duty right alongside Stacy and the others and then she goes home until the next morning. She doesn't even complain about it." "She's looking pretty haggard though," Chrissie said. "Wait until you see her. She looks like she's aged about ten years in the past two weeks." "How hard they fall," Brett said without much sympathy. "She's scheduled for the firearms class day after tomorrow," Chrissie said. "That should be interesting." "Something to look forward to all right," Brett agreed. "Well, on that note, I think I'm long overdue to get cleaned up." "Me too," Michelle agreed. "I've never felt so filthy in my life." "I'll leave you two to that then," Paul said. "God knows you need it. I'm gonna go check on Sherrie and see how she's doing." They left the gym, Paul heading in one direction, Brett, Michelle, and Chrissie heading in another. ------- "This is thoroughly disgusting," Michelle cried as she looked at the brown, muddy water that had been formed in the bathtub. She and Brett had pumped the tub full of steaming hot water and climbed in together while Chrissie stood by outside, filling their rinse buckets up for them. "That's about how bad we all were when we first got here," Chrissie told her. "Close your eyes, here comes the water." Michelle closed her eyes and had two gallons of warm water dumped over her head, turning her hair into stringy brown lumps. "Gross," she complained, running her fingers through it. "Get some shampoo in there while I fill this for Brett." Chrissie filled the bucket again and saturated Brett's hair. By the time she was done refilling it again, Michelle's head was covered in brown, frothy soap lather. She dumped another load on her, getting much of it off and then ordered her to shampoo one more time. "Yes, mother," Michelle said with gentle sarcasm. In all, it took them almost fifteen minutes just to get the first layer of grime off. As they sat in the muddy water, letting Chrissie pour buckets over the top of them, Brett's legs were entwined in Michelle's still unshaven ones. It felt nice but it was eerily reminiscent of his first night in town with Mitsy, a woman who was now dead and buried, a victim of rampant sexuality. Eerie or not, sandpaper legs or not, Brett's penis didn't seem to mind. It was standing up at rigid attention, wondering why it hadn't been placed somewhere soft and warm yet. "All right," Chrissie said next. "Pull the drain and stand up. I'll give you each one more rinse and then you get out to clean the tub." It was when he stood that the state of his penis became apparent to his team of wives. "Well look at that," Michelle said with a giggle, reaching her soapy hand out to give it a stroke. "It seems that somebody wants to play." "Hey," Chrissie said lightly, "don't be making that thing fire off. I have uses for it tonight." "You have uses?" Michelle said. "What about me?" "You've had him the last eight days," Chrissie complained. "I've had nothing but my fingers. I need the real thing, and soon." "Eight days in the filth and mud," Michelle countered, continuing to stroke up and down. "And he only performed his husbandly duties with me once - on the last night." "What?" Chrissie said, turning on him. "You only did her once out there?" "I didn't want anyone to hear us," he said defensively, suppressing a groan at the friction of Michelle's talented hand. "And she forced me to that last night. I was an unwilling participant." "Unwilling?" Michelle cried, letting go and giving the head a playful slap. "You asshole. You loved it. But I need the no-holds-barred kind. It's not in my nature to be quiet during sex." "No kidding," Chrissie said, carrying her bucket over. She dumped it on Brett, washing all the clinging suds free and leaving him mostly clean. "Out with you," she told him. Dutifully he stepped out, standing next to her, shivering in the cold. Michelle, with nothing else to do with her hands, picked up the bar of soap that they had been using and rubbed it all over her legs. That done, she grabbed the disposable razor that was sitting on the edge and began to scrape the accumulation of hair free. Chrissie, after filling her bucket up for Michelle's final rinse, grabbed Brett's erection and picked up where Michelle had left off. "Hey now," Michelle told her. "Don't you go making it fire off either. I can see that we're both going to have to utilize it tonight. Let's conserve our ammo, shall we?" "I'm just checking out the merchandise," she said with a smile, gripping it a little harder. "Making sure it's clean." "Mmmm," Brett groaned, his knees wobbling a little. Chrissie, a naughty smile on her face, dropped down to her knees at his feet. Though she ordinarily disliked giving blowjobs, she slowly slurped him into her mouth, giving a long, teasing suck of the head while her hand continued to jack. "Chrissie," Michelle said, feeling her juices starting to flow in earnest now, "don't you dare make him come!" Her lips popped free and she gave the head one final lick. "I'm just keeping him interested," she said. "Oh, I'm interested," Brett assured her. "I'm very interested." Chrissie stood back up, removing her hands from his organ. "You ready for a rinse, Shellie?" she asked. "You know it." Chrissie dumped her bucket on Michelle and then ordered her out. The mood of sexuality faded a bit as they were faced with cleaning the accumulation of mud out of the tub. Chrissie sprayed it with the high-pressure fire hose while Brett and Michelle scrubbed away the filth with towels. It took about fifteen minutes before it was presentable again. As soon as it was, they began to refill it for the final rinse. Michelle bent over to put the hot water hose in place and Brett, seeing her tight ass and her puffy pussy lips peeking at him, could not resist touching her. He slid his hand over the firm cheeks, running it down to the upper thighs. He probed between her wet lips with a finger. "Oooh," she said, pushing back at him. "You naughty man." As he began to push and pull his finger in and out of her, making her wetter by the stroke, Chrissie utilized the fire hose to fill the tub with its allotment of cold water. When it was at the proper level, she shut down the nozzle and then turned towards the two naked people. She shook her head a little as she saw what they were doing. "You guys are perverts," she said, her tone mockingly indignant. "Mmmm, we are what we are," Michelle said, pushing back a little harder. "I'm gonna go shut down the fire engine," Chrissie told them. "You two behave yourselves while I'm gone." "We won't do anything you wouldn't do," Michelle told her as she headed out the door. The moment she was gone, she looked over her shoulder at Brett. "Put it in me," she told him. "Put what in you?" he asked, adding a second finger to her wetness. He began to twist and turn his hand back and forth. "Your cock, you asshole," she barked. "Fuck me." "Shouldn't you wait until Chrissie gets hers?" he asked, continuing to finger her. "You had some last night, she's been without for eight days. Didn't we agree that I would spread myself around?" "Just give me a couple of strokes," she pleaded. "Please? I'm so horny right now!" "Just a couple," he said, grabbing his cock in his hand. "But Chrissie gets me first. Fair is fair." "Fine, just do it," she said, reaching behind her and grabbing at his leg. He pulled his fingers free and placed his cock against her wet lips, sliding the head up and down her slit a few times, teasing her. Finally, his own urges got the better of him and he buried himself in her, holding onto her hips for leverage. "Oh God, yesss," she cried as she felt the delicious intrusion. Despite his declaration that he would only give her a few strokes, he was still pounding away in Michelle's pussy when Chrissie came back into the room. She watched them for a moment, feeling the now familiar combination of arousal mixed with a tinge of jealousy she felt whenever she saw them going at it. The fact that they were doing it in her favorite position intensified her response. She had an almost overwhelming desire to put her hands in her pants and start rubbing herself but she suppressed it. She intended to have more than her fingers touching her there on this night. But first she needed to pry them apart. She walked over to them and put her hands on Brett's bare back, sliding her fingers up and down. "I'm starting to feel left out," she said, leaning in and kissing his ear. "There's more than enough for two," he replied, his voice not quite steady as he felt her touch upon him. Despite the relative innocence of Chrissie's caress, it was the first time in his life that a woman had touched him while he was making love to another woman. It sent chills up his spine. "Yes," Michelle said, just as breathless, "there's no need to go without. We're all married here aren't we? Take those pants off, Chrissie. Join the fun. We share, remember?" Now it was Chrissie who felt a shiver running through her. What Michelle was suggesting sounded so incredibly dirty, so forbidden, yet, at the same time, the very thought was blackly exciting. True, she had seen Michelle and Brett making love many times now and true she had been seen by Michelle while she was making love many times, but to do it at the same time? In the community bathing room? She couldn't do anything like that... could she? "Come on, Chris," Brett whispered, taking one hand off of Michelle's waist and putting it around her shoulders. He pulled her against him. "Take 'em off. I've missed your body. Don't make me wait any more for it." She trembled a little in desire, feeling her wetness seeping out of her, feeling her nipples harden. She ran her hand down Brett's back to his gyrating ass. She felt his cheeks clenching and releasing as he pushed and pulled in and out. "That's nasty," she said, very little conviction in her voice. "Yes," Michelle agreed, panting now. "It is. But sometimes married people are nasty with each other. That's what makes it exciting. Be nasty with us, Chrissie. I can see that you want to." "And I can feel it," Brett said, letting his hand slide over her chest to the swell of her breast. He began to caress her nipple through her shirt, twisting it with just the right amount of pressure. Tingles of pleasure began to spread along her nerve pathways. A second later she was kicking her shoes off and unbuckling her pants. They fell to the floor the moment they were undone, the holstered pistol thunking on the floor. She stepped out of them and pushed her wet panties down, flinging them off with her foot, hardly noticing that they landed in the filling bathtub. "That's the way, baby," Michelle said, taking her by the hand and pulling her over next to her. "Bend over and let him give it to you. Fuck him with me." Feeling like the most sordid slut in the world, feeling incredibly depraved, feeling nasty, Chrissie leaned over the tub next to Michelle, sticking her ass up into the air. She felt the cold air on her wet pussy and shuddered a little. Michelle's arm came up around her back and pulled her closer against her, so their shoulders were touching. She leaned into her co-wife, enjoying the feel of her body despite the fact that she was another female. She felt Brett's hands touching her butt, sliding over the cheeks, playing with her legs, spreading her a little wider. God how she loved to be taken this way. It gave her such a comforting feeling of being possessed by her man. The head of his cock touched her center for the briefest of instances before he slid it all the way inside of her in one fluid stroke. It went in easily, despite her tightness, and she could feel that it was already hot and wet. Those were Michelle's juices that were helping lube her, she realized with a start. His cock had been dripping with her musky secretions and he had just buried it in her body. This should have made her feel ill, should have disgusted her. It didn't. Instead, she moaned loudly, gripping her co-wife a little harder. "You love it when he fucks you like this, don't you?" Michelle whispered in her ear, her voice soft and sexy, her breath hot upon her skin. "Yesss," she groaned, barely audibly. "And I love watching him fuck you," she said next, her hand rubbing her back through her shirt. "It turns me on so much to see him pounding you, to hear you moaning, to see him coming in your body. Isn't that nasty, Chrissie?" "Yesss," she panted, thrusting her butt back at Brett now as she felt him powering in and out of her, filling her. "It's very nasty." "Does it turn you on to watch him fuck me?" "Ohhh," she grunted. "Does it? Tell me, baby. Tell me how you feel." "Yess," she cried, giving in to her depravity. "Yes, I love to watch it." "Because it's nasty, isn't it? Deliciously nasty and secret?" "Ohhh, yesss!" Brett, standing behind the two women and feeling his cock going in and out, was feeling pretty nasty himself. He could not believe what was happening, could not believe that he was fucking Chrissie seconds after pulling his dripping cock out of Michelle, could not believe that both of them were holding onto each other, leaning over the tub and giving themselves to him. Two pussies, one covered in blonde hair, one covered in black, were gaping at him. Two firm asses, one light completed, one dark, were being presented side by side for his pleasure. He had never been so turned on in his life as he was at that moment and he was struggling mightily just to keep his orgasm at bay for a few more minutes. Listening to the lewd words that they were saying to each other made this struggle even harder. "Do you play with your pussy after you watch us?" Michelle asked next, her lips now touching Chrissie's ear. "You do, don't you?" "Yes," Chrissie said, feeling more chills, more shameful arousal as she felt the feminine lips grazing her skin, "you know I do." Suddenly Michelle's tongue was licking at her neck, kissing and sucking the flesh there. She knew that she should stop her from doing that, that she was flirting with lesbianism, but she couldn't. It felt too damn good. "Oh Goddd," Brett groaned almost painfully as he saw this. His control slipped considerably as he watched Michelle's pink tongue lapping at Chrissie's neck, leaving glistening trails of saliva, as he saw Chrissie leaning into it, her body language demanding more. "Don't you come yet," Michelle said, breaking her lips free long enough to look at him. "Don't come until Chrissie has." She looked back at her. "Are you close, baby?" "Yess," Chrissie, thrusting back spastically, grunted. "Oh yesss!" "Let me help you," Michelle told her, kissing on her neck again. She twisted a little towards her companion, tucking her right hand under her body. She touched Chrissie's lower stomach, moving her fingers down until she was moving through the kinky curls of her pubic hair. "Shellie," Chrissie said uncertainly as the touch of another woman neared her most private place. "It's okay, baby," she said. "This is just between the three of us." And suddenly those fingers were on her swollen clit, rubbing it in short, firm circles. "Ohhhh," she barked, jumping as orgasm reared up from nowhere and hit her like a ton of bricks. "Ohhhhh, I'm, I'm, ohhhhhhh!" "Yes, baby," Michelle cried, biting her neck now, her fingers still rubbing her clit around Brett's driving cock. "Do it! Come for us! Come for us!" She came for them, as hard as she ever had in her life, even harder than the first time Brett used his mouth upon her. Her pussy clenched like a vise on Brett's member and suddenly she was kissing Michelle on the mouth, her tongue plunging between those soft lips and dueling with the tongue it found there. Michelle, with a squeal of delight, kissed her back enthusiastically, sucking on her lips, running her tongue over her teeth. This was all quite enough to push Brett over the edge. The moment their lips came together and he saw their tongues touching, he exploded, nearly going into seizure with the sheer power of his orgasm. His cock began to shoot blast after blast of hot sperm into Chrissie's body. It seemed he emptied pints, gallons into her before the spasms faded away. And even after he finished, even after his cock wilted down to a dripping, semi-hardness, the two women continued to kiss each other, their mouths making wet, slurping noises as their tongues entwined. When he pulled free of them they twisted into each other's arms until they were standing chest to chest, legs to legs, face to face. Chrissie's hands roamed up and down Michelle's bare back, her fingers touching the feminine skin delicately. Michelle's hands dropped to Chrissie's ass, where her fingers attacked the cheeks. Brett watched in amazement, his dick already beginning to twitch and resume its hardened state. His hand dropped down to it and began to stroke absently. Chrissie finally pulled away, her lips swollen, her face flushed. Michelle let her go after giving one final, lingering kiss. "I've... I've never done anything like that before," Chrissie said, her voice cracked. "Nor have I," Michelle said. She was just as flushed. "I mean, when I was in junior high school a girlfriend and I felt each others boobs once, and she even sucked mine a little before we got embarrassed and stopped, but I've never... you know... touched another woman like that, or kissed one." She took Chrissie's hand in hers. "I kind of liked it though. It was... different. Exciting. You're very soft, Chrissie, very touchable and kissable." "Are we..." she hesitated. "Are we... lesbians?" Michelle laughed a little. "No, baby," she told her. "We're not lesbians. We were just playing a little. There's nothing wrong with that in the kind of marriage that we're in. I'm just surprised it took us this long to do it." "But... well... how do we know? I mean, maybe we've always been lesbians and we just now are..." "Chrissie," Michelle said, giving her hand a squeeze. "Did you like it when Brett was fucking you just now?" "What?" "When he was fucking you," she repeated. "When he was sticking his dick in your pussy? Did you like it?" "Well... of course I liked it. I loved it." "Then you're not a lesbian," she said. "And neither am I. You're just a sexual creature that responded to an impulsive urge. That's all that I am. We're living together in the same household, sharing a man, seeing each other naked all the time, and being part of a marriage. If we get the urge to touch each other or kiss each other once in a while during the height of sexuality, it doesn't need to have any dark meanings. You just go with it." "Go with it," she whispered, confused, feeling both shame and desire. There was no denying that she had liked it when Michelle had put her hands upon her. And there was no denying that she had been the one to kiss her first. Was it just a wicked impulse as Michelle had suggested? Or was it something more? "I love you, Chrissie," Michelle said tenderly, leaning forward and giving her a gentle peck on the nose. "I love you as a friend and as a co-wife. You're my ally in this relationship. It's only natural that we'll feel the urge to express ourselves physically sometimes. Let's not get all hung up in pre-comet morality again, okay? If you don't like touching and kissing me, we won't do it. But if you enjoyed it and desire it again in the future, don't let the old prejudices and social norms keep you from doing what you want to do. Remember, it's a different world." "A different world," Chrissie repeated, her mind and body both on overload. Michelle, leaving Chrissie to sort it all out, turned to Brett, her eyes dropping down to his dripping cock, which was now nearly fully erect again. "In the meantime," she said, "I've worked myself up into quite a frenzy." She stepped up to him, letting her hand drop to his member. "I think the tub is about full now, isn't it?" "I... uh... believe it is." "Then why don't we get in?" she asked. "We have a final rinse to take care of don't we?" She gave him a soft, sensuous squeeze, smearing Chrissie's secretions. "And I know just where I want to sit too." They shut off the hot water supply and climbed into the steaming bath. They did not bother with scrubbing or rinsing. Brett sat with his back against the far edge, submerged to his nipples, and Michelle sat on his lap, facing him. They kissed hotly, their tongues playing hide and seek in each others mouths while their hands touched hot, soapy skin. Michelle grabbed his cock and slid her hips forward, placing the head against her swollen lips. With a quick, forceful push of her body, she drew him into her, sinking to the hilt. "Ahhh," Brett moaned as he felt himself encased in yet another hot sheath. "I want it hard, baby," she told him. "Fuck me hard." He put his hands to her ass and began to power his hips up and down, driving like a piston within her. She grunted and moaned out her approval as water splashed over the side and onto the floor. Chrissie watched this from the edge of the tub, still standing in the same spot she had been when she'd kissed Michelle, still naked from the waist down. She watched them intently, her tongue reaching out to lick her lips every now and then, her pussy already starting to juice up again. Soon, though her mind was still full of confusion and wildly conflicting emotions, her right hand dropped between her legs and found her saturated slit. She began to rub herself. Her left hand, with nothing else to do at the moment, reached into the tub and found Michelle's shoulder. She began to caress the soft skin, sliding her fingertips back and forth, up and down. It really was a pleasant sensation to touch the softness of a woman. A woman felt so much different than a man; not better, not worse, just different. "Mmmm," Michelle said, putting one of her hands atop Chrissie's. "That feels nice." Soon Chrissie's hand worked its way down between the chests of the lovers and was cupping Michelle's breast. Chrissie came first, her knees wobbling, her juices soaking her fingers. Michelle followed right after. Brett, since he had already come once, managed to hang in there for another five minutes, long enough to give Michelle yet another peak before he too finally succumbed and filled her with his sperm. While Chrissie put her pants back on, Michelle and Brett finished the job of rinsing themselves off. They then drained the tub and climbed out, drying off and putting on the fresh clothes that Chrissie had fetched for them earlier. Once dressed they did a final clean up of the bathing area. They talked little during this process, all of them lost in their own thoughts. Finally, arm in arm, they left the building, headed for their marital home. None of them had seen Jessica, who had just finished her final kitchen duties of the night and who had been watching them for more than twenty minutes from the edge of the doorway. She had slipped away just before they exited. Nor did any of them see or sense her staring after them as they moved down the street and disappeared into the darkness. Had they seen her they would have noticed that her hands were clenched into fists and her face was twisted into an expression of hate. While they returned to their house, Jessica returned to hers. She locked her door behind her after she entered and then she went to her bedroom, lighting a few lamps and candles along her way. She took off her clothing and then sat naked upon her bed, her mind seething at the depravity that she had just witnessed. She could not believe how low her town had sunk in the past two weeks. Not only had her people rejected her as their leader they were now allowing blatant perversions to take place right under their noses. First that pregnant hussy molested the young boy in the bathtub and then, not an hour later, the same tub was used to facilitate the disgusting sexuality of Brett and Michelle and that child! At the same time! Several of the townspeople had known that they had gone in there; they had seen them. And had they been outraged at it? Had they demanded it stop? No, they had simply made a few comments under their breaths, elbowed each other a few times, winked, and allowed it to go on. What had this town come to? Brett was the man that was corrupting everyone, he was the one that had somehow, someway, managed to turn everyone against her, to twist the role of leadership right out of her grasp just as she was on the verge of securing it for all time. He was the one that was promoting deviant sexual behavior of all kinds on the basis that it just didn't matter anymore. And the town women, once her staunchest supporters (or so she thought) were now following him, were now sinking down to the same level of depravity as him. Despite the fact that she had not talked to anyone in the last three weeks, her ears were as sharp as ever and they missed little. Already she had heard discussions from others about the possibilities that polygamy represented. Though no one besides Brett had yet made such a drastic step into the land of damnation, it seemed that more than one set of quiet negotiations were under way. Instead of seeing it as the sick and twisted perversion that it was, they were actually starting to look at it as something that made sense. She knew it wouldn't be long before other groups started to pop up and declare their status as triples or even quadruples. She had to put a stop to it. She simply had to. And she had to regain the power that she had lost. Without her role as a community leader, she was nothing. She could not command the respect that she once had, could not shape the way the community was evolving. Her destiny in this life was to be in charge, to be a decision maker, to be the one who commanded others. But in order to do that, she had to wrestle that power back from the man who had taken it from her, the man who was now enjoying the respect and admiration that was due her. She reached over and opened the drawer in her nightstand. Inside of it was a .45 pistol, the same one she had carried on her hip when she had been a committee member. She reached out and touched it, feeling its cold steel. She smiled a little. There was only one sure way to put a stop to Brett's influence in her town and regain her favor. She would have to remove him permanently, silence him so his words could not counteract hers. It was the only way. ------- Chapter 10 The soldiers that had marched on Grass Valley had been back in Auburn for three days now. Their mission had been a complete success in many different ways. First and foremost, the small gold country town had been fairly rich in food stocks. The residents had been in possession of more than twice what the early recon unit sent there had predicted. The town had also had a fairly sizable, though poorly armed, population. After a battle of less than thirty minutes, during which six Grass Valley residents had been killed, the town, its will to fight destroyed, surrendered unconditionally. The victorious 2nd and 4th platoons had returned with a total of 130 fresh women to be bartered over and traded, and 40 additional men that could be conscripted into the Placer County Militia as soldiers. The captured women had already been doled out by lottery to the men in town and had taken their places as junior wives. The captured men were still being held in the high school buildings where they were being "taught" the Auburn way. Most of them seemed receptive to the teachings but there was still that disturbing trend of males that would rather die then enjoy the paradise being offered to them. There had been four of them in the Grass Valley group so far and there were two more that seemed unhappy and teetering on the brink. As bountiful as the mission itself had turned out to be, perhaps the greatest achievement had been the manner in which the platoons and their spoils of war had returned. Instead of marching exhausted into town, their prisoners laden with supplies, everyone on the verge of total exhaustion, they had driven into town in a caravan of four-wheel drive pickups and SUVs. Though great sections of Highway 49, the main route from Auburn to Grass Valley, had been washed away or buried, enough of the side routes had been left intact to bypass these sections. The going had been very rough in a few places it was reported, and sometimes the caravan had had to swing miles out of their way in order to find a passable route, but it had been done. The entire group had made it all the way back utilizing roadways and vehicles, making the trip in only eight hours instead of the nine days that it took on foot. The possibilities that this roadway opened up was very exciting and Barnes was spending most of his time thinking of ways to exploit it. This quick return had also moved up the timetable on the Garden Hill mission. Since the platoons had returned more than a week early and since they did not need the extended rest period that typically was required after a mission, they were now, at 7:00 AM, assembled on the lawn of the high school undergoing final inspection before moving out. They stood in razor sharp lines, at brisk attention, their weapons on their shoulders, their packs, heavily laden with food and extra ammunition, upon their backs. There were four platoons of forty men each. Each platoon was divided into four squads of ten. Each squad was equipped with two automatic weapons and eight semi-automatic weapons in addition to shotguns, tear gas guns, and one sniper rifle. Colonel Barnes walked slowly up and down the lines, looking at each soldier that he was about to send out, saying a few words to each of them. Finally, the inspection complete, he stood at the head of the formation, next to Acting Captain Bracken, and addressed them as a group. "Men," he told them, "today you embark upon yet another great mission for this town, the greatest one yet. You will be conquering a poorly defended, though heavily armed, walled encampment after a march of nearly two weeks. Now this will be the furthest that we've extended our reach to this point, and this will also be the largest scale expedition that we've mounted. I know you are not equipped with as many automatic weapons as you usually are on such a trip, nor as much personal ammunition, but the trade-off is greater numbers. I have seen Acting Captain Bracken's attack plans and they are good ones. I couldn't have done it better myself. If the residents of Garden Hill do not surrender peacefully and agree to join our ranks as we hope they will do, you will easily prevail in this fight, most likely without taking casualties. "Before you go, let me remind you one more time of our mission. Strength through numbers and firepower and unity of the California region under the laws of God and man. God willing - and I'm sure he is - we will prevail in this battle and all that follow and we will be in a position of strength when civilization begins to rebuild. Always remember that. It is our job to be the strongest during the rebuilding for it will be the strongest that will reshape human society for thousands of years to come. We are the founding fathers men. Take that with you, and my God bless you on your trip. That is all." The men seemed heartened by this speech, liking the idea that they were founding fathers, the conquerors of the world. Barnes gave them a stiff salute and dismissed them for their mission. Bracken took over at that point and ordered them into marching formation facing towards the east. "Forward, MARCH!" he yelled. In perfect step, they began to move, their weapons clanking smartly upon their backs. ------- Jean Doleman and Anna Hampton watched them go from a second floor window of one of the classrooms in the school. Jean and Anna, both of whom were wives of Bracken, were part of the cleaning staff for the main building. They were responsible for keeping the top floor of the building up to military specifications and they spent at least ten hours of any given day mopping, dusting, and wiping in order to accomplish this goal. For a woman in Auburn, this was actually considered a favorable assignment and it had been bestowed upon them because of their husband's high rank in the militia. "Thank God he's gone," Jean whispered softly to her co-wife. "We're safe for at least another three weeks." "Yeah," Anna, the older of the two replied sourly, "but while we're safe from his hands pawing at us he's going out to kill our only hope for salvation." The two women were from vastly different backgrounds. Anna, who was twenty-eight, had been a loan officer at the Auburn branch of the Bank of America before the comet. A pre-comet divorcee, she had been chosen early in the aftermath as Bracken's wife because of her classy beauty. Bracken had had his eye on her since long before the collapse of civilization. He had been a frequent visitor to the bank and had asked her out weekly, getting turned down just as regular as clockwork. She had sustained her share of beatings in the beginning before she had learned that there was no point in resisting him. At least he hadn't traded her to Stu or one of his men, a fate that was the worst nightmare of any Auburn woman. Jean, on the other hand, was not from Auburn at all. A nineteen-year-old high school dropout, she had lived in Meadow Vista, the first town the militia had attacked in force. In pre-comet life she had worked full time in a small, family owned bait shop on the outskirts of town. Her father and mother had been down in Sacramento for the day when the comet had hit and had died down there. Her brother had been one of the leaders of the defense that the Meadow Vistans had put up when the militia came to town and he had been gunned down in the streets for his efforts. Jean's small-town-girl good looks and healthy breasts had attracted the leader of the invading forces - Lieutenant Corban - and she had spent nearly three weeks as his wife before being traded to Bracken just before the recon trip to Garden Hill. She could not count the number of times she had been raped and beaten by both of her "husbands" since then. Though Bracken had two other wives currently, neither Anna nor Jean liked or trusted them. Kelly, the beautiful blonde he had picked up in Colfax, had decided long ago that the way to keep in her husband's favor was by informing on the other wives when she observed them breaking the rules. More than one beating had been attributed to her tattletale behaviors. And Sharon, another Auburn acquisition from early in the aftermath, was just plain insane, her mind apparently broken from the strain of life these days. Kelly spent much of her time caring for Sharon and it was only because no one else had offered a trade for her that she was still around at all. Jean and Anna had gotten along well with each other since the very first day that Jean had been traded into "the family" as Bracken called it. Anna had been the one to explain to her on that first night, after Bracken had "broken her in", how to best avoid future beatings and other forms of punishment. She had shared with her various tips on how best to get Bracken to orgasm as quickly as possible during sexual encounters in order to get it over with for the night ("call him Lieutenant while he's fucking you," she'd advised, "it does it every time"). She'd explained about Bracken's fetish for suddenly sticking his penis into an anus during intercourse and how best to avoid pain during such times ("lube yourself up with Vaseline beforehand and don't clench down - relax"). As the days went by and the weeks went on the two women had grown closer and closer to each other, sharing their secrets during moments of solitude on work detail or when Bracken was off on a mission. This closeness and friendship was enhanced by the reality that there was really no one else in town that they could confide in or get close to. For a woman living in Auburn, life was very much like Nazi Germany during World War II or Oceania in Orwell's 1984. So cowered were the women in town that there was no way of telling who you could trust and who would inform, who had been pushed over the edge and who still had the spark of rebellion within them. Undoubtedly the majority of the women were miserable with their lot in life and would be sympathetic ears to others that shared their fate. But the men of Auburn feared organization of any kind by the women as much as plantation owners in the south had once feared slave organization. It was well known that many of the town's women had adapted the defense that Kelly had; that of garnering favors with the men by informing on their own kind. Anna and Jean had naturally talked of escaping from Auburn from time to time - there was hardly a woman in town who had not thought of such a thing. It sounded so liberating to discuss slipping out during the night and disappearing forever, never to see Auburn or its men again. Like many such fantasies, the harsh realities of the situation put a damper on it. Five women had tried to escape from their captivity at various times in the past and of those five, there was only one that had possibly made it. Two had been captured trying to slip out past the defenses and had been hung the next day. Two others had made it out only to be dragged back the next morning and hung later that afternoon. Only Marla Brown had managed to both get out and avoid capture by the pursuing troops. And what had become of Marla? Nobody knew for sure of course but Jean remembered what it had looked like on the march from Meadow Vista to Auburn and both of the women heard their husband talk to others about the sights he'd seen on his missions. There was nothing out there to live on - nothing at all - and there were no indications that Marla had smuggled any food out with her. And there was nowhere for her to go where she could expect to be taken in, nowhere until Garden Hill anyway. As much as they wanted to believe that she had made it to safety and was even now living in comfort and freedom, the odds were that Marla was lying dead out there somewhere, her corpse eaten by the scavengers that remained. "But she could have made it to Garden Hill," Jean had said on more than one occasion, the words sounding like a lie told to children. "She could have." Even Anna, who's educated mind was a little sharper than her younger companion's, found slight comfort in these words. The news that there was a functioning community in Garden Hill had served to electrify many of the town's women, especially after the first recon mission when eyewitness accounts revealed that the community consisted mostly of women and that these women were being used as soldiers. Women who were packing guns and helping defend their town were not women who were being treated as property by the men. Could there be hope in Garden Hill? Could there be a new way of life there? Perhaps there could have been but that hope was now within two weeks or so of being destroyed. Though Bracken did not discuss the layout of forces in Garden Hill with his wives he had no problem discussing these things around them when other men were present. Both Anna and Jean had heard many times over that Garden Hill consisted of only about thirty men and two hundred or so women and children. They had heard about the poor defenses being utilized to defend themselves and they had personally seen one hundred and sixty armed men heading off to take the town. Jean could testify in intimate detail how efficient the militia was at what they did. If they were going to take the town, they would take it, more than likely without firing a shot. "Well," Anna said now as she watched the line of soldiers disappear in the distance, "it was a nice fantasy while it lasted. Goodbye to Garden Hill." "Yeah," Jean said softly. "I only hope now that Marla didn't make it there. Can you imagine what they'll do to her if they find her?" "They'll make an example out of her," Anna told her, turning from the window. "But at least we have a few weeks without Asshole around." "There's always that," Jean smiled, stepping closer. She put her arms around her co-wife, pulling her body against her. "It'll be nice to sleep in peace with you again, without worrying about him catching us. All we'll have to worry about is Kelly, and she sleeps like the dead." "Yes," Anna agreed, smiling back, feeling her breasts touching Jean's through their shirts. "I have missed that while he's been home." Though neither of the two women had ever had lesbian tendencies before the comet, the realities of the aftermath and their mutual need of tenderness and affection in a world where such things were rare, had driven them into each others arms early in their relationship. The first night had been while Bracken had been off on his recon mission to Garden Hill. They had stayed up late that night doing the family laundry while Kelly and Sharon had been sleeping and their talk had turned to masturbation. Soon they had found themselves touching each other and kissing. Soon after that they had been licking each other to orgasm. After that first night they had been together many times - always in secret, either late at night or during their workday - since Bracken would have beaten them severely and probably traded one of them had he known what was going on. Homosexuality was strictly forbidden in Auburn. "I have a surprise for you tonight," Anna said to her lover as her lips reached out to kiss her softly. "What is it?" Jean asked, licking at the protruding tongue that slid out at her. "It's something I made out of that deodorant container and some nylon straps," she told her, sucking her lower lip into her mouth. "We'll play with it tonight after the bitch goes to bed." "I can't wait," Jean replied, letting her head fall back on her shoulders as Anna slid her mouth down to her neck. "I think you'll like it," she told her, tasting the much-loved flesh. "But for now, why don't we have a little warm-up?" "Oh yes," Jean breathed, her hands dropping down to Anna's breasts. Slowly Anna sank to her knees, so her face was right in line with the buttons of Jean's pants. She unbuttoned and unzipped them, pulling them down to her ankles and revealing the white cotton panties beneath. The crotch of the panties was already starting to get damp. She pulled them down, baring the hairy bush of black hair that covered Jean's sex and releasing the odor of musk into the air. Since they were in the very building that served as the administration center for Auburn and since they were committing a crime against the laws of Auburn, they could not afford the luxury of actually removing their clothing. They had long since learned to live with this. She pushed the clothing as far down Jean's legs as possible, so they were puddled up around her shoes. This allowed her to bring her knees and thighs apart far enough for Anna to put her face in there. Jean sighed softly as Anna's tongue slipped between her wet lips and stabbed into her body. She let her hands fall to her hair where she began twisting and turning her fingers in it. Anna licked at her expertly, lapping up and down the length of her slit for several minutes before attacking the swollen clit with lips and tongue. She sucked gently on the clit at first and then with more force, drawing a leg-wobbling orgasm from her that nearly made her fall down. And then it was Jean's turn. She pulled her pants back up and fastened them carefully before kneeling down before Anna and unfastening hers. Anna's pubic hair was dark brown and naturally sparse, her odor sharp and excitingly biting. Jean buried her face between those slender thighs and went to work, her tongue probing into the depths like a small penis. Anna's hands played with Jean's large breasts through her sweater as she was ministered to. Soon the lapping and probing did its work and she was coming, her pelvis gyrating back and forth uncontrollably, wetting her lover's face. After, they held each other and exchanged wet kisses, both of them tasting their own juices on the other woman's lips and tongue. "I love you, Anna," Jean said quietly. "I never thought I'd say that to another woman, but I do." "I know," Anna replied, giving her one last kiss. "And I love you too." "Somehow, some way, we have to get out of here. We have to." "I know, sweetie," she said. "I know." ------- At about the same time, Chrissie, Brett, and Michelle were waking up in the large bed of the master bedroom. Though no further sexual activity had taken place between them after their return from the community bathing area, all three had climbed into the bed together for the first time, sleeping naked and huddled together. Brett had been in the middle, the two women on either side. They all looked at each other a little sheepishly as they opened their eyes in the dim bedroom. "Good morning, girls," Brett said, stretching a little, feeling soreness in his muscles. "Good morning," Michelle said, leaning over and giving him a kiss on the lips. Her breast rubbed against his arm as she did so. Chrissie gave a weak smile - she was feeling decidedly strange after the events of the previous night - but she too wished everyone a good morning and gave Brett a peck on the lips. She looked up at Michelle, wondering if she was supposed to kiss her as well. Was that the proper etiquette after you had a semi-lesbian encounter with your co-wife? Why had Miss Manners never addressed such a topic before? "How are you feeling, Chris?" Michelle asked her, making no move to share a good morning kiss. "Okay," she said with a shrug. Michelle continued to stare back at her for a moment, trying to read her face. "Good," she finally said. "Glad to hear it." They climbed out of bed and began their morning routines a minute later. This made everyone feel a little better since they were back on familiar ground. They all used the bathroom (Chrissie and Brett still shutting the door when they peed, Michelle letting everyone see her business) and then went about their morning maintenance chores. Brett shaved off the nine days worth of beard from his face, having to use a pair of scissors to get the top layer. Michelle and Chrissie both sponged themselves off with the soapy cold water from their collection bucket and then went about combing and fastening their hair. Unlike most of the women in town, neither one of Brett's bothered with makeup or fancy hairstyles. Plain faces and simple ponytails were enough. "So what's the plan for the day?" Chrissie asked, finally breaking the silence that had prevailed. "Do you want me to take the afternoon shift in one of the posts?" Since gaining an additional sixteen volunteers for the guard force, the four original members had all been able to cut their hours back to only six a day. "No," Brett told her. "I'm going to keep you in charge of the guards for the time being. I'm going to have too much to do with the helicopter and with getting my next class of sixteen through to handle the routine stuff. In fact, I'm toying with the idea of just keeping you as the guard supervisor permanently." "Permanently?" Chrissie said, alarmed. "Brett, I can't replace you." "Sure you can," he said. "You did it while I was gone didn't you? And from what I've heard, you've managed to command a little respect doing it. More than one person has come up and told me how great of a job you've done." "But what if we're attacked again?" she said. "If a large scale attack occurs, then I'll be in charge of operations," he told her. "But for all of the small stuff like staffing, partner conflicts, anything like that, you seem to be doing fine." "But..." "Take the promotion, Chris," Michelle said, smiling at her as she pulled on her jeans over a fresh pair of panties. "It'll get you out of the damn guard bunkers." "And I'll tell you what else I'll do," Brett said. "What?" "I'll double your salary." And so Chrissie became the first Garden Hill security supervisor, establishing a chain of command of sorts. "What about me?" Michelle wanted to know. "Should I man a post today? I'm rested up enough." "Don't ask me," Brett said. "It is now officially beneath me to worry about shit like that. Ask your supervisor." They left for breakfast a few minutes later, their moods much brighter. On the way they met Paul and Janet, whose house was three doors down. They all fell in together. ------- Jessica stood behind the lunch counter, a large white apron tied around her waist, a large spoon in her hands. She stood before a steaming platter of powdered eggs that Stacy and Tina had dressed up with various spices and seasonings to taste almost palatable. As each person approached she would shovel a bit off the eggs onto a plate, add a little of the pork jerky that they had made back at the beginning, and then put one piece of the bread that had been baked the previous day atop that. Nobody thanked her as she handed him or her their plates; nobody talked to her at all, though a few gave her contemptuous looks. She kept her face expressionless as she had been doing for nearly three weeks now. She had become quite good at it. Behind her expressionless face on this morning was a certain amount of glee and anticipation. Today was going to be the day of her liberation. She was confident that by dinner this evening she would be back in power, her chief tormentor dead, his supporter, Paul, in custody pending exile. She could feel the weight of the .45 pistol resting in her waistband, beneath her apron. It was the weight of justice about to happen. Her glee increased when she saw the target of this justice enter the community center gym through the back door. He was in the company of that lesbian slut and that child they were corrupting, Paul and his bimbo right behind them. They took up a position at the end of the line, patiently waiting their turn for their food. There were maybe twenty people between him and her. Less than five minutes to wait, she figured. Her plan was a simple one. She would wait until he was directly in front of her and then she would shoot him dead right in front of everyone, putting the pistol down before the slut or the child had a chance to draw theirs. People would be shocked at first, that was a given. They would probably whisk her away to a locked room for a while. That was all right. She expected that. But eventually she would be allowed to defend her actions before the town. She would be allowed to speak to them. She could sway a crowd like no one else could, had been doing it all of her life. Without that snake Brett to counter her words, she knew she would be able to convince the people of the town that she had acted in their best interests. These women were her people. They had been bred and raised just as she had. She had no doubt that if she was just able to talk to them for ten minutes, to remind them of the morality and the values that they were all tossing away just because of the comet, they would see the foolishness of their recent actions. They would see that Brett and his followers represented evil and corruption. They would see that they needed to follow her instead. Her mind, which had become more than a little unstable since that fateful night when she had tried to expel Brett by community vote, had not one time considered that her speech, no matter how moving, would not be powerful enough to justify murder. She had not considered, even once, that maybe she had been wrong all of this time and that maybe it was time to change her views a little. All she knew is that she had been torn from power and that Brett was responsible for it. If Brett were gone, she would be the only one capable of filling that void. The town would know that and they would put her back in charge, where she could be somebody instead of a lowly kitchen worker. She just knew it. ------- Paul and Janet were in the front of the group. Then came Chrissie, Brett, and then Michelle. Behind them in line were Matt, who was working an afternoon shift in the bridge bunker, and his wife Maureen. They were talking about the subject of marriage in their town. "So it's my thoughts," Matt was saying, "that we should have some sort of formal ceremony for couples here in Garden Hill." "Couples?" Michelle asked, raising her eyebrows a tad. "Or triples," he allowed, "or even quadruples. My point is that when someone around here enters into what is a committed, permanent relationship, there needs to be some sort of legalistic and binding ritual to it. The marriage should be recorded and logged and there should even be a ceremony of sorts to accompany it, maybe even something like a ring given or a necklace." "What do we have to do all that for?" Chrissie asked, shuffling forward a few feet as the line moved. "It's not like there are health benefits or tax breaks that you get by being married." "No," Matt agreed, "there are no legalistic benefits to it under these circumstances, that it true. But by having a ceremony of some sort and by recording the nuptials, we are legitimizing the relationships and adding weight to the commitment factor. The people involved in such relationships have to declare before their peers that they are committed to each other permanently and hope to remain together for life. In every society, from primitive bushmen to that monstrosity that we had before the comet, the permanence of a mating relationship involves some sort of ritual for this very reason. Without it, there is nothing to bind the people together. There will be no step beyond simple flirtation and infatuation that shows everyone that a commitment has been made." "I see," Chrissie said softly, mostly understanding what he had said. "I think that's a real good idea," Brett said, looking at his two wives, as he now thought of them. "There could be a standard ceremony with vows and all that. When we three decided to do this, we vowed certain things before each other just so that we would all understand what was expected." "Right," Matt said. "You did it privately but I think it should be done publicly, in front of everyone. And there should be some sort of symbol of the relationship." They continued to discuss the various aspects of what a ceremony and a symbol would entail. As they did so, they slowly moved forward in the line, until Paul and Janet were getting their eggs put onto their plates by Jessica. Brett began to get a little twitch on the back of his neck as he got closer to the woman he had humiliated in front of the town. It was just a little one, it's origin unknown, but it made him take a real good look at her. On the surface nothing seemed different about her. She was wordlessly shoveling eggs, meat, and bread onto a plate as each person passed her position. It was the same thing she did every day. But something was different today. After a moment he figured out what it was. She kept glancing over at him, quick, semi-furtive glances as if she was checking his positioning. Normally she avoided looking at him at all when he approached her. Why was she doing that this morning? Was something going on? As Chrissie took her plate, the sensation became even stronger. Chrissie hesitated for a moment, her eyes worried. She looked at Jessica and then at Brett. It was obvious that she felt something as well. Finally, with nothing concrete to act upon, she moved to the side, allowing Brett to step up. As he stood in front of her his senses were on high alert status. His eyes tracked her every move, her every twitch, watching for the slightest thing out of the ordinary. He didn't have to wait very long. Just as she finished putting the food on his plate, as he was reaching down to pick it up, she suddenly turned around. Her hands reached under her apron, grabbing at something in her waistband. Now Brett had something tangible to base his fears upon. He had seen that move before during his time as a cop and had learned to fear it. The last thing a cop wants to see is someone reaching under their clothing and grabbing at something. His hand started to drop to the pistol on his belt. It was a very close thing. Jessica was fast pulling the weapon out and turning towards him. Almost too fast. She had stayed up until well past midnight practicing the move she was now executing. It took her less than a second to draw the .45 from her belt and turn towards Brett to fire it, much too fast for Brett to get his own pistol free of his holster. She spun around with a triumphant smile upon her face and a mad glint in her eyes, knowing that her plans were coming neatly together. Fortunately for Brett, Jessica had not yet taken his firearms training class. If she had, she would have known that she was breaking a primary rule of such engagements. The rule was that you never point a gun at someone who was within arms reach of you if you could help it. The reason for this rule was about to become very clear to her. Unable to get his pistol out in time, Brett instead reached out with his left hand and grabbed her wrist just as she was bringing the gun to bear on him. He sidestepped to the right, removing his body from the line of fire and tried to force her wrist downward. She pulled the trigger just as he cleared the front of the weapon. The gunshot was shockingly loud in the echo chamber that the gym was. The bullet blasted out of the barrel and out across the open area where people were sitting. It passed within four inches of Stephanie Mills' head, close enough for her to see a streak of gray shooting past her eyes. It passed through Mike Carlton's juice glass, shattering it and spraying everyone around him with Tang. It then hit the wooden surface of the cafeteria table, peeling a four-inch section off, before ricocheting upward, passing six inches from Darlene Sampson's throat, and finally climbing high enough to miss everyone else. It buried itself in the far wall of the gym six tenths of a second after it was fired. "Motherfucker!" Jessica screamed just before Brett swung a right hook into her face. He felt the meaty thump of his knuckles shattering her nose and covering his hand with her warm blood. The blow stunned her just enough so that he was able to force her hand downward before her fingers could pull the trigger again. The gun exploded with noise once more but the bullet went harmlessly into the polished wooden surface of the floor. Brett reached for his gun again, acting completely on instinct, but before he could draw it Chrissie grabbed Jessica by the hair and pulled her head downward, slamming her onto the table right into her tray of eggs. Michelle also acted, jumping onto her back and getting her hands around her neck, utilizing the chokehold that Brett had shown his students during their training. Now, without a shot, Brett's hand abandoned its quest for his gun and instead concentrated upon getting hers away from her. His left hand was still holding her wrist so his right hand joined it. While Chrissie and Michelle kept her from getting up, he slammed her arm up and down against the edge of the serving table, twisting it back and forth. She managed to fire one more shot, which again went harmlessly into the floor, and then the gun finally fell from her hand. Brett gave it a sharp kick, sending it spinning across the floor. "Get her on the floor," Brett yelled as Paul, Maureen, and Matt all stepped up to help. "On her stomach!" They pulled her over the table kicking and screaming and onto the floor. There was a clatter as the food trays were pulled off the table as well. She thumped down hard enough to expel the contents of her lungs in a painful gasp. Michelle, still trying to choke her out, went over the table with her and landed atop her. Brett, Chrissie, and the others all dropped to the floor as Jessica tried to kick and squirm her way free of them. She was trying to yell obscenities at them but didn't quite have the breath to do so. At Brett's direction they pinned her legs against the floor and forced her hands behind her back, twisting them painfully upward towards her shoulder blades. By now a large crowd was standing around them, watching in awe at the struggle. "Somebody get us some fucking rope!" Brett, fighting to keep her right arm in position, yelled. "I got it," Paul, who had not been involved in the fracas, shouted. He ran off towards the nearest door, heading for one of the supply rooms. Three minutes later it was done. While she continued to scream incoherent obscenities and threats, they tied her hands behind her back, cinching the rope tight enough to reduce the blood flow to her hands. "Let's get her in an empty room," Paul said, hooking his arm through hers and pulling her to her feet. She immediately began kicking at anyone who happened to be near. "Let me go!" she screamed. "Goddammit, let me go! He needs to die! Don't you see that? He needs to die!" Paul and Michelle forcibly dragged her across the room, Chrissie walking in front of them. She opened the far door for them and they pulled her through it, still screaming that Brett had to die. ------- Two hours later Paul found Brett in the park's maintenance shed. He was helping Steve Kensington remove the aluminum water tank from the grass fighting truck so that it could be used to transport fuel. The entire rig had been jacked up and placed on stands to allow enough clearance for the tank to be slid out once it was freed from its mountings. The going was fairly slow and Brett was serving very much in the apprentice role. Steve, who had been a pool cleaner before the comet, had also been quite adept at automotive mechanics and certainly knew his way around a toolbox better. "How's it going?" Paul asked, lighting a cigarette as he watched Steve dismantle the hose deck of the rig. "We're getting there," Brett said, dropping the wrench he had been using and walking over. "Hopefully we'll have it out in another hour or two and then we can start thinking about reinforcing it." "Do you think you will be ready to fly tomorrow?" Brett was planning on a mission to recover the maintenance supplies and a tank full of jet fuel from Cameron Park the next day. "More than likely as long as Steve doesn't fuck up that tank," he said. "Hey now," Steve said lightly. "Be nice." "I've also stripped the chopper of every unnecessary piece of equipment," Brett said. "I took out the litter, the medical supplies, even the cabinets that they were stored in. In all I lightened it up by about two hundred pounds and created a little more room. I got room for an extra passenger now or two hundred more pounds of cargo." "Are you gonna do a little recon while you're up there?" Paul wanted to know. "Maybe on the way out," he said. "I still have more than three hundred pounds of fuel on board. I thought maybe I'd take a swing down through Colfax and Auburn, just to see if anything's left there. Once I'm over the valley I can cut to the south and pick up Highway 50 as a navigation reference to Cameron Park. What other towns are along the 50 corridor? Any chance that they will be standing?" "There's Placerville," Paul said. "It was the biggest between Sacramento and South Lake Tahoe but I imagine its pretty much gone. It sat down in a gully, right where all of the water and mud would have drained. Keep an eye out for El Dorado Hills though. It was the first town in the foothills as Highway 50 climbed out of the valley. It was mostly an upper middle class suburb, a little bigger than this town. Portions of it might still be standing." "Sounds like a plan," Brett said, wondering just what he would do if he found people in those towns. Would he try to make contact? Would he just note their presence and then fly on? "I just finished up my little talk with Jessica," Paul said, changing the subject. It had been decided shortly after the attempt on Brett's life that Paul should be the one to question her despite Brett's greater experience at criminal interrogation. It didn't seem exactly kosher for the victim of the crime to be the one performing the investigation. "Did you?" he asked. "And what did she have to say for herself?" Paul shook his head a little. "It's something that really has to be seen to be believed," he said, lowering his voice to keep Steve from hearing. "I videotaped the conversation like you suggested. If need be I'll play it at the community meeting tonight." "Did she confess to trying to kill me?" he asked. "Or did she try to say it was some sort of misunderstanding?" "She confessed," he said. "She told me quite plainly that she had planned to kill you in front of the townspeople to keep you from corrupting them even further. She's really gone around the bend, Brett. She actually believes that she was trying to do this town a favor. She's not just justifying her actions like she normally does, she really believes that. She thought that she would kill you and then address the town and convince them to go back to following her as their leader." "Just like that huh?" he asked. "Just like that," he said. "I think that removing her from the committee and facing her down in front of the town made something snap inside of her. Do you remember that discussion we had a long time ago about what she would do if her sense of worth was threatened?" "Yes," Brett said. "It would seem you were right." "It would seem so. When we took away the image of superiority she was fomenting and put her down on the same level with everyone else, she just couldn't take it. She had a breakdown." Brett frowned a little. "Whether she's psycho or not, whether its her fault or not, she tried to kill me. What are we going to do about that? We seem to be a little short on mental health treatment centers these days." "I'm going to recommend exile to the town at the meeting tonight," Paul said. "We certainly can't have her walking among us anymore and I can't see us keeping her locked in a storage room for the rest of her life, wasting food and manpower feeding and guarding her. Whatever her mental issues, she made a choice this morning and she's going to have to live with the consequences." It was a drastic solution, exile. Brett knew that better than just about anyone else. Despite the understandably harsh feelings he had for Jessica, he had strong misgivings about just sending her out there. How much chance did Jessica have out in the wilderness? As he had said when the exile solution was suggested for Stacy and then himself, it was little more than a death sentence that allowed those passing judgment to pretend there was no blood on their hands. Unfortunately, like Paul, Brett really didn't see any other solution to the problem. "Can we at least give her some food when we send her out?" he asked. Paul, who had had many of the same feelings, nodded slowly. "I think we could probably do that." ------- The mood at dinner that night was somewhat somber, the weight of the decision to be made sitting heavily on nearly everyone. By then the rumor mill had already carried to every ear the proposed punishment as well as Jessica's intended defense for her actions. Appetites were down. Though an unofficial rule against leaving any food on your plate had been in effect for some time now and though this rule was usually followed religiously, quite a few plates came back only half-empty on this night. It was Paul who called the meeting to order at 6:00 PM. He flipped on his microphone and announced that the community meeting was in progress. "It is my wish that we did not have to conduct this meeting tonight," he said, "because the subject of it is the expellation of one of our citizens. Unfortunately this is something that we must address and that we must address immediately. Now I'm sure that all of you know what I'm talking about here. Most of you were here this morning and of those of you that were not, I'm sure you've heard about it. But let me make it official for you just for the sake of the proceedings we are about to undertake. Jessica Blakely will stand accused of the attempted murder of Brett Adams this morning at breakfast. Now this is not America anymore and we don't have a court system or a public defender or a jail. All we have to decide the matter with is this community meeting. All Jessica has to defend herself are her own words. And all we have for punishment for a crime of this magnitude is exile. I want you all to keep those things in mind as we go through this process and to think very carefully about your decision before you make it. Does everyone understand?" There was a loud babble of voices as everyone said, in different words, that they understood. "Very well," Paul said. "Then let us begin. Please bring out the accused." Jessica, her hands still tied behind her back, her face calm and determined, was led through a side door by Frank Bender and Barbara Stovington, two of the newest members of the guard detail. A murmur swept through the crowd as they marched her across the room and to a chair next to the podium. She sat down in the chair without being told and faced the townspeople, her eyes trying to make contact with everyone. "Jessica Blakely," Paul said formally. "You stand accused of the attempted murder of Brett Adams with a firearm. This meeting will be to decide your fate. I will present the evidence against you to the town and then you will have an opportunity to answer the accusations made against you. We will then vote on your innocence or guilt. If you are found guilty, we will then vote on your punishment. I have decided that two-thirds majority must prevail in both votes. Do you understand all of this?" "I understand," she said clearly, her face forming into a quivering smile. She looked very confident in herself. "Very well," Paul said. "Let us begin." It didn't take very long. Undoubtedly if this had been civilization, the trial would have gone on for months, but in Garden Hill in the post-comet area, justice moved swiftly. Brett came up and told the story about how she had pulled a gun on him and how he, with the help of others, had managed to wrestle it away. Paul then played the videotape of her interrogation, plugging it into a power cord that was tied into a DC converter on the fire engine outside. The crowd watched open mouthed as her taped image told Paul, in a calm, cool, collected tone, that she had planned to kill Brett because she saw him as a threat to the community. She told about practicing drawing the gun from her pants and bringing it to bear on him. She expressed frustration that her carefully conducted plan had not worked out. "I might still be able to counter his influence," her image said. "It will be harder to do while he's still alive, I know that, but I think I can still convince everyone where their best interests lie before its too late." "Do you have any remorse for what you've done?" Paul's voice asked her image. "Just that I wasn't able to move faster," her image replied. The crowd gasped a little at this last line, most of them starting to see now that Jessica was certifiably nuts. Jessica herself simply sat placidly throughout the entire playing of the tape. Not a single time did she react in any way to something her recorded image said. Paul flipped off the VCR and made a motion to one of his assistants that they should go shut down the fire engine. He then returned to the microphone. "I have no further evidence to present," he said. "You have heard from the man she tried to kill this morning and you have heard her say that killing him was exactly what she intended. Many of you actually saw the incident in question as it took place. Now I will give Mrs. Blakely the opportunity to speak in her own defense if she wishes." He turned to her. "Jessica? Anything you'd like to say?" "Yes," she said, standing up and walking slowly over to the microphone, stepping carefully since she was not able to use her hands for balance. Frank and Barbara, the two armed guards watching her, trailed her over there, taking up position a few feet behind her. "I will now turn the floor over to Jessica Blakely," Paul said, stepping away to give her room. Her speech was rambling and nearly ten minutes in length. It was clear that she thought she would be able to twist the viewpoints of the townspeople back around to her own as she had always been able to do in the past, but this time her words served only to show the depth of her breakdown. She started off by rehashing all of the "values" that had been lost or were heading out the door since the arrival of "that evil, perverted man". She mentioned the sanctity of plural marriage and monogamous commitment more than ten times, using that as the anchor of her discussion. "Not only is that man living in sin with a teenage girl and a slut at the same time," she ranted, "but now I have witnessed him encouraging homosexuality between the two of them. Just last night they engaged in this perversion right in our own bathing area! Is this the kind of morals that you want your children to grow up following? Is this the kind of man that you want leading them?" Had she stayed with this theme she might have picked up a few converts. But next she began to explain how killing Brett was a perfectly justifiable reaction to this offense against town morals. "He has seduced you all as surely as he has seduced that young child," she told them all. "He has convinced you that your morality, that the values you hold sacred just don't matter anymore. And you people, in a moment of fear and weakness brought on by the violent attack upon our town, an attack that may very well have been staged by Mr. Adams himself just for this purpose, you have begun to listen to his words. Well hear me now. His way is not the way this town should travel. His way is the way of evil and perversion. What kind of society will we have here in a hundred years if we follow his teachings, if we accept the degradation of our most cherished institutions? What kind of world will our grandchildren have if we turn on backs on these institutions now? We will have chaos and destruction! We will have our descendants perpetually living in sin! And for this, to protect these future children and grandchildren, to protect the future of humanity itself, I acted as I knew was correct and tried to remove this evil man from the equation." She said much more after this, mostly retouching on points she had already made, but that last line was what stuck in everyone's head. Jessica was insane and she was dangerous to everyone. When she finally finished up and went back to her seat, a satisfied, confidant smile upon her face, Paul stepped forward, resuming his place before the microphone. His expression was somewhat pained. "You've heard the evidence and the testimony, folks," he told the town. "Now let's vote on guilt or innocence. Remember that two-thirds majority must be achieved. All who find sufficient evidence to find Jessica Blakely guilty of the crime of attempted murder, please say aye." The ayes were not shouted out enthusiastically by any means, but they were shouted out. There was no question that nearly everyone in the room said one. Jessica's expression, which had been confidant, suddenly turned to shock. "What?" she screamed. "What are you idiots doing?" Paul ignored her. "More than two-thirds majority is clear," he said. "Jessica Blakely has been found guilty of attempted murder. The only punishment that we can possibly have for a crime of this caliber is exile from the community. Now we all know what that means and I'm sure that no one here is very happy about having to do such a thing, but there is no other option. We do not have a jail here, nor can we allow Jessica to walk among us any longer. It is my recommendation, which I make with a heavy heart, that exile it should be. Let us vote. "You can't do this!" Jessica screamed. "You can't vote me out of this town!" "All in favor of permanent exile for Jessica Blakely as the punishment for her crime, please say aye." A subdued, but overwhelming "aye" echoed throughout the room. "No!" Jessica screamed, standing up. "This is my town! I was president of the homeowner's association! You can't kick me out of here! You can't!" Frank and Barbara quickly stepped up to push her back down in her seat. She twisted out of their grasp and fell to the floor with a thump. When they bent over to pick her back up she began thrashing and kicking at them. "Let me go!" she demanded. "You can't do this!" "Jessica Blakely," Paul said formally, ignoring the ruckus, "your fate has been decided by the community. You will be exiled from this community forever. Sentence will be carried out after breakfast tomorrow morning." "You motherfuckers!" she screamed as Frank and Barbara finally were able to pull her to her feet. "I won't go! You can't kick me out of this town! This is my town, do you hear me? My town!" They dragged her away forcibly. She kicked, screamed, spit, and yelled all the way. ------- It was close to 11:30 that night when Brett finally made his way home. He had been over at the maintenance shed with Steve since the community meeting had broken up, trying to ready the water tank for transport. Using a welder that had been found in one of the houses, they had attached three reinforcement straps and a large hook that could be used to support the tank from beneath the chopper. They had filled it with water (which weighed a little more than jet fuel per gallon) and, with the help of Jason, who had been hanging out with them, hoisted it into the air to check for leaks and balance. The balance was just a little off but not enough to worry about. Satisfied that it was as good as it was going to get, Brett had drained it once more and stored it in the shed. It would receive its real test the next day. The house was empty as he entered it, the fireplace blaze long extinguished, all of the lamps dark. He lit a candle just inside the doorway and then made his way to the bedroom, stopping at the bathroom along the way to relieve himself. Inside the bedroom he found Chrissie and Michelle both in the large bed, sound asleep, Chrissie on the left side of the bed, Michelle on the right. He stared at them for a moment, listening to their breathing, looking at their faces. He smiled as he watched them, feeling contentment for the first time since Jessica had pulled a gun on him that morning. He undressed slowly, putting his gun on the nightstand and dropping the rest of his clothing into the laundry hamper they used. Naked, he blew out the candle and then crawled into bed between his two women. They were both wearing pajamas - Chrissie a long T-shirt, Michelle a flimsy nightgown - but he enjoyed their warmth nonetheless as they both snuggled up to him from either side. The feel of their two bodies against him helped put his mind at ease and soon he drifted off into a dreamless sleep. ------- Paul tried to feed Jessica breakfast in the morning but the moment her hands were untied she picked up the tray and threw it at him. He ducked just in time to avoid having a plate of steaming eggs hit him in the head and then he and the two guards - Chrissie and Matt - wrestled her to the ground and put the restraints back on her. "You're not throwing me out of this town!" she screamed as they put the rope on her. "You can't!" "We can and we will," Paul said mildly. "And if you don't want your last hot meal, that's your problem. Come on. Let's go." She had to be dragged forcefully from the room since she refused to stand on her feet. Wordlessly Paul and Matt grabbed her by the armpits and pulled her down the hall and through the main entrance of the center. Chrissie trailed behind them carrying the backpack that they had loaded with twenty pounds of canned food for her. Throngs of people leaving the breakfast area for their work assignments watched this spectacle silently, several shaking their heads at the obvious insanity they were witnessing. "This is my town!" Jessica screamed as they pulled her bodily into the back of the Dodge Ram that served as the wood gathering truck. "My town and I won't leave it!" They slammed the tailgate shut once she was inside and Matt crawled in after her. He had to kneel down on her back to keep her from getting back up. "Jessica, for God's sake," he told her, pushing on her legs with his hands to keep from getting kicked, "have a little dignity why don't you?" "Fuck you," she screamed back. "Get off of me! I'm not leaving this town!" "You are," he said. "So just accept it." Chrissie climbed in the back of the truck to help Matt and Paul climbed in the front. He started the engine and pulled slowly out of the parking lot, heading through the streets to the main gate. Every person he passed looked at the truck, knowing who was in it and where it was going. Whenever the subject of exiling someone from town was discussed in Garden Hill, the term "walking across the bridge" was used. Indeed it had become the euphemism for exile. However, now that the time had come to actually do such a thing, it had been unofficially decided that sending Jessica away in that direction constituted cruel and unusual punishment. There were no towns for many miles on that side of the bridge and, as the helicopter expedition had proven, no people except for corpses and those who fed off of them. So instead of turning left from the main gate, the direction the bridge lay in, Paul turned right, heading for Interstate 80. They reached it three minutes later. The onramp to the westbound lanes was still intact and Paul utilized it, coming to a halt just at the point where the ramp met the freeway surface. He got out, leaving the engine idling, and opened up the tailgate. Chrissie and Matt got off of Jessica and pulled her out of the truck, trying to get her to stand on her feet. She refused to do this, slumping to the pavement while screaming obscenities. "Get up, Jessica," Matt said impatiently, reaching down and pulling her to her feet again. He held her up while Chrissie untied the knots in the rope. "Take your backpack," Paul said, trying to hand it to her. "I'm not leaving," she said. "You can't make me go!" With a shrug, Matt began to drag her down the freeway. Chrissie stepped up and grabbed her other arm to help him. Paul walked behind with the backpack. Ignoring her screams and curses, they pulled her thirty yards to the west, until they were standing next to the large sign that Brett had put up warning all stragglers that they were approaching a guarded area. They then let go of her. This time she remained standing. Paul tossed the backpack down at her feet. "It's time to leave, Jessica," he told her. "I wish it wouldn't have come to this, but it did. You need to go now and never come back." "I'm coming back in," she said. "You can't stop me from living in my own town. You can't and you won't." "You stay on that side of the sign," Paul told her. "The guards have orders to treat you as any other straggler now. If you set foot over the border, they'll fire warning shots at you. If you don't go away, they'll kill you." "They wouldn't dare," she said defiantly. As if to prove her point, she stepped back across the invisible line. "Get back," Chrissie said, pulling the .45 from her holster and pointing it at her. Beside her, Matt did the same. "You wouldn't shoot me," she said, taking another step forward. Chrissie stared at her menacingly. "I would do it in a second after all you've put me through since I've been here," she told her, keeping the gun leveled on her face. "You are no longer a citizen of this town. Now get back over on that side or I'll put one right between your eyes." Jessica, despite the insanity that she was dealing with, despite her refusal to see Chrissie as anything but a child, could plainly see that she meant exactly what she was saying. If she took another step into Garden Hill territory, she would be killed as an intruder. She stopped in her tracks. "Now go," Chrissie said, continuing to point her gun. "Pick up your backpack and go." "I don't want your fucking backpack," Jessica spat at her. "Fine," Chrissie said. "You can starve to death out there then. That's your prerogative." Jessica stared back at the three stony faces. "You'll all regret this," she told them. "I promise you that. You will regret doing this to me." No one said anything. After a long moment Jessica picked up the backpack and put it on her back. She turned and began to walk down the Interstate. She stopped and looked back at them once. "You'll regret this," she promised again, her voice shaky. "I swear to you." With that she began to walk again. Soon she was out of sight over the first rise. ------- As soon as he lifted off at 10:30 that morning, Brett was able to feel the difference the additional weight had on the chopper's handling. He had a squad of four people - Jason, and three of the new guards, Karen Hanglon, Cindy Mackles and Ron Wells - the combined total of which weighed in at 684 pounds, including their weapons and packs. This weight, combined with the one hundred pound pump and the forty-pound water tank slung from the bottom, made for nearly three hundred pounds more than he had carried on his first trip, quite enough to feel a difference. Jason sat proudly in the passenger seat, the radio helmet atop his head, a top-of-the-line video camera in his hands that he would use to record the recon aspect of the mission. The three newbies, their weapons tucked against their bodies, were crammed uncomfortably close together in the limited space of the cargo area. The presence of the pump and the fifty feet of inch and a half hose that went with it made their discomfort worse. Brett brought the aircraft up to 2000 feet above ground level and headed off to the west at sixty knots, following the narrow ribbon of Interstate 80 towards the town of Auburn. To the left the canyon and its still-raging floodwaters were clearly visible. To the right were the smaller peaks and valleys of the Sierras, the fringe area where the foothills became actual mountains. In front of them they could see that the Interstate had been washed out in many places, either by mudslides or by floodwaters coming down from higher up. There were cars and even a few large trucks parked alongside the road in several places. They kept half an eye out for Jessica. The guards atop hill 1519 had reported that she'd continued walking down Interstate 80 until she disappeared from their sight. Brett wondered if she was heading towards Auburn or cowering in fear somewhere near the fringes of the detection zone. Either way, he couldn't tell. All he knew for sure was that she had moved off the Interstate and into the woods. "It doesn't look like a vehicle could get more than five miles down the interstate before it becomes impassable," Brett said into his mouthpiece, his words being transmitted to Jason's earpiece. "That's why all the people that left in the beginning never came back. Even if they tried, they wouldn't have been able to get around the mud after it closed the road." "What do you think happened to the drivers of those cars and trucks?" Jason replied, his voice excited as he pointed the camera out the window and filmed the passing Interstate. Brett shrugged, reducing altitude just a little as the land continued to drop below them. "They probably followed the road until they couldn't go anymore and then wandered off into the woods. It's likely that most of them died the very first night after the impact, either from mudslides or lightening strikes. Do you remember how it was those first few days?" "I remember," Jason said slowly, remembering the terror of the flaming rocks and the hurricane winds. It had only been through blind chance that he, Chrissie, and their parents had lived long enough to meet the biker gang. The first town of any size that they came to was Colfax, some twenty miles from Garden Hill. It had once boasted a population of about 2000 and had served as an anchor for gas stations and fast food establishments along the Interstate. Now it looked abandoned and dead, half of the houses washed away or collapsed to rubble. Brett slowed up and reduced altitude as they came over the top of it, his sharp eyes looking for any sign of human habitation or for anything that might be useful. "You see anything?" he asked Jason. "It looks empty," he replied, moving the camera this way and that. "I can see a few dead bodies down there but nobody alive." "I wonder what happened to the people that lived there?" Brett said. "There must have been survivors. Did they all die of starvation, or were they killed?" "Maybe they ran out of food and headed off towards Auburn or something," Jason suggested. "Maybe," Brett said. Feeling a vague depression at the emptiness of Colfax, he brought the aircraft back up to altitude and put on the speed once more. They flew on and found the same emptiness in Meadow Vista, the next town down the line. This time there were more corpses lying about and even from the air it was plain that they were in advanced states of decomposition. Brett spent less time examining that town, instead finding something very interesting off to the north to look at. There were railroad tracks over there, the Southern Pacific line that led from Sacramento through the Sierra Nevada Mountains. These tracks roughly paralleled the interstate (or actually, it was the other way around, the SP line had been built decades before I-80 had even been thought of) and they had already flown over them several times on their trip. But now, sitting idle upon these tracks, were the remains of a freight train. It was sitting in an area where the tracks climbed up the side of a heavily forested hill. It appeared that the train had come to a stop and then had the front two-thirds of it washed down the hill by mud. The back third was still sitting there on the tracks, although some trees and minor falls of mud had come down upon it. "Jason," he said, slowing up and turning that way, "pan over to the right. Zoom in on those freight cars on the tracks." "Freight cars?" Jason said, turning that way. He looked at them through the viewfinder. "Do you think there's something we can use in there?" "There might be," he said, bringing them in closer. "You see those yellow cars with the circular spouts on top?" There were six of them lined up near the center of the remaining cars. "Yeah," Jason said, filming them. "Those are grain carriers. I'll bet you twenty bucks to a bucket of shit they're full of rice or wheat from the Sacramento area." "Really?" he asked. "How do you know that?" "Military training," Brett said. "Blowing up trains used to be one of my jobs as an Apache pilot. I never got to actually do it, but they made sure I knew how." "Will the grain still be good?" "That I don't know. If it was kept dry it probably will still be edible, if water got in, it'll be useless." "Don't you think someone would have already gotten into them?" he asked next. "Maybe," Brett allowed, "but maybe not. This is a pretty isolated section of tracking. Unless someone was in the air like we are, I'm not sure they would have even seen these cars. Not only that, it doesn't look like the easiest place in the world to get to on foot. Those mud slides in front of and behind it would be hard to get through." "Won't that keep us from getting to it too?" he asked. "Not if we lower people down from the helicopter," Brett said, feeling real excitement now. He put the helicopter in a low hover about three hundred yards from the train. "And look over there, behind the grain cars," he told Jason. "Those are standard boxcars. There could be anything in those. We definitely have to bring someone out to take a look. Zoom in on the doors of them and tell me if they're still shut." Jason did this. "They are," he said. "The cargo is probably still inside then," Brett said. "If someone would have pilfered supplies out of there, they wouldn't have bothered to shut all the doors again, would they?" "No," Jason replied, catching some of the excitement, "they wouldn't." "Pan left now," Brett said after all of the cargo carriers were filmed. "There are about ten tanker cars there toward the rear. I'm sure there's no food in them but try to get a legible shot of those numbers on the sides of them." "What numbers?" Jason asked, looking that way. "There's a whole bunch of numbers on the sides." "There should be a four-digit number stenciled in white in large numbers. That's the Department of Transportation HAZMAT number. Every tanker car, whether it's on a train or a truck, has to have one so that the contents can be identified in case of a spill." "Oh," he said, finally locating it on the first tanker. "I got it. It says twelve-oh-three. What's that?" "I think that's gasoline," Brett said, "but I'm not sure. Paul will have a copy of the book that tells you all that on his fire engine. Every emergency vehicle with the potential to respond to a spill carries one." Jason filmed all of the tank cars finding that all but four of them were marked with 1203. Behind the tank cars were two car carriers full of Toyota 4-runners. He didn't bother filming those. Behind this were two empty flat cars and then three more generic boxcars. "I got 'em all," he said when he was done. "Good lad," Brett said, taking his hand off the control long enough to give a thumbs up. He then pulled up and began heading off to the east again to see what else was in store for them. Had he passed over the ridge that the train was stalled upon, he would have found himself flying over one hundred and sixty armed men that were heading east towards Garden Hill. As it was however, neither Brett nor Jason nor the three guards crammed uncomfortably in the back saw the slightest sign of them. Nor did the marching men on the ground see or hear the chopper. The ridge kept between them and the low noise output provided by the NOTAR system saw to this. The eyes of Garden Hill and the military might of Auburn passed each other peacefully less than five miles apart with neither realizing it had happened. ------- Corporal Tim Hansen was leaning back against one of the sandbags that made up the defensive bunker on the east side of Auburn. He was smoking a cigarette from the dwindling supply and mulling over the idea of trading Cindy, his third wife, for Sally, Private Horn's first wife. The cigarette was somewhat stale with age but the little blasts of nicotine upon his brain that it provided helped him think. Granted, Sally was not as attractive as Cindy was, but she was different. A man got tired of tearing one off the same four pieces. Maybe he could arrange for a temporary swap for a while. That was an idea that was gaining quiet popularity in town these days; a kind of try before you buy policy. He would have to talk to Horn about... "Aircraft approaching!" Private Rimms, the young recruit from Grass Valley on his first assignment suddenly yelled, interrupting his musings. "What?" Hansen said, his eyes searching high in the sky in the direction he was looking. "Did you say aircraft?" "A helicopter," Rimms said, pointing. "One o'clock low. It has something underneath it!" Finally Hansen saw it. It was still very small with distance and there was no detectable sound as of yet, but it was unmistakably a helicopter. Slung beneath it by a rope or cable was a square device of some sort. "Holy shit," he said, picking up his radio. He turned to his men. "Weapons ready in case its hostile but hold your fire." The men all picked up their weapons and pointed them in the direction of the approaching aircraft even though it was still too far away for there to be a hope of hitting it. "Command central," Hansen said into his radio, "this is perimeter station 3. Level one alert! I repeat, level one alert!" Barnes himself, hearing the highest level of alert, came immediately on the radio. "What do you have, Perimeter 3?" he asked, his voice anxious. "Sir," Hansen said, "this is Corporal Hansen speaking from perimeter 3. I have a helicopter approaching my position from the east. It is a small, civilian type chopper with a square box of some sort hanging from the bottom of it by a rope or a cable. It's probably two miles out at this point, flying about two thousand feet." "Confirm a helicopter?" Barnes said, his voice registering shock. "That is affirmative, sir, a helicopter. It's heading right towards us." ------- "Okay, we got something here," Brett said as they approached Auburn. From their height they were well above the two protective hills and able to see into what remained of the town. To the north was nothing but a floodplain with a few buildings sticking up out of it. To the south of the interstate however, was a good portion of town with the tiny figures of people clearly visible walking back and forth on the streets. As of yet they were still too far out to tell sex or age. "I can see people walking around out there." Jason, peering through the camera lens, zoomed in as close as the optical setting would allow. "There's a bunch of them," he said. "They don't seem to know we're here yet." It was then that Brett, whose view was not magnified but who did enjoy the advantage of taking in everything at once, spotted the defensive emplacements along the Interstate. He slowed up and veered the chopper slightly to the left. "I've got defenses on top of those hills in front of us," he told Jason. "Zoom in on them and tell me what you see. Be sure to record." "Got you," Jason said, swiveling his head that way. He looked them over, verbalizing what he was seeing. "Looks like a sandbagged emplacement on top of each of those hills. I got three people in one, two in the other, and they're all pointing guns at us. Looks like assault rifles." "Are they shooting?" Brett asked, bleeding off a little more speed and angling further to the south. "Negative, no muzzle flashes. They're just pointing them." ------- Barnes ran outside as fast as he could, accompanied by his staff sergeant and two of his officers who had been in for a briefing. Barnes carried a portable radio set to the command channel and all of them carried automatic weapons. The moment they were out in the open they began scanning the sky, looking for the mysterious helicopter. They spotted it almost immediately, at a near hover off to the southeast. "Listen up, everyone," he said to his guards through the radio, all of who would now, because of the level one alert, be sighting in on the aircraft. "Hold your fire unless they do something hostile. I repeat, hold your fire unless they provoke us. That helicopter is something we could really use around here." No one acknowledged but all the same he knew they had heard him and would follow his directions. "Hansen," Barnes said into the radio, "do you have an ID on it yet?" "I'm looking at it through the binoculars, sir," came his voice a moment later. "It's a highway patrol helicopter, the same one that used to patrol around here I think. It's one of those quiet ones that they came out with a few years ago. It's less than six hundred yards from us and I can't hear it at all. No external weapons visible. The thing hanging from the hook appears to be a steel container of some sort, probably empty based on the way it's swinging back and forth in the wind." "Copy that," Barnes said. "Continue to hold your fire and keep an eye on it. If they approach I want you to try to wave them down. Try to get them to land here." ------- "I got people with guns now," Brett said, his eyes tracking tiny figures running from several of the buildings and taking up defensive positions. "It looks like they know we're here." "I'm filming 'em," Jason said, panning and zooming madly. Brett let the chopper drift a little closer, still staying well clear of the defensive emplacements but wanting to get better shots of the town. As soon as he began to move that way the guards in the bunkers stood up and started waving at them, making gestures that they should land. "They're waving us down," Jason said, zooming in on that. "I see it," Brett said. "Should we do it?" Jason asked. "Maybe they've got food we can trade or something." "Maybe. Or maybe they're dangerous. You can see better than I can, are those cammies they're wearing?" "Yes." "Cammies and assault weapons make me a little nervous," Brett said. "I'm gonna skirt this town for now and we'll talk about it with Paul and the others when we get back. Keep filming as I go around. Get as much as you can, particularly any weapons or other emplacements." "Okay," Jason said. ------- "They're moving off to the south, sir," Hansen's voice said a moment later, unnecessarily since Barnes could clearly see that. "They ignored our attempts to wave them in." "Continue to hold your fire," Barnes said, watching as the tiny helicopter moved silently away over the canyon. "They may be back at some point. Maybe they'll land the next time." "Continuing to hold fire," was the reply. ------- Brett flew slowly over the canyon and its raging waters, staying well clear of the bridge, which he was surprised to find still standing. Utilizing his military mind he examined the terrain and tried to think where he would put a bridge emplacement if he were in charge of Auburn defense. After a moment's thought he decided on the tall hill on the far side of the bridge, basically the same place he had put it in Garden Hill. With that in mind it took him less than ten seconds to spot their camouflaged lookout bunker. "I have an emplacement on the big hill on the south side of the canyon, just east of the bridge," he told Jason. "Get some shots of it and tell me what's there." "Right," Jason said, swinging that way. It took him a little longer to find it but finally he did and zoomed in. "Looks like two people in there," he said. "Both have assault weapons that they're pointing at us, both in cammies." "Okay," Brett replied, nodding. "Let's give them a wide berth and then swing along the south side of the town as we pass. Keep filming." Brett flew slowly - less than twenty knots - but it still took them only three minutes to pass clear of the town of Auburn. On the way out they were able to spot and film the bunkers that guarded the west side of the town as well. "What do you think?" Jason asked as he lowered the camera and took a few deep breaths to try to clear the nausea that looking through the viewfinder while in flight had caused. "They've got their shit together down there," Brett said, putting on a little more speed. "Maybe a little more together than we do. And they have a hell of a lot more people and guns than we do too." "Is that good or bad?" Brett took his eyes off the view before long enough to look at his companion. "It could be either," he said. "It could be either." ------- They reached the Sacramento Valley six minutes later. The foothills of the Sierras came to a sudden end and they were looking at brown water stretching off to the west, north, and south as far as they could see. The surface of this water was not smooth by any means. It was cluttered with floating debris of all shapes, forms, and sizes, everything from tree branches to lumber to tin cans. In addition to the debris there were thousands of human and animal corpses bobbing around, most near the end of the decomposition cycle. The stench was so strong that they could smell it even from two thousand feet in the air. "Jesus," Jason mumbled, staring downward in awe through the viewfinder. "Look at all of the bodies." "About a million people lived in Sacramento County," Brett said. "About six hundred thousand in San Joaquin County. All of them died when the water came in." Jason said nothing else, knowing that Brett's wife and daughter were probably among the floating bodies, although much further to the south, and that that was preying on his mind. Brett banked gently to the left, turning them to almost a due south heading. He stayed out over the water about half a mile from the point where the foothills rose up out of it. "How much water is down there?" Jason asked after a few minutes of staring at it. "A lot," Brett said, his eyes looking straight ahead. "The Central Valley is about four hundred miles long from north to south and about sixty miles wide. All of it will be flooded now thanks to the rains draining down out of the mountains." "What about on the other side? Is this the coastline now?" "The coast mountains will still be poking up," Brett said. "But everything on the other side of them will be washed away from the tidal waves I would think. San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Monterey, they're probably nothing but mud flats now." "Christ," Jason said, looking off towards the horizon. "That one little comet really did a number on us, didn't it?" "It really did," he agreed sadly. ------- Brett spotted the twin black ribbons of Highway 50 rising out of the water and into the hills a few minutes later. He turned back to the east when he was directly above them, carefully avoiding a radio tower that was miraculously still standing just on the edge of the Central Sea. Two miles from the shoreline was the town of El Dorado Hills, a bedroom community for the Sacramento region and the town that Paul had advised him to keep an eye out for. Like most of the other foothill and mountain communities, landslides or flooding had flattened most of the buildings but some of the town remained standing. Like Garden Hill, there were several walled subdivisions full of expensive houses dotting the landscape. Unlike Garden Hill, there was absolutely no sign of people. El Dorado Hills appeared to have been abandoned. At the same time, something about the town was telling Brett that it was different than the other dead towns they had come across. He could not put his finger on just what it was, but his instincts were being jigged by something. He kept clear of the actual town but slowed up considerably as they passed. "Get a good record of this place," he told Jason. "Why?" Jason asked. "There's nothing there. It's about as empty as can be." "Just do it," Brett said. With a shrug, Jason did it, filming every inch of what was still standing and then panning out to the surrounding area to get that as well. Five minutes later they were back over familiar ground. The destroyed town of Cameron Park loomed ahead of them and beyond it, its rich airport. Brett circled several times around the airport, Jason and the troops in the back keeping a sharp lookout for anything amiss. They saw nothing but what they expected to see. The airport and the surrounding terrain looked the same as it had two days before. Brett made the decision to take them down. He descended slowly until he was hovering right over the fueling area. Inch by inch he decreased his altitude until the tank was resting on the ground. Though he couldn't see this happening, he was able to feel it when forty pounds of weight was suddenly removed from the aircraft. Jason, looking out through his open door, confirmed the touchdown visually. Brett pulled the release latch that opened the cargo hook and allowed the rope holding the tank to fall free. "It's down and safe," Jason confirmed, bringing his head back in and closing the door. "Okay," Brett said. "Let's take one more pass around and then we'll set it down. Be ready for anything down there." "Ready for anything," Jason repeated. He looked back behind him at the three newbies. "Lock and load, guys," he yelled loudly enough for them to hear over the engine noise. And then, by example, he flipped the safety off on his weapon and jacked one into the chamber. ------- "Where did that chopper come from?" Barnes asked the assembly of officers in the room. "That is the question that we have to address." It was an hour after the flyby had occurred and Barnes had gathered the two remaining platoon commanders he had left in town - Lieutenants Corban and Smith - for a meeting on the ramifications of what they had seen. "It came from the east," said Corban, a dark haired neo-nazi who thought that Timothy McVeigh had been framed. "That means Garden Hill, Blue Canyon, or Truckee." "No," said Smith, a former naval officer aboard a fast frigate. "We know from Bracken's recon trip that Garden Hill didn't have a chopper. I hardly think he could have failed to note a helicopter in the town. That chopper was based at Cameron Park before the comet. I bet that's were it came from." "But it came from the east!" Corban insisted. "Cameron Park is to the southwest!" "So they went north and flew along the canyon before they got to us," Smith said. "Just because it flew in from that way doesn't mean that's where it came from. Who the hell do you think was flying it if not for the pilot that flew it before the comet? It had to have come from Cameron Park!" "Either way," Barnes said, silencing both of them just by talking, "we have to find out. That chopper and its pilot are perhaps the most valuable things left in this region, more valuable than food even. We need to get our hands upon it, not just so we can utilize it ourselves but so we can keep others from utilizing it against us. We must stop at nothing to get our hands upon it. We must sacrifice men to take it if that is necessary and we must destroy it if we can't take it. "Our mission for the near future has just changed, men. Once our battalion returns from Garden Hill we will concentrate all of our efforts upon finding that machine and its pilot. Nothing else will take precedence until that is done." ------- "Okay," Jason, the videographer, said as the section with the train cars started to play. He was sitting at the front of the conference table next to the television set that Paul had utilized during Jessica's trial the previous night. He held the video camera in his hands and was using the controls to fast forward and rewind sections for Paul, Brett, and Michelle. The camera was wired into the TV so that its images could be seen on the large screen. It was two hours after the mission had ended, an hour before dinnertime. The helicopter was sitting safely back in the parking lot outside and the tank containing 250 gallons of jet fuel - a tank that Brett had neatly landed atop a wheeled pallet that Paul had built - was resting safely in the maintenance shed. After dropping off the tank and refueling from it, Brett had flown back to Cameron Park alone to pick up the four troops he had been forced to leave behind due to weight concerns. Though absolutely nothing had happened to Jason, Karen, Cindy, and Ron while they had been alone and isolated down there, it had been a long hour and half for everyone concerned. No one liked to leave their people hanging in the wind in an isolated place, nor did anyone particularly like to be left there. As a reward for the successful mission Paul had opened up the intoxicant supply room for the benefit of the returning troops. Currently Ron, Cindy, and Karen were utilizing one of the empty storage rooms to play a game of quarters with tequila shots. Brett, though he longed to join them, was abstaining for now so he could give his debriefing and discuss some of the matters at hand. He, like everyone else in the room, including Jason, was sipping from a warm bottle of beer as the video played. In front of him was a small pile of marijuana that he had carefully crunched up with a small pair of scissors. He was trying to roll a joint but was not having a lot of luck since it had been more than sixteen years since he had last attempted such a thing. "Give me that shit," Michelle said to him after the third paper ripped in half while he was twisting it. "Fucking cops don't know how to roll a decent hooter." She pulled the pile over to her and began expertly constructing a fat one. "I didn't know you knew how to do that," Brett told her, watching her fingers go through the motions. "I'm a writer," she said. "We all smoke dope. It's a law. Where do you think that some of this shit came from? I turned over at least an ounce when we gathered supplies." Paul, watching the exchange, laughed a little and then turned his attention back to the television set just as the view began to pan over the train cars. There was no sound since all they would have heard would have been the engine noise and the picture was a little jerky but the zoom worked admirably. "You were right, Brett, those are grain carriers and the lids are still on." "Will the grain still be good though?" Michelle asked after sealing shut her creation with saliva. "That's the real question." "Those containers are relatively airtight," Brett said, "but they're not vacuum sealed or anything. There's probably going to be a little mold in there after all this time. Maybe even weevils or some other vermin." "But we should be able to salvage some of it, shouldn't we?" Michelle said, holding out her hand to Paul and miming the act of operating a lighter. "We should," Paul said, fishing out his Bic disposable and handing it across. "And a little mold wouldn't hurt us anyway. If it comes down to starving or getting a few bugs in the food, I'll have to go with the bugs every time." While Michelle lit up the joint and took a tremendous hit of it, Jason slowed the speed of the tape as the first of the cargo carriers came into view. "They're still locked shut," Brett said, taking the joint as it was passed to him. "There could be anything in there, anything at all from canned food to auto parts to boxes of condoms from the latex factory in Oakland. We need to fly some people out there to go down and take a look." He took a large hit and then passed the joint on to Jason. Jason looked at it for a moment, feeling decidedly strange to be offered such a thing by an adult, but finally, figuring it was an honor, he took it and sucked some up. "I agree," Paul said, holding out his hand as the joint came his way. "I could rig up some of the vertical rescue supplies from the fire engine so that people can be lowered down from the helicopter. A pair of bolt cutters and channel locks should be enough to get those doors open." "Do I hear you volunteering for the job?" Brett asked with a smile. Paul sucked up his hit and put an amused grin upon his face. He had been neatly trapped. He passed the joint back to Michelle and then exhaled a plume of smoke. "I guess I walked right into that one, didn't I? Yeah, I guess I can do it. I'm terrified of heights, but I'm the only one who knows how to operate the ropes and pulleys." "You're scared of heights?" Jason asked. "But you're a fireman." Paul shrugged. "Most of the time we stay on the ground. Part of the academy is that we all have to climb to the top of the ladder-truck aerial. That's 110 feet up. They had to threaten to dismiss me before I finally did it. And even then I barfed halfway up." "A fireman who's afraid of heights and a cop who can't roll a joint," Michelle said. "What a strange group we have here." They all had a laugh and Jason, after taking another hit, advanced the film to the part where the tanker cars came into view. Paul had a small orange book in front of him and he opened it as Jason paused on the first HAZMAT number: 1203. He flipped through and found the entry in less than a minute. "Gasoline," he announced. "Just like you thought, Brett. What else do we got?" "One-nine-nine-three," Brett read as the next group came into view. "Hang on," Paul said, flipping through a few pages. "I guess jet fuel would be a little too much to ask for, huh?" Brett said. "Apparently so," Paul said, putting his finger on the entry. "It's diesel fuel, probably from the same refinery. That could come in handy if we can find a way to get our hands on a generator of some sort. If nothing else it'll keep the fire engine running. What's next?" The last three cars were marked with the number 2373, which Paul identified as diethoxymethane. "What the hell is that?" Michelle wanted to know. "Beats me," Paul said. "Let me look up what the book has on it." He flipped through the pages for a few minutes, referencing a different section. "It just says it's a flammable liquid with a low flash-point. It doesn't say what it's for. We'll have to do some more research on this one." By the time they looked at the last of the cargo carriers and speculated on just what might be inside of them, the joint was nothing more than a roach and they were all feeling quite pleasant. Jason then fast-forwarded the tape until the footage from Auburn began to come into view. Of course by that point every person in town knew that a large community of people had been found in the neighboring township, but it was quite different to hear about such a thing and to actually see photographic evidence of it. Paul and Michelle watched with rapt attention as the first set of bunkers came into view. "You can see," Brett narrated, "that they are fairly well set up in the defense department. Those are sandbagged emplacements that are constructed considerably better than the ones we have. They could withstand a prolonged artillery barrage with those. You'll also note that they all have assault rifles. My guess is that there was a gun store in town that they raided after the impact." "There was a gun store," Paul said. "Auburn Bait and Guns. It was where a lot of the Garden Hill men used to get their shit." Brett nodded. "There was also a sheriff's station in town, was there not?" "Yes," Paul agreed. "Auburn is the county seat. The main office was there." "That means that there's a good chance they have some fully automatic weapons as well if they were able to get to that building before it got washed away or whatever." While everyone considered that, the tape rolled on, showing closer views of the emplacements and then shots from inside the town itself. "Look there," Paul said, peering at the tiny figures of people moving here and there through the streets. "Those are all women walking back and forth. At least it looks like they are. You can just make out the long hair and the uh..." He looked uncomfortably at Michelle. "The tits?" she said, smiling. "Uh... yeah," he said, laughing a little at his own embarrassment. "The tits. And do you notice something about them?" "None of them are carrying guns," Jason said. "They're all carrying firewood or water buckets or other things, but none of them are armed." "Right," Paul said. "It looks like only the men have the firearms." They continued to watch the video, rewinding it and fast-forwarding it again and again as they approached and then skirted the town. They watched as the troops, reacting to an alarm raised probably by the emplacement crews, came rushing out into the street to take cover. All of the troops seemed to be male. There was a small margin for error of course, not every figure was in focus enough to tell, but it certainly appeared that what they suspected was true. "So what does that tell us about this place?" Brett asked as Jason halted the tape again. "It seems, based on what we see here, that they have a woman to man ratio that is similar ours. But there, they are not utilizing their women as soldiers. Why not?" "They don't trust them to do that," Michelle said. "I don't want to draw any hard conclusions based on this few minutes of video taken from a mile away, but it seems to me that, at the very least, we are talking about a society that is vastly different then what we have. Are they doing this just because they have enough men to spare that they don't need to arm up the women, or are all of those women captives there? We have no way of knowing." "So the question we have to answer about this place," Paul said, "is whether or not we should attempt to make contact with them. By initiating contact we put ourselves at risk of being attacked or captured. We risk losing Brett and the helicopter if he should land there like they were inviting him to do. Offsetting this risk is the chance that they may have trade goods we can swap." "I don't think that I should land that chopper within reach of them under any circumstances," Brett said. "It's too valuable of a commodity to risk like that. Someone in that town has a military mind. Only someone with training would have been able to set up defenses like we saw. Someone with a military mind will realize the potential of a helicopter and will do anything to get his hands on it. If we do decide to make contact with them, and I'm inclined to suggest that we don't, then we should do it in some other manner besides just landing there." "I can see your point," Paul said, lighting a cigarette. "We don't risk Brett or the chopper no matter what. But should we establish ties with Auburn? They are a relative rarity in these days - a functioning society that is managing to keep itself fed - so should we reveal our existence to them?" "I don't think we should," Michelle said. "I see more danger signs by looking at this video than I do encouraging ones. They have more population than we do and they're better armed. We have some evidence that women are not treated the same as men. I think that for the time being we should just leave well enough alone." "My feelings exactly," Brett echoed. "That place gave me the creeps. I think we should avoid contact with them until such time as it becomes absolutely necessary. And in the meantime, we should do more recon of them to try and get a better feel for the threat they represent." "How would you do more recon?" Paul wanted to know. "If they keep seeing the chopper fly over them every day, they're going to start getting suspicious. If they are a threat and they start perceiving us as one, then it won't be long before they start trying to set a trap for you. How easy would it be to shoot you down?" "Quite easy with automatic weapons as long as I got into range," Brett said. "But I would suggest that Auburn never see that helicopter again if we can help it. I can do recon after dark." "After dark?" Michelle said. "You can't fly that thing at night! How would you see where you're going?" "With the FLIR pod," he said. "It's not a very effective tool for navigation but if I know the direction to Auburn and keep the aircraft above the altitude of any hills or peaks between here and there, I can get close enough to get us some good shots in infrared. They won't be photographic quality of course, but if I can hover just outside of detection range, they'll be detailed enough to tell the difference between males and females, to tell what sorts of guns they have and to identify occupied buildings versus unoccupied ones. And if they don't know I'm there we'll get a much better picture of what their normal routines are." "That sounds awfully dangerous," Paul said. Michelle nodded enthusiastically. "Well, it's not quite as safe as flying on a commercial airliner, I'll give you that, but I wouldn't have suggested it if I didn't think I could pull it off. There are old pilots and bold pilots but no old bold pilots. That's what I was taught when I learned this business and that's the motto I've always followed. This is a little bold but it's not stupid. It's necessary." "I suppose," Paul said doubtfully. "You're the expert, not me." "I can do it," he said. "I'll plan on doing that first thing after we solve the fuel storage problem." Michelle obviously had her own thoughts about this but she kept them to herself for the moment. Jason had some thoughts as well - he wanted to go along on that mission - but he did the same. With the Auburn discussion run into the ground they turned the video back on and watched the view of the Sacramento Valley for a few minutes. Jason had done an admirable job of capturing the essence of what they had seen. First he had filmed a long-range shot showing the water stretching off into the distance. Then he had filmed close-ups of the debris and the bodies bobbing in the water. Everyone was strangely silent as they saw what had become of some of the most fertile land on earth. The last shots on the video were the views of the abandoned town of El Dorado Hills. Jason moved to turn the camera off but Brett told him to let it run. "It's just an abandoned town," Jason said. "What's the big deal?" "There's something not right there," Brett said. "I don't know what it is, but El Dorado Hills is different than Colfax and Meadow Vista." "Different how?" Paul asked as the picture showed the walled subdivisions with the neat, geometric rows of houses. Brett shook his head, trying to lock in on the fleeting sensation at the tip of his brain. There were winding, paved streets, dying lawns, the occasional flooded swimming pool. A few parks dotted the landscape here and there and there were a few vehicles sitting in some of the driveways. Aside from that, there was nothing. "I don't know," he repeated. "But there's something." It was Michelle who figured it out. She had been staring at the screen as intently as everyone else had when suddenly it came to her. "There's no bodies," she said. "That's what's different. In Meadow Vista and Colfax there were bodies lying around. There aren't any down there!" "That's it," Brett said, the light bulb going on. "There aren't any dead there! Why not?" Now that it had been pointed out, everyone wondered why they hadn't seen it before. Not everyone seemed to feel that this was significant however. "So there's no bodies?" Jason asked. "What's the big deal about that?" "I must say," Paul said, "that I don't really see the significance." "It means that the fate of El Dorado Hills, whatever that might be, is different than that of the other towns," Michelle said. "What happened to the people there? Did they all die inside their houses? That's not what happened in the other towns." "We don't know what happened in the other towns," Paul pointed out. "Why did the people in Meadow Vista and Colfax die outside? If you were starving to death and about to succumb, why would you leave your house? Why wouldn't you just stay inside? You can't make some kind of inference about El Dorado Hills just because you don't see dead bodies there." The discussion went on for quite some time, until they heard people starting to fill the gym downstairs for dinner. They reached no firm conclusions on the matter. It was only later, as he was walking home for the evening with Chrissie and Michelle, his mind starting to come out of the marijuana haze, that Brett realized what it was about the town that was really jigging him. Except for the lack of people on the streets, El Dorado Hills looked eerily the same as Garden Hill. It looked like a town that was occupied and being cared for to some degree. ------- Sherrie Philo, the woman who had been shot in the leg during the battle, was still staying in the same room she had been originally brought to, the room that Dale had died in. The reasoning behind this was simple. Sherrie couldn't walk or get out of bed. Paul had installed a traction splint - a bulky, metal device designed to keep the broken ends of the femur from slipping or grating together - on her shattered leg. Since Sherrie required around the clock care in order to urinate or take care of other bodily functions, the community center was the logical place for her to stay since there was someone there twenty-four hours of every day. Paul took care of most of the medical matters for Sherrie. He checked the status of her leg every few days and saw to it that she took her blood thinner pills. He gave her codeine tablets or Tylenol when she was in pain and Valium or Prozac tablets when she was in the midst of a severe depression (as she was prone to these days). The other aspects of her care, bathing, dressing, and of course giving and retrieving bedpans, fell mostly upon Janet, Paul's wife. She would often come up to check on her during her shifts in the day care center downstairs and would arrange to have one of the female community center guards take care of this during the night. Both Paul and Janet were gratified to see that Sherrie had finished her dinner this night, something that she had never done during the first few weeks of her convalescence but that was becoming more frequent as time went on. "Good girl," Paul told her, grabbing a seat next to her and sitting down. "I'm glad you're finally listening to me about maintaining your nourishment." "I'm finally getting my appetite back," she said softly. She looked up at Paul. "Why are your eyes so red?" she asked him. "Never mind," Paul said with a chuckle. "It's time for your calcium pill." "He was helping the helicopter crew celebrate their mission," Janet said, giving him a wifely look. "It seems they thought a little herbal stimulation would help them debrief." Sherrie giggled a little, something else that she was starting to do with increasing frequency. "I guess your appetite's been pretty good today too, huh?" "He did seem to enjoy his dinner quite a bit," Janet said. "All right, all right," Paul said, opening the vitamin bottle he carried and fishing one out. "Enough nagging. Let's get the pill down, shall we?" "I guess we shall," Sherrie said, taking it and washing it down with the warm, powdered lemonade that she had with dinner. "So how's the leg today?" Paul asked her, turning serious. "You think those bone ends are coming together yet?" "God, I hope so," she said. Paul had promised her that the moment he was confident the bone was knitting together he would remove the traction splint and replace it with a rigid thigh cast of some sort so that she could walk with the aid of crutches. "You can't imagine how anxious I am to go out and see the rain again. You can't imagine how much of a luxury it is to pee in a toilet." "Ahh, the little things in life," Paul said, making her grin. "Let's take a look at it." Sherrie pulled back the sheet that covered her, revealing one of the plain cotton nightgowns that she was perpetually dressed in. Janet helped her change them whenever she bathed her. The hem of it was just above her knees but Paul, without hesitation or embarrassment, grabbed hold of it and hiked it up to her upper thighs. Sherrie's right leg, the uninjured one, was very nicely shaped and toned. Before the comet she had been the stereotypical trophy wife to a gynecologist and had worked out obsessively in order to maintain the shape that had allowed her to snag such a catch in the first place. Since her injury she had been exercising that leg three times a day by wrapping a bungee cord around her foot and pushing against the resistance to keep it from atrophying from disuse. The skin was pale of course, as was everyone's these days in the absence of both sunlight and tanning salons, but it was clean shaven and smooth, the work of Janet and her razor. The left leg was a sharp contrast. It was surrounded by the stainless steel braces of the splint that held it in place and the muscle tone was slack and soft. A large circular scar marred the top of the thigh marking the spot where the .30 caliber bullet she had been shot with had exited. Paul had sewn the wound shut the first day using thread and a needle that he had sterilized with boiling water. Though it had kept her from bleeding or getting a staph infection, it had not healed up very prettily. Paul placed his hand on the scar, feeling the warmth of her flesh. He probed gently with his fingers, trying to palpate the femur beneath. As he concentrated on the sensations beneath his hand, his eyes could not help but notice that Sherrie's legs were slightly apart and that she was not wearing any panties. The dark shadow of her black pubic hair was plainly visible beneath the hem of her robe. He looked away uncomfortably, trying to concentrate his vision on her leg. Though he had seen her several times in all of her glory during the first few days of her injury, it was different somehow now that she was healing and fully awake. "What do you think?" Sherrie asked him, pretending not to notice where his eyes had just been. "It seems like you got one continuous bone under there," he said. "The question is whether it's knitted together enough that it won't just snap again once I take off the splint. I think that another three or four days here should do it." "Three or four days?" she whined. "My God, I'm going crazy in here." "If I let you go too early and you re-break that femur, you're going to end up right back in here for another month," he told her. "And there's no telling whether or not it will grow back together as well the next time." "Better safe than sorry," Janet said. "I suppose," Sherrie sighed. She reached up to pull her nightgown back down now that the exam was over. Paul, unable to help himself, cast one more look at her pubic hair before she hid it. Again Sherrie noticed but pretended not to. The three of them talked for a few minutes, mostly about the helicopter mission and the discovery of other survivors in Auburn, things that Sherrie had heard rumor of but had not had confirmed as of yet. She asked if Brett or anyone in the helicopter had seen Jessica during the mission. "No," Paul said, looking at her a little suspiciously. Sherrie had once been a member of Jessica's inner circle, both before and after the comet. "By the time he took off she was off the Interstate. We don't know where she is now. All we know is that she hasn't tried to come back into town." Sherrie nodded slowly. "She was insane towards the end," she told them. "Absolutely insane. When I heard those gunshots yesterday morning I knew it was her doing it, I just knew. Thank God she didn't hurt anyone." "She hurt plenty of people," Paul said. "She's a big part of the reason you got shot." "No," Sherrie said, shaking her head strenuously. "She didn't get me shot. I got me shot. Don't try to push my stupidity off on her. I'm the one that jumped up and tried to run, I'm the one who is to blame for me laying here." Paul and Janet both looked at her for a moment, both surprised by the ferocity of her tone. "I'm sorry," Sherrie said, seeing their looks. "I've had plenty of time to do soul searching since I've been laying in here, more time than I ever wanted. At first I blamed everyone for what happened to me. I blamed Brett, I blamed Chrissie, I blamed Jessica, I blamed the comet, I blamed God, I blamed everyone and everything but myself." She sighed. "But none of that is true. I made a decision out there. I chose to get up and run while people were shooting at us. I panicked and now I'm paying the consequences. I'm not the same person that did that. I was a shallow bitch before, looking down my nose on everyone because it made me feel better. I used to look down on both of you, did you know that? I used to think I was better than you because I had been married to a doctor and you Janet were nothing but a teacher who had to work for a living and you Paul were nothing but a civil servant living off tax dollars." "Sherrie," Janet said, "you don't have to..." "I do," she interrupted. "Just let me say this." "Okay," she said softly. "I was wrong about both of you. You two thought me a snob, and I was one. You two had no reason to care about me or like me and I'm sure that you didn't. But you two have taken care of me from the moment I was dragged in here. Paul, you've fought to keep me alive, Janet, you've helped me pee and helped me wipe my butt. You two did this even though I was a bitch to you both, even though I sided with Jessica against you at every turn, even though I've given you no reason whatsoever to give a damn about me." "It's what we do, Sherrie," Paul said, patting her leg gently. "Despite how we felt about you, you're still a human being. Did you think we were going to let you die if we could prevent it?" "You don't understand," she said, a tear running down her face. "I wouldn't have done the same for you. I wouldn't have come in here and emptied bedpans if you had been the one shot, Janet. I wouldn't have come up here every hour and made sure you were still breathing if it had been you, Paul. My way was to let someone else handle it. Your way is to do it. I was sadly wrong about who was better than whom." "Nobody's better than anyone around here," Paul told her. "We're all just people and that's how everyone should treat each other." "I'm learning that now," she said. "I'm learning it. And I want to thank both of you for everything you've done for me. You two have literally saved my life." Paul leaned down and kissed her on the cheek. "It seems like it was a life worth saving, wasn't it?" ------- Jason, not used to imbibing in alcohol and marijuana, particularly not after a stressful mission into potentially hostile territory, was dozing on the couch early that evening. He was bundled up in a blanket, sleeping peacefully four feet from the blazing fireplace when the sound of the front door opening awoke him. He yawned and looked at his watch, seeing that it was 6:30. Stacy was home right at her usual time. He smiled as he sat up, feeling his penis stiffen up in anticipation of a later sexual escapade. Since their first night together nearly a month before, he had learned much about the ways of pleasing a woman and had come to crave that pregnant body like a drug. Fortunately the raging hormones in Stacy made her just as horny and allowed her to keep up with the considerable demand. There was hardly a night that went by that they didn't make love at least once. "Jase," she called from the formal living room, "are you here?" "I'm here," he answered, putting his feet on the floor and standing up. He headed towards the front door, intending to meet her halfway to give her his customary hug and kiss of greeting. When he got there however, he discovered that she was not alone. Tina, her working companion from the cafeteria, was standing next to her, hanging her rain slicker on one of the hooks. "Hi, Jase," Stacy said, walking over and giving him a kiss on the mouth. The tip of her tongue slid out and touched his for just an instant. "Tina wanted to stop by and visit for a bit. I hope you don't mind." "No, not at all," Jason said politely, although he really wanted to be alone with his woman right now. "How are you doing, Tina?" "I'm fine," she said with a slight giggle. She seemed to be nervous for some reason although Jason could not think of a reason why this should be. Stacy waddled her way into the living room, Jason and Tina following behind her. He lit up a few lamps and candles, brightening the room up while the two women sat on either end of the small couch. Jason, after arranging the candles for best effect, started to sit down in the easy chair across from them. "No, no," Stacy said, patting the cushion next to her. "Come sit with me. I've missed you today. The only time I got to see you was at dinner." He hesitated for a minute, looking doubtfully at the cramped space between the two women. What was going on here? Finally, after another prompting from Stacy, he walked over and sat down where he was told. He pushed himself as closely to Stacy as he could but still his leg was touching Tina's. She looked at him a little nervously but otherwise didn't seem to mind. They conversed lightly for a little bit, Jason rehashing the tale of his trip that day in greater detail than he had shared with Stacy at dinner that night. He rested his hand gently upon Stacy's bulging stomach as he talked, occasionally feeling the strange sensation of the baby kicking at him. Both women seemed fascinated by the story and they often interrupted him to ask questions. "You see what he's doing out there while we're stuck in here making dinner and washing dishes?" Stacy asked. Her breasts rubbed softly against his shoulder as she said this, seemingly accidentally. "I should have signed up for guard detail," Tina said. "Maybe I still will. I'm taking your sister's gun class tomorrow. Maybe I'll do well enough to get a recommendation. I heard that Maggie got one from her. If Maggie can do it, so can I." "I'm sure you can," Jason said politely, wondering for the tenth or eleventh time just what Tina was doing here. Though the two women were close to each other, as coworkers in unpleasant assignments tended to get, she had never visited during the evening hours before. The former elementary school cafeteria worker was somewhat of a loner in town, rarely seen outside of the kitchen. "Do you think Tina's pretty?" Stacy asked a few minutes later. "Pretty?" Jason said slowly, doubtfully. His hesitation was not because she wasn't pretty. A light haired blonde in her mid-twenties, she was slightly chubby in a big-boned way but far from fat. Her face was very pretty with smooth, well-defined cheeks and eyes that were even bluer than Chrissie's. And she had enormous breasts, a double D cup at least. His hesitation was instead because it seemed a loaded question, full of potential pitfalls. Why would Stacy ask him something like that? Was it just a casual comment or was it something more? "Yes," Stacy said, rubbing her breast against him again. "She seems to think that men don't like her. I keep trying to tell her that she's wrong." "Stace," Tina said, blushing, obviously embarrassed. "You don't have to bring that up." "I'm just asking a man's opinion, Tina," Stacy said. "I think you've got a cute figure. And I'd kill for those boobs. I mean, look at the size of them. Mine are only half that size and I'm pregnant. Aren't those a nice rack, Jase?" Now Jason was the one embarrassed. "They're uh... very uh... nice," he stammered. "Isn't he cute when he blushes?" Stacy asked her friend. "That's why I love him so much." She shifted her gaze to Jason again. "Do you know that Tina hasn't been laid in more than five years?" Jason almost choked that time. "Uh... no... I didn't know that," he replied. "It's true," Stacy said sadly. "How could you stand it, Tina? It must be maddening." "It's not easy," Tina said softly. "She hasn't dated since she broke up with her husband five years ago," Stacy explained. "She told me all of this the other day and I was just shocked. I mean, I can't stand it if I have to go eight days without you. When you went to go get that chopper, I almost went insane." "You get used to doing without it after awhile," Tina told her. "But you always yearn for it, don't you?" Stacy asked. "Oh yes," Tina agreed. "That never goes away." Jason was now very confused. Why were these two women talking like this? Why were they sitting here telling him how long Tina had been without sex and asking him to rate her breasts? "Tina and I have been talking a lot over the last few days," Stacy said, leaning in a little closer to him, close enough for him to smell her skin. "And while we were talking, I had kind of... well... an idea." "An idea?" Jason asked, trembling a little. "Stace," Tina cut in. "Maybe this is a bad..." "Hush," Stacy told her, offering a wink. She turned back to Jason. "I thought that maybe you would be able to help her out a little bit with her... problem." "Help her out?" he croaked. "She needs some dick," Stacy said, dropping her hand down into Jason's lap. "And you just happen to have one. I don't mind sharing it with her." "Sh... sh... share?" he asked. Though his mind was having a difficult time processing what he was being told, the object they were discussing understood loud and clear. It began to stiffen up under Stacy's hand. "Only if you want to," she said. She smiled, giving him a squeeze. "I can feel that you're giving some serious thought to it." "But, Stacy..." he started. "I really don't mind, Jason," she told him, kissing his ear. "And if everyone likes it, maybe Tina can move in here with us. We can be like your sister and Brett and Michelle. That's the wave of the future in this town so we might as well accept it." "It's okay if you don't want to," Tina told him. She seemed to be upset. "I can't believe I let myself get talked into this." "He wants to," Stacy said, giving his cock a few more squeezes through his pants. "I can tell. Don't you, baby?" "Well... uh..." he stuttered, his mind reeling. Was he really being offered the opportunity to sleep with Tina? Was Stacy the one offering it to him? Was this a dream? "Well... uh... what?" Stacy asked. "Uh... sure," he finally spit out. "I mean, if everyone's really down with it, that is." Stacy smiled, kissing him softly on the lips. "We're down with it," she told him. "Aren't we, Tina?" Her eyes nervously took in the bulge in Jason's jeans. She licked her lips a few times. "I'm down with it," she finally said. "If you're sure you don't mind, Stace. I mean, this is so... weird." "It's a weird life these days," Stacy said. "Let me show you his cock, Tina. You'll like it." Jason felt her hands popping open the buttons on his pants one by one. Though like any fourteen-year-old he was very bashful about his private parts, he allowed her to open him up and push his pants and underwear down. He lifted his hips to facilitate this process. His erection popped out into the light, sticking upward, the head swollen and ready for action. Tina gasped a little as she saw it. "Isn't it beautiful?" Stacy asked, stroking it softly a few times with her fingers. "Yes," Tina breathed, her eyes shining. "Touch it," Stacy told her. "Go ahead. Play with it a little." Hesitantly, she reached out her hand and moved it towards him. She stopped for a second just inches away and then, after a few moments of thought, grasped him in her fingers. Jason moaned at the unfamiliar touch upon him. He could not believe he was actually sitting on his couch letting another woman touch him while Stacy encouraged it. "Jack him up and down a little," Stacy said, her own breathing starting to get heavy. Jason could see that her nipples were hard beneath her shirt. Tina did as she was told, sliding her hand up and down across his tender flesh, feeling him and stroking him. Soon he began to lift and lower his hips in response to her. "Suck him, Tina," Stacy said. "Put him in your mouth. You know you want to." Tina moaned a little, her eyes completely glazed over with lust now. She lowered her blonde head into his lap and he felt her wet lips and tongue surrounding his cock. She sucked softly at first, her hand continuing to move up and down upon him. "Ohhh," Jason said, looking at her head as it bobbed up and down. Stacy began to kiss his neck as Tina sucked. The sensation of two mouths upon him at once was almost more than he could bear. "Feel her titties," Stacy whispered into his ear. "Squeeze them." He reached out his hands and did as he was told, grabbing those massive mammaries through her shirt. They were soft and pliable and very heavy. Even through her clothing he could tell that her nipples were enormous. She twisted her chest into him, pushing them harder into his hands. Her mouth began to move faster upon his cock. Now that the line had been crossed, things moved a little quicker. Tina raised her head from his lap a few minutes later and whipped off her shirt, tossing it to the floor. Her breasts were contained in a large white bra with thick shoulder straps. She reached behind her and undid the clasp, setting them free. They sagged a little with the sheer weight but this did not detract from the aesthetic value of them in the least. Her nipples were indeed huge, the diameter of dimes and protruding nearly three-quarters of an inch from the areola. "Suck them," Tina told Jason, pushing them towards his face. "It's been so long since they've been sucked." He leaned forward, breaking free of Stacy, who had still been kissing his neck, and put his mouth upon the nearest one. He slurped at the nipple hungrily, tonguing it and sucking it. Tina groaned out her approval, her hand finding the back of his neck to encourage him to suck on. Stacy stroked his back with her hands as he did this. "Show her what I taught you," Stacy suggested excitedly. "Show her how you really make her feel good." Jason switched to the other breast for a bit and then, heading Stacy's advice, began to kiss his way downward across the pale flesh of her stomach. Her skin there was unlined - Tina had never given birth - and soft and smooth as silk. He licked and nibbled at her in various spots, raising goosebumps on her. When he got to her navel he ran his tongue all around it while his hands began working the buttons on her pants. Soon they were open and he tugged on them. She rose up and he pulled them from her, sliding them down her legs and off, leaving her only in panties that were soaked at the crotch. He pulled these down a moment later and found himself staring at her blonde bush. It was very thick, much thicker than Stacy's, and the odor was much stronger and deeper. He pushed her legs apart and then buried his face right in the middle of that hairy wetness, his tongue stabbing up inside of her. She moaned loudly and pushed her crotch harder into him. He licked her up and down, tasting her tart juices and then slid two fingers inside of her slit, just as Stacy had taught him. Soon, when she was bucking up and down, he was tonguing her large clit, making her cry out even more. It took a long time before she came. His tongue was starting to cramp and his lips were going numb before he was able to pull that first orgasm from her. But when it did release, it came with explosive force. Her legs closed around his head, squeezing him almost painfully and nearly cutting off his respiration. Her pelvis jerked up and down with such force that he had to struggle to keep his mouth upon her clit. When she finally came down from it, he was dizzy and out of breath, his mouth struggling with several stray hairs that had dislodged. Before he had a chance to do anything about this Tina's hands were in his armpits, pulling him upward atop her nakedness. Those massive tits pushed into his chest and his bare thighs pushed against her larger ones. "Fuck me," she panted at him, kissing him and shoving her tongue in his mouth. She seemed to get off on tasting her own juices, just like Stacy did. "Come on," she said, breaking the kiss and squirming beneath him. "I need it. Fuck me." "Yeah," Stacy said next to them. "Fuck her. Fuck her good." Jason grasped his cock in his hands and put it against her dripping slit. He pushed forward and sank into her in one stroke. All three of them gasped in pleasure at the penetration. As he began to thrust in and out of her, as her legs wrapped around him, he looked over for a moment and saw that Stacy had pushed her maternity pants down and was rubbing her red-haired pussy furiously as she watched them. "Fuck her, baby," she told Jason breathlessly. "Fuck her good. Fill her up." Thanks to his frequent couplings with Stacy he had learned a certain degree of control over his orgasm. That was fortunate because it took every ounce of willpower he had to keep thrusting long enough for Tina to come again. Watching his woman masturbate next to him while he fucked someone else was the kinkiest, most erotic thing that he had ever imagined. As soon as Tina's body began to jerk and shudder beneath him, that control slipped and he came explosively within her. When he rolled off of her a minute later, leaving her sweaty and dripping on the couch, Stacy grabbed him and pulled him over to her. She had taken off all of her clothes and her swollen, pregnant body was on complete display for both of them to see. "Now its my turn," Stacy said, pushing him back into the couch. While Tina and Jason both watched in astonishment, she dropped her head into his lap and sucked his cock, which was half erect and still wet with Tina's juices, into her mouth. It took less than three minutes of her sucking and licking him clean before he was back up to a complete erection. She then assumed one of her favorite positions. She sat on his lap, her back to his chest, as if he were an easy chair. This kept her large stomach from intruding upon the act. She reached between her legs and put him against her pussy, sinking down upon him. He began to push and pull within her, using strokes that he knew she liked, pushing her quickly towards her own orgasm. Tina watched them as they copulated less than two feet from her, still amazed that she had participated in such a perversion, still amazed that her friend Stacy had actually sucked on Jason's cock just seconds after it had plopped free of her own pussy. She had never been so turned on in her life. She opened her legs widely, putting one on the back of the couch, the other on the floor, displaying her sex for them. Continuing to fuck each other, they both looked at her, watching as her hands went to her slit and began to rub. Jason would come two more times that night, once in Stacy's pussy, once in Tina's sucking mouth. Though the two women both tasted each other on Jason's cock, neither one touched the other in any way. But before they fell into bed exhausted and sore, Jason snoring between them, both had thought about it. ------- Chapter 11 One of the features of the law enforcement package that had been installed in the MD-500 was a programmable VHF radio system that could transmit on nearly any frequency as long as the operator knew what that particular frequency was. As such, with the assistance of a manual from Paul's fire engine, Jason, sitting in the passenger seat of the chopper, was able to talk to Paul and Matt who were two thousand feet below listening to a fire department portable radio. Of course the VHF repeater that the fire department had used for its primary channels was out of action making those frequencies useless, but several direct frequencies, with a range of a mile or so, had been programmed into the portable. They were fourteen miles east of Garden Hill, just above a CalTrans road maintenance station that Brett had found during a recon flight the day before. Their mission for the day was to get a water truck that had been stored at the facility safely back to Garden Hill where it's large tank could be used to store jet fuel for the helicopter. Getting the water truck started had been the easy part of the operation. It had been a simple matter of installing two fully charged twelve-volt automobile batteries. The hard part was going to be navigation of the vehicle home. Two large slides and three washouts along Interstate 80 between Garden Hill and the station had ruled out the option of simply taking the freeway. Instead, they were using back roads to work their way home. Brett and Paul - by burning up an entire tank of fuel in the helicopter - had found a wildly circuitous route along two-lane mountain roads. It was a route that stretched miles out of the way and switched back upon its self several times, but that, after a trip of nearly fifty miles, would eventually drop them out on the Interstate just east of the cut that guarded the town. Now, as they were putting the plan into motion, Brett and Jason were flying just ahead of them to scout out the route and watch for unseen dangers. "Okay," Jason, speaking into his headset informed them, "you're coming up on the first turn now. It's just around the bend you're approaching. You're going to turn right and that will take you up a rise to a smaller road." "Copy that," said Matt's voice in his ear. "Turn right around the next bend." Brett pulled them into a hover as the orange truck below them completed the maneuver, watching until they were safely headed up the hill. He then brought them up a little higher and eased over the rise in question so he could take a look at the other side. Once they were there, Jason, who had a map laid out before him, gave them their next set of directions. This brought them to a twisting, turning road leading nearly up to the snowline, which began about 6000 feet. "I hope they don't trigger an avalanche," Brett said nervously, flying slightly behind them now. "Some of that snow up there is pretty thick." "They volunteered to chance it," Jason reminded him. "That wouldn't make me feel any better if they were buried alive," he replied. It had been three days since the discovery of Auburn and the strange community that existed there. The knowledge of all those guns and men less than forty miles to the west had stirred a near-fanatic burst of activity around Garden Hill. Some of the defensive improvements, which had been on hold in the excitement of acquiring the helicopter, had been placed back on the front burner. Chrissie, taking to her new job with gusto, was spending her every waking hour supervising the reinforcement of the hillside defenses, finishing up the training of those that had yet to go through the firearms class, and drilling the reaction force in how to deploy in the event of an attack. No longer were the Garden Hillians merely anticipating an untrained group of hunters like the last time trying to hit them, they were now being forced to consider that a hundred or more heavily armed men might suddenly come walking into their midst. As of yet it seemed an unlikely possibility at best - they had no evidence that the residents of Auburn even knew they existed - but the first attack had taught them that they had to anticipate unlikely possibilities as well as likely ones. While Chrissie and Michelle had been busy taking care of home defenses, Brett, Jason, and Matt, with the help of Paul, had been frantically trying to secure a fuel supply for the helicopter so they could begin using it to its full advantage. The problem of fuel storage needed to be solved first - thus the day's mission - before further recon flights of the surrounding area and possible recovery of the freight supplies on the train could be undertaken. There had been a furious debate the previous night on the wisdom of attempting to do what they were now doing. Brett had been firmly opposed to risking two men by driving a loud, clanking machine over those perilous roads just beneath huge accumulations of comet-caused snowfall. But none other than the two men who were volunteering to take the risk had overruled his objections. "You yourself have told us that we may as well not have the helicopter if we can't get and store fuel for it," Paul had argued. "We've been over every other possibility and this is the only way we're going to be able to store it. It has to be done." Matt, who was obviously no fan of being smashed to pieces by an avalanche, had been forced to agree with this logic. "This is the only tank we have available to us and we've scouted out a means to get it back here. You've determined that we can't cut it loose from the truck and fly it back here, right?" "Right," Brett had replied miserably. The tank, while light enough to be carried if empty, was simply too large and bulky. The drag caused by trying to pull it through the air would make the aircraft too unstable. "Then I guess our decision is made," Matt said. "Both Paul and I have been advised of the risks and have elected to go forth. No more discussion on the matter is necessary." And so now Brett, very much against his better judgment, was flying above as they entered the area directly below the snowline. "If those assholes get buried," he told Jason, "I'm going to hover right above them and yell, 'I told you so' through the fucking loudspeaker." "They'll be all right," Jason said, watching anxiously, although he had absolutely no evidence or experience upon which to base this statement. It was an agonizing twenty minutes as the orange truck crept slowly uphill on the slick, muddy road. Occasionally the back end would slide a little bit on a particularly slippery patch. Occasionally they would have to edge perilously close to a drop off so they could get around a mudfall or a crumbled section. "How are you doing down there?" Jason asked them from time to time. "We're hanging in there," Matt's voice, sounding strained, would come right back. Finally they reached the summit of the pass, where the highest danger of causing an avalanche lie. They did not pause or comment on their achievement. They only started down the other side. Soon they were well below the snowline once again and relatively out of that particular brand of danger. "You see, Brett," Matt's voice sounded in their headsets, its tone more than a little relieved. "Nothing to it." "Right," Brett replied, just as relieved. "Nothing to it. I'm scouting ahead." He flew forward for a few miles, checking on the next section of route as they continued to lumber down to the bottom of the hill. Jason, his rifle safed and resting next to his seat, peered through a pair of binoculars at the road below, looking for anything that might present a danger. He saw nothing but road and mud and the occasional dead body next to a dwelling. In the past few days Jason had once again become the subject of wild discussion in the town. He had become the second man in Garden Hill to openly live with two women and call both of them his lover. Though there was still no ceremony or official recognition of this fact, and though none of the parties involved had actually admitted what was going on, the simple fact that Tina had moved in with them had not gone unnoticed. Fortunately, with the absence of Jessica and her mindset, no one was trying to vote any of them out of town for the offense. None of them were even calling it an offense. But, no matter what the mindset of the people, Garden Hill remained a small town where everyone knew everyone else and the gossip flew like mad. But the gossip and the mood of the townspeople were not what were on Jason's mind at the moment. He had experienced much worse before. What was on his mind was something that he had wanted to bring up ever since the first Cameron Park mission. Now the time seemed right. "Brett?" he said softly, hesitantly, after making sure he wasn't accidentally keying the transmit button on the radio. "Yeah?" Brett replied, his eyes making a constant track from the instrument panel to the outside. "What's up?" "You said you were going to teach others to learn to fly this thing," he said. Brett took a moment to glance over at him, seeing his hopeful face. "I did say that," he said. "And I intend to do so just as soon as there's enough time and fuel to start." "Well, do you think that maybe... you know that just possibly... uh... well..." "I think you'll make an excellent pilot," Brett told him with a smile. "I've already decided that you'll be my first student." Jason's face lit up like a pinball machine. "Really?" he said excitedly. "You're not screwing with me?" "I'm not screwing with you," he assured him. "You've spent almost as much flight time in this thing as I have since we got it. I've seen you watching my every move whenever we've been up. You got the makings of a pilot my man and you'll be the first one. I promise." "Thanks, Brett," he said, barely able to contain himself. "When can we start? I mean, can you start showing me things now? While we're..." "Now," Brett interrupted before he could get too far along, "we each have a job to do. I have to fly and you have to observe. This is not the time for lessons to commence." "Oh... sure... I mean..." "It's okay," Brett told him. "Just keep an eye out down there like you're supposed to. I'm going to put you through an extensive ground school before you ever put your hands on these controls. We're gonna take it as slow as possible, all right?" "All right." "Now let's get back to work, shall we?" ------- It took them almost four hours to get the truck safely home. Brett was forced to abandon them at one point so he could fly back to town and refuel (and the town - at first terrified to see the chopper return alone - was very grateful to hear that no avalanche had occurred). But finally they arrived, rumbling and clanking their way onto Interstate 80 and through the gap in the cliffs that served as their eastern chokepoint. They passed the warning signs that Brett had installed and then utilized the offramp that led to the town itself. Soon the truck was making its way through the residential streets inside the wall, belching out great black clouds of diesel exhaust. Brett continued to circle overhead until they were safely parked and then he settled in for a soft landing in his accustomed spot. By the time he and Jason made it over to the truck, three quarters of the townspeople were gathered around it, hugging and shaking the hands of the two men who had delivered it. Garden Hill now had a functioning fuel station. All they needed now was the fuel. ------- They wasted no time. The men and women who were to be involved were hand picked by Brett and Chrissie (who knew the capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses of the newer guards better) at a community meeting that night after dinner and told to be ready to move out the next morning. More than one person stayed up late that night making in town preparations or learning specific tasks. The operation itself began at first light. Michelle, armed with one of the M-16s and a radio keyed into the chopper's frequency, and four of the guard force, all of them armed with semi-automatic weapons, climbed into the helicopter. Brett lifted off, the empty 250-gallon transport tank slung beneath, and headed southwest for Cameron Park. He utilized the shortest route possible, going out over the canyon and following it to the point that he had familiar navigation references. He made sure that he stayed well clear of the Auburn area. Once at the Cameron Park Airport, he circled around a few times, keeping a sharp eye out for anything below that hadn't been there before. Beside him Michelle did the same. Everything seemed as it should be so he drifted down and set the tank gently on the ground. He released the rope from the hook and then made one more pass around the area. "Lock and load, guys," Michelle told her troops as he spun in for final approach. They jacked rounds into their chambers and stood by. Brett touched down near the hanger complexes to allow them to get quickly under cover if they came under fire. Though this seemed unlikely to happen since they had already made two trips here without encountering anyone, Brett insisted that they go into every situation like it was combat. "Go!" Michelle yelled at her troops the instant the skids touched the ground. They were out the doors in less than ten seconds, lying on their bellies on the wet tarmac, all of them facing in different directions with overlapping fields of fire. No sooner were they down then Brett lifted back off, buffeting them violently with the downdraft from the rotor and soaking them thoroughly with rainwater. Brett circled around for a few minutes just south of the airport, both to keep an eye on the approaches and to be nearby in case an emergency evacuation was called for. Nothing untoward happened and a few minutes after being dropped off, Michelle radioed up to him. "Area seems secure," she said. "We're going to deploy near the hangers until the next group arrives." "Copy," Brett said. "I'm heading back now. Remember the plan." "If we're attacked," Michelle dutifully replied, "we'll make a fighting retreat and head into the hills for pick-up later." "You got it," he told her. "I'll see you in about forty minutes." Brett made two more trips before the first drop of fuel was even sucked from the tank. He brought one more group of five troops - Matt was in charge of this bunch - to help augment the protective force that was already there. He then went and picked up the actual work crew, which consisted of Jason and three of the other guards. They had the pump with them and they would be the ones that kept the transport tank filled. Brett had stayed up late with this bunch showing them how to do their jobs. The operation ran fairly efficiently for something that had been thrown together as quickly as it had. By the time Brett landed the pump crew, the combat crew had moved through the airport and secured it completely. They were now in defensive positions, watching for approaching intruders. The pump crew set up the pump, attaching it to the same maintenance truck that they had used during the first operation. Once the pump was powered, they refueled the helicopter, topping off its tank. "Okay," Brett said to them. "Let's get that tank full. We've got a lot of trips to make." It took just a hair over five minutes for the pump to fill the 250-gallon tank. Once it was full, they shut down the pump and the engine that powered it and reattached the rope to the belly of the chopper. Brett climbed in alone and fired up the engine, setting the rotor blades into motion. After a last check of his area he lifted off, slowly rising into the rainy sky until all of the slack in the carrying rope was gone. Lifting nearly two thousand pounds into the air by means of a hook and rope assembly was a very delicate piece of flying and something that helicopter pilots did not particularly like to do. It needed to be done slowly and carefully. Rising too fast ran the risk of snapping the rope or rupturing the container, an act that would almost certainly send the helicopter spinning out of control from the slingshot effect. Brett kept a delicate hand on his controls, slowly adding lift until the tank rose inch by inch from the ground. He could feel the tremendous weight beneath him in the sluggishness of the aircraft's reactions. Only when the tank was two hundred feet above the tarmac did he begin to turn to the northeast and move forward. The trip back to Garden Hill took nearly forty minutes since Brett was not able to fly terribly fast with the additional weight and drag. Once over the town he descended carefully right over the top of the community center. Paul had built a platform on the peak of the roof, right near the edge, that the transport tank could be set on. Without the electric pump to facilitate moving the fuel from one container to another, they were forced to rely on good old gravity. Paul, up on the roof with Maggie to assist him, used a radio to talk to Brett and guide his movements, telling him to "go back" or "go forward" or "bring it down". Though he was being blasted by the downdraft and pelted with small bits of debris and though he could hardly hear his own voice as it came out of his mouth, Paul's voice was transmitted clearly enough to Brett in the cockpit. This first docking took a few minutes to accomplish, requiring three aborts before the tank was finally resting where it was supposed to. "It's in place," Paul told him. "Copy in place," Brett replied. Slowly, carefully, he descended a little more, gradually and gently transferring the weight of the tank from the hook on the helicopter to the structure on the ground. Once Paul was able to confirm slack in the carrying rope, he pulled the lever and released it. "Good set down," Paul said as the rope fell to the roof. As the helicopter rose up and circled around to land, he turned to his two helpers. "Let's get it transferred." Ted, the plumber, with the help of Steve Kensington, the pool-man/mechanic, had installed a nozzle capable of taking standard two and a half-inch fire hose onto the transport tank. Paul utilized this nozzle now by leaning out and coupling a fifty-foot length of hose to it. The hose ran straight down to the water tanker, which was parked directly below, the other end connected, via a series of coupling rings, to the four-inch supply nozzle on the top of the tank. "All ready?" Paul yelled down to the two women below who were handling that end of the operation. "All ready," they yelled back up. "On its way then," he said, opening the nozzle. It took almost ten minutes for the fuel to run out of the transport tank and into the storage tank. As soon as it was empty Paul and Maggie used the rope to lower the tank back to the ground. Brett and two helpers took it from there, dragging it back over to the chopper and reattaching it to the hook. Three minutes later the engine was spinning up. As he lifted into the air, Brett checked his watch. The first emptying cycle had taken twenty-eight minutes to accomplish. He hoped they would be able to cut that down to twenty by the end of the day. He touched back down in Cameron Park at 10:30, just over two hours from the time the first drop of fuel was pumped. The first task was to refuel the helicopter for the next trip and then the next load of fuel was pumped from the storage tank into the transport tank. By 10:50 he was back in the air. In all, by working non-stop without lunch and with only minimal bathroom breaks, they were able to transport five loads of fuel - 1250 gallons - from Cameron Park to Garden Hill that day. Brett landed with the empty tank at Cameron Park at 4:30, the cargo compartment of the chopper laden with sleeping bags and cans of food. The security and pumping troops quickly unloaded these and carried them over to the hanger where they would be spending the night. Brett had wanted to spend the night at the airport with them, arguing that it would save time the next day if he didn't have to make a dry run from Garden Hill to start operations. Paul had utilized the veto power that came with being the only remaining committee member and ordered him to return home with the helicopter at the end of the day's operations. "We simply can't risk you and that machine like that," he'd explained. "I know you want to be with your troops, but the best place for that chopper at night is where it's safest, and where its safest is back here." Though Brett wasn't happy with this ruling, he nevertheless agreed to abide by it. "Be careful out here tonight," he told Michelle and Jason, who were in charge of the group. "We will," Michelle promised. "If there's any trouble we'll just pull back and contact you by radio in the morning. Don't worry about us." He smiled. "It's my job to worry about you," he told her. They shared a brief kiss and then Brett climbed into the helicopter. We went through the start-up procedure and three minutes later was lifting off. By the time he made it back to Garden Hill it was nearly dark. Though he was quite exhausted from a day spent nearly constantly behind the controls of the helicopter, Brett was not too tired to respond to Chrissie that night in bed when she expressed an interest in lovemaking. They enjoyed a long, slow, very heated session that ended with both of them sweating profusely and out of breath. "I think I'm starting to see a little swelling in your belly," Brett said afterwards, as they lay cuddled together atop the covers, the light from a single candle providing scant illumination. He was running his hand softly over her damp stomach where, just above her pubic hair, the slightest bulging of her uterus was starting to make itself known. "I'm going to be a fat pig in a few months," she said sourly, her own hand toying with the hair on his chest. "You're going to be beautiful," Brett told her. "Pregnant women are hot." "You must be kidding," she said in disbelief. "Not at all. When does a woman look more feminine after all? Just ask Jason how hot pregnant women are." "If you don't mind," she said, "I'd just assume leave my brother out of the discussion. The mental image of him having sex is something I'd rather not think about." He laughed a little, kissing her forehead. "Well I assure you," he told her. "I'll still boff you when you swell up; often and well." "I'll hold you to that," she said, giving him a kiss of her own. They lay together in silence for a little bit as the sweat dried from their skin and then, when they started to shiver, they blew out the candle and climbed under the covers. Brett didn't toss or turn, he didn't speak or make any noise, but Chrissie still knew that he was not asleep and she also knew why. "They'll be okay out there," she told him. "You trained them well." "I know," he said with a sigh. "I just feel like a father waiting for his kids to get home from a night out." "Shellie and Jason know what they're doing. They'll keep them safe." She paused. "I only wish I could be out there too." "Your place is here," Brett said. "Believe me, I would've felt more comfortable with you as part of the airport detail but that same feeling works in reverse. I'm able to relax a little while I'm shuttling between here and Cameron Park knowing that you're here taking care of defense." "Do you really think I'm doing a good job?" she asked, pleased by his praise. "I really do," he said. "And I'm sorry that I took all your best people for the airport mission." "At least I didn't have to staff the guard posts with untrained people," she said. The remaining guards that had been through Brett's training program had all volunteered to pull double duty until the completion of the mission to keep that from happening. "That's a sign of respect for their leader," Brett said. "I could never get them to do that when I was in your shoes." "That was before we were attacked," Chrissie reminded him, not about to be complimented that easily. "I think that might have had something to do with it." "Maybe a little," Brett allowed. "But don't kid yourself. A lot of it is out of loyalty to you and I. Nobody wants to spend twelve hours in one of those wet, muddy bunkers up on the hill if they don't have to." "That is true," she agreed, accepting the compliment this time. "But when are we going to get more people trained up? We have sixteen firm volunteers just waiting for their chance and ten more that are asking for consideration. I know you're busy securing fuel for the chopper and all, but we can't keep putting it on hold forever. We should pencil in a three day period after the airport mission so that the next time we don't have to double staff." "An excellent idea," Brett agreed. "In fact, why don't you start running them through it day after tomorrow, after we get everyone home and rested up?" "Me?" she asked. "What do you mean me?" "I mean that I'm going to be much too busy trying to do maintenance tasks on the helicopter and trying to figure out a way to run the train mission. You've been through my class and you've assisted on it twice. You also have considerable combat experience. I think the time has come for you to take over that aspect of training." "I can't do that," she protested, sitting up in the bed. "Brett, I can't teach your class. And they wouldn't listen to me anyway." "You can teach it and they will listen to you," he assured her. "Chrissie, you know how fanatical I am about this training and this town's security. I wouldn't ask you to do it if I didn't think you'd do a good job. And you've already run more people through the basic firearms class than I have. You can do this. You have to do this or it's going to be a while before it gets done." They discussed it for a few more minutes and eventually, as he had known she would, she agreed. Soon Brett drifted off to sleep, snoring as he only did when he was exhausted or intoxicated. Chrissie, on the other hand, with something new to worry about, lay awake for a long time. ------- It was just after first light when the men of Acting Captain Bracken's attack company resumed their march towards Garden Hill. They had been on the road for five days now and most of the men were at peak efficiency for the long march. They were accustomed to the mud, rain, and filth after five days of trudging through it and they were well acclimated to the cold and sleeping outside. Unlike on previous marches, Bracken was allowing them to stick to the Interstate as much as they could. With the numbers that they had for this mission he did not fear being on a predictable route as he once had. It seemed unlikely at best that anyone would try to attack them on their transit and walking on the asphalt cut drastically down on their time and fatigue factors since they weren't constantly slugging through thick mud or brush. Of course the many mudfalls and washouts meant that they were forced to take long detours through the heavy woods to go around such things. In all they spent about half their time on the pavement and half in the mud. They were on a fairly long stretch of unimpeded Interstate on this morning, just two miles past the conquered town of Colfax. Bracken had high hopes of reaching the pre-attack staging area in three more days. "Acting Lieutenant Jimms!" Bracken called to the senior sergeant from his own third platoon. Jimms was acting as platoon commander while Bracken acted as company commander. "Yes, sir!" Jimms said smartly, stepping up to him. "Third platoon will break trail today," he told him. "Assign a squad to the point and lets move out." "Yes, sir," Jimms agreed. He turned to the platoon and selected second squad, headed by Stu, for that duty. Stu gathered his team of convicts together and formed them up. Soon, all one hundred and sixty men were heading down the Interstate following them. It was two hours into that morning's march that Turbo, the private on point, spotted movement ahead of them. A figure was just cresting the hill above them, walking directly down the middle of the eastbound lanes. Turbo held up his hand, halting the squad behind him, and dropped to the pavement, his rifle pointing up at the figure. Stu signaled the rest of his squad to spread out to the flanks and then gave the danger signal to the rest of the company over the radio he carried. Bracken and the rest of the men quickly darted off the roadway and into the surrounding brush, for what they knew not why at this point, but reacting just as training dictated. Stu scrambled up and slid to the ground next to Turbo, his eyes looking forward and immediately locking onto the lone figure. "Is that the only one?" he asked. "So far," Turbo said. "You got binocs? It looks like a bitch from here." "Yeah," Stu said. "I'll look in a minute. Let's get under cover for now and report in." They scrambled off the road, keeping as low as possible, and into the tree line beside it, their boots sinking into the thick mud. Stu pulled out his portable radio and keyed it up. "This is Covington on point," he said into it. "You there, command?" "Command here," Bracken's voice returned. "What do you got, Covington?" "A single person walking down the Interstate about four hundred yards in front of us. Looks like a bitch. No one else in sight at this time. I'm gonna take a look through the binocs and get a closer look." "Ten-four, Covington," Bracken said. "Keep us informed and report in before you do anything." "No shit, fuckface," Stu said to the radio - without keying the transmit button of course. "Ten-four," he said with it keyed. He put it back in his belt and then fished in his pack for the binoculars that all of the squad leaders carried. "What would a bitch be doing out here alone?" Turbo asked. "Maybe it's that cunt Marla trying to crawl back to us." "Marla's dead and gone," Stu said absently, putting the binoculars to his face. "And if she wasn't, she wouldn't be coming back." He focused until he had a fairly clear view of the approaching figure. It was indeed a woman. She was dressed in a black rain slicker that was splattered with mud and grime. Poking out from around the edges of the hood were filthy strands of long blonde hair. On her back was a tattered and muddy backpack. She was limping along slowly, as if every step was painful, her course not exactly a straight line but meandering back and forth like a drunken sailor. There was no weapon in sight. Stu relayed all of this information to Bracken using short, businesslike phrases. "Ten-four, Covington," Bracken replied. "Hold in place until she gets closer and then take her into custody so we can see what she's all about. We'll be standing by in the rear." "I got something in the rear for you," Stu muttered to the closed microphone. "Ten-four," he said to the open one. ------- "What's your name?" Bracken asked her fifteen minutes later, after she had been taken neatly into custody and after second platoon had checked out her back trail and pronounced it clear. She was sitting on a fallen log beside the Interstate, Bracken towering above her, Stu's squad standing around to provide security. "Jessica Blakely," she said, her eyes arrogant. "Who are you people?" "I'm the one asking the questions here," Bracken said mildly. "I think you'll do well to remember that." Jessica snorted a little, as if to say "how dare you address me in that manner". "Where did you come from?" Bracken asked her next. "Garden Hill," she said. "I was a ruling committee member there." "A ruling committee member?" Bracken said in disbelief. "And why are you here now?" "A very bad man managed to discredit me before the town. He turned my people against me and had me thrown out of there." She made no mention of the fact that she had tried to kill him first. "I see," Bracken said, dismissing this as irrelevant for the moment. "And where exactly were you heading? Were you on your way to Auburn?" "I hardly think my destination is any of your business," she said snootily. Bracken's instinct was to give her a sharp backhand across the face. That was what an Auburn man did when a woman talked back to him. He held off for the moment, trying a different tack. "Listen, Jessica," he said. "We are from Auburn and our town is the only inhabited place west of Garden Hill. Now you can continue to not answer my questions and stay out here to die, or you can tell me what I want to know and perhaps we will consider taking you in. The choice is yours." Jessica's eyes looked up at him, considering his words, her mind ticking along. Could these people really be from Auburn? Could they really be important enough in that town to guarantee her admission? She was running extremely low on the supplies those ungrateful pagans in Garden Hill had sent her out with. If she cooperated with this rather dirty and unsavory man who seemed to be in charge of the others, she might just be able to find a safe haven for herself. And if there was a functioning township in Auburn, she would probably be able to worm her way into its command structure with a little bit of work. Worming her way close to those with power was - after all - what she did best. "What do you want to know?" she asked. "Tell me about the makeup of Garden Hill," Bracken said, grabbing a seat across from her and lighting a cigarette. She started to talk, at first interjecting her personal opinions about various people and lifestyles into the discussion but ceasing this when Bracken interrupted to let her know that he only wanted the facts. She gave the number of men, women, and children in town and explained that Paul and Brett were leading them with major decisions being made by community vote in the absence of a full committee. "Paul and Brett?" Bracken asked. "Who are they?" "Paul was a fireman at the station outside of town before the comet. I don't know what made us decide to make him a leader, but..." "Uh, Jessica," Bracken interrupted. "Just the facts please, remember?" She gave him another sour look but headed his words. "Paul is kind of a nerdy guy but I guess he's pretty smart about mechanical things. He's the one that worked out how to get us hot water and how to install cameras outside of our walls." "Cameras huh?" Bracken said. "We'll get back to that. What about this Brett you mentioned? What's he all about?" Her hatred for Brett was plainly evident in the face she made at the mere mention of his name. "He was a cop before the comet," she said. "He also used to fly helicopters in the army, so he says anyway. He snuck into town one night about two weeks after the comet and managed to sweet-talk his way into being allowed to stay. He had two little bratty kids with him. He just kept picking and picking at everyone until..." "Whoa, whoa, whoa," Stu cut in from behind Bracken. "Did you say kids? Do you mean teenagers?" He was being insubordinate but Bracken let it slide. "Yes," Jessica spat. "Chrissie and Jason. He's having relations with the girl and has gotten her pregnant. There has even been rumor of him molesting the boy as well, although when I left, this bitch named Stacy was..." "Guns," Stu said, "did they have any guns with them when they came to town?" "Well, yes," she said. "They had those army machine guns. They said they took them from some bikers or something. I'll just bet that they..." "Like these guns?" Bracken said, holding up the M-16 he carried. "Well, yeah... kind of I guess." Bracken and Stu shared a look. Now they had a name attached to the man that had killed four of Stu's men (although Bracken could hardly blame him for that, considering what they were doing). "And is he the one who set up the defenses for the town?" "Well, not at first," Jessica told them. "Paul came up with the defenses that we had at first. He put the camera on the bridge and put people in houses along the wall to watch for stragglers and drive them off. When Brett came he tried to change all of that. He kept asking us on the committee to let him put guards outside the wall nearly a mile from town in little holes on the hillsides. He kept telling us that we were doing things all wrong. I tried as hard as I could for as long as I could to keep him from changing things, but some people attacked the town one day..." "We saw that," Bracken said. "You did?" she asked, surprised. "We've been watching your town for a while now," he assured her. "So anyway, those people attacked the town. And then... ?" "Well, I'm convinced that Brett somehow talked those stragglers into attacking the town just so he could get power away from me. It was probably his plan all along. In fact, I wouldn't put it past him to have..." "Jessica," Bracken interrupted with an impatient sigh. "Just the facts please." Another sour look. "Well, after that attack was when everything really fell apart. Brett managed to convince everyone in town that it was my fault that the attack happened and Paul managed to get me voted off of the committee. Once I was no longer able to counter him, he started changing everything around. He started wasting our ammunition by having a bunch of people practice shooting. He started taking people off of bath details and laundry details and made them dig bunkers up on the hills. He even made me do that. Me!" Bracken and Stu shared a look of dread with each other. "Digging bunkers in the hills?" Bracken asked carefully. "Yes," she said. "And then he put me on kitchen detail working under that slut that's..." Bracken let her ramble on for a moment this time, hardly hearing her spout about pregnant, child-molesting hussies as he opened up his pack and pulled out a large map of Garden Hill and the surrounding terrain that he had prepared after the last mission. He unfolded it and set it down on her lap. "Show me where these bunkers were dug," he told her, cutting her off in mid-rant. "What?" He tapped the map with a dirty finger. "Show me," he said. "Where are these bunkers?" It took her a few moments to puzzle out the map - cartography was not one of her skills in life - but eventually she was able to point out where the new defenses were located. "Son of a bitch," Bracken said, shaking his head in wonder. "What kind of firepower do they put up there?" he asked her. "What kind of what?" "Guns!" he yelled, making her jump. "What kind of guns do they have in these bunkers? How much ammo?" "Well, they have one of the machine guns and one of the rifles," she said at last. "And he's almost completely emptied the ammunition supply so he could put it up there with those guards. I don't know what we would do if we were attacked again and all of those guns were up on the hill instead of in town, but like I said, they don't listen to..." "How much ammunition?" Bracken demanded. "How many guns, how much ammo does Garden Hill have in their possession?" This was an answer that Jessica knew since she had been in charge of supply inventories during her reign of power. She gave them the last figures that she had calculated. Of course these were figures taken before the battle with the twelve invaders but she didn't think that a significant amount had been fired off during that little skirmish. "We have about ten thousand rounds total. I don't remember the exact categorizations, but we were really heavy on those long bullets for the rifles..." "Thirty caliber?" Bracken asked. "Uh... I guess," she said. "And we had a lot of the kind that those machine guns that Brett brought fired. He was real excited about that when we showed him our supply room for the first time. We have a lot of bullets for the pistols too. Probably more of that than anything." "Christ," Bracken said, lowering his head a little. "And about these people that he had firing up your ammo. What was that all about?" "He called it training," she said, spitting that word out. "He tried to get people to do it before that so-called attack on the town, but nobody but that lesbian slut and that homo schoolteacher signed up for it. Afterward, people were just begging him to do it. That's another reason I think that the attack was staged. I mean why else would..." "What kind of training did they do?" Bracken wanted to know. "It all looked pretty pointless to me," Jessica told them. "He took them outside the walls and had them shoot at a bunch of targets with all of the guns. He had them taking them apart and putting them back together. Then he had them rolling around in the mud in groups and running all over the place. He even had them attack the grocery store." "And did he say what the purpose of all this was?" Bracken asked next, although he already had a pretty good idea. "These were going to be the people that manned those guard positions. He wanted only people that he had trained in his little bunkers. As if it takes training to watch for stragglers." "And he got enough people trained up to do this?" "Oh yes," she confirmed, nodding. "Sixteen of them went through and they were about to get sixteen more when I had to leave." "So he may have as many as forty of them trained up by now?" Stu asked. "Is that right?" She shrugged. "I suppose." The two men looked at each other fearfully. "Do you know what this means?" Bracken asked the convict turned squad leader. "They would've murdered us," Stu replied quietly. "They've changed around their entire defensive arrangement from what we expected. They've posted trained guards in bunkers on the premium high ground, exactly the thing we wondered why they hadn't done before. If we would've come walking in there all nice and pretty in a line..." "They would've cut us to pieces in the first five minutes," Bracken said. "They don't have overlapping fields of fire, not quite, but each one of those hills commands the area below it. The gunners on top could've let us march in until we were unable to retreat and then pinned us in place until reinforcements took up position across from us. Then they would've chopped us up like hamburger." "Jesus," Stu said. "What are you talking about?" Jessica suddenly asked. "Are you saying that you were going to attack Garden Hill?" "We were going to incorporate your people and resources into our town," Bracken said. "By force if necessary. This information you gave us has just saved us from being massacred if they elected to resist us." "What do you mean?" she asked. "Incorporate? Massacred?" "We are unifying the California region under our command and our laws," Bracken told her. "We have already taken Colfax, Meadow Vista, Grass Valley, and several other towns, bringing the inhabitants to live in Auburn. Your town was next on our list." Jessica listened to this carefully. "So you intend to take over Garden Hill?" "We're unifying the entire region," Bracken explained. "It is something that has to be done if civilization is ever going to return. For now we're taking everyone to Auburn and building up our militia and our food supplies. Our goal is to unify without actually having to fight anyone, just by overwhelming force." "Overwhelming force?" she said doubtfully. "By convincing the towns we unify that resistance is pointless. We thought we had a decent chance of that in Garden Hill with the size of the force we have here." "But you don't think that anymore?" she asked, starting to like the idea of the town that had cast her out being conquered. And if she was in a position of authority in Auburn, as she had every intention of achieving, then she would be set up to enact a little revenge on a few members of that town. "It would seem," Bracken said, "that things have changed in Garden Hill since we performed our reconnaissance." "I don't understand," she said. "Do you mean that these defenses that he put up are better than what we had before?" "What you had before was a joke," Bracken told her. "Good for keeping out isolated wanderers but not much else. Had they remained in effect we would have taken that town in less than an hour, probably without taking a single casualty. But now..." he shook his head. "Now he has a classic defense arrangement in place. Things have suddenly become a little more difficult and dangerous." "So you're not going to do it?" she asked. "I didn't say that," he replied. "We'll just need to see if we can come up with another plan. We'll need your help if you're willing." Of course he could have just beaten the information he wanted out of her but he had already pegged her personality. Stroking her ego would be the more effective way of getting intelligence from her. "You were one of the ruling members of that society. You have access to the information we need to help unify that place. So what do you say?" "I'll give you any help you need," she said immediately, a smile on her face. Bracken smiled back, ignoring the contemptuous look he was getting from Stu for treating a woman the way he was. "What other improvements to the security system did this Brett person make since the attack on the town? Try to tell me everything." "Well, aside from putting those people through the so-called training program he had and digging those bunkers, he hasn't done much else. He put up some signs warning people away from the area and fiddled with the trucks that were parked on the bridge a little. He and that child he's living with have also been making everyone in town go through some sort of shooting class." "You mean in addition to the people he is training as guards?" "That's right," she confirmed. "Brett and Paul ordered that everyone in town fourteen and older, whether they pull guard duty or not, learn to shoot." Bracken and Stu shared another look, reluctant respect for this man Brett showing in their eyes. With such a small population of men in the town, teaching the bitches to shoot only made sense. Of course bitches would not be able to take the place of a man behind the sights of a weapon, but they could still pour fire down on an attacking force if they were concentrated in high enough numbers. "What else?" Bracken wanted to know. "He's had plenty of time to whip up some other surprises for us. Tell us everything." "That was about it by the time I left," Jessica said. "He had plans for a lot of things. For instance, he wanted to rig up ammunition carrying buckets to help get extra bullets to the guards on the hill and he wanted to try to dismantle the entire catwalk beneath the bridge to try and keep anyone from using it." "But he hadn't done those things yet?" "No," she said. "He was too busy trying to get his hands on that stupid helicopter to do any of that." There was complete silence for a moment as Bracken and Stu digested what they had just heard. "Did you say helicopter?" Bracken finally sputtered. ------- Bracken and the commanding officers of his platoons were sitting in a circle beside the road, all of them smoking or chewing as they discussed this new information and what it meant to their mission. Stu, though he wasn't a commanding officer, was with them at Bracken's request. Though Stu was overly aggressive and sometimes reckless, he did have a keen military mind and was the better of nearly all of those higher in rank than he. Jessica had been spirited off towards the rear of the formation, near the guard positions. She was being watched carefully by a small squad and fed from the homemade MRE's the company carried. "I think we can still succeed in this attack," Stu was saying, taking advantage of Bracken's order to speak freely, without military courtesy. "Granted, we'll have to sit down and have a brain session on the best way of countering these new defenses they have, but the fact remains that we have more automatic weapons, better training, better discipline, and more men." Two of the lieutenants agreed with this reasoning and vocalized this to Bracken, both interjecting a few points of their own to further the argument. "There are only twenty men in that town," one said. "Twenty. We have a hundred and sixty. It doesn't matter how good their defensive bunkers are, simple math will tell you who is going to win." "They also have nearly two hundred women," Bracken put in. "Now I'll allow that women can't possibly fight with the same effectiveness as men can, but this Brett character has been training them and he is a former member of the 3rd ACR if I understand that bitch correctly. You can train monkeys to put up a semi-effective defense if a competent leader commands them. Women are a little smarter than monkeys and this Brett sounds like he knows what he's doing. Now I'm sure that we would take this town if we attacked it, don't get me wrong, but at what cost? How many casualties would we take trying to bully our way through those hills to that wall?" "And then there's the helicopter," put in one of the other lieutenant's, one that tended to think like Bracken. "Don't forget about that." "Exactly," Bracken said. "I think the helicopter is the deciding factor here. That chopper takes away any element of surprise we could hope to maintain once contact is made with the defenders. It rules out the use of a diversionary force to draw their attention away from the main attack. Once the first shot is fired, he will go up in that thing and circle around, out of weapon's range from the ground, and radio our troop concentrations and locations to the bunkers and to the people inside the wall. He will be able to direct the entire battle from three thousand feet in the air where he'll have a panoramic view of everything. If he puts a gunner with an automatic weapon in that chopper, he'll be able to swoop in and make harassing attacks on any groups of our soldiers that are pinned down or hiding behind cover. In short, that eye in the sky gives those Garden Hill defenders a tremendous advantage." "Not enough of one though," Stu insisted. "Enough of one to make the entire mission pointless," Bracken replied. "Sure, we'll probably take the town if we attack it. Sheer numbers almost guarantee that. But what will we take? We would have to kill almost every defender in order to gain entry to the town. And that means many of the women will be dead. Every position we fight our way through will take out too many of our own men. Remember our doctrine, guys? We don't have enough soldiers to be throwing them away in battles of attrition. Our way is to hit with overwhelming force and either convince the defenders to surrender, or take them quickly with minimal casualties. These people will fight us and they will fight us hard. We may have as much as a forty percent casualty rate and that, I'm afraid, is completely unacceptable." "So what are you saying?" Stu wanted to know. "I'm saying that we have lost that overwhelming force advantage we strive for. We need to abort this mission and go back to Auburn. We're going to need a hell of a lot more than one hundred and sixty men to take this town painlessly. A hell of a lot more." Had the Placer County Militia's attack force been a democracy, they might very well have gone on to take up the fight. But it wasn't a democracy; it was a dictatorship under the direction of Bracken. Bracken's word was the word of God in that force and God ordered that the entire group turn around immediately and begin heading home. By the time night fell, they were nearly ten miles west of where they had picked up Jessica. ------- It was 5:10 and nearly dark when Chrissie heard the voice come over the command radio she was monitoring from inside of the community center. "Position 4 to base," came John Marshall's voice. He was one of the two guards on duty at the hill on the south side of the canyon. "Are you still there, Chrissie?" "I'm here," she said, fighting to keep her voice neutral. "Do you have them?" "That's affirm," he said. "I have our aircraft approaching low from the west along the canyon. Looks like the last bunch made it back safe." "Copy that, John," Chrissie replied. "Thanks for the update." This last return of the helicopter marked the end of a very busy and productive day for the residents of Garden Hill. Starting as soon as it was light enough to fly by that morning, the fuel transfer operation had continued. With everyone in the rhythm they had managed to transport all of the remaining fuel from the Cameron Park tank to the Garden Hill water truck where it was being stored. It had taken a total of six cycles of transport, dumping, and refueling but now, combined with the take from the previous day's missions, Garden Hill had 2750 gallons of fuel in its possession. She picked up the portable radio she had that was set to the helicopter's frequency. With a smile she keyed it up. "Aircraft approaching Garden Hill," she said into it, "please identify yourself." "It's me, baby," Brett's voice returned. "Strung out and sore and with my ass completely asleep from sitting in this vibrating chair too long. I have just enough light to land normally." "Good to hear that, Brett," she said. "The password, if you will?" "Poultry," he said, giving the agreed upon signal that everything was normal. Had he been under duress of some kind he would have said "waterfowl". "That's what I like to hear," she said. "Is everyone safe and sound in there?" "That's affirm. Shellie and her squad are tired, dirty, and hungry but they're all safe. We'll be touching down in about two minutes. See you on he ground." "See you on the ground," Chrissie returned, getting up from her chair and pocketing her portable radio. She pulled on her rain jacket and walked downstairs to the front door. As soon as she was outside she saw the helicopter circling around overhead, bleeding off its speed. As many times as she had seen Brett take off and land she still could not get over how quiet and un-helicopter-like the machine sounded. All that could be heard was the whine of the engine and the rushing of air being churned downward. Thanks to the NOTAR there was none of the chopping sound that gave rotor aircraft their nickname. Though she was standing more than thirty yards away the blast of air and rainwater churned up by that rotor was still enough to force her to lower her head. The skids gently touched the pavement and the whining of the engine wound down to a soft growl, the rotor slowly losing the suicidal velocity it had been spinning with. The blast of air and water went away and Chrissie stepped out of the doorway and walked closer, seeing Brett going through the power-down checklist through the windshield. She kept her distance, staying outside of the arc of the rotor, not entirely comfortable walking beneath those spinning blades despite Brett's assurances that it was impossible for them to come closer than three feet above her head. At last the engine was shut off and the blades came to a gradual halt. The doors opened up allowing Michelle's squad of four to climb out of the vehicle. All of them, with weapons on their shoulders and packs on their backs, took a moment to stretch and work the kinks out of their muscles. Michelle, who had been sitting in the passenger seat, stepped out next. Seeing her co-wife standing there she ran over to her. "Chrissie!" she squealed, throwing her arms around her and hugging her tightly. "God, its good to be home." "It's good to have you back," Chrissie told her, returning the embrace. "Are you hungry? I had Stacy and Tina keep a couple of double rations hot for you and your troops." "I'm famished," she said. "And dirty too. How's the bath situation?" "Matt's squad are still working their way through one by one," Chrissie told her. "They should be done within the hour I would hope." "Good," she said. "I'll send my squad through first and then I'll go." She gave a saucy look. "Maybe you and Brett should come over and make sure I get nice and clean," she said softly. Chrissie blushed but couldn't help smiling. There had so far been no repeat of the events that had taken place the last time Michelle and Brett had returned from a long mission. Though the two women now slept in the same bed with Brett between them and though both continued to imbibe in their marital liberties freely, neither had touched the other during sexual encounters or even talked about what had happened between them. Michelle's oblique comment about it now was the first mention of it. "We'll see," Chrissie said, giving Michelle one more hug. She broke the embrace and then went over to greet Brett. ------- As it turned out, responsibility called on Chrissie when it came time for Michelle to hop into the bathtub. She had to drive out to guard position two, which was located on the hill northeast of the subdivision, to first break up a fight between the two women stationed out there and then separate them. This was not a completely uncommon occurrence. Though the training regiment had cut down on such incidents greatly and though the idea of polygamy was slowly starting to be considered an option to be pursued, the simple fact was that there was still a lot of sleeping around going on in the off-duty hours. Though Chrissie tried not to station people who were in conflict with each other together, sometimes the rumor mill, which brought her news of these lethal combinations, did not reach her in time. "Who is it?" Brett asked as she stood up from the cafeteria table in the dining room to go deal with the situation. "Maria and Leanette," she said, shaking her head. "What's the deal with those two?" she asked those seated around her. "What did I miss?" "You put Maria and Leanette together?" Maggie, who was at the same table, asked in disbelief. "Jesus, girlfriend, you are behind the times. Word is that Leanette and Hector have been spending a little time off in the empty houses." "Checking out redecorating schemes I'm sure," Chrissie said sourly. "Brett, I'm gonna have to break the same-sex rule in order to separate them. I can put Leanette over in position 3 with Greg and move Mike over to position 2 with Maria. It's either that or pull someone who just came off the mission and put them out there for the night and I don't really want to do that." Brett shrugged. "Your discretion," he told her. "Do you think those two sets will be able to keep their hands off each other?" "Probably," she said. "I think they'll at least wait until after watch if they want to get in each other's pants." Brett chuckled a little. "That's all we can ask for, isn't it?" "I suppose," she said. "I'll see you guys at home." Shortly after she left, driving off in the Honda Prelude that was used to transport people from town to the guard positions (it was the most fuel efficient vehicle in a town full of SUVs and BMWs and Mercedes'), the time for Michelle and Brett's bath period arrived. They were not so filthy that a double rinse would be required so Brett went outside and activated the fire engine pump while Michelle went about adding the hot water. Ten minutes later they were sitting in the steaming tub, scrubbing themselves clean and occasionally stroking a slippery body part that belonged to the other person. "I've been more than forty-eight hours without it now," Michelle said as she slid her hand up and down his erection beneath the water. "I'm ready for a fill-up." "Climb aboard, baby," he told her with a smile, beckoning for her to sit on his lap. "Let's go home first," she said, giving him a peck on the lips. "I'd rather have you in the comfort of our own bed." "Okay," he said. Even so he could not resist sliding into her from behind for a few strokes as they went about washing and rinsing each other's hair. "You're a pervert," she accused as she felt him penetrate her and gyrate slowly back and forth. "And proud of it," he assured her, his hand squeezing her ass. They walked home together and, after lighting a few candles, immediately removed the fresh clothing they had just donned and climbed into bed. They started out kissing and cuddling under the warmth of the covers but soon threw them off as they started to heat up. "Eat me, Brett," Michelle moaned, pushing his head down her body. "Make me come with your mouth." Ever the obedient husband, Brett kissed his way across her stomach and soon had his tongue running through her wet vaginal lips. He cupped her ass cheeks with his hands as he licked and sucked at her, tasting her fresh juices. The sound of the front door opening a few minutes later did not detract either of them from what they were doing. Only when Chrissie walked in the room carrying a candle with her did Brett raise his head out of Michelle's crotch. "Having fun I see," Chrissie said lightly as she set the candle down on the nightstand. "That's what it's all about," Brett agreed. "Did you get the guard problem taken care of?" "Oh yes," she said, unclipping her belt and sliding the holstered gun free. "I warned them all that they were the test case for resumption of coed teams on guard duty and that they should behave appropriately. I think they got the message." "Hopefully," Brett said. "It would sure make staffing a lot easier if we could put men and women together without having to worry about them being distracted." "You're telling me," said Chrissie, who did all of the staffing. "Uh, is there any chance," said Michelle, who was flushed and panting, "that we can continue this discussion at a later time? I was kind of in the middle of something here." "Sorry, Shelly," Chrissie said with a grin. "Brett, get back to work." He went back to work, dropping his head into her crotch once again and lapping away. Chrissie went to the bathroom and relieved her bladder and then walked back into the bedroom just in time to see Michelle starting to raise and lower her hips with impending orgasm. She watched them as she took off her jeans and panties, feeling her own juices starting to flow as they always did at such times. She could not resist running the back of her hand across her wet pussy lips as she reached for the hem of her shirt. "You can play with yourself if you want," Michelle, who had been watching her, said breathlessly. "What?" Chrissie said with a start, pausing with her shirt halfway up. "It's okay," Michelle said. "It's... ohhhh..." she squealed as Brett gave her a particularly pleasurable suck on the clitoris, "... it's sexy." Chrissie felt herself blushing again but she also felt a renewed gush of moisture in her sex at the thought. Sure, it was nasty but hadn't Michelle told her before that married people were sometimes nasty in front of each other? Wasn't that part of what made a successful sex life? "Come on, Chrissie," Michelle breathed, patting the bed next to her. "You know you want to." She did want to, was barely restraining herself as it was. She quickly pulled off her shirt, tossing it to the floor, and then unclipped the white bra she was wearing, letting it fall as well. She sat down on the bed with her legs spread widely, facing Michelle's supine body, close enough to see Brett's tongue stabbing in and out of those wet folds. The smell of aroused vaginal secretions hit her nose and her hand dropped between her legs, her fingers probing at her own wetness. She began to rub, her eyes peeled to the junction of mouth and vagina. "Oh God, that is such a turn on," Michelle panted excitedly, her head turned, her eyes looking directly at Chrissie's pussy. "You put yourself there on purpose, didn't you? You nasty girl." Chrissie didn't say anything. She just smiled and kept rubbing, feeling the waves of pleasure spreading out in her lower stomach. She shoved two fingers inside of herself for a moment. They came out glistening with moisture. "Oh God," Michelle groaned, her hips rising and falling rapidly now. "Oh, Chrissie that's... oh Brett... ohhhh... ohhhh!" She screamed as she came, her hands gripping the sheet on the bed hard enough to pull it loose at the corners. Brett raised his wet face from her crotch after giving her one last loving lick. He had been watching Chrissie's antics as well as he had been ministering to Michelle and he was incredibly turned on. Watching women masturbate had always held an erotic fascination for him. Watching a woman masturbate while she watched him eat out another woman was completely off the scale. "Does Chrissie need a little kiss too?" he asked her, reaching out with his hand to stroke her soft leg. "Not just yet," she said, taking his hand and putting it back on Michelle. "Fuck her first. I want to play with myself while you fuck her." "Yes," Michelle said, her eyes glazed with lust. "Fuck me while she watches." Brett slid up Michelle's body, grabbing her legs and pushing them back as he went. This opened her up widely, obscenely for Chrissie's viewing pleasure. His cock was about as hard as it was possible to get and her pussy was about as wet as it was possible to get. As such he was able to slide inside of her in one stroke, sinking until his pubic hair met hers. He began to thrust in and out, not bothering with a slow build up. As he moved within her he kept his head elevated and his back straight, using her thighs for leverage. While Michelle moaned in pleasure her eyes never left Chrissie's crotch. She watched those fingers move around and around through that light blonde hair, watched them dip in and out of her chasm itself. She put her hand on Chrissie's leg, near the knee, and began to stroke back and forth, marveling at the sexy softness of female flesh. When Chrissie made no protest at the touch, she began to move her hand higher. Chrissie felt the intruding hand as it crept higher up her leg, as it inched across her inner thigh, and her fingers began to move faster. She felt the same pang of guilt and shame that she had felt that night in the bathing room but the sense of arousal and excitement was easily enough to override it. The nastiness of being touched by Michelle, of knowing where Michelle's hand was heading, the forbiddeness of the act, was what made it so appealing. "Put them in me," she whispered to her co-wife. "Help me come." Michelle slid her hand across the inner thigh and to the wet junction where Chrissie's fingers were rubbing. She touched the soggy hairs around her lips and then ran her fingertips over the swollen membranes, feeling their slippery texture, their warmth. Using two fingers she penetrated her, pushing into the tightness, feeling her co-wife's body clutch greedily at her. Chrissie moaned loudly at the intrusion and began to rub her clit harder. Michelle had never done such a thing before but she knew exactly what would feel good. She began to push and pull, twisting her hand a little as she fingerfucked her, putting pressure on the top of the vagina, where the clitoral nerves ran. It didn't take long before Chrissie's juices were saturating her hand and starting to run down her wrist. "Oh, Shellie," Chrissie moaned, her pelvis starting to thrust now. "That feels so good." "Yes," Michelle panted, her own hips thrusting against Brett's cock. "It feels beautiful." Brett watched all of this excitedly, nearly blasting his load prematurely as he saw Michelle fingering the younger woman's blonde pussy. As before in the bathing area, he could not believe that this was actually happening to him. He was really participating in a threesome with two beautiful women; something that he had decided long ago was a myth. And he was really watching lesbian activity take place between the two women, activity that was not faked for his benefit but was actually spontaneous and full of passion. "Chrissie," Michelle grunted after a few minutes. "Sit on my face, baby." "What?" Chrissie said, shocked and excited at the same time. Had she heard her correctly? "Sit on my face," Michelle repeated with a desperate moan. "I want to eat your pussy. Please... let me eat you, baby. Let me taste you." "Oh God," Chrissie said with a shudder. Without pausing to consider the ramifications of her actions, she raised herself up and hiked one of her legs over Michelle's body, bringing her dripping sex directly over her face, her body facing towards Brett. "Bring it down, baby," Michelle moaned, seeing it above her. She reached up and grabbed Chrissie's hips and began to pull. "Don't tease me with it." Slowly Chrissie lowered herself onto Michelle's mouth, feeling the wet contact of her tongue suddenly licking at her in her most sensitive, most secret place. It was a woman doing that to her, her mind screamed at her. A woman. And it felt so sexy, so shamefully nasty. "Oh, Shellie," she said with a moan of sheer pleasure. "Ohhhh..." Again, though she had never done anything of the sort before, Michelle knew exactly where to lick and how much pressure to lick with. She used broad strokes of her tongue at first, lapping from the bottom of that tangy slit to the top and making a brief circle around the engorged clit before doing it all over. She relished the flavorful bite of Chrissie's juices. She had smelled Chrissie in arousal many times and she had tasted her own secretions clinging to the face of lovers many times, but this was her first actual taste of another woman. It was very similar to her own taste while being strikingly different at the same time. She loved it, loved the depravity of what she was doing. She was eating Chrissie's pussy! She longed to feel her coming on her mouth. Brett, meanwhile, was exhibiting an almost superhuman strength just to keep from coming. The sight of Chrissie rubbing herself over Michelle's face, of Michelle's tongue running between those pink lips, licking at that clit, was driving him nearly crazy. His cock continued to pound in and out Michelle's body wetly. He took his hands from Michelle's thighs and leaned forward, putting them on Chrissie's waist. His mouth found her breast and began to suckle it. "Ohhhh," Chrissie cried as she felt Brett sucking her nipple. Her mind went into an overload of sheer pleasure at the feeling of two mouths attacking her erogenous zones at the same time. While Brett switched back and forth from nipple to nipple, Michelle began concentrating upon her clitoris, licking it and sucking it, bringing her closer and closer to an inevitable climax. "My ass, Brett," Michelle grunted, taking her mouth off of Chrissie just long enough to spit these words out. "Put it in my ass!" Brett reluctantly broke contact with Chrissie's breasts for a moment and leaned backward. He pushed Michelle's legs further apart, widening them as far as was anatomically possible, and pulled his dripping cock from her chasm. He pushed it down, sliding the head into the slippery valley where her ass started, towards the puckered ring of her anus. Michelle loved anal sex, especially during the height of arousal after being fucked in the traditional fashion. He put the head right against her smaller opening and then pushed a little. She was well lubricated from the juices that had run down there and the first two inches slid inside easily, making her grunt from around Chrissie's clit. He began to push and pull in and out of her ass, slowly at first, going a little bit deeper with each stroke. Soon, very soon since she was used to this sort of thing, he was buried to the hilt within her and able to thrust normally. As she grunted and groaned from the pleasurable intrusion, he leaned forward again, going back after Chrissie's breasts. Chrissie, on the verge of orgasm, was nonetheless fascinated by what she had just seen. She had heard Brett and Michelle make several allusions to anal sex in the past but she had never actually seen them do it. How had that thing fit in her like that? Wasn't it painful? Though it looked like Brett was about to split her open, it was obvious from the enthusiastic way that Michelle was attacking her clit that she was not having an unpleasant time of it. As Brett started sucking on her tits again, tonguing the nipples, she found herself craning her head to look below his body and watch him go in and out. Michelle's pussy now looked so lonely, sitting there all by itself, its lips swollen and dripping, the clit standing up at attention from its hood. She took her hand, which had been resting on Brett's head, and reached for that pussy, wanting to touch it, wanting to caress it. Her fingers found the folds and she began to rub, pleasuring her co-wife's body the same way she pleasured her own. Brett came first. When he felt the back of Chrissie's hand against his lower stomach and looked down to see her masturbating Michelle's pussy, the circuit breaker in his head finally tripped, falling to a smoking mess. He grunted and began to shoot a huge load of sperm into Michelle's bowels, the waves of pleasure so strong that he almost fell over. Michelle, feeling the indescribable sensation of Brett ejaculating into her ass coupled with the feminine touch of Chrissie's hand upon her clit, was the next to go. Her second orgasm of the night rattled through her, making her cry out loudly against the wetness on her mouth. Though Chrissie was the last to come, she experienced perhaps the most powerful orgasm, its energy released after a long build-up. While Michelle attacked her clit in earnest Brett began kissing her neck and shoulders, placing soft bites upon her skin while his hands fondled her boobs. So strong was the pleasure that hit her that her body spasmed violently, her pelvis bouncing up and down on Michelle's face hard enough to hurt her. They fell to the bed in a heap, Michelle in the middle, Chrissie and Brett to the sides. Unable to help herself, Chrissie began to kiss her co-wife on the mouth tenderly, running her tongue inside and tasting her own juices clinging to her. Michelle kissed back, putting her arm around Chrissie's back, letting her tongue slide into the other woman's mouth. Brett, not to be left out, pushed his face in there with them, inserting his own tongue from the side, licking at their lips. Soon all three tongues were dueling back and forth, exchanging playful licks. "That was incredible," Michelle said at last, after the kissing died out. "I have never had an experience as erotic, as sexy as that." "I must say," Brett agreed, running his hand from one female body to the other, "that it wasn't the worst thing that's ever happened to me." Chrissie, still tingling a little from the aftereffects of her orgasm, looked at both of them. "That was very nasty what we just did," she said softly. "But God help me, I loved every second of it. I can't believe you ate me, Shelly. That was so kinky." "I was so turned on looking at you and touching you that I had to do it," Michelle said, her finger playing with Chrissie's left nipple, which was still hard. "That was the first time in my life that I put my mouth on another woman, but it was so natural. And you tasted so good, baby. I want to do that again sometime. I can't believe I've gone my whole life without it. Did I do a good job?" "You did a great job," Chrissie said. "You're even better than Brett, and you know how good he is." "I'll choose not to be offended by that statement," Brett said. "I'm a woman," Michelle said. "I know what feels really good on me so I just did it to you. I'll bet you could do the same to me," she said hopefully. Chrissie blushed, embarrassed again. "Probably," she said apologetically. "But I'm not quite ready for that yet. I'm sorry." "It's okay, baby," Michelle said, kissing her on the lips. "You move at your own pace. I won't push you to do anything you don't want to." "I know," Chrissie said, kissing her back. "But in the meantime," Michelle said, "I could use a little more practice on my technique." She shifted her position a little and began to tongue Chrissie's nipple. "You don't mind that, do you?" "Not at all," Chrissie sighed, closing her eyes and letting the sensation take her away. ------- "Aircraft approaching from the east!" came the frantic cry from Stu, whose squad was handling rear guard for this second morning of the march back to Auburn. His radio was broadcasting his words even as he and his men were diving into cover alongside the roadway. "Cover, everyone," Bracken yelled into the command channel. "Cover! Don't let them see us!" It was a frantic ten seconds but every last one of the one hundred and sixty men and the single female that was being escorted along by second squad of fourth platoon, managed to get into the trees or brush before the black and white helicopter came close enough to see them. Bracken watched it through binoculars as it approached. It was the old CHP helicopter, just as the bitch from Garden Hill had told them. It was flying a little over two thousand feet above the ground, well out of range of accurate small arms fire, and moving at about eighty knots or so. Apparently this Brett character, the only one who knew how to fly it, was following the Interstate, using it as a navigational reference to wherever he was going. "That thing is quiet," observed Lieutenant Collier, who was crouching next to Bracken and looking through a set of his own binoculars. "It passed right over the top of us and I didn't even hear it." "It's got that super quiet rotor system," Bracken said, continuing to watch as it disappeared to the west, fading into the mist of rain. "I remember reading about it in the paper when the CHP first bought that thing a few years ago. It doesn't have a tail rotor so it doesn't make the noise that a normal helicopter does. Cops like it because it helps them sneak up on people and keeps down the noise complaints from citizens." "Where do you think he's going?" Collier asked. "I don't know," Bracken said worriedly. "Maybe a little recon mission. If he hasn't already done so, we'll have to assume that he's going to check out Auburn and all the other towns around here, looking for supplies and food and so forth." "Maybe he'll land in Auburn," Collier suggested. "Wouldn't that be nice? We could take him real painlessly that way." Bracken shook his head. "I don't think he's that dumb," he said. ------- "About two minutes," Jason said over the intercom to Matt and Paul, who were sitting in the back of the helicopter. With the help of Tim Harding, the former PG&E electrician, headsets had been fashioned and hooked into the system allowing communication between those in the front and those in the back. This was particularly useful on this mission since the right side door had been removed, an action that would make their task much easier to accomplish when the time came but which more than doubled the noise level. The two men looked at each other nervously, both of them taking a few deep breaths to try to calm down. "Got ya," Matt replied into his mouthpiece, giving a weak thumbs up. They were both adorned with rope harnesses that Paul had assembled from the vertical rescue inventory on the fire engine. They had packs full of breaking and entering tools upon their backs and rifles over their shoulders. Both of them carried a portable radio set to the helicopter's direct frequency. They sat shoulder to shoulder against the port wall of the cargo area, as far away from the missing door as they could get, looking out at the scenery passing below. "How are you doing, Matt?" Paul asked his companion as Brett started to descend towards the train cars on the hillside. "I'm not sure," he said, "but I don't believe that I've ever been this scared in my life. Not even when I was in the middle of that shooting match with those invaders did I have this much adrenaline pumping through me." "I know the feeling," Paul said with terrified sympathy. "I hate just being up in this helicopter at all. It scares the crap out of me. Now I'm going to have to jump out of the fucking thing and go down a rope from a hundred feet in the air. I'm telling you, there better be something down there we can use or I'm gonna be one pissed off individual." "Amen," Matt agreed. "You guys will be fine," Brett said, bleeding off speed and altitude as the target came into view. "I used to practice this maneuver with the SWAT team twice a month. It's nothing." "Easy for you to say, flyboy," Paul said sourly. "You get to stay up here where it's safe." "Hey," Brett said, amused, "I'd watch what I say to the man who gives you the ride home." Brett circled around the area for a few minutes, allowing Jason, the observer, to look for any signs of trouble on the ground before the outside crew committed itself. Nothing was spotted and the go ahead was given for the mission. Brett dropped down further and settled into a hover just over the top of one of the cargo carriers. "In position," he said. "Let's get it done." Paul, who did not have the combat training that Matt did but who was much more familiar with the descent gear, went first. Moving gingerly to the door he picked up the loop of rope that was coiled near it and pushed it out, watching as it fell towards the train car. The other end of the rope was secured to a hook on the side of the fuselage. He lay on his stomach, his head just poking outside, and guided Brett a little closer. "About ten more feet down and about six to the right," he told him, watching as the adjustments were made. Finally the rope was just touching the top of the car. "Right there," he said. "Hold that position." "Holding," Brett answered. Unable to put it off any further, Paul pulled himself to a sitting position and eased forward until his feet were dangling out over the doorway. He reached out with trembling hands and pulled in the rope, attaching it to the wheeled clamp on the front of his rope harness. He pulled the intercom from his head and set it on the floor and then, unable to believe he was actually doing something so mad, he pushed out of the doorway so he was standing on the skid. "Jesus fucking Christ," he yelled as the downdraft, which was relatively weak this close the center of the rotor but still quite powerful, hit him. He could feel the entire aircraft tilt back and forth from the shifting of his weight from the inside to the outside. "What the hell am I doing out here?" Nobody answered him, no one even heard him over the noise of the engine. He didn't even hear himself. All the same, the words had the desired effect. They motivated him into action. Moving carefully, holding on to the side of the doorjamb he turned himself around so that he was looking back into the helicopter. Matt, his face somewhat ashen, gave him another unenthusiastic thumbs-up. "Here goes nothing," Paul said, again without anyone hearing, and he stepped off the skid. The harness bit into his groin and his chest as he dropped down foot by foot. The two steel wheels attached to the rope kept him from descending too quickly. If he began to drop too fast the friction pulled them together, causing them to clamp shut on the rope and arrest the fall. He went down jerkily, a little rougher than he had done during the practice session off the top of the community center the day before. The gently rocking skid passed in front of his face and then it was above him and rising. The brown roof of the boxcar below began to grow bigger, now looking like an actual structure instead of a scale model. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, his feet touched the roof. He took a moment to stabilize himself and get his balance and then, with a sigh of relief, he disengaged the wheels from the rope. The noise and the buffeting by the wind was still quite intense so he sat down where he was, not wanting to be blown off the top of the car and over the embankment. Once he was down he hauled out his radio and turned it on. "I'm down safe," he yelled into it. "Send in the next victim." Matt emerged from the helicopter a minute later and began to come down, his own descent considerably more jerky and halting than Paul's had been. A couple of times he fell free for a few feet and caused the wheels to lock, which in turn made the entire helicopter rock back and forth. The end of the rope, which was two feet in front of Paul, danced up and down, back and forth whenever this would happen. At last Matt's feet came down and Paul was able to get his hands on him. He helped him disengage the wheels and then radioed up to Brett. "We're both down. Go ahead and pull back." If Brett answered it was lost in the noise, but a moment later the helicopter raised into the air and moved off to the west. "I don't ever," Matt said, his face white and pasty, "want to do anything like that again. Why the hell did I volunteer for this shit?" "Hell," Paul said, "you ain't seen nothing yet. Wait till he pulls us out of here. Then you can be really scared." Since the gear they had was only good for lowering someone down, the only way to get the two men back out of there was to have them clip onto the rope and to fly them dangling from the bottom of the helicopter to the nearest clearing where Brett could then land and let them inside. "I don't even want to think about that right now," he said. "Let's get to work." They unfastened their rope harnesses and left them atop the freight car. They then climbed down, utilizing a ladder bolted to the end of the car. They had planned to move from place to place by walking between the freight cars and the side of the hill. One quick look told them this was impossible. Mud and rocks had piled up in this space in many places preventing passage. This forced them to inch along the edge of the embankment, in the three-foot space between the edge of the cars and the drop-off. "You know something, Paul?" Matt asked, trying desperately not to look down at the drop. "What's that?" replied Paul, who was doing the same. "I'm not having a lot of fun here today." Paul chuckled a little. "You mean you don't like flying around in a poorly maintained contraption piloted by a man who has never been checked out on it, dangling from the bottom of it, and then walking along a cliff? What don't you find enjoyable about that?" "I guess I'm just weird," Matt said. "You want to check the grain carriers first?" "Yeah," he agreed. "They should be the easiest to get open." They came to the first one and utilized the ladder to ascend to the roof of it. These were steel cars, painted yellow, that had circular spouts on the top where bulk grain was loaded in from huge bins at the point where the car was filled. They crawled along the top until they came to the spout. It was sealed shut with a latching mechanism but it was not locked in any way. Though the latch was sticky from sitting closed for so long, it came open easily when the both of them pulled on it. Paul threw the hinged lid upward and caught a strong, musty odor. He pulled a three-cell flashlight out of his pack and shined it down in the hole. "Well?" Matt said. "It's rice," Paul said, seeing the brownish-white granules that filled the entire space. "Goddamn if it isn't rice. Probably twenty or thirty tons of it." "Is it still good?" "I don't know," he said, reaching his hand inside. "It's dry but there's some mold on the top. Let me see if it extends underneath." He pushed aside the rice under his hand, digging down a little before pulling up a handful. It was a nice uniform color with very little mold. "Looks like we're in the rice business," Matt said happily. "If nothing else is here, that'll keep us from starving to death." "But it'll be boring as hell," Paul said. "Let's check the other ones." They moved from one grain carrier to the next, checking each one and reporting their progress every few minutes to Brett and Jason, who were circling a half-mile away. The first four contained rice - one of the staples of Sacramento Valley agriculture before the comet - but two of the four had leaked enough water into the hold to spoil all within them. The last two contained wheat, another common crop in the valley. In one of the two the mold was so bad that the contents were completely unusable. In the second one however, though the top layer was contaminated, the underneath seemed relatively all right. "Looks like we've got a bread and flour supply as well," Paul said happily, almost forgetting that he was on the edge of a cliff. He slammed shut the lid and re-engaged the hatch. "Let's go check those boxcars now," he told Matt. There were ten of those in two distinct groupings. They climbed down from the grain car and worked their way carefully back to the first boxcar. Unlike the grain carriers, these cars were locked tightly with steel latches. Paul examined the mechanism for a moment and then concluded that the best tool for the job would be a five-pound hammer and a heavy-duty chisel. Fortunately he had had the foresight to bring these items with him. He pulled them out of his pack and went to work. It took five minutes of hammering and banging but finally the entire latch fell off, landing on the ground at his feet. "Nothing to it," he said, wiping sweat from his brow. "I can see that," Matt said. "Let's get it open." They both grabbed hold of the sliding cargo door and pulled, moving it on its track until it was fully open. Inside were cardboard boxes stacked on pallets from floor to roof. They were labeled SONY. "Well isn't this ironic?" Paul said, looking at their bounty. "I always wanted me a DVD player but the wife wouldn't let me spend the money. And now look. I have about two thousand of them." "Two thousand, two hundred and six," Matt corrected, reading from a manifest he found just inside the door. "Fresh off a cargo carrier from the Port of Stockton, headed for a warehouse in Chicago." "Wonderful," Paul said, shaking his head partly in amusement, partly in frustration. "Let's see what's in the next one." The contents of the next one turned out to be more Sony products. There were one thousand Surround Sound processors and eight hundred stereo VCRs. "Look," Matt said, pointing at one of the boxes. "They have the Smart Record feature." "Shut the fuck up," Paul grumbled. He handed the hammer and chisel to his wisecracking companion. "You do the next one. My arms need a rest." The next one did not contain consumer electronics. Nor did it contain anything particularly useful either. "Two million Bic ballpoint pens," Paul read from the manifest. "Ain't that some shit?" "That's a lot of fucking pens," Matt agreed. "Shall we move on?" They moved on. Matt once again handled the job of chiseling the lock off the freight car. In the rhythm now, it took only about three minutes before it fell and they were able to pull the door open. This time they struck gold, at least as far as staving off starvation went. This car was carrying cans of Campbell's concentrated chicken noodle soup - the same thing that the Garden Hill residents had been eating at least once a day since the impact, so common was that stock in their food supply. "Unbelievable," Paul whispered, looking at the pallets of tin cans stacked atop each other. Matt stared for a moment as well and then reached for the manifest and took a look at it. "How many?" Paul asked him. "Thirty thousand cans," Matt replied. "Coming from the factory in Sacramento and heading for a distributor in Omaha." "Thirty thousand cans," Paul repeated. "If there's a God, I will have to say that he is kind and benevolent for giving this gift to us. But he sure has one twisted-ass sense of humor." "Yep," Matt agreed. In the next car they found three huge rolls of blank newsprint that was heading from Seattle to the offices of the Reno Gazette. In the one following it were eleven thousand boxes of Saran Wrap. The next three all contained Maytag products - washers in the first, dryers in the second, dishwashers in the third. All of the appliances were top-of-the-line, but none were very useful to a community with no electricity. With some of their frustration returning they opened the very last cargo carrier. "Well," Matt said, looking at what they had found. "It's food, I'll say that." "Yeah," Paul agreed. "I guess we won't have to worry about anemia or scurvy now, will we?" "And if we ever meet Popeye, we'll have a huge edge on trade." Inside of the final car, stacked to the roof on pallets, were thirty thousand cans of Del Monte spinach. "Well," Paul said. "At least we know we won't starve to death. It may not be much variety but at least it's edible. Let's get all these cars closed back up and get ourselves home. And then we can start figuring out how to get some of this stuff back with us the next time." "Amen," Matt said. ------- Chapter 12 "Don't let anyone try to fault you, Bracken," Barnes said as he puffed on a cigar. "You did the right thing by aborting the mission. It may not be glorious to turn away from a fight, but you stayed within our doctrine and brought everyone home." "Yes, sir," Bracken said, sipping from a bottle of beer and taking a puff of his own stogy. "Some of the other men wanted to push ahead anyway, but I figured a forty percent casualty rate was a conservative estimate for that kind of operation. That's just way too high." "I would've skinned you alive if you would've got half your people killed," Barnes assured him. "If any of those men give you any shit about it, you have them come talk to me. I'll straighten them out." "Yes, sir." They were in Bracken's modest house, just down the hill from the high school. It was the first evening since the return of the company from their broken mission. Though he had already been given an official debriefing that afternoon, Barnes had invited himself over for dinner so he could get a more informal view on the Garden Hill situation. Though most of the town ate community meals at pre-set times in the high school cafeteria, those in Barnes' inner circle, which Bracken certainly was, were privileged with a certain amount of personal groceries from the stock each week. Utilizing these groceries, Jean and Anna, two of his wives, had prepared a stroganoff dish out of dry noodles and canned beef. The remains of it were now littering the dinner table where the two men sat. "I must say," Barnes told his newest official captain (that news had been the first offered that evening) as he patted his stomach, "your bitches surely did a good job on dinner." "Thank you, sir," Bracken replied, pleased with the praise. Though both Anna and Jean were hovering nearby, one clearing plates away, the other delivering fresh bottles of beer, it did not occur to either man to extend that thanks to them. "Maybe I'll send two of my bitches down here to take some cooking lessons from them," Barnes said reflectively. "God knows they could use them." "Anytime, sir," Bracken assured him. "Anytime." Bracken's other two "bitches", as the term went in Auburn, were sitting on the couch just outside the dining area. Kelly, the blonde, was spooning pureed meat into Sharon's mouth. Barnes looked at this sadly for a moment. "Still no improvement with her huh?" he asked. "No," Bracken replied. "I think the comet has driven her completely insane. I've been hoping she'll snap out of it but so far she just keeps getting worse. I'm afraid I might have to... you know... put her out of her misery." Barnes nodded understandingly. "Whenever you think the time is right, I'll sign the order for you," he said. "We can't keep feeding people that aren't able to function as productive members of the society." "Maybe we'll do that in the morning," he said. "It's a pity. She really was a fine bitch when I first got her. She had one of the tightest cunts I've ever felt." "Well go ahead and give her one last ride before you bring her in," Barnes grinned. "It should still be tight, shouldn't it?" While they laughed about that Jean and Anna, their faces completely expressionless, made a trip to the kitchen with their dishes. By the time they returned a minute later to finish clearing, the subject of Sharon had been tossed aside in favor of Garden Hill. "So what do you think it will take to counter the forces at Garden Hill painlessly?" Barnes wanted to know. "Well," Bracken replied, "taking into account their air superiority and their bunkers, I'd say that four hundred to five hundred men would be required just to make them consider giving up without a fight." "And suppose they demand a fight? Would that many men be sufficient to win?" "We would have won with the men we had," Bracken said confidently. "The question is not of winning or losing but of what casualty rate we take and what sort of damage we inflict upon the spoils that we're after. I'm sure we could take them with little more than a hundred men, but in order to minimize casualties to an acceptable level, we'll need at least five hundred." "We don't have five hundred men," Barnes reminded him. "The last class from Grass Valley has been through the training now and that brings us up to a grand total of four hundred and fifty troops, a lot more than we had in the beginning, but not nearly enough to attack in the strength you are suggesting and still maintain enough of a force here for security and self-defense. What if I gave you three hundred troops? What kind of casualty rate would you expect from that?" Bracken thought about that for a minute. "High," he said. "But I could minimize it by attacking from two different directions at once." "Use a diversionary force?" "No." Bracken shook his head. "The chopper they have rules out that tactic. With three hundred men I would have two full-blown attack forces hitting them simultaneously from two different directions. Overwhelm their defenses all at once and basically use speed to get inside that wall before too many of us get chopped up. It's not pretty but its sound." "The D-day technique," Barnes agreed. "That would do it." "But losses would still be rather high. Maybe as high as thirty percent if we were unlucky." "Ordinarily that would be an unacceptable loss," Barnes told him. "But in light of the need to either capture or destroy that helicopter, it becomes acceptable. We have to get our hands on that machine and its pilot, no matter what the cost." "I understand that, sir," Bracken replied. "And I agree with your reasoning. However, if we could take that town painlessly or force a surrender, wouldn't that still be the more acceptable option?" "Of course it would. What are you suggesting?" "If you could give me four hundred men," Bracken told him, "I think that just might be enough to convince them to give up the fight. I could hit them from three different directions at once - three companies of one hundred and twenty men apiece and one reserve platoon of forty that could be moved to wherever it's needed. I think we'd have a decent chance of forcing surrender very early in the battle if we did this. And if not, the sheer numbers alone will make it a very short fight. I would project no more than ten percent losses at worst and we might very well be able to overwhelm them before the helicopter can even leave the ground. After all, it takes a few minutes for it to spin up and lift off. You don't just jump in it like a car and start driving." Barnes clearly didn't like this idea too much. "That would only leave forty-five troops inside the town," he said. "What if we're attacked? That is stretching our defense way too thinly." "Who's going to attack us?" Bracken asked him. "We've already cleaned out every other town within a thirty mile radius." "Somebody from beyond that thirty mile radius," Barnes returned. "We don't have the luxury of that helicopter like Garden Hill does. We don't know what is out there except for the places we've physically walked to on the ground. If a major attack comes two days after you take four hundred troops out of here, we're fucked." "What if we left you some of the most experienced men and most of the automatic weapons?" Bracken countered. "That would make your forty-five men more like ninety. And I wouldn't need either the experience or the rapid-fire capability as much. Just give me some squad leaders and some officers who know what they're doing and the sheer numbers will do the rest." They discussed this back and forth for a few minutes as Jean and Anna finished clearing and cleaning the table. Barnes, though clearly reluctant to commit so many of his troops, eventually decided to go with the plan. "I'll need to reorganize them in to different units and exercise them for a bit first," Bracken said. "Of course," Barnes agreed. "When can you have them trained up?" "Give me three weeks and they'll be ready to march," he said. "Three weeks," Barnes said. ------- Jean and Anna said nothing to each other as they went about cleaning up the kitchen. Though they had much they wanted to discuss with each other - the day had been rife with rumors and stories from the returning attack force - neither dared talk inside the house. There was too much danger of Bracken or Kelly overhearing their words. It was best to pretend they knew nothing, heard nothing, saw nothing. So they washed dishes in the large tub of cold water and dried them with a towel. They put them neatly away in the oak cabinets over the useless sink. They did not even share a meaningful glance at each other. And then it came time to take out the garbage. They each grabbed an end of the large plastic tub that they stored disposable matter in and lifted. After informing Bracken that they were going to dump refuse - it was required that a woman check with her man before leaving the house unexpectedly - they went out the back door and began walking slowly down the darkened, rainy street. A Ford F-250 was parked at the intersection, discreetly hidden in the closed garage of an empty house. This was the street's garbage collection point. Whenever it got full a work-crew of men (it used to be women until Marla's escape - it was suspected that she hid in the garbage to get out and that the other women covered for her) drove it two miles outside of town to a dumping area that had been established. "Garden Hill is still there," Anna whispered excitedly. "They couldn't attack it!" "It doesn't sound like Marla made it there though," Jean said. "I heard Asshole tell the head asshole that that woman they picked up said she never made it." "Oh, fuck Marla," Anna said. "We knew she was probably dead all the time. Think about us for a moment." "Us?" "Us," Anna confirmed, slowing her pace a little more so they'd have more time to talk. "If we can get out of here, there's someplace for us to go now! Someplace where the women aren't slaves." "Anna," Jean said carefully, "they're in there right now planning on how they're going to attack that place. What good would it do for us to go there if Asshole is just going to destroy it next month?" "Maybe if we warn them," Anna suggested, "they won't be able to take it. If nothing else, maybe they can evacuate everyone to someplace else." "Or maybe they'll still take the place and hang us once they do." "It's a chance, Jean," she said. "We might die, but if there's any hope of getting out of this life, I'm going to take it. I'm going to go. You can stay here if you want." "I'll go if you go," she said with a nervous sigh. "You know that." "I know," she said, giving her an unseen smile. "But how do we get out?" Jean wanted to know. "How do we escape and get far enough away so they can't catch us? And then there's the fact that it's almost a ten-day walk to Garden Hill. What will we eat?" They reached the house where the garbage truck was parked. They set down their tub and lifted up on the garage door, which was kept unlocked. They picked the tub back up and then, with a coordinated heave, they dumped the contents into the back amid the rest of the garbage. "We need to start stashing food," Anna said thoughtfully. "We need a place to hide it where we can recover it later." "How will we do that?" Anna looked at the mounds of debris in the back of the truck and had an idea. "We'll throw it away," she said. "Huh?" Anna explained what she meant. Soon Jean was smiling as well. "Brilliant," she said. "Is that what they teach you in college." "Yes," Anna said seriously. "It was a two semester class." They shared a small laugh as they closed down the garage. They picked up their tub and began heading back home. "How are we going to actually get out though?" Jean asked. "If we can't do that, then it doesn't do much good to solve the food problem." "I'll have to work on that one," Anna said. "Give me a little time." "A little time is all we have," Jean reminded her. ------- Not too far away, unseen and unheard by anyone in the town of Auburn, a small black and white helicopter was hovering in the darkness. It was at an altitude of three thousand feet above the north side of the town, about half a mile from the closest habitation or manned position. Brett, behind the controls, was sweating nervously, his eyes ignoring the blackness outside the windshield and concentrating on the instruments in front of him. He was experiencing a strong sensation of vertigo, common among pilots under instrument conditions. His mind, with no visual inputs to counter the notion, was telling him that he was slowly descending and drifting to the right. His instincts cried at him to correct for this. Only the radar altimeter and the artificial horizon, which told him he was holding steady, kept him from actually doing this. "Let's do this quick," he said to Jason, who was peering at the FLIR display just as intently. "I don't like just sitting here like this. It's disorienting in the dark." "Copy," Jason said, using the controls to move the pod back and forth. He was seeing a black and white view of the nearest guard bunkers, the four guards manning them clearly visible as light figures on the darker background. "I've got the bunkers, I'm gonna pan over the residential area now." He moved the controls, seeing rows of houses, some of them brighter on the display than others. He saw a few people on the streets, a few of them obviously women, most men carrying guns. The men seemed to be some sort of interior guard force. "How's it look?" Brett asked him, not wanting to take his eyes off the instrument panel. Jason told him what he saw in fairly good detail. "The houses that show up lighter on the display," Brett told him. "Those are the occupied ones, or at least the ones that have some sort of heat source inside of them." "Got it," Jason replied. "There's not too many of them in this section, most are dark. It must be the outskirts of town. Spin around about twenty degrees left, I'm at the end of the panning range." "Spinning," Brett said, slowly manipulating the anti-torque pedals so the tail swung to the right. Again, the vertigo gave him conflicting signals. It felt to his body that he was not rotating at all. Only the compass told him that he was in fact changing his orientation. It moved slowly from 180 degrees to 170 to 160, where he stopped it. "Okay," Jason said, "I'm getting some good shots now. I have a whole cluster of houses just below the hill by the bridge. Almost all of them are brighter on the display than the others. There's a few more women walking around, mostly in pairs. A lot of them seem to be carrying tubs of some sort. There's also a big building on the top of the hill. It's glowing a lot brighter than anything else and there are some guards posted out in front of it." "I can see it on visual," Brett said, daring to look away from his instruments for a second. Sure enough, there was a glow that could only be caused by electric lights showing plainly before him. "They've got power in that building. Probably from a portable generator or something. It's got to be their headquarters." "I got it on tape," Jason said, referring to the video recorder that was included in the FLIR processor. "Can you get shots of the other bunkers from here?" Brett asked, putting his eyes back on the instrument panel. "I should be able to get all but the bridge bunker," he answered. "You'll have to rotate back and forth for me though." "I'm yours to command," Brett told him, wanting to wipe the sweat from his brow but not daring to take his hands from the controls. For the next five minutes Jason had him rotate left and right while he filmed the defensive arrangements and staffing levels in infrared. He then took a few more shots of the sparse activity on the darkened streets. He was able to figure out that there were two distinct sets of interior guards and that the women on the streets seemed to be in the process of dumping garbage into the garages of houses. He articulated all of this to Brett as it occurred. "Good job," Brett told him. "Now let's go get some shots of the bridge and the bunker over there." "How are you going to get over there?" "We're gonna go west until we're clear of the town and then cut south over the canyon. We'll creep up the other side until we're in sight of our target. We'll use the canyon itself as a reference point. So keep that FLIR pointed at it and tell me if I start to drift too far away." "Copy," Jason agreed a little nervously. It took them the better part of twenty minutes, with several lapses of communication that had Brett turning or moving the wrong direction, but finally they were hovering a half-mile southwest of the bridge bunker on the far side of the canyon. Jason, once Brett's positioning was stable, locked the FLIR onto it and started recording. He saw that the two men in the bunker were standing, looking off towards the town instead of towards the approaches. "They seem kind of antsy about something," Jason said as he watched them shifting back and forth. "And they're both smoking. I can see a bright flare in front of their faces when they take a drag." "Smoking cigarettes?" Brett asked, hoping that they were undisciplined enough to be using marijuana on duty. "I think so," Jason said. "They each have one and they're not passing it back and forth." A brighter flare on the edge of his view caught his attention. "What's that?" he said, panning the FLIR towards the bridge itself. "What's what?" Brett asked. Like any pilot, he did not particularly care for hearing those two words spoken while in flight. About the only worse phrase to hear was "oh shit". "There's a truck coming across the bridge," Jason said, seeing it's bright headlights on his display. "Looks like two men in it." "What time is it?" Brett asked. Jason looked at his watch, pushing the light button to get a reading. "I got 6:50," he said. "Must be crew change time," Brett said. It was. They hovered and filmed the changing of the bridge guard. Jason narrated as the two men in the truck parked at the bottom of the hill, got out, and then, with the help of flashlights, started climbing up one of the narrower sections. It took them about five minutes to reach the top. Once up there the two off-going guards exchanged a few pleasantries with their relief, handed over weapons and radios, and then started down the hill. While the new crew settled into the bunker for their shift, the old crew jumped in the truck and drove it back to town. "I think we got enough," Brett said once the truck disappeared over the bridge. "Why don't we get out of this place." "Sounds good," Jason agreed. "You gonna skirt around to the north again to pick up the Interstate?" Following the Interstate with the FLIR was how they had navigated to Auburn in the first place. "Well actually," Brett said slowly, "I was thinking we could make a little side trip." Jason looked over at his mentor's silhouette. "A side trip?" he asked carefully. ------- While Paul was in the community center office with Chrissie, anxiously awaiting the return of Brett and Jason from their nighttime recon mission, Janet and Sherrie were at Janet's nearby house, getting Sherrie settled in. It was her first day free of the traction splint that had been on her for so long, her first night out of the community center bed and on her own two feet. Paul had constructed her a rigid, removable cast out of sanded plywood and bungee cords. It was a crude, bulky device but it allowed her to walk with crutches and kept her from putting pressure on the mending but still weak femur. It had been decided that she would stay with her two caregivers, Paul and Janet, until such time as she was able to walk on her own. There were still quite a few tasks that she needed assistance with. "Oh my God, Janet," she sighed blissfully. "You can't imagine how good this feels." Sherrie was currently reclining in the master bathroom's oversized tub, her injured leg free of the cast for the moment and stretched out before her. Bath bubbles frothed around the edge of the tub and small tendrils of steam rose into the air around her. Though the community bathing center was the easiest place to take a hot bath since it had a constant supply of heated water, it was still possible to take a hot bath in the privacy of your own home as long as you didn't mind expending a little effort. Cold water could be supplied from the rain gutter system and hot water could be heated three gallons at a time in a large cooking pot in the fireplace. Janet smiled at her. It had been a lot of work to fill the tub up but seeing Sherrie's contented face made it worthwhile. "Here," she said, handing her a glass of warm chardonnay from a bottle she had pilfered from the supply room. "Have a little wine with it." "Wine?" she said delighted. "I haven't had any wine in... well... you know." "I know," Janet said, taking a sip from a glass of her own. They talked of inconsequential things for a while, each of them finishing two glasses and starting to feel the beginnings of a good alcohol buzz. "I used to drink far too much wine before the comet," Sherrie said as Janet poured each of them a third glass. "Yeah?" Janet asked. "Yeah," she said a little sadly. "I think it was an escape mechanism for the marriage I was in. I mean, I was the wife of a doctor and that was real important to me then, and I had a nice house in Garden Hill and I was a part of the upper crust and all that, but I didn't really like my husband all that much." "No?" "No," she sighed, shaking her head a little at her former self. "I married him because he was a doctor. That was all I was interested in. That was all that my mother had taught me to be interested in. I loved him for the lifestyle he was able to give me but I wasn't attracted to him in any way. I didn't enjoy looking at him, I didn't enjoy talking to him, and I certainly didn't enjoy having sex with him. He was a climb on, rut a few times, and fire off kind of guy. If I could get five minutes out of him it was a good night." "It seems there was a lot of that in this town," Janet said with a wine-induced giggle. "I don't know how many women have told me that exact same thing." "Sad but true," she sighed. "Being a trophy wife does have its disadvantages. Funny how my mother never mentioned any of that to me. And so I would spend my afternoons while he was at the office sipping wine from a box in the refrigerator. I would never get bombed and pass out or anything, but I would go through each day with a strong buzz and have to take a nap before Josh got home from the office." "You weren't the only one I'm sure," Janet said. "Why do you think we have so much wine, so much booze, so much pot and crank and cocaine and Prozac and Xanax in the supply room? They're all symptoms of the trophy wife syndrome. That's what happens when you marry for status or money instead of for love, you end up needing a crutch to get you through the days and the weeks. I wasn't all that different." "You weren't?" she asked, surprised. "Nope," she said. "I wasn't quite in the same class as the women in this town before the comet, but I married for pretty much the same reason. I grew up poor in South Sacramento. My mother supported my half-sister and I with child support payments and alimony from two different husbands. I was taught that the thing to do was find yourself a well-off man, marry him, and then divorce him once you put in "enough time" - as my mother put it - to get yourself a good settlement. My mom always taught me to do better than she had in that department. She had only found herself a construction worker and a car salesman, both of whom were abusive and rarely employed." She gave a cynical smile. "I did do a little better for myself. I went to college on a freakin' cheerleading scholarship and got myself a bachelor's degree in education. I became a kindergarten teacher because I really loved kids but I must admit that in the back of my mind, I was hoping to meet me a nice divorced father to take me away from it all and set me up. That's why I turned down job offers from the Sac Unified system and waited until Placer Hills Unified offered." "So did you meet the nice, divorced father?" Sherrie asked, taking a large sip of her wine and smoothing some bubbles over her chest. "No," she said, "not quite. Instead, I found the principal of the first school that I worked at down in Newcastle. His marriage was teetering on the brink when I started working there. I pushed it over the edge by seducing him into an affair. He divorced his wife and married me once it was final. They had to transfer me up here to Garden Hill when we became an item. He probably died when the water came in." "Just like everyone else's husband," Sherrie said sadly. "Just like it," Janet agreed with a sigh and a large sip. "I never really loved him. I was just putting in my time like my mom taught me. I really didn't know what love was like until I met Paul after the comet. Its kind of funny that it takes the end of the world for me to find out what's really important in life, isn't it?" Sherrie grunted a little. "At least you figured it out then," she said. "I had to get shot and almost die to figure it out." "But you've learned?" "Yeah," she said. "A little too late, but I've learned." Janet held up her glass for a toast. "To the important things in life," she said. "To the important things," Sherrie agreed. They clinked their glasses together and had a drink. ------- "There are people there!" Jason yelled excitedly as he peered at the FLIR display. "There are people, Brett! You were right!" They were hovering 3500 feet above the ground a half-mile west of the remains of El Dorado Hills. It had been a rather harrowing twenty-five minute flight from Auburn, with Brett creeping along at forty knots over the shoreline between the Sacramento Valley/Sea and the foothills, Jason guiding his turns with the FLIR. They had done this until they'd found Highway 50 rising out of the black water and then they'd turned east, using the Highway as their reference point to guide them in. Now, Jason could see that what he'd assumed was a dangerously mad mission had been worthwhile after all. On the screen before him, as he panned the FLIR back and forth, he could clearly see nearly sixty houses that were lit up with the white glow that betrayed a heat source within them. In addition, he could plainly see the white figures of twenty to thirty people walking here and there on the streets. "What do you see?" asked Brett, who, when he dared to avert his eyes from the instruments, could see nothing but the faintest of glows before him. Jason gave him a quick summary of the overview and then began to go into more detail. "There's a group of buildings that looks like an elementary school near the south side," he said. "That's where most of the activity seems to be. Most of the occupied houses are surrounding it. I have brightness coming from the biggest building in the school." "The cafeteria?" Brett asked. "I think so," he agreed. "And there's also a glow coming from the smaller building next to it. There are two guards standing in front of that building. They both have rifles - looks like assault weapons of some sort." "What's the sex of the guards?" Brett asked. "Can you tell?" "One male and one female it looks like," he said. "They're talking to each other but they seem to be paying fairly good attention to what they're doing." "Coed guard teams," Brett said with a smile. For some reason this idea comforted him. "Any other people with guns about?" "Not that I can see," Jason said, panning back and forth. He directed Brett to turn to the left so he could get a better view of the north side of town. He took shots of all there was to see there and then began looking at the hills surrounding the town for guard positions. It took a while but eventually he found two different sets. "I got two people in the treeline near the top the hill on the east side of town," he said when he spotted the first one. "I can only get a glimpse of them between two of the trees, and only from the shoulders up. It looks like they're pretty well hidden in there." "They must've seen us coming the other day when we did the first fly-by," Brett said reflectively. "They probably have radio communications in place down there and warned everyone in town to take cover somehow. That must be their defense; to hide and pretend they're an abandoned town if an unknown force probes them." Brett hovered for the next ten minutes, turning this way and that and allowing Jason to film a complete infrared view of El Dorado Hills. "All right," Brett said when they were done. "Let's get ourselves home. They're probably worried about us." He increased the lift of the rotor blades, bringing them up to an altitude of 6200 feet above sea level, a height that put them well above any peaks between the valley and Garden Hill. It was also high enough that the El Dorado Hills residents would not be able to hear their engine as they passed over. "Are we gonna go back to Auburn and backtrack?" Jason asked. "Negative," Brett replied. "Keep the FLIR on Highway 50 and we'll follow along it until we get to Cameron Park. Once we get to the airport I literally can fly us blind back home. Those sixteen flights I did back and forth from there let me lock in the exact course." "The exact course?" "From the airport, if I fly straight on a heading of 54 degrees, I will pass right over the Garden Hill bridge. Of course the wind would have to be factored into the equation if there was any, but we seem to be a little short on that lately." Since about impact+45 days, there had been almost a complete cessation of air movement in the atmosphere as temperatures became relatively equalized around the globe under the thick cloud cover. Strangely enough, Maggie, Chrissie's newest friend, had provided this information to Brett and the others. Maggie had minored in meteorology back in college while she had been waiting to meet her Prince Charming. "I see," Jason said, filing this fact away in his rapidly growing lexicon of aircraft knowledge. Once they were underway, Brett asked him if he had been studying the materials he had prepared for him. "Yep," Jason assured him. "I've got them memorized. Coming up on a curve, bank five degrees left." "Banking," Brett answered, making the turn. "How we looking?" "A little too much," he said. "Go back right about a degree. There you go. On course." "So tell me about the collective," Brett said. "The collective?" Jason asked. "That's right. What does the collective control on this aircraft do? If you've memorized the materials, you should know this." Jason smiled confidently. "The collective," he said. "It is..." ------- "Do you want to put a nightgown on?" Janet asked as she and Sherrie entered the spare bedroom where she would be staying. Sherrie had a towel wrapped around her body and one wrapped up in her wet hair. She was leaning heavily against Janet to avoid putting weight upon her injured leg, which was still free of the improvised cast and would remain so for the duration of the sleeping hours. The process of movement from one room to the other was made more difficult by the fact that both women had consumed four glasses of wine in the past hour. "No," Sherrie replied. "I'm gonna sleep naked tonight in honor of my new freedom. I've had those damn nightgowns on for too long." Janet giggled. "You're the boss," she said, guiding her over to the side of the neatly made twin bed "But don't be surprised if Paul finds some reason to come in here and check on you half a dozen times tonight." This made Sherrie blush in embarrassment. She had of course noticed Paul's recent attention to her body whenever he examined her. His eyes always seemed to be focused on her braless breasts or between her legs. Truth be told, she actually encouraged his eyeball explorations, finding them exciting in their forbiddeness. She often kept her gown just a little higher than necessary and her legs just a little wider than necessary during such times. She had not been aware that Janet had noticed this as well. At least not until now. She went with her instincts in response, which was to deny. "I don't think Paul would do anything like that," she said with a tone of dismissiveness that didn't come across very well. "Besides, who would want to look at this broke up body anyway." Janet smiled knowingly. "Give me a little credit, Sherrie," she said. "He's been looking at your pussy every chance he gets. And do you really think he needs to feel up your leg twice a day?" Sherrie honestly didn't know what to say. In the olden days such words would have meant a war was being declared and would have been spoken in a threatening tone. That was not the case here though. Janet was speaking lightly of these things, as if they were cutely amusing traits. "Here, let me pull the covers back for you," Janet said, bending down and doing so. "In with you now." Slowly Sherrie was lowered to the bed, keeping her injured leg as straight as possible. Janet then reached down and lifted up on her feet, helping her swing them up onto the mattress. This served to open her crotch up almost obscenely for a moment, giving Janet a premium view right up under her towel. She did not avert her eyes as a woman typically would under such circumstances. Instead, she took a good hard look at what was revealed. "I can see why Paul likes to look at it," she said with a smile. "You really do have a nice little slit there." "Uhhh... well... thanks. I mean... uh..." Sherrie stammered, unsure just how to handle such a situation. Janet had seen her vagina a hundred times when she'd bathed her and helped her with the bedpan. Why was she making comment on it now? And why was she talking about it in such a decadent manner? "Here," Janet said, reaching down and tugging on the towel. "Give me that thing so I can put it in with the laundry for tomorrow." Sherrie raised up a bit to let the towel come free of her, leaving her completely naked atop the sheet. She quickly reached down and grabbed the covers, concealing herself. Janet did not try to stop her, although she feared that she might. "I got a lot of your personal stuff out of your house, just like you asked," Janet told her, sitting on the edge of the bed. "Thanks." "I got your make-up supplies, your razor, your deodorant, some of your clothes and underwear." She paused, giving a wicked look. "I also got your toy out of your nightstand and brought it over." "My... toy?" she said slowly, hoping that Janet wasn't referring to what she thought she was. It was a hope that turned out to be a vain one. "Your toy," she said, reaching over and opening up a drawer on the nightstand. She reached in and pulled out a nine inch vibrating dildo. "It's a nice one. Top of the line." Sherrie was familiar with this particular dildo since she had purchased it herself at an adult store in Citrus Heights about a year before the comet. It was the only thing that had given her any orgasms throughout her married life. "Oh my God," she said, appalled at seeing her most personal possession in Janet's hand. Janet smiled. "Nothing to be embarrassed about," she said lightly, making no move to put it away. "These things are the staple of trophy wife syndrome, aren't they? Remember when we went through the empty houses looking for supplies? We found dildos of various shapes, sizes, and colors in almost every master bedroom. And in those houses that we didn't find them, it was probably only because they'd hidden them too well. Hell, I got one myself." "You... you do?" "Of course I do," she said. "I was a trophy wife of sorts wasn't I? I used to bust that thing out whenever Frank went to sleep before me and fire it up. I went through at least a set of batteries a week. How else is a girl gonna get a good come?" Sherrie started laughing. She was still acutely embarrassed and more than a little uncomfortable with the direction the conversation was going, but she couldn't help herself. "I thought I was a pervert," she giggled. "I used to hide that thing in the bottom of my sewing cart so my husband wouldn't find it. I would've died if I'd thought the other women knew I had one. I mean, we used to joke about it sometimes, but no one ever admitted to having one." "The suburban housewife's best friend," Janet said, still holding the object in question in her hand. "Mine's just a standard ten dollar model. This one looks like it must've run you fifty bucks at least." "Sixty-five," Sherrie said, making both of them laugh. "That's genuine lamb skin it's lined with. It even has a warmer in it to make it... you know... warm." "Oooh," Janet said, giving it a few strokes with her hand. "I thought it felt awfully nice. You must've missed it during your convalescent period, huh?" "Well..." she said, her face flushing brightly again. "You should've asked for it. I would've got it for you. I mean, the hand is okay in a pinch, but nothing beats the old latex friend when it comes to relieving the pressure. Or at least nothing but a good, real one that's attached to someone that knows how to use it." "I wouldn't know," Sherrie said. "I've never come from the real thing before." "Never?" She shook her head. "Never," she said. "I've only slept with four guys in my life and none of them were all that good at it." "That's a shame," Janet said sympathetically. "Isn't it though? And you're right. I really did miss my friend while I was in the community center. It seems that this last week I've really been wanting him." "So I did good bringing it over," she said brightly. She let her hand drop down to Sherrie's leg and began rubbing the head of the dildo back and forth across it over the covers. "I bet you want to use him now, don't you? After the bath and the wine and all. I always found that that's when I was the horniest." Sherrie looked at her friend's hand nervously, watching as the lambskin dildo pushed against her thigh. What was going on here? Surely Janet wasn't coming on to her, was she? "Well..." she said carefully, "maybe a little later." "Oh come on, Sherrie," Janet said, using her other hand to tug on the covers. Before Sherrie had a chance to realize what was happening, they were down below her waist, revealing her nakedness. "Why don't you play a little? You deserve it after all you've been through." She began to slide the dildo over her breasts, making the nipples hard. "Janet," she said, almost paralyzed from the turn things had taken. "I don't really... I mean I'm not a..." "Shhh," Janet said, sliding the dildo between her breasts and trailing it slowly down her stomach. "Just relax a little. I'm here to help you, just like I always was." "I don't need any help right now," Sherrie said, feeling goose bumps rising on her skin as the lambskin touched her navel. "I think maybe we've had a little too much wine and..." "You like it when I give you your baths, don't you?" Janet asked softly. "What?" she said with a start. Janet smiled. "When I bathe you," she said, continuing to make slow circles around her belly button, "your nipples get hard, just like they are now. And your pussy gets wet. When I'm washing your legs and your thighs, I can smell it when you get aroused, and I can see your clit gets hard. It turns you on to have me touch you, doesn't it?" "No," Sherrie said, shaking her head, knowing that she was lying. Over the past two weeks she had become incredibly aroused whenever it was bath time, so aroused that she looked forward to it almost as much as Paul's medical exams. She had refused to acknowledge this to herself, had refused to delve deeply into the meaning of it in her mind, but there was no denying it. She liked Janet's hands upon her body. "Let's be honest with each other, Sherrie," Janet said, sliding the dildo a little further to the south, so that it was just touching the top of her pubic hair. "You're wet right now, aren't you?" "Janet..." Sherrie said, confused. "Aren't you?" Janet repeated. "Don't fib to me. You're lying there with your legs open and you're letting me slide this thing all over you. I can see the wetness on your pussy. You want me to put this in you, don't you?" She let it slide for just the briefest moment over the top of her clit and down between her pink lips. "Ohhh," Sherrie said, startled as electricity shot through her nether regions. Her hips jerked upward, instinctively trying to increase the contact. What was happening to her? Why was Janet acting this way? Why was she responding to it? "Tell me, Sherrie," Janet said, letting the dildo trail over her inner thighs now. It left a small smear of wetness where it touched. "Do you want me to put it in you? Do you want me to fuck you with it, to make you come?" "Yes," Sherrie said helplessly, giving in. "Put it in, Janet. Put it in me." Janet smiled. "That a girl," she said, bringing the tip back to those wet lips. "Honesty is always the best policy, isn't it?" Slowly, she began to twist the dildo back and forth, pushing on it with delicate pressure so that the lips parted, allowing a half-inch to penetrate her. "More, Janet," Sherrie pleaded, her hips gyrating and trying to drive it in deeper. "Put it all the way in!" "I'm getting there," Janet said, pushing a little harder, so another inch slid inside of her. She gave it a few twists and then pulled it back out a bit. Before Sherrie could protest, she pushed it back in, a little deeper this time, and then pulled it back out, and then put it back in. Slowly, inch-by-inch, stroke-by-stroke, she pushed and pulled until the entire nine inches was sliding in and out, it's surface wet and slippery with juices. "Ohhh, Janet," Sherrie cried, her breathing somewhat rapid now, her hips bumping with the rhythm. Though she had shoved that pink dildo in and out of herself hundreds of times before, never had it felt so good, never had it turned her on as much as she was at this moment. What was happening to her? "Have you ever played around with another girl before?" Janet asked her, picking up the speed a little, giving the dildo an extra little twist with each stroke. "No," she breathed, her head falling back on her shoulders. "Not really." "Not really?" Janet asked, her free hand finding a breast and beginning to softly caress it. "What does that mean?" "Well," she said, "when I was in high school this woman I... ohhhh... I babysat for tried to... you know." "To fuck you?" "Yeah," she said, pushing her breast into Janet's hand to increase the pressure. "She started kissing me one night... ohhhh God, Janet... turn it on. Make it vibrate." "Tell me the story first," Janet said, pushing it in to the hilt and then slowly withdrawing it for an instant. She then resumed the strokes, though at a slower rate. "She started kissing me on the couch one night after she came home," she said. "I was so surprised that I let her. And then after a minute or two, I started getting... you know... kind of hot." "And then what?" "And then... oh God... and then... well... I was wearing a skirt. She took my panties off and put her face down between my legs. She started eating me." "Did it feel good?" "I never felt anything like it before," Sherrie said. "But I was ashamed. I thought that maybe I was a lesbian or something. I ran away before she finished. I never talked to her again." "She didn't make you come?" "No," Sherrie said. "I only let her do it for a minute or so." "But you liked it?" "Yes," she said softly. "Did you always wish you would've let her finish?" "Yes." Janet smiled, licking her lips a little. "I'll finish it for her," she said. "Janet, I don't think we should..." "Shhh," Janet said for the second time that night. She flipped on the vibrator, making it hum. "I don't think you should think right now. Thinking just gets in the way of things sometimes." As she began to push and pull the humming contraption in and out with vigor once again, she slowly lowered her head to Sherrie's right breast. She licked the nipple slowly and then took it into her mouth, suckling it. "Oh, Janet," Sherrie moaned, letting the sensation take her away. "Oh God." Janet suckled the nipple for a moment and then switched to the other one, making it firm and puffy with her mouth. She then let her head move downward, tonguing her way across Sherrie's stomach and pelvic area until she was right above the dildo moving in and out. By now it was starting to get warm. She licked her lips one more time, inhaling the exciting scent of female pheromones, and then began lapping at the swollen clit. ------- It was a little over three hours since Brett had safely and uneventfully landed the helicopter safely back in the community center parking lot. A debriefing meeting had been held almost immediately afterward, with Chrissie, Michelle, Matt, and Paul attending while Jason ran the video player and Brett narrated the events. Copious notes and observations had been made both about the layout of Auburn and about the newly discovered town of El Dorado Hills. Overall, Paul thought as he walked wearily home, the mission had been a success, well worth the fuel that had been burned to run it. They now had some good, solid information about the town down the hill. They knew that only the men carried the guns and staffed the guard positions and that the women seemed to carry garbage and clean things up. They knew that their headquarters was a high school atop a hill and that they powered their headquarters with a diesel generator that was fueled from a tanker trailer parked behind it, a trailer that had probably been scavenged from the Interstate. None of this information was particularly enlightening as to the intentions of the Auburnites, but at least it gave them an idea of their make-up and armament. And then there was El Dorado Hills. It was quite exciting to discover that there was another group of people out there, people that were adept at hiding themselves at the approach of enemies. Paul had given Brett a stern talking-to about the unauthorized side-trip and asked him not to operate outside of his mission orders any more, but he was, in retrospect, glad that he had done it. The El Doradans seemed, at least from the blurry infrared images, a lot more like the Garden Hillians than those in Auburn were. In EDH they used women on guard detail! That one little discovery spoke volumes about the type of society they were operating under. There had been some talk about possibly trying to make contact with them in the future. As he walked up his driveway, slogging through the ever-present puddles, he was mulling over just how they could go about making that contact if the time came. Certainly just having Brett land his helicopter in the middle of their town was far too dangerous. What other options were there? The house was darkened as he entered it. He hung up his rain jacket in the entryway and then, operating by feel, lit a candle that had been sitting just inside the formal living room. Using it's meager light, he navigated his way through the damp clothing hanging from the drying line and into the hallway. He went first to the guestroom, where Sherrie would be sleeping, so he could check up on her. Of course he had no reason to believe that she was in any sort of peril, but he checked anyway. He took any excuse he could to look in on his beautiful patient. He was sometimes concerned with how attracted he had become to her over the past few weeks but the attraction was undeniable. Though he loved Janet deeply, he lusted strongly after Sherrie, that lust growing every time he caught a glimpse of her vaginal area or saw her bra-less breasts bouncing beneath her nightgown or put his hands upon her soft legs. He wanted her badly and had taken to imagining it was she that he was making love to whenever he made love to Janet (which he did frequently these days). It wasn't that he didn't desire Janet any more it was just that Sherrie was different and variety was what men craved. The first thing he noticed when he stuck his head into the guest bedroom was the smell. In the poorly ventilated room the odor of musk was almost overwhelming. Paul had no trouble identifying what that odor was - he had smelled it often enough in his life - and his penis began to stiffen at the first whiff. What the hell? Had Sherrie been playing with herself in there? That very thought was enough to stiffen him up completely. As the light from the candle penetrated the darkness he saw an amazing sight. On the bed, sleeping soundly, was not just Sherrie but Janet as well. They were in bed together! Though the covers were pulled up to their necks, hiding their bodies from his sight, it was quite obvious that they were cuddled together, Janet's head nestled into the crook of Sherrie's neck. Lying on the floor beside the bed was a dildo! A dildo! What had happened in here? Had the two women had sex together? "Holy shit," he whispered, trembling a little as he envisioned the two of them, naked and sweaty and using that dildo on each other. That had to have been what had happened! It had to! Why else would it smell so strongly of sex in the room? Why else would they be cuddled up together? Janet, a light sleeper even under the influence of wine, opened her eyes at the sound of his voice. She blinked a few times and then looked up at him, giving him a smile. He opened his mouth to say something to her but she put her finger to her lips, hushing him. Slowly she extricated herself from Sherrie's grasp, sliding out from beneath the covers and standing naked. She walked towards him, continuing to hold her fingers to her lips, and then kissed him lightly on the mouth. The strong taste of musk was upon her lips. "Janet..." he stammered softly, "what have... I mean..." "Shhh," she said, giving him one more kiss. "Let's go the bedroom. We need to talk." ------- The next day was very busy for the residents of Garden Hill. The operation to recover the freight train supplies began in earnest. A group of eight people - Paul in command of them - were flown out to the sight of the train and lowered down on the ropes to the tracks. Utilizing empty hot water heaters that had been stripped from the houses and modified with latched lids on the top, more than two tons of rice was moved from the grain carriers and placed into storage in the community center. The water heaters were used both to airlift the commodity and to store it, eliminating the step of moving it from one container to another once back in town. Nearly everyone in town participated in the operation in one way or another, even the children. And as they worked a variety of new rumors and stories circulated among the townspeople. First and foremost was the story about the existence of another operating community in El Dorado Hills. Excitement at the discovery of fellow human beings that had survived the comet was on every lip. But coming up a close second was the story about the newest triple that had been formed in town. By mid-morning the rumor was confirmed. Paul, their leader, and perhaps the most respected man in town, was taking himself a new wife. ------- Jessica had been in a state of complete disbelief for the past three days. Like any new woman brought to Auburn, she had been housed in the high school under guard and subjected to the "education class" in which the rules and laws of town had been explained in exacting detail to her. Two women had been the one's to give her these so-called lessons and with each word out of their mouths her disbelief had grown. Don't speak to your husband or any other man unless you are first spoken to? Infidelity to your man was punishable by hanging? No leaving the house without first asking permission? No leaving the town at all? No handling of firearms or reading of books under punishment of hanging? What the hell were these ditsy women trying to hand her? Surely they could not be serious? Had she been placed in the care of the mentally deranged? Never once did she consider that these mad ravings could be actual town rules that were enforced. That was simply impossible. Sure, she was living in a male oriented society, that was easy enough to see. But then hadn't society always been male-oriented? Hadn't women like her always found a way to grasp and exert power through those men? Surely this place couldn't be any different. And now, on her third day in town, she had been informed that her training was complete and that she had been assigned to a husband who had been selected by lottery. Assigned? She was certainly going to see about that. Someone named Sergeant Stinson was allegedly to be her new man. As if she was going to allow that. She was already perceptive enough about the workings of Auburn to know that a man's military rank was synonymous with his power within the town. A sergeant? They had assigned her to a mere sergeant? That simply wouldn't do. She would accept no less than that man Bracken who had led the group that she had met up with. He was a captain and was rumored to have the ear of the lead man himself, Barnes. Though it was Barnes who she was ultimately angling for, she figured that she would be pushing it if she tried to get close to him so soon. But if she got close to Bracken first it would only be a matter of time before she... The door to the small room she was being held in opened and a man walked in. He was a small man, dressed in the inevitable camouflage clothing that all the men in town wore. He was a short man, standing about five foot nine, and very skinny with thick, coke-bottle glasses upon his face. He looked like a computer nerd and in fact, though she didn't know it, had been a systems engineer for Placer County prior to the comet. She looked at him with contempt as he looked her over. "Not bad," he said, nodding a little as he took in her form. "I'm Steve Stinson, your new husband. You ready to go home?" "My new husband?" she asked, continuing her look. "That's right, bitch," he said, scowling a little at her expression and her tone. "Let's go." "Now wait a minute," she said, standing up and walking over to him. "While I'm sure that you're a very nice man, I hardly think that a lottery is the proper way to pick a mate. I mean, I don't even know you. I'm sure you'll agree that a marriage must be based on mutual respect and goals." Stinson looked at her in complete disbelief. "Mutual respect and goals?" he asked through clenched teeth. "Why yes," she agreed. "I mean what kind of civilization would we be building if we just went around assigning every woman to a man on a random basis? That is certainly not the way that things..." "Listen," Stinson interrupted. "I am basically a nice guy, just like you said, so for that reason, I'm going to cut you a little bit of slack. They told me that you were a bit mouthy and that you didn't seem to take your lessons very seriously, but let me tell you that you are not in the world you grew up in. Talking back to me, talking to me at all without being addressed first is a beating offense, do you understand? Unless you wish to have the back of my hand across your face, I'd suggest you pick up your stuff and follow me right now." She opened her mouth to reply to this but he stopped her before she could speak. "No words," he warned, raising his hand a little. "I don't enjoy violence but I will use it if needed. Pick up your stuff and let's go." Jessica began to feel a bit uncomfortable. Beating offense? Surely he wasn't serious. Why, if he so much as laid a hand upon her, she would complain directly to Barnes himself about it. Nobody hit her! No man talked to her that way! But still, she thought that maybe the best thing was to go along for now, to accompany this man to his home until this could all be worked out. She would find out what the grievance process was and utilize it. In doing so she would undoubtedly find a way to talk to those who really mattered in the town. And so, keeping her mouth shut, she picked up her bag of clothes and followed him out the door. ------- They had told her many times in her classroom that the men of Auburn all had multiple wives - at least two but as many as four. Still, despite this knowledge, it came as a shock to her when Stinson led her inside the small house and introduced her to Linda and Cathy. They were both young, mousy looking women, obvious tramps. "Now Linda," Stinson explained to her, "is the senior wife. She will be who conveys my orders to you and she will assign you to any household tasks that need to be done. If you have any requests of me or if you wish to talk to me for some reason, you must go through her first. Do you understand?" "Uh... yeah," she said slowly, looking at her as if she were a bug. "Welcome to the family," Linda said meekly, hardly raising her eyes. Jessica continued to stare, not saying anything. "Cathy," Stinson said next, "is technically the same rank as you are but there is still the issue of seniority. Since she has been in the family longer than you have, she has the privilege of being given the nicer assignments by Linda. Everything is based on seniority around here, especially among the women. Do you understand?" "Sure," Jessica said mechanically, thinking that it would be a cold day in hell before she took an order or lifted a finger to help either one of these women. "Now the way we work things around here," Stinson continued, "is that I sleep with one woman a night. Who that is depends upon what my fancy happens to be on that particular night. The other two sleep in the guest bedrooms. Of course, once we start to have children around here we'll have to come up with other arrangements. And that'll be in about seven months, won't it, Linda?" "Yes," Linda said quietly, patting her stomach. Jessica looked at Stinson, hardly having heard the allusion to Linda's pregnancy. Sleep with one woman a night? The little nerd didn't think he was going to sleep with her did he? She gave her body to no one who couldn't help her in some way. And this man was surely a low-level flunky if she'd ever seen one. He finished showing her around the house - which was pitifully small in Jessica's opinion - while the two "wives" trailed along behind. She asked nothing, said nothing during the tour, simply going along with it, listening as he explained about household duties and work assignments and dinner schedules, but not really hearing him. When could she get away from him and meet someone who mattered, she kept wondering? How long until she had a chance to talk to Bracken or Barnes? Finally the tour came to an end at a closed door near the back of the house. "And this is the master bedroom," Stinson said, "or... the pleasure palace as I like to call it. Isn't that right, bitches?" "Yes," they both dutifully replied in unison. Jessica could barely keep her tongue in check as she heard this. "And so now," Stinson said, a certain amount of eagerness on his face, "I think it's time for the breaking in. Linda, Cathy, you're dismissed to your duties." "Yes, sir," they both replied. They immediately turned and walked away. "Jessica," Stinson said, opening the door to the room and waving her inside, "shall we get to it?" "Get to it?" she said icily, giving him her most contemptuous stare. It was a stare that could usually be counted on to cower just about anyone. In this case if did nothing but produce a dangerous look on Stinson. She didn't let that bother her however. She had more than her share of experience dealing with peons like this. "We're married now," Stinson told her. "It's time for us to consummate that marriage. Get in the bedroom." "Consummate?" she asked with a sharp laugh. "Oh I really don't think so." "You... don't think so?" he asked, seemingly in disbelief. "Listen, Stinson," she said. "You seem to be under the impression that I am some sort of... bimbo like the rest of the women in this town. Well let me tell you right now that I am not. I am a woman of breeding and education. I have a bachelor's degree in history and I was married to a lawyer before the comet. I was the president of the homeowner's association back in Garden Hill and I was a key member of the ruling council." Stinson's mouth dropped open in sheer surprise at what he was hearing. His face started to turn red. "You... you... how dare you..." "And furthermore," Jessica went on, figuring that she was well on her way to gaining the upper hand, "I do not respond to assignments for housework. I don't do housework, I have it done for me. I do not take orders from little white trash hussies just because you've got them convinced that you are somebody. And most important of all, I will not be consummating anything with you. Now why don't you take me to someone important in this town so I can explain this to them and get assigned to a household that is a little more fitting of my background." She saw the fist coming but did nothing to stop it. It was his right hand and it swung upward from his waist with lightening speed, moving directly for her face. She could have ducked, could have raised her hand in defense, but so disbelieving was she that someone - especially a nerdy geek like this - would dare strike her, that she only stood there. It crashed into the side of her face like a sledgehammer and pain exploded in her head. Bright stars fired off before her eyes as she was slammed into the wall next to her. She stumbled a few steps, dazed and confused, trying to regain her balance, but before she could, the left hand swung up and struck her on the other side of her face. She spun around with the sheer force of it, dropping to her knees on the carpet of the doorway. Blood was running slowly down her cheek and pattering to the floor from a cut below her eye. Stinson grabbed her by her blonde hair and lifted up on her, pulling her painfully to her feet. Another blow landed on her back, right in the left kidney, driving the wind from her lungs. She tried to fall down again but the hand in her hair prevented this. She was dragged forcefully over to the bed and thrown bodily upon it. Her head was still ringing and she was still in a state of complete shock as he began talking to her. "Roll over and look at me, bitch," he said, his voice low and dangerous. When she didn't do this right away he stepped forward and grabbed her roughly by the hair again, jerking her face upward and turning to him. "Did you hear what the fuck I said?" he demanded. "Roll your ass over." Slowly, trembling with fear, anger, and pain, she did what she was told. "Now you listen," he told her, staring into her eyes, "and you listen good. You are my property now. My property. I will do with you as I please, when I please, and you will obey my every fucking command. I could have you hanged for what you just said to me. Hanged! But I'm going to give you another chance because you're new here and because you're a pretty hot piece that I really want to fuck. Know this though. If you ever talk back to me again, if you ever pull any shit like that again, I'll beat you to within an inch of your life and then have Barnes hang you the next morning. Is that clear?" She brought her hand up and rubbed at the cut on her face. He had hit her! He had beaten her! Where the hell did he get off thinking that he could do that to her? Why she was going to... He backhanded her sharply, sending a spray of blood flying across the room to patter on the headboard of the bed. "I asked if that was clear?" he demanded. "Do you have a fucking hearing problem? Answer me!" In an instant it came home to her that she was in danger. This man was crazy! She needed to get help, to get out of here! She eyed the doorway, trying to gauge whether or not she could get past him. Stinson took a step forward, raising his fist towards her. "If you know what's good for you," he told her, "you'd better answer me in the next second." "It's clear," she said carefully, her entire head throbbing with pain. "Good," he said, stepping back to the doorway and shutting the door. "Now get those clothes off." "Look," she started, trying desperately to think of a way out of this situation. She needed to get help. The blow struck her on the jaw this time momentarily dislocating it from its socket and loosening two of her teeth. She fell to the bed, feeling the muscles and tendons on the side of her mouth cramping in protest. His hand pulled her hair again, forcefully raising her up. "Get those clothes off," he said, carefully annunciating each word. "I'm not going to tell you again." "You won't get away with this," she said fearfully, her hands reaching for the button on her shirt. "Get away with what?" he asked her. "With raping me. I'll report it." He started laughing. "Raping you? Report it? Lady, you're not in Garden Hill anymore, you're in Auburn. You are my bitch now and I can do whatever I want to you. If I wouldn't have beaten you for what you said and for disobeying me, I would've been the one breaking our law, do you understand that? Now I don't like having to hit people - as I said, I'm basically non-violent - but you are way out of line. There's nothing for you to report to anyone. After they beat you for talking without permission, they would tell me I was doing my husbandly duties well. Now get those fucking clothes off before I give you a Goddam concussion. It's time this marriage was consummated." Slowly, her fuzzy mind trying to sort through what was happening, she began to remove her shirt. Could it be true? Could it be that she was nothing but property here? Could it be that this man could beat her whenever he wanted? That he could rape her whenever he wanted? What kind of place was this? "Come on," Stinson said impatiently, "I ain't got all fuckin night. I have to pull a watch in an hour." Feeling as trapped, as helpless as she ever had in her life, she took off her shirt and her bra, baring her surgery enhanced breasts to his greedy eyes. "Very nice," he said, reaching out and giving one a squeeze. She winced at the touch but did not pull away from him. "Now the rest," he told her, pulling off his own shirt and revealing his skinny chest. "I wanna see that pussy as well." Soon she was completely naked and trembling on the edge of the bed. Stinson dropped his pants and underwear, revealing a five-inch cock that was sticking out erectly. "How about we start with a little blowjob?" he suggested, stepping up and sticking it in her face. "That'll get the old juices flowing properly." Jessica had never put a penis in her mouth in her life. She had never been laid in anything other than the missionary position. She started to cry as he pushed himself towards her. "No," she told him. "I don't..." Another backhand across the face convinced her that she did. She opened her mouth and took him into it. He grabbed her by the hair and guided her motions roughly. Several times she gagged as it was forced to the back of her throat. "Goddammit, do it right," he demanded. "Suck on it! Use your mouth, use your tongue, use your hands! I want it to feel good, do you understand?" For the next five humiliating minutes, she listened to his instruction and did what he told, slurping and sucking on him, bathing him with her saliva. "Now you're getting the hang of it," he told her with a sigh. "A little more hand action, and watch those teeth. If I feel them scraping me again you're gonna get another shot." She gave him more hand action. She watched the teeth. "You have such a pretty little face," he said. "It's a shame you made me mess it up like that." He pumped a few times, forcing himself all the way in again. And then, abruptly, he pulled out. "Now lay down on the bed," he told her. "It's time to fuck." Numbly, knowing that resistance was beyond futile, she fell back on the bed, awaiting her fate. "I'm not on any birth control," she said weakly, her last ditch effort to dissuade him. "Good," he said, grabbing her legs and throwing them wide open. "We have to repopulate the earth you know." He gazed at the center of her, nodding appreciably. "Not a real blonde huh?" he asked. "You did a good job of covering it up. First thing in the morning, I want you to shave off all of that hair. And keep it clean from now on too. I like my bitches smooth. Any stubble gets a beating." She said nothing, only nodded her understanding. A second later he was atop of her, his cock, still wet with her saliva, forcing its way into her dry folds. She grunted in pain at the entry. He rutted atop her for nearly fifteen minutes, his hips rising and falling, his breath panting on her neck. A few times he crammed his tongue down her throat, forcing her to kiss him. His breath was sour, as if he hadn't brushed his teeth in a few weeks. She fought back a gag whenever he did this. Eventually her body acted in a biological nature and produced lubrication to help ease his passage within her. The pain went away but was not replaced by pleasure. Finally, at long last, his pace became erratic and, with a grunt, he came. She felt his seed shooting within her, felt it pattering against her cervix. When he was done he got up and began putting his clothes back on. "You need to work a little more the next time," he told her. "I'm not gonna have a bitch of mine just lying there while I fuck her. You need to learn to move." She said nothing, could not even look at him. "Tell you what," he said, "I'm gonna have you sleep in here tonight. I get off shift at midnight and I'll be home by 12:30. We'll go again with you on top. It'll be your job to make me come. If you need some tips on how to do that, just ask Linda and Cathy. They used to be dead fucks too, now they're the sweetest pieces in town." Again she didn't answer. He stepped over to her, pulling her head up by the hair again. "Did you hear me?" he asked, glaring at her. "Yes," she said quietly, her voice defeated. "Then you answer me, you understand? Now get yourself dressed and get this room picked up. Linda will give you some chores to do when you're done." ------- Like all of the Auburn women before her, it didn't take her very long to learn the rules. She perhaps had a few more lapses than some of the others did - she was given a black eye on one occasion, a cracked rib on another for speaking without being spoken to or for speaking disrespectfully - but she did learn. Every night for the next three days she was forced to pleasure him in bed but she no longer fought it or tried to control it in any way; not even when he lubed himself up with Crisco shortening and put himself in her ass. And after he pulled himself out, his cock coated with her blood, her rectum feeling like a blow-torch had been lit in it, she wordlessly got dressed and went about her assigned chores. The two senior wives, particularly Linda, did not like her. It was obvious they considered her a snooty bitch who thought she was better than they and they seemed to take a perverse delight in ordering her to do the most unpleasant chores in the most unpleasant manners. She found herself cleaning the toilet with her bare hands; washing Stinson's fecal stained underwear in the sink with cold water, a little bit of laundry soap, and a toothbrush. She found herself crawling around on her hands and knees on the carpet picking up pieces of lint one by one. She did these chores without protest. She knew that there were only beatings to be gained from protesting. Aside from her household tasks, she also had a community job that she did for seven hours each day. As the most junior of the women in town, she was assigned to the most unpleasant, labor intensive duty. Her job was the community laundry detail. Each day, starting after breakfast, she walked up to the high school and spent her time washing towels and washrags in a cold tub. It was amazing how much community linen a town of 2000 people went through in the course of a single day. Like everything else, she did this without protest, to the best of her abilities. Her hands dried, cracked, and bled from the constant exposure to industrial soap but she carried on. She had hoped at first that Stinson was merely an anomaly in the town and that some of the other men would be more like... well like the men she was used to dealing with. Unfortunately she found out that she was right - that he was an anomaly, only not in the way that she had figured. According to Anna and Jean, two of the other women that she saw frequently in the course of her workday, Stinson was actually considered to be on of the nicer husbands among the Auburn men. "Nicer?" she said incredulously that first day she talked to them, her face swollen and sore from the beatings she'd received the night before. "You must be kidding." "Oh no," Anna said sympathetically. "You must've really pushed his buttons to get him to do that to you. From talking to Linda and Cathy they say he almost never hits, not even when they step over the line a little bit. He's got kind of a reputation of a wimp in fact." "A wimp?" she asked. "Yep," Jean, standing there with her mop bucket, confirmed. "And they say he's not really into the kinky sex like some of the other ones are." "Kinky sex?" she asked. "He put Crisco on his dick and shoved it up my ass. You don't call that kinky?" "Not in Auburn these days where they can do whatever they want," Anna said. "Some of the girls say their men are into water sports." "Water sports?" she asked, not quite sure what that even was. "They like to piss on you," Jean clarified for her. "Or in you," Anna added. "I've even heard that some of Stu's guys are into... you know... scat." "I don't think I even want to know what that is," she said. "Trust me," Anna told her, "you don't." It seemed that the greatest fear of any Auburn woman was to be traded to one of the former convicts that had come to town with Stu. So far, of the twenty some-odd women who had been hanged for some offense, sixteen of them had been the wives of one of the convicts. And it was rare to see a wife of one of them who didn't have bruises on her face and arms. "They're just bad, bad men," Jean advised her. "If I was you, I'd straighten up and fly right around Stinson or he just might trade you to one of them. Trust me on this, you're much better off where you are." Jessica, all of her life, had made it her prime directive to put herself into the most coveted places possible. The idea that she was already in such a place here in Auburn, that she was "married" to a man that other Auburn women dreamed of being traded to, was a blackly depressing thought. And then there was the fact that she could not even imbibe in the most common fantasy that the other Auburn women had; that of escaping to Garden Hill. She had been exiled from there at gunpoint. Even if she could somehow get out of here, there was nowhere for her to go, there was no other place. At night, after Stinson had had his way with her, as she lay sore and sometimes bleeding on the bed, listening to his snores, she couldn't help but feel that maybe she had been wrong back in Garden Hill. After seeing life in Auburn, after experiencing what else was out there, she longed to go back home, she longed to take back the actions that had brought her to this place. Had she really thought that Brett, that Paul, that Stacy were evil back then? Had she really thought that? It seemed a joke now. Here, in this town, was true evil. ------- For the past week Jean and Anna had been making slow, careful preparations for their escape. There were several obstacles that they had to overcome in order to have a hope of both getting away and getting to Garden Hill. The food problem they had handled. Or so they were hoping. As cleaning staff for the high school buildings, the guards and personnel within there were used to seeing them moving from room to room in the building at all hours of the day - in fact, hardly seemed to notice their presence anymore. One such area that they regularly visited was the food storage area. As they were in there each day, mopping and dusting, they made a point to pilfer a few cans of food, usually making the effort to get high calorie and fat items like ravioli or beef stew. They would then put these cans in the plastic garbage bags that they emptied from the wastebaskets throughout the facility, tying each bag shut a zip-tie, which they would then mark by cutting off the excess length of tie that stuck out. It was just a little difference - something that the men who emptied the garbage from the truck into the landfill would likely not even notice, that they wouldn't investigate if they did - but it would make those bags distinguishable from thousands of others in the garbage dump when the time came to recover them. So far they had managed to steal and send out more than thirty cans of food. All they were waiting for now was for the truck they dropped it in to get full so someone would make the dumping run. The biggest obstacle to their escape was how to go about getting away from the town in the first place. How could they get past the defenses, especially since the loopholes that the previous escapees used had all been discovered - or at least suspected - and closed? Both of the women spent every waking hour trying to think their way through this and still they had come up with nothing concrete. They played around with and discussed several wild possibilities but ultimately rejected every one of them as impractical or too dangerous. "If we make the break," Anna said on the occasions they could talk in privacy, "it has to be with a plan that has a decent chance of succeeding. Granted, it's not pleasant here but we don't want to be stupid and get ourselves killed by taking a wild shot. If we can't get away clean, there's no sense in trying." "But how?" Jean, not as good at problem solving, would always ask. "How do we walk out past guards stationed on the hill above us without being seen? How do we get two miles down the Interstate and out of their sight before they see us even if we can get past?" "I don't know," Anna would say. "We'll keep working on it." Interestingly enough, it was Jean who finally happened across a workable solution to the problem. One of her daily chores was cleaning out Barnes' office. As she was in there one afternoon, dusting the cabinets, emptying the trash, and sweeping the floor, Barnes was having an informal meeting with Bracken and two of the platoon leaders. They were drinking beers and smoking cigarettes and/or cigars and they completely ignored her presence as they talked about the attack plans they were formulating for Garden Hill. "Now as I've said before," Barnes told the men as Jean sprayed Windex on his large screen television set and wiped it down, "don't underestimate these people, even if we do outnumber them, even if they are using a bunch of bitches for soldiers. The minds behind those bitch soldiers are clever ones indeed. This Brett Adams that that bitch we picked up on the road told us about used to be a member of the 3rd ACR. They were second in to Saudi Arabia back in 1990, right behind the 7th. I fought with them there and they were a badass group of soldiers. This man knows what he's doing and he knows how to lead troops. And then there's this Paul character. He was never in the military apparently but he's not an idiot either. Without any formal training of any kind he was able to lead and set up a halfway decent defense plan for that town. He was smart enough to come up with that little night vision camera trick, so keep that in mind." "Night vision camera trick?" one of the platoon leaders asked. "He mounted a standard top-end video camera equipped with a crude night vision setting on the end of their bridge approach," Bracken explained. "They ran wires from it all the way to the other end of the bridge and monitored it from a television set at night." "That is pretty smart," the platoon leader agreed. "It's so smart," Barnes said, "that we're going to begin doing that ourselves on our close approaches as soon as we scrounge up enough power and coaxial cable. But anyway, my point is..." None of them happened to be looking at Jean at that moment or they would have seen that she had stopped in mid-wipe, her eyes growing bigger in their sockets. Night vision camera system? Night vision? Ten minutes later she was talking to Anna, who had been cleaning in the hallway downstairs. "I have an idea," she said quietly. "An idea?" "Yes. Do you think we could get our hands on a camcorder?" ------- Three nights later, everything came together perfectly for the two women. The garbage truck next to the high school had been driven to the landfill and dumped the day before - apparently without anyone discovering that there was a little more than garbage in there. Bracken was sleeping with Kelly that night, which meant that the informer of the family was safely tucked away with Asshole. Sharon was no longer in the picture. After one last rape of her shapely body three nights before, Bracken had had her "put out of her misery" by means of a bullet to the back of the head. Her body had then been dumped unceremoniously over the bridge and into the canyon. "Are you ready for this?" Anna asked Jean at 1:00 AM. She had just crept into the other woman's bedroom after putting on her warmest, thickest clothing. "We could still back out you know." "No," Jean said, touching her hand in the darkness. She was dressed in two layers of her warmest clothes as well. "Let's get the hell out of this place. It's time." Slowly they eased out of the room and out into the hallway. It was pitch black in the house and they moved slowly, operating primarily by feel, until they got to the linen closet. Slowly they removed four of the thickest blankets in there and rolled them up into two tight bundles. They moved to the kitchen next and removed two of the large, plastic garbage bags from a drawer. As quietly as possible, they stuffed the blanket rolls into the garbage bags and secured them into bundles by using twine that they had stolen from the supply room and hidden in the back of the drawer. They now had watertight packs for their blankets and their food when and if they recovered it. Holding hands they walked slowly out of the kitchen, down a hallway, and into the living room. As in Garden Hill the daily laundry was hung and drying in this room and they had to duck under it in order to get to the front door. They both pulled their rain jackets down from the hooks by the door and put them on, buttoning them up and then pulling the hoods tightly over their heads. Two more steps brought them to the front door. "This is it," Anna said softly. "Open that door and there's no turning back." "Open it," Jean said without hesitation. Just as her hand reached out to grasp the handle, there was a click next to them and suddenly, shockingly, they were being illuminated by the beam of a flashlight from less than five feet away. "Going somewhere, girls?" Kelly, the holder of the light, asked them. Jean was paralyzed with fear, unable to talk, unable to move. Anna jumped in fright but quickly recovered, willing herself not to panic. "Kelly," she said slowly, her mind whizzing as she weighed their options. "You scared me half to death." "I thought I heard someone creeping around out here," Kelly said with feigned sweetness. "It looks like my little co-wives were thinking about trying a little escape." "Escape," Anna said, as if that was the most ridiculous thing she'd ever heard. "Don't be silly. We were just... uh..." She could think of nothing else to say. After all, it was perfectly obvious what they were doing. "Come with me," Kelly told them. "Let's go wake up husband dear and see what he thinks about all of this. I don't imagine he'll be very happy with you two." "Listen, Kelly," Anna said pleadingly. "Can't you just..." "No, I don't think he'll be happy at all," Kelly went on. "In fact, it might just be that the two of you will be hanging from a rope by breakfast tomorrow. And then I'll have him all to myself." "Kelly," Anna said. "If we get away from here, you'll still have him all to yourself." "Yes," she said, "but then he'll blame me for letting you get away. He may even suspect that I helped you. Oh no, I'm not playing that game. Now shall we go upstairs peacefully or shall I start screaming for him now? It doesn't really matter to me." Anna started to tense up. They were trapped. What was there to do? Her mind screamed at her just to run out the door, dragging Jean by the hand, and to hide out in the town somewhere until they had a chance to slip out later. It was a ridiculous plan - one that almost surely would fail - but what else was there to do? Jean kept her from implementing it. Her initial panic had subsided, allowing a cooler, more calculating part of her mind to take over. In a low, quiet voice, she said: "All right, we're caught. Let's go face the music." Anna looked at her in disbelief. "Maybe he'll be lenient with us," Jean said softly. "Maybe he'll give us another chance. Let's throw ourselves on his mercy." "Oh I doubt he'll be lenient," Kelly said with delight. "But anything's possible, isn't it? Let's go." She gestured with the flashlight, waving it towards the stairs. "Jean," Anna said fearfully, knowing that if they went up those stairs they were dead women. Escape attempts by women, by anyone, was not tolerated. "We'll be okay, Anna," Jean said carefully, looking steadily at her lover. "Let's just follow Kelly upstairs and confess. Okay?" Something in Jean's tone convinced her. As Kelly turned towards the staircase and as Jean stepped towards her, Anna followed. It happened with shocking speed. Kelly made it three paces back towards the hallway before Jean, moving faster than Anna would have thought possible, was upon her. She grabbed her by the hair, yanking her head viciously backward, and then, before she had a chance to cry out, threw her arm around her neck and tightened it. The flashlight dropped from her hand with a small clatter and rolled a few feet. Jean, though not fat, was not small either. She was a solidly built woman of farm-girl proportions. Kelly, on the other hand, was a petite wisp of a girl, built more like a model than anything else. She kicked and twisted in Jean's grasp, she grabbed at her arms, she stomped on her feet, but she was unable to get free. Jean pushed on the choking arm with her free hand, tightening it even further, and, within a second or two, Kelly began to jerk spastically against her, her eyes rolling back in her head, her limbs flailing as if in seizure. And still Jean held onto her. Anna watched opened-mouthed as Kelly's struggles suddenly ceased, her body going limp in Jean's grasp. And still Jean held onto her, keeping the tension tight around her neck. "Jean," she whispered in horror, "what are you doing?" "I'm killing her," Jean said with surprising calmness. "If I let go of her now, she'll just wake up again in ten minutes or so." "Oh my God," Anna cried, starting to tremble. The reality of what was going on hitting her. "Killing her?" "She was going to have us killed," Jean replied. "I couldn't let that happen, Anna." "Oh my God," she said again. She held her for almost five minutes, maintaining the chokehold upon her. Finally she lowered her to the ground and let go. She leaned down and put her mouth near Kelly's ear, listening for respiration. "Nothing," she said blankly. She picked up her wrist and felt for a pulse. "Nothing," she repeated. "She's dead." "Jesus, Jean," Anna said, still standing in the same place. "How did you... I mean, why did you... I mean... oh God." Jean stood up, walking over to the flashlight and picking it up. "I grew up with an older brother," she said quietly. "I learned how to wrestle by the time I was four years old. I accidentally choked him out one time by grabbing him like that. My dad told me I should never grab anyone around the neck that way because it makes them pass out in a few seconds and if you do it long enough, you'll kill them." She took a few deep breaths, starting to feel the aftereffects of her actions now. "I guess Dad was right, huh?" "I guess he was," Anna agreed. "Now we really can't turn back," Jean said, starting to tremble. "No," Anna said. "I guess we can't. Let's get out of here." They listened for a moment, reasonably sure that Bracken had slept through the entire incident since he hadn't stormed down the stairway, but wanting to be sure. The reassuring rumble of his snores continued to drift downward towards them. He would have quite a surprise when he finally did wake up. Anna opened the door and stuck her head out, her eyes searching the rainy darkness outside. All of the surrounding houses were occupied, mostly by other high-ranking members of the militia and their wives, and she wanted to make sure that no one else just happened to be out and about. This was an unlikely possibility at this ungodly hour of the morning, but a possibility nevertheless. She saw nothing - no lights on, no faces in the windows (not that she could see the windows very well). "It looks clear," she whispered to Jean. Slowly, holding hands once again, they slipped out onto the porch and closed the door behind them. Stepping out into the rain, they walked down to the sidewalk and turned left, easing down the street. Three doors down was a metal box sticking up from a lawn. This used to be a communal mailbox back in civilized days, the place where the twelve houses on this end of the street had sent and received their correspondence. Anna, the night before, had pried it open from the back with a screwdriver and placed a very special package inside for hiding. "Is it still there?" Jean asked nervously, knowing that without it, all hope was lost. "It's here," Anna said with relief as she pulled out the small Sony Camcorder and three spare batteries she had stolen from a locked supply room. They were wrapped in plastic to protect them from the rain and all were fully charged thanks to the power supply at the high school. Anna opened the package and turned on the camera, switching it to the night vision setting. "Let's get out of the open now." "Right." With Anna looking through the viewfinder, she was able to see a black and white view of the area directly in front of her. The range on the night vision was only about twenty feet but it was enough. Jean held onto the back of her rain jacket, staying as close as possible to her, allowing herself to be led blindly along. They started moving. They made their way out of the populated part of the town as quickly as possible, moving silently but speedily along the sidewalks. It was not the most direct way to the east side of the town, where they planned to make their egress, but they figured it was best to get away from the occupied dwellings. They passed through a derelict industrial section and a small commercial strip mall before making their way into a lower class residential neighborhood that no one had bothered taking up housekeeping in yet. Once, just near the end of this section, they had to hide behind an old dumpster when they saw the bobbing flashlights of the interior patrol making their rounds. The two-man team passed within thirty feet of them and continued down the street. "That was close," Jean whispered fearfully. "Too close," Anna agreed. They were forced to skirt the edge of a more populated area in order to access the freeway at the Foresthill onramp. They moved on the far side of the street during this stretch, noting in alarm that one of the houses was still lit from the inside. Why were they still awake in there? Would they step outside and spot the escapees? They did not, at least not as far as either woman could tell and five minutes later they were walking up the onramp to Interstate 80, Anna following along the white line in her viewfinder. At the top of the onramp, as they stood on the surface of the freeway itself, they paused, each taking a few uncomfortable breaths. They were now within sight line of the two guard posts that watched over that side of town, protected from view only by the darkness. "Here comes the hard part," Anna said. "Yeah," Jean agreed. "Let's get it over with." They walked slowly along the freeway, drawing ever closer to the guard positions with each step they took. Anna kept her eye glued to the viewfinder tightly, both to see where she was going and to keep the minute amount of light that leached out of the rubber gasket from giving them away. Jean, still holding tight to her friend's rain jacket, still completely blind in the darkness, followed along behind her, concentrating on each step that she made to keep from making any noise. Anna could not see the two guard hills through the night vision as they came up to the Bell Road offramp - they were well out of the range of her meager camera - but she could feel them, could sense them rising up directly in front of her. She felt so horribly exposed. Were they really going to walk directly below those four guards? Were they really going to try to navigate through the maze of sandbags and barbed wire that lay in front of those hills? Did they really think that this crazy plan had a chance in hell of succeeding? Had it not been for the fact that Kelly's dead body was lying in the living room back at Bracken's home, she would have aborted the escape attempt as too dangerous. But there was no choice now, was there? They had to give it a shot. With sweating palms, with a hammering heart, she pushed onward, Jean behind her. Soon they were passing into the chasm that the Interstate had created between the hills. The four guards were less than three hundred feet above them now. Both women slowed their pace to a near-crawl, knowing that it kept them in the danger zone longer but also knowing that gingerly, careful steps would help keep them from stumbling and making unintended noise. The guards up there were equipped with powerful spotlights hooked up to automotive batteries. Though they did not routinely sweep the area below them, they would surely light up the area if they heard a noise. At last they came out the other side of the hills and came to the entrance of the sandbag maze. The opening was four feet wide, a small gap between six-foot walls of sandbags, with rolls of razor wire stretching off in both directions to the side. Anna looked at it carefully, examining the ground for any sort of trip wires or other noise-making booby traps. She had never heard Bracken mention that such things were part of the defenses but she certainly was not going to rule it out. She saw nothing of the sort. "We're at the maze, Jean," she whispered as softly as she could, barely loud enough for Jean herself to hear. "Tighten up on me a little. Hold onto my shoulders with both hands and turn when I turn." "Okay," Jean whispered back. "And don't trip over my feet." "Okay." Anna eased forward, Jean holding onto her like a shadow. Slowly, moving at the speed of a snail, she entered the maze, staying as close to the center between the rows of sandbags as she could. The view through the camera was two-dimensional and it was a little difficult judging distance for this reason but by the time she reached the second turn, she was used to it. Step by step she walked forward, always cognizant of the guards directly above and behind her and what would become of them if they were discovered. She turned to the right, to the left, back to the right again, doubled back towards town for a few feet and then doubled back towards the east. In all there were more than twenty separate corners to navigate. At last, after what seemed an eternity but which was actually only twenty minutes, they came to the final turn. In the viewfinder Anna saw a stretch of Interstate stretching off into the darkness beyond her range. It was one of the finest things she'd ever seen before. She stopped for a moment in the last four feet, again looking carefully on the ground for any trip wires or other devices. Seeing nothing she started slowly forward. Six steps brought her through the barrier of the sandbags and razor wire and they were out. Though they were still within easy view of the guards above, and though they would still need to step quietly for quite some time, they were actually out of Auburn and on their way to freedom. ------- Chapter 13 It was thirty minutes before dark when Bracken reentered Barnes' office. The discovery of the death of Kelly and the apparent escape by Jean and Anna had taken place twelve hours before and Bracken had spent the day with a full platoon of soldiers trying to track his traitorous wives down so they could be hanged. "No sign at all huh?" Barnes asked as he looked at his wet and muddy and now wifeless subordinate. He had been following the results of the search on a radio set on his desk. "Nothing," Bracken confirmed. "We went all the way to the first mudfall to the east and saw nothing at all. Fourth platoon went all the way to the edge of the valley on the west and they saw nothing either. First and second platoons checked to the north and south, even though those are the least likely directions they might have gone, and again, nothing." "There's no way they could have made it more than a mile outside of town in the dark," Barnes said confidently. "Even if they did manage to get out somehow, they would have been forced to camp just outside the range of the guards' visual zone until sunrise. It would've been impossible for them to navigate or move in the darkness." "I agree, sir," Bracken said. "If they were out there, we would have seen them or picked up some sign of them. We have no evidence whatsoever that they even made it outside the perimeter. How could they even have made their way through any of our defenses in the dark? It's impossible." "So that leaves us with the conclusion that they are still in town somewhere," Barnes said. "That's right," Bracken told him. "They're probably hiding in one of the abandoned houses or in the industrial area. With your permission, I'll start a building to building search of the entire town at first light." "Permission granted. We'll probably find them by noon tomorrow at the latest. We'll hang them before dinner if that's the case." "Yes, sir." "Don't blame yourself for this, Bracken," Barnes told him reassuringly. "No one can tell when their bitches are going to do something stupid like this. They're secretive little cunts, the bitches, and they plot against us without our even knowing about it." "There must be some way to prevent that," Bracken said. "After all, we've got to maintain order in town." "We'll have to come down a little harder on them it would seem. I think that, starting with this escape, we should punish all of them for the offense." "Punish all of them?" "Yes," Barnes said, nodding as the thought grew more detailed in his mind. "We'll punish them all and try to make them realize that their actions affect more than just themselves. I will order tonight that every woman in town be beaten by their husbands for the offense committed by your wives. In addition to that, I will pull three names of women at random and order that they be hanged." Bracken raised his eyebrows a bit. "Hang three other bitches at random because of what my bitches did? I don't think the guys will like that too much if it's their bitch that gets picked." "I'm sorry the guys won't like it, but they'll just have to put up with it. We'll set the precedent right here and right now to all of the bitches just what the consequences are for trying to escape. It's harsh, but I think it's the only way we'll get these bitches to see that they are affecting more than themselves." "I understand, sir," Bracken said. ------- Contrary to Barnes and Bracken's assumptions, Jean and Anna had made it well past the mudfall by the time the light returned to the sky. Well aware of the dragnet that would be pursuing them, they had recovered as much food as they could find from the landfill - more than twenty-seven cans - and had then moved at as quick of a pace down the Interstate as they could physically maintain. Of course both of these operations - food recovery and escape run - were aided greatly by the use of the night vision on the camera. With three long-life batteries to burn, there had been more than enough power to last them until morning. They had reached the mudfall by 5:00 AM that morning and, continuing on without pausing, had been nearly two miles into the woods on the trek around it when their escape was finally discovered. They had not stopped for anything but bathroom breaks and a simple breakfast at sunrise (such as it was with the sun still hidden behind thick clouds). They had simply stashed the video camera and its one remaining battery back in their packs and continued on, their pace somewhat faster as they trudged over logs and up hills and through gullies. By the time the pursuing troops made it to the mudfall at around 1:30 that afternoon, Anna and Jean were back on the Interstate on the other side of it starting to feel, for the first time, that they had safely gotten away. "I don't think we left any tracks that they could follow or any other sign that we were even out here," Anna said as they began walking east on the paved surface once again. "Chances are that they'll conclude we never left town in the first place. They'll probably waste at least two days searching for us there before it occurs to them to look this way again. By then we'll be far too far in front of them for there to be any hope of catching up with us." "So you think we're safe?" Jean, who had been obsessively looking over her shoulder the entire time, asked hopefully. "Safe from the Auburn men," Anna corrected. "However, there's still the great unknown out here to deal with; and we still only have twenty-six cans of food to last us all the way to Garden Hill." "We'll make it," Jean said. "I just know we will. The hard part is over now." All afternoon they had marched onward, coming to the second of the major mudfalls at about 4:30, just as the light started to fade towards darkness. They pushed another quarter mile into the woods and then, at long last, decided to make camp for the night. Here Anna gave up her unspoken leadership and passed it on to Jean, who had done a fair share of camping and hunting with her father and brothers before the comet. Jean was able to quickly build a lean-to against the side of a group of fallen trees. It was a lean-to that was both larger and better constructed than those that Brett and company had made on their initial trips through the woods. "Let's get some sleep," Jean told her fellow conspirator once the makeshift structure was complete. "I'm up for that," Anna agreed. "I can't believe you were able to build something that's dry inside." "Mostly dry anyway," Jean said. She opened up the plastic bag that she had been using as her pack, pulling out the dry blankets inside. "Put the plastic bags down first," she said, demonstrating what she meant. "That will keep the water on the ground from getting us. Then, if we take off our clothes, our blankets will stay somewhat dry for tomorrow." "Pretty smart, Jean," Anna said, repeating her motions with her own bag. "Are you sure you haven't been to college?" Within minutes their wet clothes were stripped off and stored and their naked bodies were cuddled up together under the thick blankets. "We're free," Jean whispered, pulling Anna closer to her. "Yes," Anna said, soaking up the warmth of her friend's body. "We're free at last." Exhausted, both were sound asleep in less than five minutes. ------- January 1 dawned just like any other day. The coming of the new year marked the 80th day since the impact of Comet Fenwell. Though there was still no sign of the sun through the thick cloud cover and though the moderate but depressingly steady rainfall continued to drop without let-up from those clouds, the spirits in Garden Hill were at perhaps an all-time high since that fateful day. They were now quite safe from the specter of starvation. More than six tons of rice and wheat, as well as more than six thousand cans of chicken noodle soup and more than four thousand cans of spinach, had been recovered from the abandoned train and stored. Mealtimes were starting to get a bit boring despite the best efforts of Tina, Stacy, and the other kitchen staff to dress up the new staples of their diet, but at least there were mealtimes every day. In addition, the social climate of Garden Hill was undergoing a rapid metamorphosis. Though Brett and Jason and their various wives had been the ones to pioneer the concept of polygamous marriage, the concept had not received widespread acceptance in town until Paul, Janet, and Sherrie took the plunge. Though Brett was respected greatly in town for all that he had done, his reputation would always be associated with rebellion and radicalism. And though Jason was rapidly gaining the respect due him as an adult, many of the townspeople associated him with the burnings of youth. Paul, on the other hand, was considered about as straight-laced and normal as a person could get. Since Paul made it publicly known that he was participating in such a marriage, it was concluded almost unanimously that such a thing must be the wave of the future. As of the morning of January 1, four more polygamous marriages had been declared and two more seemed inevitable. "So I was thinking," said Matt that afternoon as he sat in the cramped cargo area of the helicopter next to Paul. "A dangerous thing," said Brett from the pilot's seat, producing a dutiful laugh from all on board. They were two hours into a recon mission to examine the contents of all of the trucks that had been abandoned on the Interstate between Garden Hill and the snowline. So far they had dropped Matt and Paul down five times next to vehicles and five times they had drawn blanks as far as anything useful being in the trucks. The first one had been empty. The second had contained sixteen thousand heads of lettuce that had long since spoiled. The third had been full of bags of steer manure - which might be somewhat useful once the sun came back out. The fourth had been empty. The fifth had contained two thousand cases of Sprite soda. "What were you thinking, Matt?" asked Jason, the designated lookout and student pilot. "Well, we're going around calling today January 1, right?" "Are you saying that it isn't January 1?" Paul asked him. "We've kept pretty good track of all the days since impact and I'm pretty sure that our date is correct." "Also," Brett said, "I've got the same watch I was wearing before the comet." He held up his hand to show it to them. "It takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'. I never did set it back an hour when we went back to standard time in October, but it says that it's the 1st of January too. We haven't forgot to count any days, I'm quite sure of it." "No," Matt said, "that's not exactly what I'm saying. I still have the same watch as well and I have been marking off days on the calendar in my house in addition to that. It is in fact January 1 under the old calendar." "The old calendar?" Jason asked. "Correct," Matt said. "It is my thought that we should not be using that calendar any longer. It is outdated, counting down days and years from the alleged birth of Jesus Christ more than two thousand years ago. A significant event for those who believe in Him, I will agree, but it does not have a lot of bearing on mankind's current situation." "I'm sure there are a lot of religious people out there who will disagree with you," Paul said. "I'm sure you're right," Matt said. "But fanatics not withstanding, I believe that the new significant event we should be concerned with is the impact of the comet that nearly destroyed us all. It is that event that marks the major change in mankind and it is that event that those in the future generations should be able to mark as the new beginning of society - whatever it turns out to be." "That does make a certain amount of sense," Brett said, banking slightly to the right as the Interstate two thousand feet below curved. "So what date would it be on your new calendar?" "Today would be March 21, year 0," Matt replied. "Exactly eighty days, or two and two-thirds months from the day of impact. On January 1, year 1, we'll be exactly one year from the day of impact." "March 21?" Jason asked. "But that's the first day of spring. Right now we're in the middle of winter, or at least we would be if these clouds weren't screwing everything up. You can't just go changing around the months and the seasons, can you?" "Why not?" Matt wanted to know. "It will probably be a long time before we go back to any sort of normal weather patterns anyway. I mean, once the rain stops and the clouds break up a little, we're still going to have vastly different weather than we're used to. All of the snow in the mountains will make new glaciers, which is going to affect winds and temperatures globally. According to Maggie - who's the closest thing to a scientist that we have - we're probably going to be starting a new ice age that will last for a few thousand years. What possible difference will it make to our descendants is the winter solstice is in February instead of December? What difference will it make if the summer solstice is in September instead of June?" "But what about Christmas and Easter and all of the religious holidays?" Paul asked. "What will you do about those?" Matt shrugged. "If Christianity somehow manages to survive all of this intact, its followers can just continue to worship on the previous dates if they want. December 25 can still represent the birth of Jesus under this new calendar. That date was pretty much picked at random at some point in history anyway. Nobody really knows what day or even what year Jesus was actually born. And as for Easter, which represents The Resurrection, they can still use the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, just like they always did. Only now, that will be in June or July instead of March or April." "Wow," Brett said after everyone had a moment to consider all of that. "And they call me a radical." The timekeeping discussion was put on hold for the moment when Jason spotted more trucks down on the highway below. There were two of them this time, sitting next to each other near the edge of a massive washout of the roadway. It appeared that the two drivers had stopped there and never moved since. Brett circled around over the top of them for several minutes, visually checking the area for any signs of humanity while Jason utilized the FLIR to check for the telltale signs of body heat glowing from beneath bushes or near trees. Neither method of search turned up any likely humans so Matt and Paul picked up their weapons, flipped off the safeties, and prepared to exit the aircraft. At least this time there was sufficient room to land on the freeway and they wouldn't have to rappel downward and then be carried along underneath to get back up. Brett touched down lightly about a hundred yards from the two trailers. Matt and Paul, in a well-practiced maneuver, went out either side and lay on the ground, weapons trained outward. Brett lifted back into the air and flew off to the south, where he circled around awaiting a radio call to pick them back up. The two outside team members then got up and carefully approached their targets. They spent about ten minutes checking the area just to be absolutely sure that they were all alone. They saw no signs of anyone or anything in the woods to the side of the freeway so they finally approached the cab of the first truck. While Matt covered him with the rifle, Paul tried the handle on passenger side door, finding it unlocked. The inside was empty so he climbed up and dug around inside, looking for the shipment papers that every big-rig was supposed to carry. He found them in the usual place and took a moment to look them over. "What do we got?" Matt asked from behind him, his weapon now pointed at the ground. "Laundry soap," Paul replied. "He's carrying six thousand boxes of Tide from Gary, Indiana to Oakland." "Christ," Matt said, somewhat dejected. "I guess we can haul some of it back later on. We are getting rather short on it." "Yeah," Paul agreed, tossing the papers back down. "It is a rather low-priority item though." Utilizing their breaking and entering gear - in this case a pair of bolt cutters - they opened up the trailer just to make sure that the manifest matched the cargo. You could never tell. Maybe the truck driver had been a smuggler of some sort and had been transporting automatic weapons and ammunition for some radical anti-government group. It was possible wasn't it? Perhaps, but it was not the case in this instance. In the back were the orange and white boxes so familiar to housewives the world over. "Okay, let's check the other one," Matt said. Again, they approached carefully and checked the cab first. This time the manifest papers were missing, as were most of the loose contents of the cab. Where had they gone? Had the driver taken them with him - wherever it was that he went - for some bizarre reason? They didn't know, nor did they waste time speculating about it. Instead they simply walked to the back of the rig and prepared to open the door. In this case they didn't have to force entry. Someone had already done it for them. The lock was lying opened on the bumper of the trailer and the latching handle was in the up position. They both looked at this for a moment, both having the thought that there must be something useful inside or the driver of the truck would not have bothered taking some of it out. Paul grabbed the handle and, with a grunt of effort, pulled open the door. "Well now," Matt said, seeing the contents. "Well, well," said Paul. Inside of the trailer were hundreds of boxes stacked on pallets. Each box, according to the labeling on the side, contained sixty jars of Gerber baby food. "It's food," Matt said, reading the sides of the boxes to see what kind it was. All of the boxes that he could see proclaimed they contained broccoli and cheese variety. "It should come in handy in another month or so when Stacy has her baby." "And it'll come in real handy in about seven months when everyone else starts to pop," Paul added, referring to the recent epidemic of pregnancy that had struck the women of Garden Hill. As of that morning, and not including Stacy and the other women who were carrying pre-comet children in their wombs, there were nineteen confirmed pregnancies, including Chrissie's, and more than twenty suspected ones. Janet, who had run out of birth control pills at impact+20 days, was among them, her period now more than a week late. "Amen to that," Matt agreed. His wife Maureen was one of the confirmed ones. He pulled the portable radio from his pocket and keyed it up. "Brett, Jason, you there?" "We're here, Matt," Jason's voice replied. "Got anything in that bunch?" "Laundry soap and a shitload of baby food," he replied. "We're gonna close it up now. We're ready for pickup." "Copy that, we're coming back in." Since the fuel in the chopper's tank had dwindled to less than three hundred pounds, Brett elected to call an end to that day's mission and head back to town. He pointed the chopper's nose to the west and brought them up to 2500 feet, accelerating to ninety knots. Jason, at the controls of the FLIR, watched the landscape in front of them hoping to spot a deer as he had on one of the return flights from the grain detail. Then, there had been no scoped rifle or time to pursue the animal. Now, Brett's own pre-comet rifle was stashed under the passenger seat, just waiting for the opportunity to take down some fresh meat. Alas, nothing was seen but trees and ground. In the back, Matt and Paul were leaning against the sides of the cabin on opposite sides, their headsets on their heads, their legs stretched out as far as was possible (which wasn't very far at all). They had both long-since gotten over the worst of their fears of flying, so often had then done it in the past two weeks. Especially since Brett had put the helicopter through a complete maintenance routine with the supplies taken from the airport and the thing still flew. "You given any more thought to the El Dorado Hills mission?" Matt asked Paul. Ever since the discovery of the neighboring town's occupied status, Matt and several others had been quietly pushing for an attempt to make contact with them. Paul, still the only remaining member of the ruling committee, was very much in favor of attempting contact but had so far been reluctant to bring the matter to a community vote, mostly because of pressure by Brett and a few others who thought such a thing was a bad idea. "I've been giving it a lot of thought," he said with a sigh. "Like I told you before, I think it's something that should be done, but I have to listen to the other points of view about it. It's my responsibility as leader." "This isolationism school of thought," Matt said. "No offense Brett, I know how you feel about all of this, but I think that you're reasoning is flawed." "Yeah, yeah," Brett said, unoffended. "Call me paranoid if you will. It's just that we know nothing about the people there except for what we saw on a few blurry infrared pictures. Just because they allow women to carry guns there, doesn't mean that they are like us. So far, they have no idea we even exist. Why should we alert them to a potential target for attack?" "I'm not saying that we land there and reveal everything about ourselves to them," Matt said. "And I agree with your reasoning in regard to Auburn - those people give me the creeps as much as they do you. But we know there was a gun store in El Dorado Hills. Maybe they have ammunition that they'll be willing to trade for food." "The initiation of trade is the first step in rebuilding society," Paul felt compelled to point out. "And the initiation of war to take what you need is also one of the staples of the beginnings of society as well," Brett countered. "Why invite trouble?" "Sooner or later, we're going to have contact with them," Matt said. "If we survive here, which we certainly hope to do, it's inevitable that us, Auburn, El Dorado Hills, and any other groups of people are going to meet up, for better or for worse. I think it would be in our best interests to control the manner in which it is done. Right now, they are pretty much isolated there and we have an aircraft. Even if they did decide to attack us, we're talking about a fifteen to twenty day march even assuming that they can somehow get across one of the canyon bridges." "I think that that is the most compelling argument in favor of making contact," Paul added helpfully. "Right now it is we that are in the position of strength. We have food and we have control of the sky. Negotiating from the position of strength is always the best way to do it, isn't it?" "I suppose," Brett said reluctantly. "I've hesitated bringing the issue to a vote at a community meeting so far because of all the fervor," Paul said. "I thought I'd give it a chance to die down so that people would make their decisions rationally instead of emotionally." "I understand," Brett said, knowing what was coming next. "I think we've reached that point," Paul said next. "Unless there are any stern objections," he gave Brett a sharp look, "then I'm going to bring it up tonight and call a vote." Brett sighed a little. "You'll get no objections from me," he said at last. "I don't agree that this is the time to do this but I will agree that its time to decide one way or the other." ------- Dinner that night was of course very heavy on rice, chicken noodles, and fresh baked bread made from flour that had been ground from the wheat. The mechanics of eating were over and done with fairly quickly. The community meeting that followed went on for quite some time. Paul, to give him credit, explained fairly dispassionately and in a non-partisan matter, just what it was that was being proposed. He explained the potential risks as well as the potential benefits of attempting to establish contact, covering every single point that had been brought up to him since the idea was first suggested. For the first time since the initiation of the decision by community vote concept, opinion was sharply divided on a subject. This division followed no clear lines and was almost completely even - with half the townspeople being strongly in favor of making the attempt and about half strongly opposed. The first hour of the discussion did not even touch the subject of whether or not they should do it but as to how the votes were going to counted. Representatives of both points of view pushed for a two-thirds majority being required - in opposition to their respective choices of course. Some of the arguments became quite inflamed and, for the first time since Jessica's ouster as chairwoman of the meeting, Paul found himself wishing that he had a gavel to bang. Finally Paul declared that, for the purposes of the decision-making, majority would rule. This then brought another extensive round of discussion as person after person asked to be recognized so they could speak their piece. Most of the statements made were impassioned cries to try to convert others to their side and the same points on both sides of the issue were brought up over and over again. "It's too dangerous to expose ourselves," cried the opposed group in thirty or forty different ways. "The benefits of establishing trade from a position of strength make the risk worthwhile," cried those in favor in just as many different manners. Eventually, at nearly 8:00 that night, everyone had had his or her say and Paul called the vote. It was very close, requiring that those people manning the guard positions (they had listened to the entire debate through a radio-link that Paul had set up) needed to be polled in order to make the final determination. The decision was made - by a margin of only two votes - to make the attempt to establish contact. ------- Jessica was having a little trouble getting a deep breath. As she sat in the bleachers of the high school's football stadium that afternoon along with every last one of the other 2200 some-odd women in town, her nose was swollen shut and caked with blood and there was sharp pain in her right side whenever she inhaled or exhaled. Nor was she the only one. Every woman around her was sporting similar beating injuries of varying color and severity. Some, the women of Stu's clan, had had to be carried to the mandatory meeting by their companion wives. The beatings had occurred immediately after breakfast that morning. Colonel Barnes had ordered that every person return immediately to their assigned homes and that every man soundly beat his wives as punishment for the "AWOL status" of Anna and Jean Bracken. "This is your responsibility to do this correctly," Barnes told the men of the town just before dismissing them to take care of this. "If I see a bitch walking around in this town without bruises on her, I swear by God that I'm going have her husband hanged. You will beat them and beat them well for this! Every last one of them!" And the men of town had taken his words to heart. The rumor mill among the women was a weak one - there was too much fear and mistrust, too many informers trying to gain favor for there to be a truly free exchange of information and stories - but there was a rumor mill nonetheless. Jessica, who had been perhaps one of the all-time best at ferreting out gossip in her previous circles, was starting to become tuned in to this network. The word was that three women had actually been beaten to death. And now, with less than a half-hour until dinner, Barnes had ordered again that every person in town assemble. The women had been put on the bleachers and in front of it while the men were formed up at attention on the muddy field. Most of the women were tittering nervously as they waited to find out what this was all about. The only time the women were forced to gather like this was when one of them was to be hanged. Had they caught Jean and Anna? Was that what this was all about? The hanging scaffold was standing in its accustomed spot in the center of the field - a large wooden structure that had been constructed from scrap wood only days after the comet impact. Somehow Jessica didn't seem to think that the two fugitives had been captured. Though she had never witnessed one of the town's hangings before, she had heard that in every other case the women in question had been chained to the outside of the scaffold when the meeting convened. "I have a bad feeling about this," said Cathy, her co-wife, who was sitting next to her. "There's nothing to worry about," Linda, who was on the other side of Cathy, replied nervously. "He probably just wants to warn us again about trying to get away. Imagine the nerve of those two sluts, running away and subjecting us to all this." Jessica said nothing to them. Their relationship was still not the best, especially the relationship with Linda, who seemed to delight in reporting every word, every action that Jessica said or did to Stinson. As much as she hated to admit it to herself, there was no denying that Linda's personality was very much like her own. Would she - Jessica - have been like this if she had been in Auburn since the start, if she had not known how different things could be? She tried to tell herself that she wouldn't have been but she had had much time to do some soul searching since that shocking day she had first been beaten and raped, and she had a hard time convincing herself of the truth of this notion. "There's Barnes," Cathy said softly, a tinge of fear in her voice as he walked to the covered podium that had been set up for him. "Yes," Linda agreed, her eyes looking at him with adoration. "Isn't he just the most?" Nobody answered her. As one, the entire congregation of women stood up - as Auburn law demanded they do when their leader was addressing them. Barnes mounted the podium and clicked on a loudspeaker system. He tapped the microphone a few times and then began to speak. "This gathering," he said, "is for the bitches of town. By now, your husbands have beaten all of you as part of a group punishment for the elopement of Anna and Jean Bracken. These beatings were not something I ordered lightly - as I've told you time and time again, I am firmly opposed to needless violence against the fairer sex - but they are something that I thought necessary to prevent further elopements by others. I want you all to know that you are all going to be responsible for the actions of each other and that your actions will impact what happens to everyone. The beatings are only the first step in this punishment process. Now, we will address part two of this punishment." There was a low murmur from the women, almost inaudible over the sound of the rain and the hissing of the public address system. Part two of the punishment? A bad feeling began to infect everyone, becoming almost palatable. "I have put the names of every bitch in town into a box," Barnes told them next, holding up a small, wooden container about the size of a toaster. "This includes even my own bitches, as they are no better than any of you others. I will now draw three names from this box and those women will come up and stand before the town where they will then be hanged for the offense committed by Anna and Jean Bracken." This time the gasp was clearly heard as his words sank into everyone. "Silence!" Barnes barked angrily. "If I hear another peep out of anyone, if I have any sort of problems with this group, I will order another round of beatings tonight and add one more woman to the hanging list! Now if you're name is called, you will proceed immediately down here! If I have to send someone up to get you, I will change the punishment from a simple, painless hanging to being burned at a fucking stake!" He began to draw the names a moment later. Jessica watched and listened numbly as three women, none of whom she knew or had heard of, wordlessly marched from their places in the bleachers and down to the scaffold. Members of Bracken's company, assisted by Bracken himself, handcuffed their arms behind their backs and then led them, one by one, up the rickety steps to the platform. A noose was put around their necks and a lever was pulled, dropping them five feet downward. The snapping of their necks could be heard plainly each time. "Now remember what you've seen here today," Barnes told the remaining women after the last one fell. "Remember that your actions affect more than just yourself. For this elopement I ordered one beating and three hangings. For the next one, I will order two days of beatings and six hangings. Remember and learn. You are now dismissed." Slowly, most expressions shocked and haunted, the women stood and began filing down the nearest set of steps. Jessica maintained her position next to her two co-bitches. "He's mad," she said softly to them, unable to help herself, unable to keep from articulating that any longer. "We're being ruled by a madman." "You'd better watch what you say about our leader," Linda warned her, though her words seemed to be reflexive instead of having any real menace to them. "He's absolutely insane," Jessica repeated. "How can you not see that?" Linda opened her mouth to say further but Cathy beat her to the punch. "She's right," she said. "He's not just harsh, he's not just a sadist, he's insane." ------- At 10:00 the next morning, Brett, Paul, Matt, and Jason climbed into the helicopter. With them, in addition to the usual assortment of weapons and packs that they carried, was a very special package that had been constructed the night before. Brett went through the pre-flight check and then got the rotor turning. He applied power and the machine left the ground. Twenty minutes of flight time brought them to the familiar landmark of Cameron Park, the former home of the helicopter. Using Highway 50 as a reference, Brett turned to a heading that was nearly due west. As the land became lower in altitude below him, Brett did not drop down with it. Instead, he kept his altimeter at a steady 5500 feet, which would put them a little more than 4200 feet above ground level when they finally reached their destination. "You're sure that this is out of gun range?" Paul asked nervously from his spot in the cargo compartment. "Unless they have heavy caliber weapons," Brett told him, "they won't be able to scratch us even if they do somehow manage to get a shot on target. Four thousand feet straight up will eat up all the velocity." "And if they do have heavy caliber weapons?" "Then that would be one on us, wouldn't it?" It was only a five-minute flight time from Cameron Park before the roofs and streets of El Dorado Hills came into sight ahead of them. "Two minutes," Brett said, his eyes straining to spot any sort of movement in the town. How fast would their lookouts spot the helicopter? How fast could the people get under cover after that? Apparently it was pretty fast. When they flew over the hills that guarded the east side of town, Jason was able to spot a faint hint of the guards on duty with the FLIR. In the township itself, there was nothing visible, either with the naked eye or in infrared. Just as it had the first time they'd spotted it, El Dorado Hills looked just like an abandoned, dead town. Brett slowed up and brought the helicopter into a high hover directly over the center of the town. "We're ready for the drop," he said. "Jason, Matt, keep your eyes peeled for any ground fire." Paul picked up the package he had and removed a large rubber band from around it. The package was a shoebox wrapped tightly in a heavy-duty plastic garbage bag. Attached to it was an improvised parachute that had been made out of another garbage bag and some string. "Let's hope this parachute works," he said, opening the door. "It would seem kind of strange to them if we just hovered and dropped a shoebox to shatter on the ground, wouldn't it?" "It worked in the test from the community center," Matt said. "It'll work now. Drop it out." "Right," Paul replied, pushing the door open a little further. "Here goes nothing." He pushed the package out the door and watched as it fell. The chute had been deliberately twisted up into a tight ball to keep it from opening too soon and being torn to shreds by the downdraft from the rotor. It was a plan that worked well. Nearly five seconds passed, during which the package dropped more than three hundred feet, before it popped open in a flash of industrial green and began to drift slowly downward. "We have a deployment," Paul announced. "Confirm that," Matt said. "Very good," Brett said, using the anti-torque pedals to spin the nose back to the east. "Now let's get the hell out of here." "My thoughts exactly," Paul said. "I hope we haven't stirred up too much shit down there." ------- It took more than a minute for the package to drift down to earth. It swung gently back and forth on the end of its tether, the arcs growing smaller and smaller with each cycle, until finally it was hanging almost motionless in the air. Thanks to the absence of wind, it came almost straight down, landing in the middle of the elementary school soccer field, almost exactly where its droppers had intended. By the time it touched down in a puddle of standing water, the helicopter that had dropped it had disappeared into the distance. Nothing moved in the town for more than five minutes after the landing - the package simply sat there amid the raindrops. Finally, from the row of classroom buildings two hundred feet away, a door opened. Three people - two women and one man - stepped out. All three were dressed in rain jackets and carrying assault weapons in their hands. Two of them had portable radios on their person. The male raised the radio to his lips and keyed it. "East perimeter, this is Rowley," he said into. "Still no sign of the chopper?" "It flew straight off to the east along the highway and disappeared," came the reply. "We're keeping a sharp eye out for it." "Okay," he said into the radio. "Good job spotting it back there. I don't think they saw anyone." He put the radio away. "If they didn't see anyone," the woman closest to him asked, "why did they drop a package on the ground? What the hell is going on here?" "I don't know," he told her. "I guess there's only one way to find out." "What if it's a bomb?" the other woman said. "You're not just going to go open it up, are you?" "Why would someone go to all the trouble of dropping a package bomb on us from a helicopter?" he asked her. "Because they're crazy?" she countered. "Pat, we don't have any idea what kind of people we're dealing with here." "No," he agreed, "but maybe we will have some sort of idea once we open that thing. You two stay back here. I'll go check it out." Neither of the two women seemed to like the idea, but neither voiced any more protest. Around them, other people began to stir and heads began to poke out from doorways and other hiding places despite the fact that the all-clear signal had not been sounded yet. Pat handed his weapon to one of his companions and then began to ease across the ground towards the mysterious gift. He walked gingerly, almost on tiptoes for a moment until he realized just how ridiculous this was. Shaking his head at himself, he then walked normally, strolling up through the soggy mud pit that the grass had become until he was less than five feet away. Despite his confident assurances to the others that it wasn't a bomb, he was still very reluctant to touch the thing. Finally, squatting down next to it, he gathered his courage and reached out, wincing as his fingers touched the plastic. Nothing happened, so he picked it up gently, testing its weight. It was four or five pounds and nothing inside rattled or shifted or exploded. Feeling a little bit better, he pulled out a pocketknife and unfolded it. He cut the parachute loose first of all and then began cutting through the duct tape that held on the outside layer of plastic. Slowly he pulled a cardboard shoebox free. It was a box that had once contained a pair of Nikes. Now, it was taped shut with more duct tape and a white envelope was fastened to the top of it with clear tape. The envelope read: TO THE CITIZENS OF EL DORADO HILLS. He pulled this envelope free and stuffed it inside of his rain jacket. Then, with a quick, reassuring glance back towards the anxious crowd that had gathered, he gave a thumbs-up sign and turned his attention to the box. Using his knife, he slit through the duct tape centimeter by centimeter, suspecting that if this package was indeed a bomb that this would be the detonation mechanism, but doing it anyway. Curiosity killed the cat after all. Nothing blew up when the first section was cut so he cut the second section a little quicker. Once the knife sliced through the silver layer, the lid was free. With a deep breath of anticipation, he lifted it, peering inside. What he saw at first was nothing but old newspapers and magazine pages all crumpled, apparently for shock resistance to whatever the contents were. He lifted several layers free and found himself looking at a portable radio. It was not a cheap walkie-talkie such as the ones they used to communicate between guard posts and the main building but an actual public safety issued radio. On the front of it, in big green letters, was stenciled: CDF, which he knew meant California Department of Forestry. It was a fire department radio. What the hell? He examined the rest of the box and found nothing but more packaging material. He then took another look at the radio itself to make sure that it was not in fact an explosive device of some sort before he carried it back. Though he was far from an expert on explosives, he was able to reasonably ascertain that there was no C4 or TNT attached or hidden in the parts. Finally, more than five minutes after he first kneeled down, he stood back up and walked over to the crowd. "It's a portable radio," he announced, carrying it inside the box from which it had come. "And there was an envelope attached to the front of the box." "What's in the envelope? What does it say?" asked nearly twenty different people in nearly twenty different ways. "Let's go inside the cafeteria," he said to them. "Pass the word. I'm calling an emergency community meeting right away and I'll read it aloud." ------- It took almost twenty minutes before everyone gathered inside the school's cafeteria (with the exception of the guard force of course). Though the room was the largest in the school, indeed in the remaining township, there was not nearly enough seating for everyone. Well over half of the room was standing, many of them with small children in tow. "Listen up everyone," Pat said from a podium near the front of the room, his words amplified via a PA system powered by a generator. "I'm sure that by now that all of you know a package was dropped from a helicopter onto our town a little over an hour ago. We are reasonably certain that this was the same helicopter - a former California Highway Patrol aircraft - that flew by and probed us not too terribly long ago. Inside of the package they dropped was packing material, a fire department portable radio that used to belong to the California Department of Forestry, and an envelope addressed to "the citizens of El Dorado Hills." There was a considerable babble that rose up in the room at his words as he confirmed what most of them had already heard via the rumor mill. "Now," he continued, "without any further ado, I will open up the envelope and read what is inside to you all. From there, we will then have an open discussion on what the meaning of it all is." While the babbling rose back up, Pat utilized a pocketknife, the same one he'd used to open the package, to slit open the seal on the legal sized envelope. He peeled back the flap and removed a single piece of paper upon which rows of neat, typewritten text were printed. He unfolded it and set it down before him, his eyes taking in the first sentence: To the citizens of El Dorado Hills. He put a pair of reading glasses upon his face and began to speak: "To the citizens of El Dorado Hills," he read, "Greetings to you from your neighbors and fellow comet survivors in the town of Garden Hill. Before we go any further in this correspondence, let us reassure you first and foremost that we attempt this contact with you in the name of peace. We have no wishes of harm or conquest towards you and if you do not wish contact with us, we will respect that decision and leave you alone. Our purpose in this endeavor is nothing more than the wish to touch bases with others in the same predicament as ourselves, namely those that have managed to stay alive after the disaster that has stricken our planet and our civilization. We understand that talk is cheap and that, throughout history, many hostile undertakings by one group of people towards another have begun with peace overtures such as this one and that we have no way to convince you that we are sincere. But it is our hope that others out there our like ourselves and realize that the first step towards rebuilding after this calamity is communication with others. Trust has to begin somewhere so we hope that it can begin right here and it is our decision that we will start this process by being truthful and open with you. "You are probably wondering just how we know about your existence in the first place. As you are aware, we are in possession of an aircraft that used to belong to the California Highway Patrol. You are also undoubtedly aware that this aircraft flew by your town a few weeks before during daylight hours. At that time we saw no hint of habitation in your town, most likely because your defensive strategy is to hide when faced with a potential threat. This is understandable given the current climate in the world. However, this helicopter is also equipped with a forward-looking infrared pod, or FLIR, and a reconnaissance mission at night did reveal the fact that your town is populated. Please forgive us for this spy-like activity. We are not proud of it, but we did feel it necessary to look at the surrounding terrain under all conditions just to see what, if anything, is out there. Do be advised that we have learned much with this aircraft and that we would be happy to share this knowledge with you if a relationship is established between our communities." There was quite a bit of uproar from the floor of the cafeteria as they heard this. Some of the voices were angry, some fearful, some excited. Everyone, it seemed, had something to say however. "Folks," Pat said, raising his voice a little, "please, let's keep nice and calm, okay? Let me finish reading the letter and then we'll have a nice, orderly talk about what it says." Slowly the voices died down and the attention of the people was returned to him. "Okay," he said. "Continuing..." "In the package we have dropped to you, you have found a VHF portable radio with a fully-charged battery. This radio is capable of talking to our helicopter up to a distance of ten miles or so, as long as there is a direct line-of-sight. The setting to place the radio on is channel 7 on the selector switch if you wish to do this. We will return to the vicinity of your town tomorrow at 12:00 PM (Pacific Daylight time - we have not made the adjustment in light of other considerations - this will be 11:00 AM if you have made the adjustment). We will hover nearby and attempt to contact you on this radio. If you do not wish to have contact with us at this time you can either ignore us completely or tell us on the above-mentioned frequency that you do not wish to contact us. If you do either of these things, we will leave you in peace and not bother you any further. If you do wish to make contact with us however, please reply when you hear our hails and we will take things from there. "Please be advised as you decide on this matter that we, in Garden Hill, are just as scared and alone as you in El Dorado Hills and that we will be taking as much of a chance by attempting contact. We are a small community that has barely managed to hang on through the recent events and we suspect that you are the same. Maybe together, we can help each other. Please remember that the first step is to establish trust between one another. "Hoping that we will hear from you tomorrow, Garden Hill." With that, Pat put down the letter. "There you have it, folks," he said into the microphone. "Let's start hearing your thoughts on what this all means and what we should do about it." The discussion that would follow would last until well after the dinner hour. ------- Matt had been left behind for the return mission to El Dorado Hills, replaced by Michelle. Jason, as always, was in the observer's chair while Michelle and Paul crammed themselves into the back. The flight was almost completely silent as everyone was lost in his or her own thoughts. Jason simply stared ahead of them, not watching the ground with the FLIR as he usually did. Michelle nervously wrung her hands together, occasionally chewing on her lip as if in deep concentration. Paul, perhaps the most nervous of all since he had helped push this idea through, only looked down at his lap, his hands twisting a small scrap of paper into an unrecognizable shred. "Five minutes," Brett announced when the passed over the Cameron Park airport. "We should be in radio range in less than three." "Copy," Paul said automatically. "I'm gonna cut to the south a little bit," Brett told them all. "I want to approach from an unexpected direction just on the off chance that they've laid a little trap for us." "That's a comforting thought," Michelle said with a frown. "Hey," Brett said lightly, "it's my job to try to anticipate every eventuality. I like to think that they wouldn't do something like that, whether they want to talk to us or not, but I certainly can't say it's impossible." Relying mostly on his own instincts to navigate by, Brett brought them around in a broad circle, passing over some low hills and a large debris field that had once been the south part of the developed area. He slowed his airspeed but increased his altitude and soon the main part of El Dorado Hills became visible in the distance. "There it is," he told his back seat passengers. Paul, not bothering to crane his head to peer out the front, checked his watch. "Right on time," he said. "Are you ready to talk to them?" Brett asked. "I'm ready." "Okay," Brett replied. "Jason, if you would be so kind?" "Right," Jason answered, reaching down and fiddling with the VHF radio for a moment. "Okay, Paul," he told him when he was finished, "your headset is patched in. Just key up that transmit button and you'll be live." "And be sure to un-key it if you want to talk privately to us," Brett warned as he pulled into a high hover. Paul nodded, putting his fingers on the button, which was located on the side of his earpiece. "Here goes nothing," he muttered and then keyed it up. "El Dorado Hills," he said. "This is Paul Terra onboard the helicopter from Garden Hill. Is anyone out there?" Everyone was quiet as they listened for a reply in their headsets. They waited ten seconds, hearing nothing. "El Dorado Hills," Paul repeated, "this is Paul Terra, representative of Garden Hill speaking to you from the helicopter. Is anyone out there? Please reply." "Good afternoon, Mr. Terra," a male voice answered a few seconds later. "This is Patrick Rowley, representative of El Dorado Hills, speaking to you on the radio you dropped to us." A sigh of relief was breathed in the aircraft as everyone let out the breath that they had been holding. Careful smiles were exchanged. "Mr. Rowley," Paul said, speaking formally. "I'm glad you decided to communicate with us. You probably have us on visual hovering just to your south. Are you reading my transmissions all right?" "I'm reading you just fine," was the reply. "Please state for us exactly what your intentions are today." Paul was somewhat taken aback by the curtness of the tone. "Our intentions," he answered, "are nothing more than establishing contact with another group of survivors. As we stated in the letter we delivered to you, we come in peace and we mean no harm to you or those in your town. We just want to talk, maybe find some common ground. As we also stated in our letter, if you do not wish to talk to us or communicate with us, we will go away and leave you alone." "Well," Rowley answered back, "we decided that we would leave that option open for the time being. Suffice it to say that your appearance and the drop you made has created quite the turmoil among us down here. We finally decided to hear what it is you have to say before we elect whether or not to maintain any kind of contact with you." "Understandable," Paul said. "And let me assure you that the decision whether or not to attempt this contact has created quite the turmoil in our town as well. Eventually the decision was made to give it a whirl, so here we are." "Here you are," Rowley replied. "How are things up the hill where you came from? Are you the only group of survivors in the area?" Paul took a few breaths before replying, a part of him very reluctant to share information with strangers. Was this really a good idea? Good or bad though, it had been decided that they would be truthful with these people as much as practical. "Things are going fairly well for us up there," he said. "Many of our houses are still intact and livable and we have recently secured enough of a food supply to carry us through, hopefully, until the sun comes back out. Armed men at one point attacked us but we were able to fight them off before they did too much damage. As for other groups, we've done recon of the Interstate 80 corridor from the snowline at six thousand feet all the way to the valley and along the Highway 50 corridor from the valley to Placerville. There are a lot of dead people out there but not many living ones. The only other group that we've taken note of is in Auburn." There was a long silence on the airways, probably while this Patrick Rowley person was discussing what had been revealed with others. Finally, after about a minute, he came back on the air. "Forgive the pause in conversation," he told them, offering no explanation for it. "Have you made contact with Auburn as you are doing with us?" "We have not," Paul told him. "We don't know what the exact population of Auburn is at this point but it is obvious from our observations that it is considerably more than what we have. There were also certain things about the town that made us a little uncomfortable with it. We elected to avoid contact with them for the time being." Another long pause occurred. "Please clarify," Rowley said when he came back on, "what you mean by 'certain things'. Do you believe you have something to fear from Auburn? Do we have something to fear from them?" "We don't really know if anyone has anything to fear from them," Paul said. "We're just being careful at this point. There is really no single thing that made this decision for us; it's more a combination of many things - their larger population being one of them. They also have a lot of guns. After some discussion among ourselves, we just thought it best to leave well enough alone." "I see," came the reply, again after several moments of silence. "And where did you get the helicopter?" "We got if from the airport at Cameron Park," Paul told him. "One of our townspeople is a pilot and we had an expedition out that way a few weeks ago. We've airlifted the fuel from the airport and returned it to our town. We should warn you that there is evidence of a group of people that are armed and practicing cannibalism out here on your side of the canyon." "Cannibalism?" he returned, his voice showing strong emotion for the first time. "Yes," Paul said. He explained about the bodies that Brett and company had found that had literally been butchered. "I must say," Rowley said slowly, "you've managed to shock us here." "I'm sorry," Paul said, "we just thought that maybe you should know." "I understand and agree," he told them. "Thank you for sharing that with us." There was another pause, this time with the microphone open. They heard Rowley take a deep breath, as if deciding something. After a moment he asked, "Can you stand by on the air for just a minute? There's something I wish to discuss with my companions here." A look was passed around the chopper. "Uh... sure," Paul finally answered. "We'll be standing by. Just start talking again when you're ready." "Thank you, I'll be back with you in a moment." With that, there was a click as the connection was closed. "What was that about?" Michelle asked. "I think Paul gave him some food for thought," Brett answered. "It would seem so," said Paul. He turned to Brett. "Brett, what's your take on this? You're good at listening to people and hearing deceit and all that. What do you think so far?" Brett thought about that for a moment. "I'm not sure," he said. "It's hard to read people over a scratchy radio link. You have to be able to see their body language. He seems sincere enough based on what I've heard, but we don't know what's going on down there." "What do you think they're doing right now? Why the pause for discussion?" "I couldn't even begin to guess," Brett said. "Jason, how we looking on the FLIR?" Jason, who had been scanning the area since they'd first pulled into a hover, looked up. "Nothing down there," he said. "No people, no animals, nothing. Just trees and mud." "Well, they're not setting up an attack on us," Brett said. "At least there's that." "I'm just glad they answered us," Michelle said. "It would've been depressing to waste all of this fuel and sacrifice one of our radios just for nothing. I think they're a lot like us." "Why do you think that?" Paul wanted to know. "I don't know," she said. "Woman's instinct? Psychic flash? Something just tells me that they're being on the up and up down there." "Interesting," Paul said thoughtfully. A full five minutes went by before the click of the transmission being opened reoccurred. "Mr. Terra," said Rowley's voice, "are you still there?" "We're still here," Paul replied. "Mr. Terra," he said, "I have discussed this with my fellow townspeople here and we have come to a decision. We would like to extend an invitation to your group to meet with us face to face. It seems that you have much information that we would be negligent to ignore. We, in turn, have information that you might find useful as well. Is there any way that you would consent to landing?" "No," Brett said immediately, before anyone else had a chance to respond. His words were only transmitted to the helicopter occupants since he had not keyed up his headset. "Stand by on that, Mr. Rowley," Paul said. "We need to have a discussion of our own." "I understand," Rowley returned. "Please be advised that if you do not wish to land in our town, perhaps you could drop someone off outside of it and we could pick them up. We would be agreeable to this as well. I know that promises do not mean very much in this day and age, but we will promise to return your people safely whenever they wish to go." "We'll take that into consideration," Paul said. "Please stand by, we'll get back to you." "Standing by," he told them. The click of closed transmission came again. "Absolutely not," Brett said firmly. "We will not land this helicopter down there." "Brett," Michelle started. "No," he repeated. "It's too risky. Establishing contact is one thing. Risking giving those people hostages is quite another. We have no idea what their intentions are." "I think we should do it," Paul said. "What?" Brett said, taking his eyes off his instruments to look at him. "Are you crazy? You want to land right in their town and take the chance that they'll capture us and the helicopter?" "Oh, I agree that we shouldn't risk the aircraft," he said. "But landing outside of town and having them pick me up, that is an acceptable risk." "Acceptable?" Brett asked incredulously. "What if they tell us they'll kill you if we don't turn over the helicopter to them? What if they tell us that they'll cut off pieces of your body one by one until we land the helicopter there? We can't give them a hostage!" "Trust, Brett," he said. "That's what this whole thing is based upon, isn't it? Trust has to start somewhere. They've made what seems a sincere offer, and I intend to take it. If they take me hostage, you will leave me down there no matter what they threaten, no matter what they do. I'm expendable, this helicopter is not." "Michelle," Brett appealed, "tell him that he's crazy! Tell him!" "He's crazy," she said slowly, eyeing her husband nervously, "but I'm afraid that I have to agree with him. Someone has to take that first step." "Oh Christ," Brett replied, shaking his head. "You're both crazy. Well I'm not going to do it. I refuse to drop anyone off down there. We'll just have to continue communicating by radio until..." "Brett," Paul interrupted, "I order you to drop me off down there." "You... you order me?" he said slowly. "I know I can't physically force you to do it," he told him, "but I am giving you an order as the leader of Garden Hill. I am the government there and you are the military. It is the military's job to obey the orders of the government regardless of whether they agree with those orders or not. Isn't that the way it works? Isn't that the only way it can work? Or are you staging the first military coup of the new age?" Brett looked at him stunned as he heard these words. "I'm afraid he's got you there, babe," Michelle said seriously. Brett sighed. "Shit," he muttered. "All right. I will follow your fucking order, but I'm putting in a complaint with the goddamn civil service commission. And if you get taken hostage down there, I'm going to kick your fucking ass." "And mine," Michelle said softly. "What?" Brett and Paul both said in unison, turning towards her. "You can't be serious," Paul said. "I'm dead serious," Michelle told them firmly, cutting Brett off before he had a chance to add anything else. "They should see a woman down there as well as a man. That will help assure them that the tales we tell about Auburn are truthful. They need a woman's perspective down there as well as a man's." "Michelle," Brett said. "You could be killed down there. You could be cut up into pieces one by one. I can't allow that." "You're my husband, Brett," she said, "not my boss. This is my decision to make." "And mine," Paul put in. "And I don't like the idea of risking one of our women to..." "We have women falling out of our assholes in Garden Hill," Michelle interrupted angrily. "Don't try to exclude me because of my sex. If you have a legitimate reason, then let's here it, Boss Man, but if it's because I have a pussy instead of a cock, keep your fucking mouth shut." Paul reeled a bit under the ferocity of her tone. He looked over at Brett. "The ball's in your court, bud," he said. "She's aced me." Brett looked at her. "I don't want to risk you, Michelle," he said. "You're my wife and I love you. I have no reason other than that one." "That's sweet, Brett," she said, giving him a smile. "But it's also not good enough. I want to go, I need to go. Besides, it'll get me out of this flying deathtrap for a while." Brett kept his eyes on her for far longer than was probably safe considering that he was in a hover. "Christ," he muttered. "Michelle, are you sure?" "I'm sure," she told him. "I'm going down." "Give us three hours," Paul said next. "Fly back to town and then return at 3:30. I'll have them let me use the radio to contact you. If everything is cool, I'll give you the code word... oh... corporation. If something is wrong, if they're trying to use us to bait a trap, we'll use the word conglomerate." "Corporation if good, conglomerate if bad," Brett said. "And what if we don't hear from you at all? Or what if they give us hostage demands?" "We've already been over that," Paul told him. "We're expendable. This helicopter is not. You are to attempt no rescue mission of any kind for either one of us. Is that clear?" "It's clear," he said, not liking it one bit. "Good. Now let's call back our friend, shall we?" "You're the boss," Brett said. Paul let this remark go and contacted his counterpart on the radio once again now that the decision was made. "We have decided to drop off two representatives just outside of town if that is acceptable," he told him. "We will come down unarmed and we will wait for your pick-up." "I understand," Rowley replied, his voice with a slight hint of pleasure in it. "I will leave the landing area up to you. Where will you be touching down?" Paul, hearing this, looked over at Brett. "What do you think?" he asked. Brett, despite his trepidation, was impressed by the offer to choose their own landing zone. This meant that this Rowley person had anticipated that they would worry about a trap being set. "Tell him we'll drop you off on Highway 50 about a half mile west of their westernmost guard position on the hill. It's relatively empty over there and it also lets them know that we know their defensive arrangements without sounding hostile." Paul nodded and repeated the words. If they had any effect on Rowley, he didn't let it show. "I understand," he replied. "I'll meet you there in ten to fifteen minutes with a truck." "Ten to fifteen minutes," Paul agreed, closing the connection. He turned to Brett again. "Let's get it done." Brett turned the helicopter to the south and began to descend even as he picked up speed. He circled widely around until he was orbiting 1500 feet above the spot he had chosen. Jason checked the surrounding area with the FLIR as a matter of course. "It's clear down there as far as I can tell," he said. "Okay," Brett said. He looked at the two back seat passengers again. "Last chance to back out," he told them. "Are you two sure about this?" "I'm not sure about anything," Paul replied. "But take us down anyway." "What he said," Michelle replied. He turned his attention back to the instruments and the view outside and quickly brought them down, making a controlled descent until the skids were resting on the wet pavement of Highway 50's eastbound lanes. Michelle and Paul, both of whom had stripped off their sidearms, opened the doors and, with one last word of farewell, stepped out. They trotted to the side of the road, their heads hunched low beneath the spinning rotor. "They're clear," Jason said once they were. "Right," Brett replied, giving them one last, doubtful glance. With nothing else to do, he applied power and lifted back off, bringing them quickly up to an altitude of 2000 feet above the ground. He stood off to the west, watching as a truck - some sort of yuppie SUV - left the town and drove slowly down the surface of the highway. "They'll be fine," Jason said doubtfully as the SUV came closer and closer to Michelle and Paul, who could be seen as tiny figures standing helpless in the middle of the roadway. "Yeah," Brett said, not comforted much. The SUV came to a stop about twenty feet from them. Brett and Jason watched as three people stepped out. From the air it appeared that two of them were women. They did not have any rifles on them but Jason was able to tell by looking through the FLIR's magnification setting that all had sidearms. They kept these weapons in their respective holsters. The two groups approached each other slowly, seeming to talk as they did this. "They're putting their hands up!" Jason barked as Michelle and Paul both raised their hands into the air and turned around. "Relax," Brett said, watching this development carefully. "They're just patting them down. It's the same thing we would do in those circumstances." The pat down was quick but seemed thorough. Once it was complete, handshakes were exchanged all around. Michelle and Paul both gave encouraging waves up at the helicopter and then, of their own free will, climbed into the back of the SUV. Their hosts climbed in after them and a moment later, the vehicle turned around and headed back to town. Brett and Jason watched it until it disappeared over the rise. "Well," Brett said, once it was out of view, "I guess we head back then." "I guess so," Jason said. Brett turned the chopper to the south and skirted around the town. A few minutes later he was flying at ninety knots towards Cameron Park and home. ------- The people of El Dorado Hills were very secretive. That was the first thing Michelle and Paul noticed as they were driven into and then through the town. Though they already knew, from the tapes that Brett and Jason had made, that the town had a population of at least two hundred, no one, not a single person, was visible on the streets. They were taken directly to the elementary school where the SUV was parked in the parking lot outside the administration building. Their hosts, who aside from the initial introductions back at the pickup point had been completely silent, led them inside and up a hallway to a conference room. There was a large, simulated wood grain table with a few generic chairs around it. "This is where we hold our meetings," said Patrick, or Pat, as he had asked to be called, as they entered the room. He was a man in his mid-thirties, his eyes sharp and intelligent looking. Though friendly, he gave the distinct air that he could be dangerous when provoked. "Why don't you have a seat in here and we'll have a talk." "Right," said Paul, hiding his nervousness. He walked over and grabbed a seat on the side of the table. Michelle followed him over and sat next to him. "Can I get you folks some tea?" asked Bonnie, the oldest of the escorting trio. She was a fit looking woman in her fifties. She had a thick mane of auburn hair that was starting to gray. Large, coke-bottle glasses sat upon her face. "We aren't as well set-up in the supply department as we probably should be, but we do have some nice herbal teas left over from the grocery store stocks." Paul opened his mouth to decline the offer but Michelle beat him to the punch. "Tea would be nice," she said. "It's always easier to talk over a beverage, isn't it?" "Yes it is," Bonnie said with a smile. Instead of going out to get the tea herself, she lifted a portable radio to her lips and keyed it. "Howard?" she said into it. "This is Bonnie. Can you bring us settings for tea in the conference room?" "It'll be there in five minutes," replied a gruff male voice. "Thank you, Howard," she said and replaced the radio. The other member of the trio was Renee, who was also a little older of a woman than Paul and Michelle were accustomed to seeing. She was in her forties and slightly chubby. Her thin, blonde hair was cut short. She too sported glasses upon her face. She sat down directly across from Paul and looked him up and down for a moment in a clinical manner. "You folks look fairly healthy from the outside," she told him. "Uh... thanks," Paul said. "Our food supply was starting to get a little short there for a while but we never did go through a period of starvation or anything like that. You all look reasonably well-fed as well." Pat nodded as he took his own seat. "We're hanging in here for the moment," he said. "As you've probably found out, scavenged food from the grocery store can only carry you for so far. We've had to find alternate sources." "Alternate sources?" Michelle asked carefully, thoughts of cannibalism going through her head. Pat, seeming to read her mind, quickly put it at ease. "We're not eating our dead," he said lightly. "Trust me, when I said that we were shocked by your mentions of cannibalism, I was being entirely truthful. We've been subsidizing ourselves a little bit with the venison from the scraggly deer we've managed to bring down around here, but mostly with fish." "Fish?" Paul said, feeling a little ill at the thought of eating anything caught in that sea of floating human bodies that the Sacramento Valley had become. "Not from the valley," Pat said, again picking up on his guest's thoughts. "We've mounted some fishing expeditions across the valley and out to the Pacific Ocean. The pickings are rather good out that way." "You've gone all the way out to the ocean?" Michelle asked. "How?" "In boats," Pat told her. "We've salvaged several large cabin cruisers that used to belong to the people that lived up here. We carry extra gasoline in storage tanks and make our way across the valley and into what used to be San Francisco Bay. From there, we go right out through the Golden Gate and into the open sea. Of course these boats were not meant to be ocean-going vessels, but you do what you have to do, right? Since the winds have died down the ocean surface is pretty calm anyway. We follow the coastline either north or south and stay in sight of land until we're out of the drainage area from the bay. We use the carp that we catch around here for bait and we pull up rock cod and occasionally some salmon." "Each trip takes about a week," Bonnie put in. "We've done three of them so far and managed to catch almost a ton of usable meat. We filet it and smoke it for short-term usage and dry some for long-term storage." "It keeps us alive," Renee added, "but it gets a little boring after a while." "Amazing," Paul said. "How are things out that way? We haven't gone any further west than the edge of the valley." A haunted look passed among the three hosts. "Everything is gone," Pat said slowly. "Where San Francisco and Oakland used to be is nothing but some chunks of concrete and a lot of mud. All of the buildings, all of the cars, the freeways, the bay bridge, the Golden Gate Bridge..." He shook his head. "All of it is gone. There's absolutely no sign that it had ever been there in the first place. Most of the hills surrounding the city are gone too. The trees were all ripped off of them by the tidal wave and the rain just made them collapse. There aren't even bodies left, at least none that you can see. There are huge mountains of debris up against the coastal mountains and in the inland valleys. That's where all the bodies went. The stench when we go past these areas is so bad that we have to use gas masks." "Jesus," Paul said. Although he had intellectually known that what Pat had described was what had happened, hearing it confirmed was still a shock. "It's unbelievable isn't it?" Renee asked them. "How fast our entire civilization was just wiped out? One minute we were there, six billion of us, and the next... pow, nothing but a few groups of scattered survivors." "The damage that one little chunk of ice did," Michelle said. "And it hasn't stopped yet," said Pat. "We've still got this rain to deal with. We have no idea how long it's going to last. Will it go on for a year? For two years? Will the entire land eventually be covered with snow? We don't know. You said on the radio that the snow level starts at 6000 feet?" "That's right," Paul said. "Brett - he's our pilot - has flown all the way up to Blue Canyon. The accumulations up there are pretty deep. There are a lot of avalanches up that way and everything is completely covered." "What about beyond the Sierras?" Bonnie asked. "Have you checked out that area?" "Not yet," Paul replied. "We have a finite amount of fuel and we don't want to waste it. Reno is below the snow line but more than likely it's flooded from all the water pouring out of the east side of the mountains. It's also a good bet that Lake Tahoe has more than overflowed its pre-comet shoreline. All of those floodwaters will pour right into the high desert." "A lot of people lived in the Reno area," Michelle said. "And as far as we know, none of them have worked their way over Donner Summit to us." "How about to the south and the north?" Pat asked next. "Amador County and Nevada County?" "We haven't done any recon out that way ether," Paul said. "There may be survivors there or there may not. Like I said, we've been using most of our fuel and our flight time for recovery missions instead of for long-range recon. The discovery of you and of Auburn was just incidental to our normal operations." "I see," Pat said, nodding thoughtfully. They talked of a few incidental things for a few minutes, just getting to know each other. There was an undercurrent of suspicion and mistrust between both groups at first but it started to fade a little as conversation developed. Pat explained how El Dorado Hills happened to live through the comet strike. Though landslides had buried most of the town when the rain started, the portion they were now sitting in had managed to remain on solid ground. As in Garden Hill, most of the survivors were women. Pat shared that the ratio was approximately 4 to 1, although the average age was a little higher than in Garden Hill because the community was older. Also, like in Garden Hill, there was an abundance of pre-school and elementary school age children but virtually no older children or teenagers since the junior high school and high school had been down in nearby Folsom, which was washed away when the dam broke. "We had a lot of mothers that went rushing down the hill right after the impact to try and get their kids," Pat explained. "They probably got down there just in time to get killed by the floodwaters. We watched that dam go from up here. It was something that I never care to see again. It's one thing knowing that hundreds of thousands of people are being drowned like rats, it's quite another to have to see it." In spite of the age differences in the two towns, the actual history and evolution of their government was remarkably similar. In the first few days after the rains started, El Dorado Hills, like Garden Hill, had been mostly in a state of shock and denial. They could not believe that civilization had really collapsed, that billions of people were really dead, and that they could really not expect any help to come to their stricken community. After this period came the power struggles as several different personality types attempted to put themselves into command of what remained. Organization was difficult at first since everyone wanted to be a chief and no one wanted to be an Indian. "It was Pat and Bonnie that finally pulled everyone together," Renee told them. "They basically just took charge and started telling people what to do. It took a few days before they started listening to them, but once it became apparent that everyone was going to starve unless something was done, common sense seemed to kick in. We gathered all of the food in town and stored it, we gathered all of the weapons and ammunition and stored that. Pat took charge of digging defenses and setting up our perimeter. He saw that everyone was trained in how to use their guns." "You sound like Brett," Michelle said, hearing this part. "Were you in the military?" "I was in the army," Pat replied, "but I wasn't a combat soldier. I was a computer nerd in for a standard pre-college stint. My job was to help program software for M1A1 tanks. Still, a lot of that basic training they gave us stuck with me. It's not exactly rocket science constructing defenses, but it does take a little basic knowledge." "Yeah," Paul said with good nature, "that's what I found out. We had a pretty harsh lesson about that back in our town." "Oh yeah?" Pat asked, interested. Paul and Michelle took turns describing the history of the Garden Hill township. For the most part, as agreed upon beforehand, they told the truth about the events, leaving out only fine details about their actual ammunition supply, arsenal, and defensive set-up. They described the power struggle that had almost led to the downfall of town under Jessica and Dale. This seemed to hold particular interest among their hosts. "We had our own version of Jessica here," Pat told them. "Only ours was a male and we didn't allow him to get as far as you did yours." "Really?" Michelle asked. "Tom Borden," Pat explained. "He was actually our State Legislature representative for this district. He was a going nowhere politician who had pipe dreams of one day being the governor of California but who only managed to hang onto his current office because his name happened to appear first on the ballet. The only reason he was home that day was because he had one of the highest absentee rates in the state. He had many of the same traits of your Jessica and he tried real hard to take command of everyone as we were trying to get things together. He kept claiming that he was now the official governor of California since all of the other politicians were dead down in Sacramento. We followed him for a few days until it became apparent that he just wanted people to wait on him and revere him and that he didn't actually have any idea what he was doing. Eventually we removed him from power and, after the turmoil that we told you about, formed the three person committee we now have to make the important decisions." "Did he go quietly?" Paul, thinking of Jessica's departure, wanted to know. "He didn't," Renee told him. "He tried to organize an armed rebellion against us and we had to exile him from town. We sent him out and our guards were forced to shoot him after he tried to force his way back inside." "That's too bad," Paul said. "It sounds like he and Jessica would've made a good couple." The talk of town histories continued. Paul and Michelle told about the attack on the town that had finally killed the voting alliance of Dale and Jessica and that had ultimately led to Jessica's own exile. Renee, in particular, seemed fascinated by Paul's heartfelt outpouring about watching Dale disintegrate and die from wounds that were probably not lethal. "That must've been hard for you," she said sympathetically. "It was very hard," he agreed. "I've never felt so helpless in my life. In my past life, when I was a fireman, I would've just had him flown to the trauma center. My contact with him would've been less than twenty minutes. In this life, I was the doctor and I had to watch him die." "You did everything you could for him," Renee told him. "And the treatment you gave this other woman, this..." "Sherrie," he said. "Sherrie," she said. "Right. The treatment you gave Sherrie was outstanding considering your lack of higher medical training and supplies. You did everything right with her." Paul looked at her carefully. "You seem rather knowledgeable on this subject," he told her. "She should be," Pat said. "She's a doctor." "A doctor?" Michelle said excitedly. "You mean a real doctor, with a medical degree and everything?" Renee laughed a little. "With a medical degree and everything," she agreed. "I was a family practitioner before the comet. I graduated from the UC Davis School of Medicine in 1985. My practice was the only one in this town. I had somewhat of a monopoly. Still do in fact. That's how I ended up as a part of the governing group after the impact. I was a somewhat respected member of the town." "You have a doctor," Michelle said slowly, speaking to no one in particular. "Your town is truly blessed." "And your town has a helicopter," Pat said. "You are blessed as well. Maybe if we can foment this relationship a little, our respective blessings can work together." "That was why we made contact with you," Paul put in. "We have a lot of pregnant women in town and very few medical supplies." "And I'm sure that we could find uses for a community with a helicopter," Bonnie said. "But the problem," Paul said, articulating what everyone was thinking, "is one of trust now, isn't it? We're sitting over here wondering if you are conspiring to steal our helicopter and our pilot. You are probably sitting over there wondering if we're conspiring to steal your doctor or other assets you might have." "Trust," Pat agreed. "That is indeed where it all falls apart. We all know what human nature is like, don't we?" "We do," Michelle said. "The instinct of us humans is to try to take what we need if it benefits us. We will lie, cheat, and steal to get it without much of a second thought. How do we convince each other that we are not embarking upon this path?" "Trust has to be earned and demonstrated," Bonnie said. "On both sides of the equation. We're working towards that now just by talking. We haven't got there yet, but maybe we will. So let's keep talking, shall we?" "Why don't we?" Paul said. And they continued talking. The discussion would go strong right up until the time that it was time for the visitors to be returned to the landing zone. ------- Brett was very cautious as he approached El Dorado Hills for the scheduled pick-up. With Jason in the observer's seat, he flew well to the south of Highway 50 from Cameron Park before turning to the west, adding more than fifty nautical miles to the trip. Once he was over the brown water of the Sacramento Valley/Sea, he turned to the right, following the shoreline until he reached the highway. Only then did he turn back to the east and, from as high an altitude as he could climb without risking icing problems, approach the town. The flight, which had taken nearly forty minutes, had been almost completely without conversation. Jason, without the years of life experience as his mentor, remained very optimistic of the meeting that was taking place. After all, he figured, why wouldn't El Dorado Hills cooperate with them? It only made sense. He kept quiet however, knowing that Brett, who had a much more cynical and realistic view of what human beings were capable of, worried about what he would do if Michelle and Paul failed to materialize at the pickup spot. "We're coming up on it," Brett said softly as the hills guarding El Dorado Hills' western flank came into view. "Start looking." "Bringing the FLIR on line," Jason dutifully replied, activating the system. As Brett slowed up the airspeed, he looked in the viewer, panning left and right, finally spotting four figures standing in the middle of the westbound lanes. "I've got four people ahead," he said. "Looks like two males and two females. I can't tell if two of them are our people or not." "Any of them armed?" Brett asked. "Not as far as I can tell," he replied. "There might be a handgun down there but there aren't any rifles." Brett, knowing that Jason was probably looking at Michelle and Paul in the company of two of the El Dorado Hillians, was not quite comforted just yet. Why were the other two people there? "Anything off on the flanks?" he asked. "Nothing at all," Jason said after a complete scan was done. "They're alone." "Okay," Brett said, pulling them into a hover. "Let's see if we can make contact." "You're live," Jason replied after a check to make sure the radio was tuned to the right frequency. Brett thanked his companion and then keyed the headset up. "El Dorado Hills landing party," he said calmly, his voice monotone, "this is the Garden Hill helicopter. Anyone down there?" "One of the males is raising his hand to his face," Jason, still watching carefully through the FLIR, announced. "It looks like he has the radio." This was confirmed a moment later. "Brett, this is Paul," sounded in their headsets. "We have a visual on you. Everything is okay down here. I have two of the El Dorado Hills leadership with me but they are unarmed." "We have a visual on you as well," Brett answered. He paused for an instant, keeping the radio link open, and then asked: "Do you have a code word for me?" "I do," Paul answered. "The word is corporate." Brett sighed in relief as he heard the correct word. True, it was technically possible that they had tortured one or both of their visitors to get that word, but it was very unlikely. "I copy the correct word," Brett said. "We'll be landing for the pick-up in about two minutes." "I copy two minutes," Paul answered back. Jason continued to watch the surrounding terrain through the FLIR as Brett made a cautious descent to the highway surface. There continued to be no signs of mammalian life within a one-mile radius of the four people. Satisfied that there would at least be no overwhelming attack by El Dorado Hills soldiers, Brett touched down on the asphalt about thirty yards away from the waiting group. He idled the engine once the skids were safely in contact and waited, his hands nervous on the controls, as Paul, Michelle, and the other two trotted over. "They look like they're all right," Jason observed. "It seems so, doesn't it?" Brett answered. Brett hated to be on the ground in unfamiliar territory. That was where the helicopter was most vulnerable. As such, it was his habit to make pick-ups and drop-offs as quickly as humanly possible. He had drilled everyone that regularly flew in the aircraft on how to get in and out so that his ground time in such circumstances would be less than 45 seconds at worst. This time however, the ground time stretched out much longer than that. The doors were opened slowly and introductions were made all around. Patrick Rowley and Dr. Renee Sawyer were the visitors that Paul introduced. "Nice to meet you," Brett said a little testily, some of his nervousness leaching through into his words, hardly even noticing the salutation of "doctor" at the beginning of the woman's name. Jason did though. "Are you a real doctor?" he asked, thoughts of Stacy's upcoming delivery dancing in his head. "I'm a real doctor," she assured him with a chuckle. While Brett fidgeted in his seat, wondering if this delay was some sort of trap set by the El Dorado Hills people to keep him on the ground long enough for troops to close in, Paul and Michelle exchanged a few pleasantries with Patrick and Renee. "Once again," Paul said, yelling a little over the sound of the engine, "we thank you for your hospitality." "Yes," Michelle echoed, "I'm glad you decided to let us land." Handshakes were exchanged and then Paul handed over the portable radio that he had used to contact the helicopter. "We'll be in touch," he said. Finally, at long last, he climbed inside, followed by Michelle. The doors closed and the headsets were donned. The two people outside both trotted a safe distance away. Only then did Brett relax a bit. "Everyone ready?" he asked. "Ready," said Michelle. "Ready," echoed Paul. With a sigh of relief, Brett applied power and got the rotor blades spinning up to take-off velocity. The view in front of them became a blur of spraying water and they broke contact with the ground, lifting into the sky. Just before he turned to the west, intending to skirt around the perimeter of the town again, they were able to see an SUV topping the rise in front of them, coming to pick up the two townspeople. By the time it reached them, Brett was nearly over the Sacramento Valley/Sea once again. "So how did it go?" he asked, feeling safe for the first time since he'd dropped his two companions off. "It went well," Paul replied, settling in against the wall. "They were a bit secretive overall, but they did share some pretty interesting information with us." "Oh?" Brett asked. "We talked for almost the entire three hours," Michelle said. "They have a population of 500 people. Like us, men are the minority. Pat told us that they have 95 men. The rest are women and small children. Pat and Renee, the doctor that was with him, and one other woman are the ruling council that makes all of the decisions. They're kind of like we were with Jessica and Dale, only without the voting alliance." "So they seem like they're cool?" Jason asked. "As far as we can tell," Paul said. "They didn't tell us how much ammunition they had or how many guns but they were willing to share most other information with us after they got to know us a little." "What kind of information?" Brett wanted to know. Michelle and Paul took turns narrating the story of how the current-day El Dorado Hills came to be. They told of the initial confusion and power struggles that were so similar to what their own town had gone through. "They even had the same problems with people trying to cling to pre-comet morality in regards to relationships," Michelle explained. "Their first month after organizing they had constant problems with women fighting among themselves over men and men giving in to the temptations of other women. Though they tend to be a little older than we are, most of them are still in their sexual years and cared enough about that for it to be a problem." "And how did they solve the problem?" Brett asked. "The same way we did?" "That's right," she said. "They now have an organized system of polygamy in place there. They told us that most men in town have at least two wives and some have as many as four. They also have a ceremony that they go through both for adding a new wife to a group and for dissolving a marriage." "Dissolving a marriage?" Jason asked. "Yep," Michelle confirmed with a nod. "Apparently some of the groupings haven't worked out too well. Some jumped into the arrangement hastily without realizing what they were getting into and others just couldn't handle the concept of sharing. I expect we'll go through much the same thing in our town as more and more groups form." "That's something to look forward to," Brett said. "How about defenses? Have they experienced any attacks?" "They didn't discuss their defensive arrangements with us," Paul said. "Understandable considering the circumstances. But they did say that they have not had any contact with any organized group of survivors until us. They had stragglers during the first two months, just like we did, but nothing else." "They said they were starting to wonder if they were the only group left on Earth," Michelle added. "I can see how they would think that," Brett allowed. "They are somewhat isolated there. They have the flooded valley to the west and a huge, nearly impenetrable mudfall and washout to the east. The canyon cuts off any sort of access to the north and to the south, there aren't any towns for miles." "They also haven't done any sort of recon of the area," Paul said. "They told us that except for their fishing trips, no one ever leaves the town." "Fishing trips?" Brett said, wincing in disgust. Like Paul and Michelle when they were first told of this, his first thought was of the Sacramento Valley/Sea and the millions of dead bodies in it. His disgust turned to respect however when the actual situation was explained to him. He was particularly impressed by the navigation skills that would be required to boat across the debris-laden sixty-mile width of the valley and then out through San Francisco Bay to the open water. Since visibility was only about five miles or so through the rain, the majority of such a trip would necessarily need to be done without land-based references. "Pat said they do it entirely with compasses and charts that they've made," Michelle said. "They have GPS receivers but they still can't get any sort of signal from them because of the clouds. So far they've pulled in more than a ton of fish that they've dried or smoked. He said they've also brought back some crabs and lobsters as well. They eat those as part of a return feast whenever they come back." "Crabs and lobster," Brett said slowly, his mouth watering at the very thought. He had a vision, almost sexual in nature, of dumping fifty or sixty live crustaceans into the hot water tank used for bathing and boiling them until they were bright red. Of course there wouldn't be any butter to dip it in, but he thought he could live with that. "Yes," Paul said, "amazing, isn't it? We touched on the possibilities of trade in the future but didn't go into any negotiations. I can certainly see us delivering a load of rice and wheat to them in exchange for some fish and some lobster though." "Oh yeah," Jason said dreamily. Like everyone else in town, including his wives who made the stuff, he was getting quite tired of rice, spinach, and chicken noodle soup day after day. "What about the possibility that they're setting us up?" Brett, reluctantly throwing the image of fresh seafood aside, asked next. "Anything's possible," Paul allowed. "But for what it's worth, they seemed sincere." "I agree," Michelle said. "In fact, it seemed that the secrecy that they displayed was more out of the fear of us than anything else. I think that if we keep up a dialogue with them, it will be beneficial to both of us. Remember that they have a doctor there. That factor alone makes it worthwhile to stay on their good side. Imagine if there was a problem with one of the pregnant women as they approached delivery. Suppose there was a breach presentation or something like that. Brett could fly that woman to El Dorado Hills and have her in the presence of a doctor within a half-hour's time. No offense to you Paul, you've done a great job so far, but that doctor could do a C-section and save what would otherwise would be the death of a mother and child." "They also had a complete pharmacy in their grocery store," Paul added. "They have access to antibiotics and other drugs and they have someone who knows how to give them." "That is a good point," Brett was forced to allow. "There are a hundred good reasons to maintain a relationship with these people," Michelle said, "and only one reason not to: that they might try to take our helicopter or attack us. I think that until we have a reason to mistrust them - something we don't have at this point - we are compelled to further these meetings. The potential payback makes the gamble worth it." "Well put," Paul said, nodding in agreement. Brett sighed. "You're right," he said slowly. "But I would suggest we take things slowly. We can't disregard the possibility that they might be just waiting for a chance to get their hands on me and this aircraft." ------- The community meeting that night stretched until nearly eight o'clock. Paul and Michelle, who were being hailed as town heroes for their trip, first explained everything they had learned that day and then answered question after question from the townspeople. It was eerily like a press conference in pre-comet life - a press conference that went on for hours. Most of the inquiries were of a nature that simply couldn't be answered for lack of information but people insisted upon asking anyway. "Do you think that they might attack us?" was asked again and again in different phrasing. "We hope not," Paul or Michelle would reply, "but we simply don't know for sure." "Will the doctor help us if we need help?" was another common question. "Again, we don't know," was the reply. "What about this fish and lobster thing? How much do they have? How much will they trade?" "We don't know," would be the answer. "That didn't come up yet." On and on it went until finally, through sheer exhaustion, the questions finally died out and Paul was able to declare an end to the meeting. His final word was that another trip to El Dorado Hills was planned for the following week. Maybe they would be able to entice a visitor to come back with them for a tour of their own town. As the people of Garden Hill finally shuffled out of the community center and back to their homes, the conversation was mostly about what had been learned that day. It didn't occur to many of these people that in El Dorado Hills, a very similar meeting was also just breaking up and that many of the same questions had been addressed there as well. ------- "God, it's been a long day," Brett said as he pulled on a pair of tattered sweatpants prior to climbing into bed. Shirtless, he walked into the bathroom and proceeded to relieve himself into the toilet. He didn't bother closing the door as he did this. Everyone, even Chrissie, had gotten over being seen by their spouses as they urinated. "I am completely exhausted," Michelle intoned with a yawn as she pulled on a long T-shirt over her nakedness. "Flying in that helicopter does something to sap your strength. How did you used to do it every day, Brett?" "You get used to it," he said, shaking off and tucking himself back in his sweats. He picked up the bucket of water that stood on the rear of the tank at all times intending to pour it in to facilitate the flushing process. "Don't flush yet," Chrissie said, walking into the bathroom completely naked. Her breasts had gotten noticeably bigger in the past few weeks, as had the bulge in her stomach. "I need to pee too. No sense wasting water." "Okay," Brett replied, putting the bucket back. He tried to leave the bathroom but was delayed when Chrissie reached out and put her hand on his crotch. She gave him a playful squeeze. "I hope you're not too tired," she said with a seductive smile. He gave her a tired look. "Actually," he said apologetically, "I'm about to drop. Maybe we can play a little in the morning?" "Screw the morning," she said sourly, letting go of him and sitting on the toilet. "It's been two days since I've had any. I'm horny now." "Sorry, babe. It's been a very long day," he told her, feeling guilty about turning her down. It had been a few days since he'd made love to her. With the honeymoon phase of the relationship nearing its end, all three of them had slowed down the frequency of their relations a bit. Instead of making love twice a day, Brett was now doing it only about once a day and sometimes even going for a day or two without. By far Chrissie had the most voracious sexual appetite of the trio as the hormones of pregnancy assaulted her body. She was typically the initiator between her and Brett and would even ask Michelle to eat her or finger her to orgasm if Brett wasn't in the mood, although she always felt somewhat guilty about this and, as of yet, had not been able to bring herself to return the favor. Michelle, when she wasn't tired, was usually a good sport about it and actually seemed to be developing quite a taste for her co-wife's vagina. And she never complained about the lack of reciprocation. "Spoilsport," Chrissie accused Brett with a pout as she unleashed a stream of urine. "I'll give you a proper pounding in the morning," he told her. "I promise." She didn't reply to him, she only stuck her tongue out in a mock display of childishness. Brett returned the gesture and then left the bathroom, leaving her to pee in peace. He went into the bedroom and climbed into the bed. Michelle was already there, lying on her back on the left side of it. She seemed almost asleep already. He put himself in the middle - his accustomed spot - and, with a yawn, stretched out and got comfortable. The sound of the toilet flushing came a minute later and then Chrissie walked in, still naked. She climbed in on the right side of the bed and immediately pressed her smooth body against Brett. Her breasts slid against his shoulder. "Chris," he said tiredly, "you didn't blow out the candles." "I don't plan to go to sleep just yet," she whispered in his ear, her tongue snaking out to lick at the lobe. "You didn't think I was going to give up that easily, did you?" "Chris, really," he pleaded. "I'm exhausted. I don't think I could even get it up right now." "And I'm trying to sleep," Michelle said from the other side of him. "Blow out the damn candles." "You guys are prudes," Chrissie said, letting her hand slide across Brett's stomach. Before he could stop her, she had reached into his sweats and grabbed his wilted cock. She began to softly squeeze it and stroke it. "Chrissie," he said, trying to roll away from her. "Really, I'm not in the mood right now." "You will be," she whispered, nibbling on his earlobe now, her hand stubbornly continuing its actions. Despite the fatigue, which was pulling at him like a drug, Brett felt simple biology at work as a result of her caressing hand. Blood began to flow into his cock and he began to stiffen a little, very much against his will. "You see?" Chrissie said triumphantly as she felt the first stirrings. "You are interested." "No he's not," Michelle groaned impatiently. "Now put the damn light out and go to sleep." "Not until I get what's coming to me," Chrissie said indignantly. "I've been neglected lately. He has his husbandly duties to perform." "Oh Christ," Michelle said, rolling over and pulling the covers over her head. "Chrissie please," Brett said, feeling himself stiffen even further under her hand. The first glimmerings of interest began to blossom in his body, nudging the fatigue to the side. "Maybe you need a little more convincing," she said, reaching down and pulling the covers off of him. "Chrissie!" Brett said, feeling the chilly air upon his skin. "Chrissie!" echoed Michelle, whose body had also been partially uncovered by this move. "Prudes," she said, not making any move to recover them. Instead, she yanked the front of Brett's sweats down, revealing his half-erect penis. She gave it a few more squeezes and then twisted around in the bed so that her head was down at his crotch. Before he could protest or do anything else, she slurped his entire length into her mouth. "Ohhh," Brett groaned in surprise, feeling the teasing lips and tongue upon him. Though Michelle was quite the aficionado of oral sex, it was very rare that Chrissie actually took his penis into her oral cavity. The unusual nature of the event coupled with the pleasurable sensation of it was enough to drive the last of the fatigue underground and make him stiffen up completely. "Mmmmm," Chrissie moaned from around the cock in her mouth as she felt it harden up, as she sensed Brett's protests coming to an end. She was starting to see why Shellie liked doing this so much. There was such a feeling of power involved. She swirled her tongue around the head a few times and then began to move her mouth up and down upon him. "Goddammit!" barked Michelle impatiently as she reached up and pulled the covers back over her. "Would you guys go do that in the other room?" Neither Brett nor Chrissie answered her, nor did they make any move to get up and go to the other room. Chrissie kept slurping her mouth up and down on Brett's cock, wetting it with her saliva, teasing it into a rigid hardness and Brett just moaned, quickly becoming lost in the sensation. He put his hand into Chrissie's long blonde hair and ran his fingers through it as she worked on him. Michelle gave one more grunt and then closed her eyes again, trying to ignore what was going on. Chrissie sucked him for the better part of five minutes, tonguing every millimeter of his cock and even taking his balls into her mouth for a few quick slurps. She deep throated him a few times although her technique was very inexpert and she had to fight a gag when she reached bottom. Brett's hands left her hair and found their way to her breasts, which he squeezed and kneaded gently, feeling the hardness of the nipples and the softness of the flesh. "Mmmmm," Chrissie said, pulling her mouth free and giving him one last loving lick from root to head. "Now we're getting somewhere." "It would seem so," Brett told her, giving her nipples a playful pinch. She pulled his sweats the rest of the way off and tossed them to the floor. Her pussy was now quite wet and ready for action so she raised up and straddled his legs, inching forward until his cock was nestled against her pubic hair. "Now for the payoff," she said, putting the head against her moist lips. She moved her pelvis back and forth a few times, sliding him around in her opening and then she sank down upon him, engulfing his entire length in her tight cavern. Both of them sighed in pleasure at the intrusion. She began to move up and down, back and forth, pushing and pulling him in and out of her body. She ground herself against his pubic bone, stimulating her clit and sending shivers of pleasure through her body and his. The bed began to bounce as his hands found her tits once more. Michelle looked up at them in annoyance again, letting loose an irritated sigh. Chrissie's thigh was banging into hers through the comforter with each stroke that she made and the headboard of the bed was clanking against the wall behind it with the rhythm of their movements. She felt a small twinge of arousal when the odor of the union taking place next to her caught her nose but she quickly buried it beneath her fatigue. She picked up a small pillow and crammed it between the headboard and the wall, silencing the pounding. With one more sigh she pulled the covers a little tighter around her and put her own pillow over her head, trying to block out the grunts and groans from her bedmates. But Chrissie was feeling naughty this night and she had no intention of letting her co-wife off that easily. As she continued to bounce and gyrate atop Brett's rigid cock, she forced her hand underneath the covers and found Michelle's bare leg just below the back of her knee. She moved her hand up and down, touching the soft, feminine flesh, creeping higher and higher with each movement. Michelle tried to pull her leg away but Chrissie held tight. Michelle reached down and batted at the invading hand once but Chrissie simply put it right back. Soon, as her vaginal secretions dripped down and soaked Brett's crotch, her hand was touching the swell of Michelle's bare ass. Brett, seeing this, decided to get in on the act too. His fatigue was now completely gone, overridden by passion and excitement. He moved his right hand from Chrissie's breast and pushed it under the covers as well, moving it around against Michelle's body until he was fondling her breast through her nightgown. Again Michelle tried to squirm away from him but he refused to let her. Soon he could feel the nipple hardening against his hand and could sense her breathing quickening. Finally, after being pawed and groped by two different people of two different sexes, she gave up the battle. She pulled the pillow from her head and rolled onto her back, casting the covers aside and opening her legs. "You guys just don't know when to stop, do you?" she breathed, her face flushed. "We know when to go," Chrissie said, running her hand higher up the front of Michelle's legs. Brett pulled Michelle's T-shirt up, exposing her breasts. Her nipples were now standing up proudly and his fingers found them. Chrissie, now panting and flushed, let her own hand continue its journey until she touched the wet folds of her pussy. She slid first one and then two and finally three fingers inside of her and began to push and pull with the rhythm of her own strokes atop Brett. "Yeah," Michelle groaned, feeling the delicious intrusion, "finger-fuck me, baby. Give it to me hard." She grasped Chrissie's wrist and began to forcefully piston her hand in and out. Chrissie felt the clenching muscles of Michelle's sex, felt the wonderful slickness of her passage grasping at her, and suddenly she wanted more. She stared at that gaping slit as Brett's cock slammed in and out of her, she saw that hard clitoris poking out of its hood, and she knew that the time had finally come to do what she had been avoiding all of this time. She suddenly rose up, pulling herself free of Brett, who cried out in protest at the loss of sensation just as he was approaching an orgasm. "Fuck me from behind," Chrissie told him, dropping to her knees and swinging her rear end around in a circle until it was facing him. "I'm gonna eat Shellie's pussy out." "Oh God," Michelle moaned, feeling a shiver travel through her at the very words. She had been hoping and fantasizing since the first cautious encounter that Chrissie would one day put her mouth upon her sex and now, at last, it seemed it was finally coming true. While Brett worked his way around behind her and put his cock back into her pussy from behind, Chrissie, continuing to slam her fingers in and out of Michelle's slit, dropped her mouth to her nipple. She suckled it frantically, harshly, the way she knew Michelle liked it at this point in a session. She kissed between the breasts and worked her way over to the other one, sucking and biting the nipple over there as well. Finally she began to kiss and nibble her way across the soft flesh of Michelle's stomach. When her mouth reached the top of her pubic mound she pulled her dripping fingers free, inhaling the sharp odor of her co-wife's juices. "Do it, Chrissie," Michelle moaned desperately, putting her fingers atop Chrissie's head and pushing at her. She was so keyed up by the sight of the innocent-looking teenager about to lick her that she thought she might come at the first contact. "Yeah," Brett echoed, panting as well, barely in control of his own orgasm at the sight of what was happening. He slowed down the pace of his strokes a little to keep from losing that thin edge of control. "Eat her, Chris. Eat her good." Chrissie, trembling with desire and feeling the delicious nastiness pervading her body at what she was about to do, ran the back of her tongue through Michelle's pubic hair, moving downward until she was licking the edge of her swollen lips. She tasted the tang of another woman's vaginal juices for the first time and this drove her onward. Without pausing for a second thought, she plunged her tongue directly into the gaping chasm before her, spearing it in as far as was physically possible. "Oh yessss," Michelle cried, her hips rising up at the contact, her hand pushing harder against Chrissie's head to increase it. "Mmmmm," Chrissie moaned from around her mouthful of pussy. She plunged her tongue in and out, lapping at the juices, drinking in their flavor, feeling like a depraved, nasty girl and loving it. She licked up and down for a moment and then went back to driving her tongue inside. She rubbed her nose against the swollen clit. "Oh yes, baby, yesss!" Michelle gurgled happily, her legs coming up around Chrissie's back. "Eat me, eat meeeeeeee!" "Oh God," Brett grunted, losing control of his body. The spasms began in his groin, quickly building up to a crescendo of wicked, glorious pleasure. He grasped Chrissie's ass harshly, digging his fingers into the pale flesh, his own hips an out of control piston as he slammed into her with all of his might, their groins making a wet, slapping sound with each stroke. Soon the sperm was shooting out of his body, filling her and then overfilling her. Chrissie experienced her first orgasm as she felt Brett shooting his hot seed into her. She groaned and panted, raising her wet face out of Michelle's crotch long enough to cry out her own pleasure to the room. No sooner had Brett pulled his sticky member from Chrissie's pussy than Michelle brought things up to a new level. "Swing around, Chrissie," she said, grabbing at her leg. "Put your pussy on my face. I want to eat his come out of you." "Ohhhh," Chrissie said, delighted at the nastiness of that. She scooted around in a circle, keeping her own face in Michelle's crotch, until her legs were straddling Michelle's head. Her pussy was gaping open obscenely, the pubic hair matted from wetness, white sperm oozing out and running down her thighs. Michelle looked at this with a wild, lustful look in her eyes, as if she was contemplating a gourmet feast. She put her hands on Chrissie's ass and pulled her crotch to her, burying her face in that messy junction. Her tongue began to lap up and down her slit, gathering all of the come and vaginal secretions on the outside before she probed through the lips, sucking what was inside out as well. Chrissie shuddered at the sensation and immediately had another, more powerful orgasm. As the tremors faded away, making way for the next one, she put her own face back in Michelle's crotch and began working to bring her off. Brett, still kneeling in the same spot that he had fucked Chrissie from, watched this excitedly. His penis, which had never really softened after his own come, was once again firming up into a ramrod. He stroked it softly as he watched the two women eat each other, wondering just where he should put it next. It didn't take long before someone gave him a suggestion. ------- Meanwhile, in Auburn, Colonel Barnes and Captain Bracken were drinking scotch and sodas in Barnes' office. They sat in comfortable chairs in a heated room beneath the glow of electric lights, sipping out of genuine crystal glasses. On the desk before them was a bottle of Cutty Sark, a twelve-pack of Coca-Cola, and a decanter filled with ice-cubes that had been made in a small freezer that was hooked into the generator. "It's hard to believe that they managed to slip out of town," Barnes said, taking a puff from his cigar. He was referring to Anna and Jean, the search for whom had finally been abandoned at sunset that very day. "Who would've thought?" "I know how you feel," Bracken said, shaking his head a little. "But I'm quite certain at this point that they are nowhere in town, living or dead. We've searched every building, every nook, every cranny within the guarded area and we have found no trace of them. We guarded the areas that we've already searched just to make sure that they didn't slip from one area to another. Unfortunately, as much as I hate to admit it, they had to have slipped out of town somehow, either on the night they killed the other bitch or sometime after." "They must've been incredibly lucky not to have been picked up," Barnes said, shaking his head at the travesty of it all. "Luckier than they'll ever know," Bracken agreed. He took a sip of his latest drink and then helped himself to one of Barnes' cigars. "Now for the important question," Barnes said, flicking a gold-plated Zippo lighter to life and igniting his companion's stogy for him. "Will this escape have any bearing on the upcoming attack on Garden Hill? What do you think the odds are that they will be heading for that town?" Bracken puffed his cigar alight and then leaned back in his chair, looking thoughtfully at his leader. "I'm quite certain that their plan from the start was to head to Garden Hill," he said. "Ever since we brought that bitch Jessica back from the last mission, rumors have been flying about the town. We've had reports from many of the men that they've overheard their bitches talking about the place and how much better it would be if they were there." "I hope those bitches were beaten severely for that," Barnes said. "Oh, I'm sure they were. But my point is that I'm surprised that my two bitches were the only ones who tried to get away. The bitches see that place as some sort of Utopia." "So do you think that a change of plans is in order?" Barnes wanted to know. "Will the possibility of those two bitches making it to Garden Hill destroy the element of surprise in the attack?" Bracken shook his head. "I don't think we need to worry about that," he said confidently. "In the first place, I can't see them actually making it to Garden Hill. They left carrying nothing but a few blankets. There's no way that they'll survive a ten-day hike through the rain without any food. My guess is that we'll come across their bodies somewhere between here and there as we march. They're probably out there collapsed and starving even as we speak." "That sounds logical to me," Barnes said. "And even if, by some miracle, they manage to get to Garden Hill, what of that? What can they really tell those people that would compromise our attack plans? They're bitches after all. Sure, they've probably managed to overhear the fact that we plan to make an attack, but they won't be able to tell them when, or how, or with how many men. At worst, the Garden Hill people will just have confirmation of what they probably already expect anyway. After all, they did probe us with their helicopter. That tells us they know we're here. And they haven't been back since then. That tells us that they have decided we're something to fear." Barnes thought these words over carefully for a moment and decided that they made a lot of sense. "You sound like you've thought this out very well," he said. "I concur with your reasoning. Do you still plan to leave on the 7th of January?" "We've been delayed a bit in the training schedule because of the search for the bitches," Bracken said. "I would like a few more days to exercise the new platoons and the new lieutenants." "Fair enough," Barnes told him, finishing off the last of his drink. "After all, time is on our side, isn't it?" "Exactly." ------- Chapter 14 Guard position 1 sat atop Hill 1514 outside the northwest perimeter of Garden Hill. The hill itself was sparsely populated with pine and redwood trees and rose five hundred feet above the rooftops of the town. The guard bunker was a four-foot trench that stretched thirty feet north to south at the summit of the hill. Sandbags lined the front and back of the trench and a camouflaged cover had been placed over the top of it and covered with tree branches and mud. Openings in the sandbag walls allowed for visualization of the post's area of responsibility - the Interstate stretching off to the west and the low hills to the north and immediate south of it - and served as firing ports if a battle ever became necessary. Brett had designed the bunker so that a complete ten-person squad could occupy it during a battle and pour fire down upon any invaders approaching from the Interstate. Now, however, at 2:30 on the afternoon of January 5 (or March 26 under Matt's calendar), it was staffed only by Maria Sanchez and Leanette Benton who were two and a half hours into a standard six-hour guard shift. They were armed with one of the automatic M-16 rifles and a long-range, scoped hunting rifle in addition to their sidearms. They also had a fully charged portable radio and a set of expensive binoculars. The inside of the trench was damp and muddy on the floor of it but relatively free of dripping water or direct rainfall. The two women were dressed warmly in jeans and flannel shirts covered by black rain jackets and hoods. They sat side by side upon small stools near one of the sandbag openings playing a game of cribbage that was set up on a small end table between them. Every few minutes one of them would stand up and make a complete scan of the area with the binoculars and then, after seeing nothing, they would go back to their game. Maria and Leanette had once been bitter enemies. It had been they that Chrissie had had to actually separate at post because of physical fighting not too long before. Those days were tentatively over, replaced by a cautious friendship born out of their recent polygamous marriage to Hector. After Paul's legitimization of the concept by participation in it, Hector had been one of the first to jump on the bandwagon by suggesting that his semi-permanent mistress Leanette officially join the union. Maria had not been too terribly wild about the idea but she had accepted it, knowing, as most of the other women were learning, that her husband was going to sleep with Leanette with or without official sanction anyway. Since then the two had become cautious friends with each other, well on their way to developing the camaraderie with each other that marked most of the other triples. Together they were attempting to keep their man in line and so far their combined efforts seemed to be doing the trick. "Fifteen-two, fifteen-four," Maria counted, laying down her latest hand, "fifteen-six, a pair is eight, and a three-card run is eleven." She picked up her peg and advanced it well past the last hole on the board. "And that," she said with a small smile, "puts me out. That's two in a row I've whipped your ass." "Yeah yeah," Leanette said with a good-natured grunt as she threw down her uncounted cards. "This is a stupid game." "It sure is," Maria agreed. "You wanna play again?" "Screw that. What else we got in here?" "We have Monopoly," Maria, the veteran of this particular post told her. "Chrissie actually replaced the Monopoly money inside of it with real money from the grocery store." "You mean there's real hundreds and fifties and twenties in there?" Leanette asked. "Everything except the five hundreds," she answered. "It's kind of fun to play that way until you remember that the real money is just as worthless as the Monopoly money was." "Okay," Leanette said, "let's do it." "I'll kick your ass at that too," Maria warned. "I'm the Monopoly master." "Bring it on, girl," Leanette told her with a smile. "Why don't you start setting it up and I'll make another check outside?" "It's a plan," she said, reaching under the end table and into a plastic garbage bag where the entertainment items were kept. Leanette picked up the binoculars and stood up, taking two steps through the mud to the opening. Sometimes she wondered why they even bothered looking out every five minutes. Nothing was ever out there anymore, not even isolated stragglers. The last of them had apparently died out more than six weeks ago, or at least they never showed themselves anymore. But then, when her boredom at guard duty would reach a peak, she would remind herself of that terrifying day when armed invaders had come right in the wall, bent on capturing the community center and kidnapping the women. She had been one of Brett's hastily assembled squad on that day and she always remembered the horror she had felt when bullets had started whizzing in over her head, when Dale and then Rick and then Sherrie had been felled right in front of her. Those thoughts always compelled her to perform as she was told on guard duty and make her checks religiously. Never again did she want to feel the way she had at that moment. She put the binoculars to her face and began her slow scan of the area, starting from the far south of the zone of responsibility. She looked at a magnified view of the rolling hills, of the mud flats, of the trees and shrubs. She looked over the abandoned grocery store and the abandoned gas station. At the gas station a work crew of two women was using a siphon hose to draw gasoline from the underground tank and fill up the Dodge truck that served as the town's wood gathering and general hauling vehicle. She held her gaze on them for a moment, not because she thought they were invaders - she and Maria had been informed by radio a few minutes before that a work-crew would be leaving the town - but only because they were actual people in an otherwise sterile environment. When she got her fill of looking at them, she turned her head slowly to the right, spinning her view to the north. Soon she was looking at the abandoned lanes of Interstate 80, the most likely avenue of any outsider advance. She started at the signpost that marked the official border of Garden Hill and then worked her way west, towards the small rise some three miles distant where the lanes disappeared from view. So accustomed to seeing nothing was she that she actually looked right over the two figures coming over this rise and kept scanning before her brain finally gave her a little kick in the ass and told her to pan back. She did this quickly, the view jumping and bouncing for a moment before she was able to steady it on the two people she had seen. They were still several miles out and therefore very difficult to catch any fine details of, but they were unmistakably human beings. They were walking sedately right down the middle of the eastbound lanes, shoulder to shoulder, occasionally leaning on each other for a moment. "Maria," Leanette said, her voice excited. "I've got two people out there on the Interstate!" "What?" Maria said, looking at her co-wife to see if she was joking or not. She did not seem to be. "Two people," she repeated. "They just came over the rise to the west. They're walking right down the freeway!" Maria stood up quickly, pushing her face through the nearest opening. Her eyes were sharp and even without artificial magnification she was able to spot two tiny specks making their way forward. "Let me see those glasses," she said, holding out her hands for them. Leanette handed them over to her and she put them to her face, getting the close-in view. "They don't look like they're carrying rifles," she said doubtfully. "They might be over their shoulders though. Who do you think they are? Where are they coming from?" "I don't know," Leanette said, picking up the scoped rifle. She aimed it out through the opening and peered through the scope. The magnification wasn't as much as the binoculars but it was considerably more than the naked eye. "They don't look like they're very heavily loaded. You see anyone else behind them or to the sides?" "No one," Maria said, shaking her head. "Goddammit, and Brett and Jason are gone with the helicopter right now too. They could've used the infra-red to check behind them." Leanette nodded as she remembered this. Brett, Jason, Matt, and Paul had flown off about an hour before to continue their recon mission of the abandoned trucks on the Interstate. They also planned to do some recon to the north of the Interstate, on the secondary roads, as well. "We'd better tell Chrissie about this," she said, backing away from the rifle a little and picking up the radio. "Position one to base," she said into it. "Are you there, Chrissie?" ------- Chrissie was upstairs in the community center's main office, going over the schedule for the 6:00 PM crew change when the call came in. She was currently the only one in the office since Brett and Paul were both away on the recon mission. She wheeled her chair over to the shelf where the main radio set rested and picked up the microphone. "This is Chrissie," she said, already sensing - based on the tone of Leanette's voice - that something out of the ordinary was in the works. "What's happening, Leanette?" "Chrissie," Leanette said, "we have two people walking up the Interstate towards us. They're approximately two miles to the west at this time walking in the eastbound lanes." She felt a jolt of adrenaline surge through her as she heard this. People approaching the town? Who were they? What could they want? Where had they come from? And Brett was out of radio range in the helicopter! What if they were hostile? "Chrissie?" Leanette's voice said from the radio. She sounded a little worried. "Did you copy my transmission?" "I copy," Chrissie said slowly, her mind spinning up to overdrive. "Where uh... I mean, can you tell if they're armed or not?" "Unsure at this point," Leanette replied. "They're still too far away for us to make anything out. They're not trying to hide from us or anything, they're just walking down the roadway." "No sign of others?" she asked next. "Not so far," was the answer. "We're keeping our eyes peeled." She took a few breaths, trying to think through what she should do next. Was this an emergency? Well, not really, not at this point anyway. But it was unusual and there were certain things that should probably be done. "Leanette," she said into the microphone, "keep watching them for the moment. Don't do anything until they get up to our sign. At that point, if they cross over, treat them like any other straggler." "I copy that," Leanette replied. "Positions 2, 3, and 4," Chrissie said next, "answer up in order please." One by one the other guard posts all checked in with her. None of them reported anything unusual outside of their posts. She told all of them to increase their alertness until told to stand-down. This meant that they all dropped their games and conversations and picked up their guns and binoculars. "Are they still advancing?" she asked Leanette and Maria once that was taking care of. "That's affirmative," Leanette told her. "We have a better view of them now. It looks like two women. Still no weapons visible on them. They have packs on their backs that look like they're made out of garbage bags." "How close to the border are they?" "Still over a mile and a half out, but moving at a good pace." "Copy, keep me updated." The minutes dragged onward maddeningly. Chrissie chewed her fingernails nervously while she waited for updates, all sorts of evil possibilities running through her head. She envisioned the two women on the freeway as some sort of diversionary tactic for a main group of invaders. Maybe they were even now creeping in on one of the other guard posts. She wondered if she should activate the fast action teams. A quick blast of the fire engine siren outside would bring them running from all directions to assemble in the parking lot. Should she call them up just so they were available? Or should she wait and see for a few more minutes first? Finally, after agonizing over this, she elected not to call them up unless she had some concrete reason to think there were more than two people out there. "They're still heading in," Leanette said after about fifteen minutes. "Under a mile away now. We can say for certain that they are two females now. They have no weapons that we can see on them." "How do they look health-wise?" Chrissie asked. "Not great," Leanette said, "but not bad either. They don't seem to be starving." Another fifteen minutes crawled by, again with no new developments. None of the other guard posts reported seeing anyone or anything. Nor did post 1 report seeing anything but the rapidly approaching women. "They're coming up on the border sign now," Leanette said. "They should be able to read it at any time." "Copy," Chrissie said. "Let's see if they obey the sign." The sign in question read: THIS IS A SECURED AREA. APPROACH NO CLOSER TO GARDEN HILL OR YOU WILL BE FIRED UPON. IF YOU ARE PASSING THROUGH, GO TO THE WESTBOUND LANES AND WALK QUICKLY ALONG THE NORTH SHOULDER. DO NOT STOP OR DEVIATE UNTIL YOU HAVE PASSED THE CLIFFS 3 MILES TO THE EAST. WE WILL HAVE YOU IN SIGHT THE ENTIRE TIME. IF YOU ATTEMPT TO LEAVE THE INTERSTATE AFTER CROSSING OUR BORDER, YOU WILL BE FIRED UPON. "They're slowing down," Leanette reported a minute later. "It looks like they've spotted the sign. They're approaching it now." A pause. "Okay, they're reading the sign now." "I copy," Chrissie said. "Remember, if they do what the sign says, let them go peacefully." "Understood," Leanette answered. "They're still reading the sign. Now they seem to be talking to each other about something." Another long pause. "Chrissie, they're uh..." A click of the transmission closing. "They're what Leanette?" she demanded. "What are they doing?" "They're waving at us," Leanette said slowly. "Waving at you?" "Affirm. They're standing just on the other side of the border and both of them are waving their hands back and forth at us. It looks like they're yelling something too but we can't hear them." Waving? Chrissie thought. What the hell was going on? "I copy that, Leanette," she said. "What should we do now?" "Nothing," she said. "Don't do anything for the moment unless they step over the line." ------- Leanette and Maria watched the women wave at them for almost five minutes. Leanette reported every minute or so that they were still there and Chrissie told them just to follow protocol for the time being. "It sounds like they're trying to make contact with us for whatever reason," Chrissie told them. "It could be a trap of some sort so keep your eyes out for anything else to the flanks. I'm going to gather a couple of people together in case we have to go out there." "Copy," Leanette replied. "We'll keep watching." Before Chrissie was able to gather her small force together, the women became impatient with the lack of response and tried a new tactic. They stopped waving their arms and instead held them high above their heads, as in surrender. They then slowly walked forward, crossing over the invisible line that marked the Garden Hill border. Leanette, still holding the rifle, contacted Chrissie and reported this development to her before acting. "Drive them back," Chrissie said. "Be careful not to hit them unless they insist on continuing in, but don't let them come any further." "Copy," Leanette said. "Driving them back." She put the radio down and flipped the safety off on the hunting rifle. She peered through the scope, aiming at a spot about twenty feet in front of the advancing females. The angle insured that the ricocheting bullet would more than likely not pose a danger to them. As she had been taught by Brett himself in the first training class after the attack on the town, she took a deep breath, held it, and then squeezed the trigger softly. The sound of the rifle shot rolled across the landscape and she was able to clearly see the chip of pavement flying into the air when the bullet impacted half a second later. "That got their attention," Maria, still watching through the binoculars, noted. Indeed it had. The two women stopped instantly in their tracks and quickly backed up until they were once again on the other side of the border. "They backed off," Leanette reported to Chrissie. "Copy," she replied. "Good work. What are they doing now?" "They're still standing on the other side of the sign. They've gone back to waving their hands in the air." There was a pause. "All right," she said. "It sounds like they're kind of persistent. Keep watching them. I'm gonna take a small squad out there to see what they want." ------- She gathered up Maggie, Michelle, and Mike Monahan, all of whom were off duty and easily accessible at the time. She armed them all up with semi-automatic rifles and then commandeered the Dodge Ram truck that had just come back from its fueling mission. "Maggie, you drive," Chrissie instructed. "Mike, Michelle, I want you in the back of the truck with me." "Chrissie," Michelle said a little doubtfully. "Are you sure we should be doing this? Brett never told us to go out and talk to stragglers. He just told us to drive them away." "That was when we had stragglers coming five times a day," she said. "We haven't had any in six weeks and now all of a sudden two women show up and start signaling us. Obviously they have something to say. I think that Brett would have probably done the same thing, don't you?" "Well..." she said, knowing of course, that Chrissie was right. "Well that's what I'm going to do," Chrissie told her. "I've given my orders. Now let's mount up." No one else questioned her. Maggie climbed in the cab of the truck and Michelle and Mike climbed in the back. Chrissie jumped up as well and stood up, her weapon resting on the roof of the cab. "Get on either side of me," she told her companions. "Keep your weapons trained outward. Are we all locked and loaded?" Everyone confirmed that they were. "All right," she said. "Let's do it." She craned her head down a little and spoke through the opened sliding rear window into the cab. "Move out, Mags," she said. "Keep it slow. We're standing up back here. Drive out and approach them at about twenty miles an hour. Stop when you get into voice range of them." "Right," Maggie replied. She dropped the truck into gear and started driving. They exited the gate of the subdivision a few minutes later and started heading along Route 63 towards Interstate 80. Chrissie checked with Leanette via her portable radio several times during the trip to make sure that the women were still there, that they were still waving their arms, and that no one else had appeared on the scene. Leanette reported each time that everything remained as it had been. "I'll get out and make contact with them," Chrissie said as they pulled up the offramp in the wrong direction to access the eastbound lanes. "You two keep me covered. I'll try to stay out of your line of fire as much as I can. If there's trouble, I'll dive to the ground. If there's a lot of trouble, like troops hiding in the flanks, then forget about me and get the hell out." "Chrissie," Michelle said, "we're not gonna leave you out there." "If this is a large-scale attack, you're gonna have to and I expect you to do it," she said. "Is that clear?" Michelle looked at her, the woman she loved as a sister, as a co-wife, as an occasional lover. "Yes," she said softly. "It's clear." They came around a small bend in the freeway surface and suddenly they were able to see the two figures before them. They were about a half of a mile in front of them, standing just as Leanette had described. They were still waving their hands slowly back and forth in a gesture indicating they wanted to communicate. As soon as they saw the truck they stopped and put their hands up as high as they could physically make them go. "Nice and slow, Mags," Chrissie said loud enough for the driver to hear. "As long as there's no trouble, stop just inside of voice range." "Right," Maggie yelled back a little nervously. "Stick to the right shoulder of the road," Chrissie said. "Keep the gearshift in drive and your foot on the brake. If you have to get away quick, you'll have room to make a fast U-turn." Everyone tightened their grips on their weapons and took aim at the two females as they approached. Maggie slowly rolled forward, the powerful V-8 engine nearly at an idle, and came to a gentle stop about forty feet away from the two women. This close they were able to see that they were filthy with mud - the mark of being outside for long periods. It was hard to tell hair color or even race so dirty were they. They looked at the truck and its occupants a little fearfully. "Are you armed?" Chrissie yelled at them. "No," shouted the woman on the left. "We only have a few cans of food and a video camera." "A video camera?" Mike said softly. Chrissie ignored him. "Is there anyone else out there?" "No," said the same woman. "We're alone. We came from Auburn." "Auburn," Michelle said. "Jesus." Chrissie took a deep breath, her adrenaline pumping, her mind whizzing along like mad as she considered what to do next. "What is it that you want?" she asked them. "Are you just passing through?" "We escaped from there a little more than a week ago," the woman said. "We wish sanctuary with your town. We will trade information about Auburn and their intentions towards you for safety." "Escaped?" Michelle said loud enough for only Chrissie and Mike to hear. "Intentions towards us?" Mike echoed. "Please," said the other woman, her voice seemingly near tears. "We don't have anywhere else to go. We're almost out of food. Men from Auburn are planning to attack you! We can tell you about it but you have to take us in! If you don't take us in, we'll die and you'll die!" "Attack us?" Mike and Michelle said in unison. "Cover me," Chrissie said, coming to decision in her mind. "I'm gonna go out and talk them from a little closer." "Right," Michelle and Mike said. "Stay right where you are," Chrissie told the two women. "I'm gonna approach you. Keep your hands up like you have them and don't make any sudden moves." The two women promised that they wouldn't and Chrissie jumped down out of the truck. She trotted over to the left shoulder of the Interstate and, keeping her AR-15 trained on them, slowly walked forward. She made sure that her body did not cross between the truck and the women. She stopped about ten feet in front of them. "What're your names?" she asked. "I'm Anna," said the woman on the left, the first to have spoken. "I'm Jean," said the second. "What's this about an attack on our town?" Chrissie asked. "There is one planned," Anna said. "That's all I'll tell you unless you give us sanctuary in your town." "Uh huh," Chrissie said. "And how do I know that you really have any information? How do I know that you're even from Auburn?" "You recently exiled a woman named Jessica Blakely," Anna said. "She showed up in Auburn not too long before. She was picked up by an attack force that had been planning to attack your town but that pulled back when they heard what Jessica had to tell them about your upgraded defenses. Before Jessica was exiled you were attacked by a group of men and you managed to repel them. In some strange way that I wasn't able to follow, this attack is what led to the exile of Jessica." Chrissie relaxed her grip on her weapon the slightest bit. She knew that these women were speaking the truth - she simply knew it. "You have Jessica huh?" she asked. "Too bad for your town. What do you mean you escaped from Auburn? Are you not allowed to come and go as you please?" "No," said Anna. "Women are slaves there. The men control all of the guns and they pass us around like joints. Escape attempts are punished by hanging. We managed to get out by using a trick we learned from you - the night vision video camera." Any doubts about the authenticity of their tale disappeared at that moment. "I don't have the authority to grant you sanctuary," Chrissie told them. "Our town leaders are uh... well... out of town at the moment. I will take you in and keep you under guard until they get back however. You can discuss this with them." "Thank you," Anna said, sighing a little. Jean repeated this sentiment. "I want you two to slowly drop your packs to the ground and then lay down on the pavement," Chrissie told them. "Put your arms out in front of you and spread your legs. I'm gonna pat you down for weapons and then take you back to town in the back of the truck." ------- "You did what?" Brett asked upon hearing the news two hours later. He, Jason, Matt, and Paul were weary after their day of mapping the terrain and poking through abandoned trucks on the highways and byways in the area. Though they had found two more food sources - an abandoned big rig up near the snowline that had been hauling Dennison's chili and another, deeper in the backcountry, that had been hauling Skippy peanut butter - they had checked more than twenty trucks in all. And now, as they were approaching Garden Hill at last, their fuel supply dwindling, their bodies grimy and sweaty, Chrissie was telling them on the routine radio check-in that she had brought two stragglers from Auburn into the town. Brett's reaction to this revelation was more instinctive than anything else. "I brought them inside," Chrissie repeated, her tone daring him to challenge this decision. "Isn't that what you would have done, given the same circumstances?" Like Michelle earlier, these words had a sobering effect on him. Yes, that was what he would've done in the same circumstances. These two women were potentially valuable information sources and the very rarity of their presence in the first place would have compelled him to bring them in - as it had Chrissie apparently. It was the thought of his young wife deliberately putting herself into harm's way that caused the knee-jerk reaction. "Yes," he told her after a considerable delay. "I suppose you're right." "So don't yell at me then, Brett Adams," she said quite huffily. "I was just doing what I knew you wanted done anyway." "I think she put you in your place quite nicely there," Paul, who was listening in along with everyone else in the helicopter (as well as probably half the town), noted with a smile. "It would seem so," Brett said, reluctantly smiling. He keyed back up his microphone. "My sincere apologies, Chrissie," he told her. "You did the right thing and I'm letting my emotions get in the way. So where are our guests now?" "I have them under guard in one of the storage rooms in the community center," she replied. "I let them take baths and I've given them fresh clothes. Right now they're eating some of our leftovers from lunch. They've been living on canned food for the past eight days now." "We know what that feels like, don't we?" Brett replied. "Good job. Have the guard posts reported anything unusual since you picked them up?" "Negative," she said. "I've had them on high-alert ever since the first sighting and everything seems to be as it should be. However, I would suggest you make a pass around the perimeter and check everything on visual and with the FLIR, just to make sure that there's not an attack force out there." "I concur," Brett said, taking a quick glance at his fuel gauge. It was getting pretty low but there was still enough for a quick run around the area. "We have just enough fuel to do that. It should take about ten, fifteen minutes or so. We'll report anything to you as it comes up." "Copy that, Brett," she said. "See you on the ground." ------- The aerial check of the area revealed nothing but hills and trees and mud. There was no sign of a hidden attack force hiding anywhere within ten miles of Garden Hill's borders. With less than ten gallons of fuel in the tank, Brett landed the helicopter its accustomed place. He then allowed Jason, his apprentice, to go through the power-down procedure as part of his training. "Good job," he told him after he had flipped all of the switches and turned all of the dials. "Do you think you can handle refueling by yourself? I wanna go meet our new friends as soon as I can." "No problem," Jason assured him. "You the man," Brett told him, opening his door and stepping out onto the wet parking lot. Behind him Matt and Paul had already gotten out. They carried their rifles, which were now safed and unloaded, over their shoulders and their packs upon their backs. Together, they all walked to the side entrance of the community center, said hello to the guard stationed there, and went inside. First and foremost, Brett and Paul gave Chrissie a thorough debriefing on her contact with the two women so far. She only had a few details to share that she hadn't already told them over the radio. Basically the women were offering to trade everything they knew about Auburn and its inhabitants for sanctuary and citizenship in Garden Hill. As proof of their identity they had dropped Jessica's name and revealed the fact that she was now living in Auburn. As an enticement to take the deal, they had made vague assertions regarding both an upcoming attack by Auburnites and an aborted earlier attack. "What do you think?" Paul asked Brett after hearing all this. "I say we should go talk to them," he replied without hesitation. "It sounds like they might be a wealth of valuable intelligence." "Should we agree to their deal?" Chrissie asked. Paul shrugged. "Why shouldn't we? Truth be known, there's no real reason to exclude people with the... uh... vigor that we used to. Now that we have access to enough food to carry us through, a few more mouths to feed is no longer potentially the difference between survival and death. I would probably be inclined to offer them citizenship even if they didn't have information for us. As long as they don't pose a danger of any kind, why not?" "Jessica wouldn't be very happy with that attitude," Brett told him. "No," said Chrissie, who still had more than a little lingering hatred for Jessica. "I wouldn't think she would. And she was president of the homeowner's association you know." "Yes," Paul said. "And we all saw what that got her in life, didn't we?" He silently dismissed the subject of Jessica and turned back to Brett. "So how do you want to handle this? You're the expert at questioning people." "I wouldn't say expert," Brett said, "but I did do my fair share of it back in my patrol days. If this were a criminal investigation, I would have them separated from each other so they couldn't collaborate on stories, but in this case, we might as well leave them together. They've already had a couple of weeks to get their details straight if they're planning on scamming us in some way. I'll do most of the questioning of them and hopefully I'll be able to pick up if they're feeding us a bunch of bullshit. If I start to feel that that is the case, then we'll separate them at that time." "Sounds like a plan," Paul said. "Chrissie," Brett continued, "you should be in the room during the questioning, just so they see a familiar face. And you Paul, you should be in there as well since you're the one that has the authority to grant sanctuary or not. But I'll ask both of you to keep your questions and comments as minimal as you can." "Okay," they both agreed. "And we should videotape the interview," Brett added. "That way we can go over it slowly and in detail later if we need to. We can also use it against them if it turns out they're lying or misleading us in some way. A real good technique in interrogation is to confront your subject with contradictory information that they gave earlier." "It'll take a few minutes to rig up a power supply and the equipment," Paul said. "We have all night," Brett told him. "True. Chrissie, why don't you dig out the camera and I'll start running a power supply?" ------- Brett started off very low key with the two women. He introduced himself and Paul and then reintroduced Chrissie to them as well. Hands were shaken all around. He then explained to them that - if they had no objections - the interview would be recorded for the town archives. He strongly hinted that this was a routine matter - as if every conversation that took place in the community center was videotaped. They both agreed to this stipulation without debate. As he went through these initial steps he looked the two of them up and down, his sharp, observant eyes not missing a single detail of their appearance. Though they were now bathed and fed and dressed in designer jeans and sweaters that had come from Garden Hill's abundant clothing stock, it was quite obvious that they had been through quite an ordeal to get where they now sat. Their faces were somewhat gaunt, with a few premature lines and crow's feet - factors which bespoke of both a considerable amount of recent stress and near-starvation. Their hands were callused and worn, the surface marred by multiple cuts, scrapes, and abrasions. Their fingers had ground-in mud beneath the nails. Most telling of all were the eyes - one set brown, the other set blue - which were haunted and filled with desperate hope. Without even broaching the meat of the matter, Brett was able to develop a pretty good idea that they were on the up and up. "You say you came from Auburn," he asked them. "Is that correct?" "Yes," Anna, the apparent spokeswoman for the duo, replied. "I lived in Auburn before the comet. Jean is from Meadow Vista." "Meadow Vista huh?" Brett said, turning to the younger woman. "We flew over that in the helicopter once. We saw bodies down on the ground everywhere." "The militia attacked it," Jean said in a quiet voice. "The militia?" Jean opened her mouth to say more but was interrupted by Anna. "Don't tell them anything, Jean," she said. "Not until they agree to give us sanctuary." "We've already agreed to do that," Brett said, unoffended by the interruption. "Even without your information, we more than likely would have allowed you to stay. As long as you don't prove to be dangerous or spies or anything like that, you're in." "Really?" Jean said, beaming. Anna was a little more cynical however. "How do we know that you're telling us the truth?" she asked shrewdly. "How do we know that you're not just telling us what we want to hear to get our information from us?" Brett smiled a little. "Well," he said thoughtfully, "the truth of the matter is, that you don't. I have no way to prove to you that I'm sincere. No way at all. I could put it in writing for you if you want, but what good would that do? We seem to be a little short on courts and lawyers to enforce verbal or written contracts now, don't we?" "Yeah," Anna said. "I guess we are, aren't we?" "All we have is our word," Brett said. "It might not mean much, but it's all we got. I promise you that as long as we don't discover some fact that indicates you are a danger to us, we will let you stay. We have enough food to feed two additional mouths. We have enough houses to house two more. We have enough clothing to keep you dressed warmly. And we most certainly have enough work that needs to be done to appreciate two more sets of hands to do it with. So what do you say? Shall we talk or what?" Anna still seemed a little doubtful. "Look," Brett told her, leaning forward and softening his voice a bit. "I was in your shoes not too terribly long before. I led Chrissie and her brother through the woods after the comet fell just trying to get us all to some place resembling safety. I found this town and they were keeping out all outsiders at that point. I snuck across the bridge one night just to prove to them that I had something valuable to offer them - namely, my knowledge of security and military tactics. I've sat in that same position that you are now sitting and I've wondered and obsessed about the same things. I don't know how I can assure you that you're all right, but you are." Anna sighed, uncertain about how to feel but pressing on anyway. "All right," she said. "I guess we'll have to take you at your word, won't we? What other choice do we have?" "I don't know," Brett said, leaning back a little once again. "What choice do you have?" "None at all," she told him. "None at all. Let's talk." "Right," Brett said with a smile. "Let's talk." They talked. For more than two hours they talked. Jean and Anna told their story in semi-chronological order, starting with the comet fall and their pre-comet lives and working through their eventual escape from the town that had become a fascist prison camp. They told about the militia and its early missions to conquer and loot the surrounding towns. They told of how the men in these towns were then incorporated into the militia and the women were then utilized as slaves, both for sexual and work purposes. Brett moved them along from point to point, place to place with his questions. Occasionally, very occasionally, Paul or Chrissie would toss in a question as well, unable to help but ask for some point to be clarified in the horrible tale they were being told. Brett was simply amazed at the quality of the information that Jean and Anna possessed. Had these men that ran Auburn really been so dumb as to talk freely of these things in front of the women and assume that they weren't absorbing any of it? Did it never occur to them what a potentially catastrophic information drain that represented? Apparently not. "So let me get this straight," Brett said after the descriptions of women's rights in Auburn, such as they were. "You're not allowed to carry a weapon or participate in any sort of military training?" "That's right," Anna confirmed. "And the men are not allowed to do any sort of cooking or cleaning chores - except for their weapons of course." "They love to play with their weapons," Jean said with a hateful smirk. "What an incredible waste of manpower," Brett said as he pondered this. "The population of Auburn is around three thousand, right?" "Right," she replied, reiterating the answer to one of the first questions asked in the interview. "And of that number, more than 2200 are women?" "Yes." "Jesus," Brett said, shaking his head. "In a way we're kind of lucky that they're doing things this way. Can you imagine how formidable of an army they'd have if they trained up the women like we do? They'd outnumber us by more than twenty to one." As shocking as the tales of life in Auburn were, more shocking was the plans that the Auburn militia had for Garden Hill. This portion of the talk took up the most time. "So they were watching us when we were attacked by those assholes the first time, is that what you're saying?" Brett asked. "From one of the hills overlooking town," Anna confirmed. "There was just a single platoon of forty men that had been sent out to observe your town. Bracken was in charge of this mission, as he has been all of the follow-up missions." "And Bracken is the man that used to... that you were..." Chrissie said, unable to think of a delicate way to put their former situation into words. Jean had no problem. "The man who used to rape us," she said bitterly. "He of the small dick and the big head." "Uh... right," Chrissie said. "So anyway," Brett said, steering the interview back on track, "this Bracken was camped out on one of the hills?" "Right," Anna said, nodding. "He found that your defenses were pretty uh... weak I guess you would say. He was impressed by the way you handled the attack once it started but he was disgusted by the fact that it happened in the first place." "Thank you, Jessica," Paul said sourly. "That's kind of what we found out once she was brought back to town," Jean said. "So what happened," Anna went on, "is that Bracken came back and made plans to take your town. Barnes gave him command of an entire company of one hundred and sixty men and off they marched." "One hundred and sixty men?" Brett said with a shudder. "But that was before he knew about your new defenses or your helicopter," Anna said. "They ran into Jessica about three quarters of the way to town and were able to get that information from her. She told them about your bunkers on the hills and about your training programs and about your helicopter. Bracken decided that he needed more men to make the attack and turned everyone around." "He aborted the mission?" Brett asked in disbelief. "He said that your defenses would've murdered them if they had walked in without knowing about them," Jean said. "And even once he did know about them he still decided not to press the attack?" "Right," said Anna. "He thought that he probably would've taken the town..." "Goddamn right he would've," Brett said, envisioning trying to fight off that many men. "But he also thought that he would've taken too many casualties doing it. The helicopter seemed to be the deciding factor. He was afraid that you would use it to direct the battle from the air and to harass the troops on the ground." "Which I would have," Brett said. "But I still don't understand why he didn't press onward. Sure, casualties would've been a little higher on their side, but they would've won. No doubt about it." "That's the thing," Anna said. "The doctrine of the militia is not to take casualties. That will probably change in the future as more people are added to it, but Barnes knows that he doesn't have an unlimited supply of men right now. Since there is no one to replace the dead and wounded, they rely instead on overwhelming force to win their battles." "Hmmmm," Brett said, thinking that this made quite a bit of sense, and was something that could also be potentially exploited. "So what happened once he got back?" "Once he got back," she said, "he managed to talk Barnes into authorizing a new attack. This was an attack that they were still planning and exercising for when we got away." "How many men?" Brett asked, afraid to hear the answer. "Four hundred," Anna said almost apologetically. There was a stunned silence around the table as this number worked its way into everyone's brain. "Four hundred?" Brett said incredulously. "But that's almost the entire male population of Auburn!" "It will leave only forty-five men in town," Anna confirmed. "Barnes stipulated that those left would be the most experienced and that most of the automatic weapons would stay with them. Bracken agreed to this since it went along with the brute force doctrine." "Holy Jesus," Paul said, actually trembling at the thought. "Brett," Chrissie said fearfully, "we can't fight off that many people!" "This is bad," Brett was forced to agree. "But let's sift through this all the way before we start coming to any rash decisions, shall we?" "But..." Chrissie started. "We still have some time," he said before she could go any further. "Like I said, let's sift through this." He turned back to Anna. "Do you know when they were planning to make this attack? Are they already on their way here now?" "They were planning to leave January 7," she said. "There's a good chance that our escape might've delayed that for a few days however. They would've used a good chunk of the troops to look for us." "January 7?" Paul said, his eyes widening. "That's tomorrow! How long will it take them to get here once they head off?" "About ten days," Anna said, "maybe a little more. We got here in only seven days but we were moving as fast as we could physically go. They'll just be ambling along to conserve their energy." "So we're going to have four hundred armed men coming down on us in less than two weeks?" Paul said, approaching the point of panic. "Calm down," Brett said, his voice soft and soothing. "Calm down? How can I calm down when we're two weeks away from having our..." "You're looking at it the wrong way," Brett interrupted. "What?" "You're being a glass half-empty kind of guy," Brett told him. "Let's try to be glass half-full people instead. Instead of saying that we only have two weeks, let's say that we've been blessed with two weeks of warning." "What the hell difference does that make?" "Maybe none," Brett admitted. "But maybe everything. If not for these two young ladies here, we would've been hit pretty much by surprise. Now we have enough time to sit and calmly decide what, if anything, there is to be done about this." "What can be done?" Paul asked. "You're not telling me that you think we can fight off four hundred men, are you?" "I'm not telling you anything just yet," he said. "All of the information is not in at this time. Why don't we finish the debriefing and then we'll start discussing what is to be done?" This served to calm Paul down a little bit. "All right," he said, taking a few deep breaths. "Why don't we do that?" Brett turned back towards Anna and Jean. "What do you know about their attack plans?" he asked them. "Did they discuss that in front of you as well?" Anna smiled. "They talked about everything in front of us," she said. "Barnes is the mastermind of the attack plan. He intends to divide the four hundred men into three companies of one hundred and twenty men apiece and one reserve platoon of forty. He will be overall commander and will direct the three main companies to attack from three different directions simultaneously. The reserve platoon will be used to fill any holes that develop. The plan is to quickly overwhelm your defenses and get inside the perimeter before you have a chance to rally. He has high hopes that he can get to your community center before the helicopter even has a chance to lift-off." Brett stared slack-jawed at her for a moment, stunned at the quality of detail she was providing. He had been expecting, at best, an inexpert summary of the plans. Instead, she was giving him an overview that General Patton would have been proud of. Paul wasn't so impressed. The information did nothing but scare him worse than he already had been. "I sure feel better," he said, "knowing how they're going to massacre us. I think I'll be able to sleep at night now." Chrissie wasn't too keen on this either. "Brett," she said nervously, "I don't think we can counter something like that. Our guards are pretty good but... well... four hundred people attacking at once? We're not that good." "And we're critically short on ammunition as well," Paul felt compelled to add. "All of that is true," Brett agreed, still speaking calmly, as if he were addressing the subject of dinner that night. "There is no way we can fight off four hundred men attacking from three different directions. And we are somewhat short on ammunition." "So what are you saying?" asked Anna, who had been patiently listening to this exchange. "I'm not saying anything just yet. I still don't have all of the information. Let's finish talking about this attack plan for the moment. I want you to give me every detail that you can think of. I want to hear about the people that are leading these companies, what kind of weapons and ammo they'll be in possession of, what kind of food they eat on their marches, what kind of morale they typically show. I want everything." And so Anna and Jean took turns telling all they knew about the attack. It was considerable and it took nearly an hour but Brett was able to get a well-rounded view of just what he was facing. "So now that you know everything," Paul said. "What do you think? Should we start making plans to evacuate the town to somewhere else?" "That's a possibility," Brett said doubtfully. "And we'll keep that high on our list of considerations of course, but you should realize that it is not quite as simple as you seem to think." "Why not?" "In the first place, where would we go? El Dorado Hills is maybe a possibility but we don't know that for sure. And even if they did agree to take us in, moving everyone and everything there in a short period of time is not as easy as it sounds." "What do you mean?" Paul asked. "We have more than two hundred people in this town," Brett said. "We can only fly four, maybe five out at a time. That represents more than fifty round trips in the helicopter. That will almost exhaust our fuel supply and will cause horrible wear and tear on the chopper itself. I cannot even guarantee that we would be able to make that many trips without losing some vital component that I can't replace with the supplies I have. And then there's our food, weapon, and ammunition supplies. How many more trips would it take to move them over? Another twenty? Another thirty?" "So you're saying that we can't evacuate?" Chrissie asked. "No," he replied, "I'm saying that it's not a simple matter of just loading everything and everyone up and flying off into the sunset. If we try to go that route, we're talking about an eight to ten day operation at best and with a good possibility we won't be able to get everything and everyone safely there." "If we lose the chopper we could go on foot," Paul said. "It's a long march, sure, but..." "A long march of about two weeks," Brett said. "And we would be forced to leave most of our food supplies here. And if we don't have extra food or this helicopter, why would El Dorado Hills take us in?" Paul became extremely frustrated at this point. "So are you saying that we should stay here and try to fight off four hundred men?" he yelled. "Because it sure the hell sounds to me like that's what you're suggesting! Do you want to fight these people?" "I don't want to do anything," Brett told him. "And I'm not suggesting anything either. I'm only telling you the realities of the situation. And the realities are that evacuation will be costly and may very well cost us our food and our bargaining power with other communities." "Shit," Paul muttered, running his hands through his hair nervously. "We have a community meeting scheduled for tonight. Tongues have been wagging ever since these two arrived here. What am I going to tell everyone?" "Tell them the truth," Brett said. "They have a right to know that trouble is on the way and what our options are." "And if they panic and decide to flee town?" "I don't think they'll do that," Brett said. "Just tell them what we know and we'll work from there." ------- "Remember the days," Brett asked Jason at 10:00 PM that night, "when community meetings used to be quick little affairs that took about twenty minutes? We used to gather, have a quick discussion on the matter and hand, have a vote, and then it was all over. Do you remember that?" "I remember," Jason said wearily from his seat in the observer's chair of the helicopter. "It looks like those days are over." "Yep," Brett said, applying power and getting the rotor turning. "Lifting off. Is the FLIR up and on line?" "Ready for action," Jason confirmed. The meeting in question had ended only twenty minutes before after raging for more than three solid hours. In the course of those hours nearly every adult in town, including those on guard detail, had had their say on the matter of the coming attack. The emotions of the meeting had run even higher than they had during the recent El Dorado Hills contact debate. This time however, nothing was ultimately decided. Brett, following Paul's previous lead, had described the ramifications of the information in a dispassionate and non-biased manner, advocating no particular course of action. He had explained that fighting off so many armed men attacking at once was impossible - it simply could not be done. He had also explained that evacuating the entire town and its contents - even assuming El Dorado Hills agreed to take them - was a risky venture at best without much chance of succeeding. The townspeople, scared, angry, and feeling helpless, had taken a lot of their frustrations out on Brett. What, they demanded, was there to do about it then? Were they just supposed to sit and wait for the attack to come? Were they supposed to try to make the evacuation anyway? What? Brett had few answers for them and, even after the hours of debate and discussion, no course of action had been either suggested or voted upon. The only thing that had been pretty much unanimously agreed upon was that surrendering to Auburn was not an option. After hearing Anna and Jean's description of Auburn life firsthand, that line of possibility was permanently shut down. About the only thing Brett could do at the present time to make anyone feel better was what he was now doing - flying out under cover of darkness to make sure that the Auburn forces were not yet underway. "Coming up on 5800 feet," Brett told Jason now, as he rose straight into the night sky. All of the instruments were dimmed down, allowing only a soft red glow in the cockpit. "Turning to heading two-five-eight." "Right," Jason said, panning the FLIR forward. "Everything clear in front of you." "Off we go then," he said, adjusting his controls and slowly building up forward speed. "Let's hope we don't find anything." He flew the helicopter slowly, never exceeding thirty knots of airspeed and often stopping and hovering so that Jason could take a better look around the area. They did not strictly follow the Interstate as they normally would have on a flight to Auburn. Instead, at each mudfall or washout that they encountered, they made a wide circle, checking both north and south for large groups of men off in the woods. "Are you sure we'd be able to see them?" Jason asked at one point. "What if they hide themselves at night just in case we try to do what we're doing now?" "You'll see them if they're there," Brett told him. "There's no way in hell that they'd be able to conceal four hundred warm bodies without a trace of heat showing. Besides, it doesn't sound like they even know about the FLIR's capabilities. They stick strictly to a..." Brett paused, a thought suddenly occurring to him. "Strictly to a what?" Jason asked after a moment. "A daytime doctrine," Brett said slowly. "They march and fight only during the day. Only during the day." Jason, not following what Brett was getting at, simply nodded and went back to his examination of the screen. Brett however, suddenly had a lot to think about. In all, the first night recon mission of the area between Auburn and Garden Hill took nearly three hours and an entire tank of fuel. They checked every square mile of potential real estate between the outskirts of Auburn and the border of Garden Hill. Brett even made a few checks of the area south of the canyon, just on the off-chance that they might have a force approaching from that direction bent on a suicidal attack across the Garden Hill bridge. They saw nothing at all, not a single person, not even an animal. "This area is sterile," Brett said, stifling a yawn, as they neared home at the end of the flight. "So now we have at least ten days," Jason said. "Right," he agreed. "And starting tomorrow, the night flights will be a routine thing. We'll go out every evening at 9:00 PM and make another check." "You mean we're going to do this every night?" Jason asked with a groan. Though he loved flying in the helicopter almost as much as he loved having sex with his wives, the thought of spending three grueling hours every night peering through the FLIR scope was a bit much. "No," Brett said, shaking his head. "Now that we've completed a thorough search, we'll only have to check the narrow area that the Auburn troops could have potentially marched to during the previous day. That's not much more than a ten mile radius, or, right about the first mudfall east of Auburn on the Interstate." "Oh," Jason said, nodding. "I see." They reported in on the radio a minute later, making a point to let Chrissie and Paul, who were manning the radio, know about the negative status of their search. By the time the chopper touched down five minutes later, pretty much the entire town had been informed of the good news. ------- Jessica was beyond feeling humiliation at what was being done to her, was beyond feeling shame or loathing or anything but tired resignation. She was naked on the couch, on her hands and knees, her ass sticking up into the air. She felt the greasy intrusion of three fingers being shoved in and out of her anus. "She does have a tight ass," said Sergeant Rosewood, who was naked and kneeling behind her. It was his fingers, lubed with Crisco shortening, that were currently invading her back door. "And it's a hoity-toity ass as well," said Sergeant Stinson, who was naked in the recliner next to the couch, Linda kneeling between his legs and slurping on his erect penis with her mouth. "She used to be president of the homeowners association you know." "I heard that," said Rosewood, who removed his fingers and used them to coat his turgid cock with a liberal amount of Crisco as well. "This is the bitch that ordered people to shoot at me and Doug when we tried to get into that town." Rosewood, who had moved up nicely in the ranks of the militia, was one of the hunters that had met Brett, Chrissie, and Jason in the woods and had been given life-sustaining food by them. "Yep," said Stinson. "She's the one all right. I had to tame her quite a bit when she first came here. She wanted to go the hard way, that's for sure." "She seems nice and tame now," Rosewood said, grabbing Jessica by the hips and putting his cock against her lubed asshole. With a quick thrust he was buried in the tightness of her back passage. Jessica didn't even grunt at the intrusion. She was used to it by now. Rosewood pushed and pulled in and out of her a few times, getting the feel of the pleasure her orifice could provide and then he began to slowly move, setting an unhurried pace. "Taming high society bitches is my specialty," Stinson said with a grin. Jessica endured the thrusting within her, feeling neither pain nor pleasure from it. It was simply a part of her life these days. She made no noise except when Rosewood seemed to expect some and then she gave him what she thought he wanted to hear. What was happening to her now was quickly becoming a common thing in Auburn - although Barnes did not approve of it. Gone were the days when men would get together and have a few beers with their buddies and shoot the shit. There were no more liquor stores or 7-11 stores to buy the beer in and the town's supply was accessed only for special occasions. Now when men socialized with each other, they gang-banged the host's wives. An actual system of etiquette had developed for such occasions - the primary rule being that the highest-ranking guest got to choose which wife he would fuck first. Luckily Stinson was somewhat of an odd-duck among the other men and he did not have very many friends. And he had no friends at all among Stu's people - who were notoriously cruel to their sexual partners (another rule of etiquette involved in such gatherings was that the host not object to any act that his guest decided to employ). "Nothing like a good blow-job after a hard day of training," Stinson said as he ran his fingers almost lovingly through Linda's hair. "Helps relieve the soreness from all that marching and shooting and crap." "No shit," said Rosewood as he dribbled a little more Crisco on his cock on each out-thrust. "It'd be nice if we had some beer or something to go with this, wouldn't it?" "It would," Stinson agreed sourly. "But Barnes and Bracken and the rest of those pricks have probably drank it all by now." "Yeah," said Rosewood, "those fuckers. One of my bitches works in the admin building and she told me that those pricks sit back at night and drink fucking scotch on the rocks. On the fucking rocks, can you believe that shit?" "I heard that too," Stinson said. "They say that Barnes has a motherfuckin freezer set up in there that don't do nothin' but make ice for his drinks. And he has a fridge that does nothin but keep his beer cold." "A cold beer," said Rosewood nostalgically, savoring that thought even more than he was savoring the sensation of his cock in Jessica's ass. "That would be God's fucking law that Barnes is always spouting about, wouldn't it? Didn't God say that Barnes has the right to iced booze and cold beer?" "I'm sure he fucking did," Stinson agreed with a hiss of disgust. They each enjoyed the sensations they were feeling for a moment in silence. Stinson directed Linda to suck a little harder while Rosewood began to thrust a little harder. Soon, not wanting to end their episode prematurely, they slowed down and struck up conversation once again. "So what's the word on when we move out?" Rosewood asked. "No firm date," Stinson told him. "But I think it'll be pretty soon. Covington is chomping at the fucking bit to get marching and he has Bracken's ear." "Fucking Covington," Rosewood said. "Why's he so fucking hot to walk all the way to Garden Hill anyway?" "He says it's for the bitches. According to him there's some prime poontang there." "We got enough fucking poon here. I'd just as soon leave those Garden Hill assholes alone and kick it." "And Barnes has got a hard-on for that helicopter," Stinson added. "He wants that thing and its pilot." "Why?" Rosewood said bitterly. "They're not fucking with us. Why should we fuck with them? Everything is cool here. We have bitches, we have enough food to last us until the sun comes out, and we have enough weapons, ammo, and men to defend ourselves. Life is good right now. What the fuck do we need to go to Garden Hill and possibly get shot for?" "Orders," said Stinson with a bitter shrug. "What can you do?" "Fucking orders," Rosewood said, giving an extra-hard thrust into Jessica's ass. Soon the talk ended and the serious thrusting began. While Stinson took the can of Crisco and lubed up Linda's ass for penetration, Rosewood began to pound in and out of Jessica's with a fever. Soon he stiffened up and she felt the familiar sensation of hot sperm shooting into her bowels. As was customary in such acts, she used her mouth to clean his cock off afterward and then submitted to a more conventional fuck in the missionary position. By the time he was done with her, Stinson was also done with Linda, having shot his load all over her face. "Go get yourselves cleaned up, girls," Stinson ordered as they stood, dripping and aching, from the furniture and the floor. "And then help your sister clean up that fucking bedroom." The both answered as they were expected and retreated to the nearest bathroom, leaving the two men to dress themselves and continue their gripe session. "So was that enjoyable?" Jessica asked Linda when they were alone. "Do you enjoy having him fuck you up the ass and then blast you on the face?" "Shut up," said Linda weakly as she dipped a washrag into a bucket of water and wiped her face. "I'll tell him what you're saying. I swear I will." "And what will that get you?" Jessica asked her. "He'll beat me a little bit and he'll still be fucking you up the ass tomorrow. Do you really think ratting me out helps you in any way? Do you really?" "Fuck you," Linda said. "You're a troublemaker." "Nobody ever fucked me up the ass in Garden Hill," Jessica said, taking a washrag of her own and wiping the greasy slime from her backside. "Well you're not in Garden Hill now, are you?" "No," Jessica said. "I'm not. And the reason I'm not is because I was just like you are. I've learned something from my mistakes. Can you learn anything?" "Get the fuck outta my face," Linda said. "Social climbing gets a woman nowhere in this town," Jessica said, careful to keep her voice low. "We're property here and they use us like property." "So what? That's the way things are." "But it doesn't have to be that way," she whispered. Something in the tone of her voice caught Linda's attention. "What do you mean?" she asked. "Think about it," Jessica said. "We have more than two thousand women in this town. Two thousand. In a few days there is only going to be about fifty men. That's a twenty to one ratio. Have you ever thought about just what that means?" "You'll be hanged for talking like this," Linda said fearfully. "Or even worse, you'll be burned." "Only if someone tells the men," Jessica said. "Whose side are you really on anyway, Linda? Do you like the way things are in this town, or are you just adapting to a reality?" "What?" "Be honest with yourself. You don't really like being used like some masturbatory device, do you?" "No," Linda said. Jessica smiled. "I've had this discussion with Cathy already. I've also had it with a few other women at the high school. Maybe its time that you and I had it. What do you say?" Linda thought for a long time. "You want to talk," she said at last, "then talk." ------- "Nervous?" Paul asked Anna early the next morning as the helicopter once more lifted into the air, this time with Paul and Anna in the back of it. "I've never flown in one of these before," she said with a voice that was not quite steady. Her hands were holding tight to the door handle next to her as the chopper rattled and bounced its way through the take-off maneuver. "Don't worry," Paul assured her. "It used to scare that crap out of me as well. Human beings are just not meant to fly, you know?" "I know," she said, cracking the briefest of smiles. "But you're safe enough up here," Paul said. "Brett hardly ever crashes this thing." "Hardly ever?" she asked, trying to figure out if he was joking or not. "Hardly ever," Brett, who was listening in, confirmed with a straight face. "However, I'd advise you not to pull too hard on the handle you're holding on to. You probably don't want to open the door in flight, do you?" She looked at what she was grabbing and then jerked her hand away as if it had been hot, visions of tumbling to her death in her head. "It's okay," Jason assured her, hiding a smirk. "Really. You're in good hands." While Anna perspired and wrung her hands and while Paul found cold comfort in the fact that someone else was more fearful than he was for once, Brett headed at ninety knots for Cameron Park. Once there he banked right and followed the ribbon of Highway 50 to El Dorado Hills. When they got close, Jason patched in the radio headsets to the frequency of the portable radio they had dropped to the town five days before. "Coming up on the town," Brett announced as he decreased his altitude and airspeed. Ahead of him the hills that guarded the town and part of the township itself were visible. "They've more than likely spotted us by now. It looks like they've all hidden themselves again." "Copy," Paul replied. "Go into a hover just outside of weapons range of them and I'll give them a call on the radio." "Are you sure that these people really want to talk to us?" Anna asked nervously, not liking at all the term "weapons range" or the fact that they were hiding. "We'll find out in a minute, won't we?" Brett asked her, bleeding away the last of his forward speed. "We're hovering," he told Paul. "Right," Paul said, raising his hand to his key button. He pressed it. "El Dorado Hills, El Dorado Hills, this is Paul Terra aboard the Garden Hill helicopter. Anyone down there?" This time the response was almost immediate. "Good morning, Paul," said a male voice. "This is Pat. You're a few days earlier than we expected you. To what do we owe the honor of this visit?" "Sorry for dropping in unexpected," Paul said. "But we've had something of fundamental importance occur in our town and we thought that it might be a good idea to discuss it with you." "Please explain what you mean," Pat answered back after a moment. "We've had two women from Auburn find their way to our town," Paul explained. "They had quite a shocking tale to tell about life there. It seems that what we discussed the other day about our suspicions towards that town were actually somewhat naïve compared to the truth. They are in fact a very militaristic society that makes a habit of attacking other groups of survivors for their supplies." There was a longer pause this time. "I understand," Pat said at last. "Do you wish another face to face meeting today? We are agreeable to that down here." "We do," Paul said. "We have brought one of the women from Auburn with us as well." "Very well," Pat told them. "I'll send a truck to go pick you up at the location of your choice." "Copy that," Paul said. "Let me talk to Brett and I'll advise you where that will be in a moment." He turned to Brett. "So how about it? You trust them enough to drop us in the same place as before?" "I think," Brett said slowly, almost agonizingly, "that we're going to have to learn to trust these guys even more than that. And they're going to have to learn to trust us. What do you say we take this trust a giant leap forward right now?" "What do you mean?" "Why don't we ask them if we can land in the town?" Paul looked at him wide-eyed. "Are you serious?" "What've we got to lose?" Brett asked. "At worst they'll capture us and have the chopper for their own. At best, we'll prove to each other that we're on the up and up. A radical experiment, true, but at this point we're running out of time to coddle this potential alliance along. If there's any help for our situation to be had here, we need to find out quickly." Paul continued to look at him, trying to calmly evaluate what Brett was suggesting and having a hard time at it. In the end, he was forced to simply go with a gut feeling. "I think they're on the up and up," he said at last. "Let's ask." Brett nodded, having his own mix of emotions about the decision. Paul keyed up the microphone. "Pat, are you still there?" "Right here, Paul," he answered. "I have a team standing by in the truck. Where will it be?" "Well actually," he said, "we were wondering if maybe you would allow us to land in the town." The pause was about ten seconds this time. "I'm sorry," Pat said. "Did you say you wanted to land in the town?" "If you'll allow it," Paul replied. "We promise we don't have an attack force on board." Another long silence. Finally: "Will the parking lot outside of the elementary school be sufficient?" ------- Brett touched down gently less than a hundred feet away from the cafeteria building. With hands that were trembling a little from nervous anticipation, he went through the power-down procedure and turned off the engine, allowing the rotor to slowly spin to a halt. "Well now," he said, watching as two men and three women, all of them carrying rifles, came out of the building, "I guess we find out if we just made a big mistake or not, don't we?" "I guess we do," Paul replied, putting his headset down. "Let's get these guns off." "No," Brett said, shaking his head. "Leave them on." "What?" Jason said. "Won't that piss them off?" "If they want us to disarm, they'll tell us," he said. "Until then, leave them on. It's a trust issue." "I see," Jason said, not understanding but obeying. The group of El Dorado Hills residents walked closer to the helicopter, their own faces reflecting the nervousness that the Garden Hill residents were feeling. Their rifles were slung over their shoulders, not pointed at anything. They stopped just outside the arc of the rotor and waited. Brett and Jason both opened their door and stepped out, both taking care to keep their hands in the open. From the back of the helicopter, Paul and Anna (who was looking a little green and was more than a little unsteady on her feet) joined them. Paul recognized Pat as one of the men and Bonnie as one of the women. "Thank you for allowing us to land," Paul said, walking a few steps forward. "It's our pleasure," Pat said, giving a slight smile. Brett watched all of this carefully, waiting for the guns of the El Dorado people to swing upward, waiting to be taken into custody. But they didn't and they weren't. Paul walked forward towards the crowd and Pat, after a moment, stepped forward as well and met him halfway. They exchanged a handshake and a few words of greeting. The guns on the waists of Paul, Jason, and himself were looked at but not commented upon. "Why don't we go inside out of the rain?" Pat suggested. "Yes," Paul agreed. "Why don't we do that? We have a lot to talk about." ------- An hour later Paul, Brett, Jason, Anna, Pat, Bonnie, and Renee were sitting around a conference table in the same room that the meeting the other day had taken place in. All of them, with the exception of Jason, were sipping from cups of herbal tea and occasionally chewing on small pieces of dried fish. Brett and Paul had just finished telling the tale of Auburn and the coming attack to their hosts with occasional stories thrown in by Anna when they were requested. "So you can see," Brett said when the story was told, "why we're concerned." "Four hundred men," Pat said contemplatively. "That is quite an army in this day and age. And they are well armed you say?" "They raided the sheriff's department, the Auburn Police Department, a large gun store, and an army/navy surplus store after the comet," Anna replied with a nod. "They've also taken all of the weapons and all of the ammo from every town that they've conquered since then. They don't have a limitless supply of ammo and guns, but they do have a lot, certainly enough that every man marching on Garden Hill will have a rifle of some kind." "And what about your own ammo supply?" Renee asked. "Forgive me for prying, but will you be able to fight them off?" "No," Brett said. "We have quite a few guns, including a few automatic assault rifles, but we're critically short on ammunition. There is no way that we could absorb a three-pronged attack such as the one they're planning to hit us with." "So what is it that you want from us?" Pat asked carefully. "Obviously it is something or you wouldn't be here. Do you want to evacuate your people here? Is that what you want?" "That is an option that has been discussed," Paul replied, "but Brett has pointed out to me quite graphically that it is not a terribly viable option." He explained a little further as to just why this was so. "So are you asking us to come to Garden Hill and help you fight then?" Pat asked next. "I'm not sure that any of our people would agree to that." "No," Paul said, "that's not what we're asking either. What we were hoping for with this trip was to fast-track the discussions on trade that we started on the last trip." "What kind of trade?" "Any kind of trade," Paul said. "You see, our options in Garden Hill are to either try to fight these people or to flee town for someplace else. Since fleeing town is not as easy as it sounds, that leaves us with the former option. We're going to have to fight." "And to fight," Brett said, "we need ammunition and guns." "And what makes you think that we have ammunition and guns to spare?" Pat wanted to know. "We don't know if you do or not," Paul told them. "That's what we're here to find out. We do know, from looking in the El Dorado County Yellow Pages, that there used to be a gun store here in town. Bob's Guns it was called if I'm not mistaken. So if you managed to salvage the stock from Bob's Guns, maybe you would be willing to trade some of it for a few tons of bulk rice and wheat." Pat, Renee, and Bonnie all shared a look with each other, interest clearly in their eyes. "We also have access," Brett added, sweetening the pot a little, "to canned spinach, canned chicken noodle soup, Gerber baby food, and, as of yesterday, peanut butter and Dennison's chili." "That does sound rather intriguing," Bonnie said, actually licking her lips a little. "But supposing that we did have this ammunition," Pat said. "How would we know that you wouldn't use it against us? How do we know that all of this isn't some plot to deprive us of our own stock?" "You don't," Paul said. "That's where trust comes in. This isn't some corporate boardroom or some diplomatic chambers. We're not businessmen or ambassadors here. We're human beings, just like you are. You have intuition and you have common sense. Does it feel to you like we're setting you up?" "No," Pat said after a moment's consideration. "It doesn't." His companions both agreed with this assessment. "That's because we're not," Paul said. "We're a scared, outnumbered group of people that are facing a potential slaughter. We came here to ask you if you could help us and we're willing to help you with your food shortage problem in return. That's all there is to it." Another look was shared among the El Dorado Hills group. It was followed up by a few more as an unspoken, telepathic type of communication occurred between the three of them. It went on for quite some time until finally, careful, cautious nods were exchanged. "We were able to get the entire inventory of the gun store up here before it was washed away," Pat said. The sigh of relief from the Garden Hill side of the table was clearly audible. "You have .30 caliber rounds?" Brett asked. "We have more .30 caliber rifles than anything else and we're down to less than three hundred rounds." Another look was exchanged among the El Dorado Hills group, this one followed by a mutual shrug. "In for a penny, in for a pound I guess," Pat finally said. He stood up. "Why don't we go take a little tour of the armory and then we'll work from there?" ------- "Oh my God," Brett said excitedly as he saw just what kind of firepower El Dorado Hills was in possession of. Like in Garden Hills, all of the weapons and ammo that were not being used or had not been issued to a person were stored in one place, in this case one of the larger classrooms of the elementary school. Shelves had been scavenged from other parts of the school and installed in geometric rows from wall to wall in this room. These shelves were all filled to near capacity with firearms of many different types and boxes upon boxes of ammunition. "I had no idea a gun store carried so much inventory." "They had quite a storeroom in the back," Pat said, leading him around the room. "Some of the stuff back there was not exactly legal." "No?" Brett asked. "No," Pat confirmed. "The owner of the store was one of those militia types and I think he had a few things from his personal collection in there. We found a few fully automatic Uzi's, a fully automatic Mac-10, ten military issue M-16s, six fully automatic AK-47s, and nearly forty different illegal assault weapons of varying type." "It's a Goddamn motherload," Paul, trailing a little in the rear, commented. "What happened to the owner?" "Apparently he was standing outside of the shop on the street when the earthquake hit," Pat explained. "He must've been trying to get clear of the building while the shaking was going on. While he was doing that an electrical pole snapped and fell down at the end of the block and the wire hit him. He died of electrocution probably only a minute or two before the power went out for good." "That's too bad," Jason said without much emotion. "Maybe," Pat replied with a shrug. "Or maybe it was just as well for the rest of us. Bob was someone that probably would've made a bid for town leadership back in the organization phase. I could easily envision him allying with our politician friend and maybe turning this place into something like Auburn. I'm also quite certain that he wouldn't have just quietly let us come and raid his store." "Probably not," Brett allowed, looking at a shelf full of ammunition. The entire shelf, which ran from one end of the room to the other, was filled with boxes of .30 caliber rounds. There had to at least five hundred of them. "As you can see," Pat said, watching Brett lovingly caress the boxes, "we're very heavy on the various varieties of .30 caliber. Bob's store was a major stopping point for hunters heading up into the hills and we were right smack in the middle of hunting season. At last count we had around twenty-six thousand rounds of it. Of course not all of that is from the store alone. Just like you, we scavenged the empty houses in town and took all the weapons and ammo from them as well." "What about 5.65 millimeter?" Brett asked. "We're not as well set in that department," Pat told him. "We only have about twelve thousand rounds of that." "Is that all?" Brett asked with humorous sarcasm. Pat laughed. "I guess that is quite a bit, isn't it? I'm sure we can spare some of it for you in the interests of food exchange." "What are these red boxes?" asked Jason, who was at the end of the shelf that held the 5.65 ammo. He was holding up one of a group of fifty or so boxes that was colored differently from the others. "It's not a different brand or size, it's just a different color." Brett and Pat both walked over to him and looked at what he was holding. "Tracer rounds," Pat said. "Bob had a pretty good supply of those as you can see." "Tracer rounds?" Jason asked. "No shit?" Brett said, taking the box from him. He looked it over and confirmed that that was what they were. "They're treated with red phosphorus so they'll glow red when you fire them." "Cool," Jason said, impressed. "All the better for home defense, right?" Pat cracked. "How many boxes of those do you have?" Brett asked, an idea he'd had earlier reoccurring to him with this new discovery. "About sixty," Pat said. "We haven't found much of a use for them here as far as defense goes, although they are useful for training purposes." "Three thousand rounds of tracers," Brett said contemplatively, his idea taking on a larger form in his head. "Very intriguing." "I've seen enough," Paul said. "Why don't we go start negotiations?" "Why don't we?" Pat agreed. They left the room, with Pat locking it carefully behind them, and headed back to the conference room. Once there they resumed their previous seats and began bartering. It was perhaps the fastest diplomatic agreement in modern history. "Look," Paul said, "we're not much into haggling here. We need what you have and you need what we have. I promise to be fair if you will." "That's the only way to do it," Pat said, getting nods of agreement from Renee and Bonnie. "Good," Paul said. He turned to Brett. "You saw what they have and you know what we need. Why don't we get that figure out on the table first?" "Okay," Brett said, looking across the table. "If we're to have a prayer in hell of driving these Auburn assholes back, we're going to need at least seven thousand rounds of .30 caliber and five thousand rounds of 5.65. Why don't we start with that?" The three El Dorado Hills negotiators all whistled softly as they heard this. "That's quite a bit," Pat said a little doubtfully. "And four hundred people with guns are quite a bit as well," Brett replied. "Like Paul said, we're being fair here. That is honestly what I think it'll take to put up any kind of defense that could be rated above hopeless." "We could absorb that," Renee said. "I suppose," Pat reluctantly allowed. "What else?" "That's the meat of our needs," Brett told them. "If you agreed to nothing else, I think we could get by with that alone. However, there are a few other things that would make my job a little easier." "Such as?" "We could use another four automatic weapons, either the M-16s or the AK-47s, or a mixture of both. And speaking of AK-47s, we have a few of those in our inventory as well. We could use about two thousand rounds of ammo for them." "Anything else?" Pat asked. "Those tracer rounds," Brett said. "All that you can spare. All of them if that's possible." "The tracer rounds?" Paul asked. "What do you want those for?" "A little idea I'm having," Brett said, and he refused to say anymore about it at that point. "Okay," Pat, who had been making notes, said. "Let me go over this real quick just to make sure I have it right. You want seven thousand rounds of .30 caliber shells, five thousand rounds of 5.65 millimeter, two thousand rounds of 7.62 millimeter, four automatic weapons, and three thousand rounds of 5.65 millimeter tracer rounds. Is that correct?" "That is correct," Brett confirmed. "And again, that is what I believe to be a fair assessment of our needs versus your supply." "I think the first thing we should decide, Pat," Renee said, "is whether or not we can spare that much of our armory. What do you think?" "We could spare it," he said immediately. "It will create a significant dent in our holdings, that is true, but we'll still have enough to fight an Auburn-sized force if we had to." Or a Garden Hill sized force with aerial assault capabilities, he did not say, but which was clearly on his mind. "All right," Bonnie said. "We can spare that amount. That's decided. So now comes the good part. What are you offering in return for this?" Paul handled that part of the negotiation. "We'll deliver to you two tons of rice, two tons of wheat, and six thousand cans each of spinach, chicken noodle soup, and Dennison's chili. We'll be willing to throw in some baby food and some peanut butter as well when we get around to making the recovery of those items." A quick discussion ensued among the El Dorado Hills team. They whispered back and forth and looked at Pat's notes. Finally Pat said: "Those amounts are acceptable. How would delivery work?" "We'll give you half of the grain right away and all of the canned food except the chili. After delivery of the weapons and ammo, we'll deliver the rest of the grain. The baby food, the chili, and the peanut butter, we'll do when we get around to it. Sorry, I can't give an exact date on that one - recovering those supplies are not one of our priorities at the moment." "I understand," Pat said, looking at his companions. "Any questions?" "How will you get the grain to us?" Renee asked. "We'll take it directly from the same train cars that we took it from," Brett said. "It'll be an all day operation, maybe a two-day operation. You'll need to strip enough water heaters out of abandoned houses to transport and store it all." "Water heaters?" "You're not using them for anything else, are you?" Paul asked. "They hold five hundred pounds apiece and they're easy to fill and rig with ropes. You need to cut the tops open and put hinges and clasps on them. Once you get eight of them ready for us, we'll do the deed." "And we would certainly," Brett added, not bothering to consult his leader on this, "be open to further trade of our food stocks for some of your fish and especially some of your lobster and crabs." "Assuming, of course," Paul said, "that we're still around to do that." The El Dorado Hills team excused themselves for a minute and left the room so they could discuss the deal in private. They returned five minutes later, their expressions neutral. "It looks like you folks have yourselves a deal," Pat said, holding out his hand. ------- "Okay," Paul said on the flight back to Garden Hill, "we have the ammunition we need, or at least we will. Now what? We still have the slight problem of fighting off four hundred men." "One obstacle at a time," Brett said. "The ammunition was a big one - maybe the biggest one. Now that we don't have a shortage to worry about, I think I can come up with something." "What are you going to come up with?" Paul demanded. "You told everyone yourself that we can't fight off that many people hitting us from three different directions. Has that changed in some way that I'm not aware of?" "No," Brett said. "We can't fight off that many people at one time. That still holds true." Paul gave a grunt of frustration. "What am I missing here, Brett? You're telling me that we'll be slaughtered but you're implying that you have some sort of plan. Please clarify." "I said that we can't fight off that many people at once," Brett explained. "So what we'll have to do is make sure that there isn't that many people when they get to us." "What?" Paul and Jason said together. "We have a helicopter," Brett reminded them, just in case they had forgot. "And they have a ten to fourteen day march to make before they get into fighting range. We know what their intentions are towards us, don't we? So why should we wait patiently for them to come to us?" Paul looked at him carefully. "What are you saying?" "I'm saying that we need to harass them every step of their march. We need to fly squads out to do hit and run missions on them from the very day that they leave Auburn." "Hit and run missions?" Paul asked. "We fly a four-person squad out and drop them along their avenue of advance. The squad rakes them with fire and then withdraws to the helicopter before they can be engaged at close range. We fly a little further down the line and do it again. We do that three or four times a day, every day, at random intervals, and I think we'll have a very detrimental effect on them." "Are you saying that four people will be able to significantly reduce their numbers?" Paul asked. "I find that very hard to believe. I mean, what's the best that we can hope for? That they'll take out ten or twelve people at a time at first." "That would be a good figure," Brett said. "Of course, as they get used to the attacks they'll learn to react faster to them when they occur. After the first two days or so I'd be surprised if we could hit more than five or six per attack." "Okay," Paul said, "so we knock off a hundred or so before they get here. That'll still leave three hundred people to battle when they arrive, won't it?" "No," Brett said. "You're missing the real value of this tactic. It is not so much the dwindling numbers that it will create through casualties that will help us, it is the morale problem that we will create by doing this." "Morale problem?" Paul asked incredulously. "You want to try to win a war by making them mad?" "Not mad," Brett said. "Scared. Terrified even. I think that you're maybe underestimating the power that demoralization has in a combat situation. We will be raining random death down upon these people constantly. They will never know where it is going to come from or whom it is going to strike. They'll get antsy and nervous as they come closer to us. If we can hit them at night as well - and I have a pretty good idea of how we can do that - than that will rob them of sleep. Do you remember when Anna told us about how some of the men are starting to question the wisdom of constantly attacking everyone?" "Yes," Paul said, sparing a glance at her. She was listening intently to the conversation. "These militia people are mostly conscript types. They are a part of this army because of conquest, fear, and intimidation. Right there is the beginnings of the morale problem. Things have not come to a head however because they've never really lost a battle or even been significantly challenged on the battlefield. They think they're invincible. We need to show them that they are not, that they will have to pay a steep price for taking us. Once they start to see their friends blown away on the trail, once they have to contend with being hit when they least expect it, even while they're trying to sleep, that morale will break. They won't feel safe anywhere. They'll start to have desertions and maybe even the fragging of officers. It's what the Vietcong did to us in Vietnam, it's what the Afghans and the Chechens did to the Russians, it's what we did to the British in the Revolutionary War. It is a sound military tactic and I intend to employ it to the best of my abilities here." "And you think it'll help?" Paul asked. "It'll help," Brett assured him. "And with some upgraded defense plans at the town itself, I think it just might be enough." "I hope you're right," Paul said. "Because it's damn sure going to have to be." ------- The community meeting was called early that day, with Paul passing the word that everyone except the guards on station drop whatever task they were engaged in and report to the community center. The guards on station, as was becoming routine, had the meeting broadcast to them on the radio waves. The mood of the town, which had been frightened and almost panicked, quickly turned to optimism as Brett explained to them just what he had in mind. "We can beat these fuckers, people," he told them. "And not only that, we can beat them so hard that they'll never show their faces around here again. We have the motivation to fight where they do not. We now have the weapons and the ammunition to fight them with. I'm not going to go so far as to say that we have God himself on our side, but I will tell you that our spirit for success and our survival instinct is sure to prevail." This speech was met with a round of spontaneous applause from the crowd and even a few tears of emotion. "But in order to do this," Brett said, "we're going to have to pull together like we've never pulled together before. We need to abandon just about every other project that we have underway and start digging bunkers in those hills outside of town. We need to put up obstacles and make some sort of landmines. And most of all, I need some volunteers to undergo some additional training and be part of the harassment force. I need..." He was forced to wait while hundreds of cries of "I volunteer!" were shouted out. "I'll pick the volunteers later," Brett said once they quieted down. "For ease of training, I'll only accept those that have been on the guard force and undergone more than the basic firearms course." There was a collective groan from those that had not gone through that. "But the rest of you need not worry I think," Brett responded. "You'll have your chance to get in the battle. Trust me on this. Some other things that we'll need to do are form up into squads and platoons so that we can establish a firm chain of command for this battle. We'll have to develop radio procedures and codes to employ once the Auburn group gets close enough to monitor our radio traffic. We also have the obligation to start delivering the promised grain and canned food to El Dorado Hills. This is going to be a very intense and busy two weeks or so, have no doubt about that. But if we do this right, and I have no reason to think that we won't, this battle will be something that our distant descendants will read about in their history books. We will prevail!" The applause this time lasted nearly five minutes. ------- It was an hour before dinner. Jason and Hector were standing on ladders next to the helicopter. The engine compartment and the rotor housing were both opened and they were changing fluids and checking the status of the major components. They were performing a complete maintenance regime on the chopper even though it was not scheduled for one for another twenty flight hours. The helicopter was about to get a serious workout over the next few days and Brett wanted it to be in tip-top operating condition. Jason, who had assisted in all of the previous maintenance of the machine was doing it solo for the first time and training Hector, who had aspirations of one day piloting the machine, in the routine. Brett was very close by, though not watching what Jason was doing. Though Jason was only fourteen, actually fifteen now, he had every confidence in his abilities. Instead, Brett was underneath the nose of the helicopter with Steve Kensington pointing out some features to him. He had an unloaded M-16 rifle from one of the guard posts in his hands. "So what do you think?" Brett asked once they'd crawled back out and stood up. "Can it be done?" Steve pulled a cigarette from his pack and sparked up, taking a thoughtful drag. "I can do it," he said confidently. "It's just a matter of cutting a hole in the bottom between the frame supports and welding a mount of some sort into place." "Can you make a mount though?" Brett wanted to know. "That struck me as the hard part." "Oh no," Steve said, shaking his head. "The mount will be the easy part. I won't even have to make it. All I have to do is use the mount from a telescope tripod. I think that'll work nicely. I'll install a receiving port on the stock of the weapon and it'll screw in tighter than a nun's cunt. Of course, the weapon will be upside-down. That won't matter, will it?" "Actually," Brett said, considering this, "that'll be better than having it right side up. The trigger will be inside the cockpit that way and the shells will eject outside. It'll also make reloading easier." "Good enough," Steve said. "I'll get right on it." "I have to make the check of Auburn tonight at 9:00. Will you have it done by then? If not, just wait until tomorrow morning to do it." "I'll have it done in less than an hour," Steve promised. "I'll go dig out to the cutting torch and the welder right now." "You the man," Brett said, patting him on the back. Pleased by the praise, Steve headed off towards the maintenance shed with a smile on his face. Once he was gone Brett walked over to the ladder that Jason was standing on. Currently he was pouring fresh lubricating oil into the rotor housing. "You okay here?" he asked. "I need to go talk to Paul for a few minutes." "We're on top of it," Jason assured him. "Cool," Brett said. He found Paul in the community center office dictating some notes into a battery operated tape recorder. He shut the machine off when Brett came in. "Everything going okay?" he asked. "Perfect," Brett said. "Jason and Hector are almost done with the maintenance of the bird and Steve says it'll take him about an hour to install a 16 on a mount beneath it." "An hour?" Paul said. "Really?" "He's a fuckin' mechanical genius, I'm telling you. Anyway, I wanted to talk about a few special missions that I'd like to make and another work crew that I'd like to raise when we have the time." "Shoot," Paul said. "When we're done making our deliveries to El Dorado, I think we should make a few trips to recover some of the laundry soap in that truck trailer." Paul looked at him as if he were mad. "Tide?" he asked. "What the hell do you want to do that for? Don't you think we can let our laundry concerns ride for the time being?" "I don't want it for laundry," Brett said. "It can serve another purpose for us." "Oh?" Brett explained what he meant. "Remarkable," Paul replied, obviously impressed. "And how will you do this?" "That's where the work crew comes in," Brett said. "We need to get some people to start pulling the gas tanks out of some of the vehicles that we're not using. I think a fifteen-gallon tank would work just perfectly. It's big enough to create the effect that we're after but small enough so that dropping it from the helicopter won't spin me out of control." "Wow," Paul said. "I'll get a work crew together in the morning." He paused for a moment. "Did I ever tell you, Brett, that I'm really glad that you're on our side?" "You never did, but I'm kinda glad to be here." ------- Chapter 15 Brett was finding that he was having a major time-management problem as the frantic, pre-battle preparations were being undertaken in and around the town. There were many things that required his attention and his attention alone and only twenty-four hours in each day to do them all. The bulk of his daytime hours were being spent behind the controls of the helicopter. In the three days since the deal had been struck with El Dorado Hills he had logged more than thirty flight hours. In a marathon two-day operation, all of the promised grain and canned food (except the chili, the peanut butter, and the baby food) had been delivered to El Dorado Hills either in water heaters or upon pallets. And El Dorado Hills, keeping with their end of the bargain, had supplied Garden Hill with more than eighteen thousand rounds of ammunition, six automatic weapons, and, as a gesture of good faith, four hundred pounds of dried fish. When not flying recovery missions for El Dorado Hills, Brett was flying them for his own town. Just this day he and his crew of four had recovered four hundred boxes of Tide laundry detergent and five hundred gallons of gasoline from the tanker car on the railroad tracks. Brett had special plans for these two substances. The bulk of his early evening hours was being taken up by basic infantry tactic lectures that he gave to the entire town. He had had Chrissie and Michelle - both of whom were considerably more artistic than he - make a large, scale model map of the surrounding terrain. This map was very detailed, showing the location and name of every hill large enough to hide a squad of troops on. Brett would stand with a pointer and explain to his audience the best way to go about defending their town while hopefully keeping casualties to a bare minimum. "We'll be fighting a purely defensive battle here," he would tell them, "and, once the enemy gets into our playing field, we're going to be using a fighting retreat tactic. These outer layers of hills to the north and the west, the ones out beyond our main guard positions, that is where we're going to meet them first. Now many of you know exactly what I'm talking about since you've been out all day digging foxholes in those hills. What we're going to do is move our forces to whatever hills are between the town and their avenue of advance. More than likely, they'll have more than one such avenue and they might have as many as three. You'll engage them with your weapons as soon as they come into range. We're not going to be doing any of that until-you-see-the-whites-of-their-eyes shit. Our goal is to keep these fuckers as far away from us as we can. We have plenty of ammo now so don't fret too much about wasting it. We're going to make them pay heavily for each advance they make and then we're going to pull back as soon as they start to get close. Remember that you'll be in well-protected positions while they will be forced to move across open ground. The advantage goes to the defender. "Once they close with our first positions, we'll retreat to our next set of prepared defenses. Once again, we should have foxholes already dug there and the whole process will start over. We'll bloody them some more and then we'll retreat again when they start to get close. Layer by layer that's how we're going to fight them. Eventually, if necessary, we'll fall back inside the wall itself and make our final stand in the park outside of this community center. We're already in the process of setting up bunkers in the grass and we're working on setting up some minefields to channel them into killing boxes." He went over this plan with everyone again and again, explaining it and pointing at the map every evening after dinner. He encouraged questions and there were many. He answered each one to the best of his abilities and with complete, sometimes brutal honesty. "Yes," he told those who asked about casualties, "we will more than likely have some of our people get wounded or even killed. I don't like it and I wish I could tell you that it won't happen, but this is a war and that is the nature of war. What I can promise you is that we will make every attempt to care for those who are wounded. Paul and Janet will serve as our battalion aid station and El Dorado Hills has agreed to take in our wounded and allow their doctor to treat them if we can get them there. Unless the fate of the entire town is resting upon using the chopper for something else at the moment, I will fly our wounded immediately there." After the evening's lecture was wrapped up it would be time for the recon flight to check the vicinity of Auburn for the invasion force. So far, there was still no sign of them. Brett was grateful each night that he and Jason flew out there and saw nothing on the FLIR but empty woods and abandoned interstate. He was not so optimistic as to think that they might have called off the attack but he was grateful for each additional day of preparation that they were given. After returning from the recon missions he would then typically spend an hour or two going over the status of the day's work with the people that had been placed in charge of each task. Chrissie was in charge of the digging crews while Matt was in charge of the weapons and ammunition crews. There were also several other special projects that were underway that Steve Kensington was working on. If he got to bed before midnight, Brett considered himself lucky. In the morning, he would wake up to the blaring of his wind-up alarm clock at 4:30 AM so he could spend a few hours training the eight people that had been chosen for the task of harassing the advancing Auburnites. Chrissie and Michelle, his original guard force members, were his squad leaders for this force. They were each in charge of a four-person team who were going to be dropped in the woods very near the advancing enemy. Though everyone who was in this task force had been through either Brett or Chrissie's advanced training class, this type of warfare was something that he felt they needed additional instruction on. Most of the training consisted of lectures. "There's no reason why any of you should get hit out there," he told them. "You actually have one of the safest jobs in this whole conflict if you do it right. You pick your ambush site carefully and you make damn sure you have good cover and a good path of retreat. When they come into view, you hit them fast and then you get the hell out of there before they have a chance to engage you. Chrissie and Michelle, you assign targets to your riflemen and make sure they know who they're going to be aiming at. If two people shoot the same person, it's a waste of ammo. Riflemen, you all fire at the same time at your assigned target and just like that, three enemies are dead or wounded. Once the riflemen fire, the squad leader opens up for a quick burst with the automatic weapon. And I mean a quick burst. Don't get greedy. That's how you get killed. As soon as they start to return fire, get the hell out and back to the helicopter." As exhausted as he was all of the time, Brett was still quite pleased with the pace that the war preparations were moving forward. The townspeople had pulled together like they never had before. Previous enemies had managed to set aside their petty differences in the interest of efficiency. Most of the workforce marched out after breakfast each morning and dug trenches in the hills, filling their best pillowcases with the mud that they dug out of the ground to make sandbags. Others ripped the gas tanks out of cars so that Steve could use his welder to convert them into bomb casings. Others still helped load ammunition clips and clean weapons or assembled combat packs out of children's backpacks. And because all of this war-related labor did not allow for such routine tasks as wood gathering and drying, they were forced to go without their once-demanded luxury: hot baths in the evenings. They did not complain about this, not even the most vocal of them. They simply bathed in cold water or went without. Similarly the food that they were served was now usually served cold for the same reason. Although Stacy and Tina managed to put fresh bread on the table every night, they did this only with the wood that they gathered themselves and everything else was served directly out of the can. Again, no one complained, apparently realizing that survival took precedence over luxury. Brett sometimes found it hard to believe that these were the same yuppie women that had followed Jessica's teachings and tried to oust him from town. He began to have hope that his crazy scheme just might work. ------- "Brett," said Steve Kensington on the morning of January 11, just as he was heading from his early training session with the harassment force to the cafeteria to pick up his ration of cold food. "You got a minute?" "Sure," Brett said, stifling a yawn. "What's up?" He noted that Steve, who had been working like mad for the last three days, looked even more tired than he himself felt. There were dark circles under his bloodshot eyes and his skin had an unhealthy pallor to it. "I think I managed to make an operational mine," he said. "Come outside and have a look." "Yeah?" Brett asked, pleased. Part of his defensive plan called for some sort of landmine to help protect certain parts of their perimeter. Steve, as their resident mechanical genius, had been tasked to come up with a design if he could. "Let's go check it out." "I got the idea from what those assholes that killed Mitsy and Dale did with the Raid cans," he said, leading Brett down a hall and out through one of the side doors. "They key to the whole thing are the mousetraps." "Mousetraps?" Brett asked. "Where did you get mousetraps? There weren't any of them in the supply room." "But there were in the grocery store," Steve said. "We never brought them over here because we didn't have a use for them. None of the stragglers that picked through the store in the early days had a use for them either. They were still sitting in the storage room yesterday, four boxes of fifty." They walked through the rain to the maintenance shed, a room that had become Steve's workshop. He had a variety of tools and equipment stacked on the floor of the shed, including an air compressor, a welder, and various power tools, all of which he powered with the inverter on the fire engine. Several of his gas tank creations were sitting on a shelf, waiting their turn to be turned into bomb casings, and several completed ones were stacked outside. Brett saw that he had been using a power saw and a drill recently. The former was sitting on the edge of the bench, it's blade dusty with sawdust. The latter was sitting on the floor next to a vise. It was still plugged into the power cord that ran from the fire engine and it had a one-inch drill bit installed in it. "It's very simple actually," Steve explained as he picked up a three-foot length of lumber that looked like it had been cut from a two by four. "All I need is scrap wood from the collapsed houses, a shotgun shell, a mousetrap, and some fishing line. Here," he handed it over, "check it out. This one is safe, it doesn't have the shotgun shell in it yet." Brett took the offered piece of wood. He saw that three holes, one large and two small, had been drilled in the center of it. On either side of these holes was a seesaw type of assembly made out of 3/8-inch dowels and a twelve-inch wooden ruler. Fishing line had been tied to the ends of the rulers and run through the smaller holes where it was attached by means of a fishing hook to the spring of a mousetrap. "How does it work?" he asked. "You put the shotgun shell in the big hole with the primer side facing the trap," Steve explained. "The hole is just the right size so the shell will fit snugly. If you look at the mousetrap you'll see that I cut a small hole in the base of it and cut the trap part in two and bent it upward. The bent-up piece will strike the primer of the shell when it's tripped. The wood will act like a small shotgun barrel and channel the blast upward." "And these rulers set it off?" Brett asked, running his finger over them. "Right," Steve said. "Go ahead and arm the trap." Brett did so, forcing the powerful spring backwards and setting it. "Now you see," Steve explained, "that fishing line is connected to the rulers on one end and the trip mechanism on the other. If anyone steps on this thing on either side, they'll push the far end of the ruler down which will force the near end up which will then pull on the string and spring the trap. Go ahead and try it." Brett pushed on the ruler. Nothing happened at first except the ruler bent a little. Steve told him to push a little harder and he did. This time there was a snap and the trap slammed home. "Boom," Steve said with a grin. "They step on that thing and the pellets will blast upward right into them. It'll either take them in the crotch if they happen to be straddling it or it'll take out the side of their leg if they're off to the side." "Ouch," Brett said, wincing a little at the thought. "It probably won't kill them," Steve said apologetically. "Especially if we use the birdshot shells that we have." "It doesn't have to kill them," Brett assured him. "In fact, it demoralizes the other soldiers even more if it doesn't. Especially considering the lack of field hospitals and medical care. Trust me, you blow a guys balls off with that thing and leave him writhing in agony on the ground, it has a detrimental effect on morale." "I guess it would at that," Steve said. "Anyway, that's the ground version of the mine. I've also come up with one that you can mount on a tree or in a bush or on any other solid surface." "Yeah?" Steve picked up a smaller piece of two by four, this one only about four inches square. It had the same hole for the shotgun shell drilled in the center of it but only one smaller hole to string fishing line through. The bottom of it was different as well. Small strips of plywood had been screwed into all four sides of it. These strips extended about four inches past the bottom of the thing so that there was a hollow area under it to give the trap room to swing shut. "It fires with the same principal," Steve told him. "A fish hook connected to the trap mechanism. Only this time you put the thing on the tree or whatever, camouflage it with some branches or some mud, and then run a length of wire down to the ground. I figure that we put a small pulley on a stake and then string the wire about two inches or so off the ground. When someone trips over the wire, boom, that's their ass." "Fucking brilliant," Brett said. Steve gave an embarrassed shrug. "Just doing my part," he said. "Well you just keep doing your part," Brett said. "How many of these things can you make us?" "I can make two hundred of them," he said. "That's how many mousetraps I have. Can you use that many?" "I can use them," Brett said. "Trust me on that. Make a hundred and fifty of the ground mines and fifty of the tree-mounts." "I'll get right on it. I'm almost done with these gas tanks so I'll have the crew that's been stripping them out for me start working on these." ------- "Coming up on the mudfall," Jason, looking through the FLIR scope, reported that night at 9:30. They were on the nightly recon flight to the vicinity of Auburn and the mudfall in question was the first one east of the town - the same one that Anna and Jean had walked to in the darkness on their first night of freedom. "Copy," Brett said. "Slowing up." "You're about two miles and closing," Jason reported. As they got closer he continued to read off distances every fifteen seconds or so. "Okay," he finally said. "About a mile out. No sign of activity." "Right," Brett told him, exhaling a breath of air. "Banking left to check the south." He turned to the left, keeping a careful eye on his compass and his altimeter. As often as he had done night flights over the past few weeks, he was still not comfortable with him, he couldn't afford to be comfortable with them, although he had learned to trust Jason, his navigator and remote eyes, implicitly. "Still looking good," Jason reported as they neared the edge of the impassable zone. "And still no signs of soldiers. Go ahead and come around to 270 now, we're past the edge." "Banking right," Brett said, watching the compass swing around to 270 degrees. They flew in this direction for nearly five minutes and then banked right again, heading back to the north to pick up the interstate again. It was in this area that Brett figured they were most likely to find the soldiers they were looking for. "Nothing," Jason reported as they ambled along at thirty knots. "Coming up on the interstate again. It's about two miles in front of you." Once again he started announcing the distance as they closed. Brett's goal was to stay about a mile away from the actual roadway - close enough to see if the troops were camping on it but too far away for them to hear the helicopter if they were there. "One mile," he announced when they reached that point. "And still nothing visible." "Turning left to 270 again," Brett said. They flew parallel to the roadway for another five miles, Jason constantly scanning back and forth, searching for the telltale glow of body heat. He saw nothing. Once inside that five-mile zone Brett turned back to the north, not going any closer to Auburn. They were only about four miles east of the eastern guard positions and they figured that the Auburn force, had it left that day, would already be well past this point no matter how slowly they'd marched. They crossed the freeway and made a check around the base of the large hill that had collapsed over the freeway, causing the mudfall. This check was just in case the Auburnites had elected to bypass to the north instead of the easier route to the south. They hadn't. This route was just as empty as the southern route. "No armies out there tonight," Jason said gratefully once they'd come back to their original position. "I guess Anna and Jean's escape really did throw their schedule off," Brett said, picking up his airspeed a little. "They're now three days behind." "Maybe they won't come at all," Jason said with a shrug. "They'll come," Brett said. "That's the thing about people like that. Once they decide to do something like that, they follow through." "I can always hope, can't I?" "That's true. You can always do that. Why don't we do a little more target practice on the way back?" "You bet," Jason replied with a grin. He liked playing with his new toy that Steve had installed for him. "Let me know when you find a target and we'll do some runs on it." It took less than five minutes before Jason spotted an abandoned car on the side of the interstate below. "Okay," he said, "I've got a car about a mile ahead. Let's set up." "You're the boss," Brett told him, pulling into a hover. While they held in place, Jason opened up a compartment and pulled out a banana clip. Inside of this clip were thirty rounds of 5.56 millimeter bullets, every third one of which was a tracer. Between their two seats, sticking half in and half out of a hole that Steve had cut in the chassis of the helicopter, was an automatic M-16 rifle, mounted upside down on the telescope tripod mount so it could spin back and forth, up and down. Using the scant ambient light from the cockpit instruments, Jason put the magazine into the weapon and jacked the first round into the chamber. He flipped off the safety and made sure that the weapon was set on full automatic fire. "Locked and loaded," he reported, swinging the weapon back and forth and then making a small adjustment to the mounting tension. He kept his finger well clear of the trigger for the time being. "Okay," Brett said, taking another deep breath. "Bring me in." What they were practicing was a very dangerous tactic but one they needed to perfect. Jason, as the gunner and as the eyes of the helicopter, was basically in charge of the machine. Brett's hands and feet controlled the motions but, since he was effectively blind, Jason's voice controlled Brett's hands and feet. "Drop down," Jason said, "and we'll circle around to the left to get into position. There's a ridge just to the north of the target that rises about sixty feet over the roadway. Stay above 500 AGL and you'll be well clear of it and the higher ridge to the northwest of it." "Copy," Brett said, reducing altitude much faster than he really felt comfortable with but doing it anyway. He watched the radar altimeter - which gave a readout of his altitude above the ground as opposed to above sea level - as he dropped. He pulled up and back into a hover when it reached 550 feet. "Okay," Jason told him, watching his target with one eye and the ridgeline with the other. Using short, concise commands he guided Brett around in a large circle and back towards the highway until they were about half a mile away from the car and heading right at it. "How we doing?" Brett asked after a long silence. "Right on track," Jason said. "Target area is at twelve o'clock, half a mile away. We're ready to make the firing run. After the run, come off target ninety degrees to the left and you'll be clear of obstacles." "Got it," Brett told him, putting on the speed. Jason let his finger inch onto the trigger of the weapon as his eyes remained glued to the FLIR. He made a few adjustments to the rifle's attitude until he thought it was pointed approximately at the car, which was growing bigger and bigger on the display. "Looking good," he said almost absently. "Looking good. Almost in range. Slow up a bit." "Slowing to twenty knots," Brett told him. "In range," Jason said. "Opening fire." He squeezed the trigger and the gun began to buck as it sprayed a stream of bullets from the barrel. The sound of the gunshots were muted, both because of the headsets they wore and because the barrel was outside of the vehicle. On the display Jason saw the white streaks of the tracers arcing outward. They were impacting in front of and to the left of the car. Without releasing the trigger, he adjusted the angle of the rifle, turning the tracers to where he wanted them. He raked back and forth and was able to see the windows of the car explode, the tires flatten, and neat rows of holes appear in the body. "On target," he said excitedly. He continued to hold the trigger down until the last shell was ejected below them and the action locked open on an empty chamber. "Banking hard left," Brett said once the last round was fired. He came off target and immediately began to climb and put on speed. "I got it on target in less than a second that time," Jason said once they were back up to cruising altitude. "Probably didn't waste more than ten rounds or so." "You're getting a lot better," Brett said. Although he would take a look at the videotape back in Garden Hill, he had no doubt that his young friend was telling the truth. Jason was not prone to exaggeration. "How many more clips do we have loaded?" "Three more." "Let's make another run," Brett suggested. "A simulated follow-up attack. We'll spin around to the south this time and hit the same target." It took them another ten minutes to set up and get back around to a firing position from the south. This time Jason blasted apart the other side of the car without wasting more than six or seven rounds. That was a far cry from when they first started practicing and it would take him two entire magazines of ammunition before he could hit a target the size of a tractor-trailer rig. "Those Auburn fucks are gonna hate your ass," Brett told him after hearing the results of the last run. "Good," Jason told him. ------- Early the next morning, just after first light, the Placer County Militia of Auburn was once more assembled on the lawn of the football field. They were divided into three different companies of four platoons apiece, all of them loaded with heavy packs of food and extra ammunition, all of them with rifles on their backs. They stood at attention in neat, military rows, listening as Colonel Barnes, their commander, gave his traditional departure speech. Barnes outdid himself with patriotic and militaristic fervor, ranting on for nearly fifteen minutes about God and conquest and unification and the need to secure air superiority for further conquest. He told his troops that he was proud of them - as proud as a father was of his sons. He told them that they would prevail on this most important mission and that the rewards would be great. He seemed almost near tears at several points as his voice went up and down with his emotional outpouring. So wrapped up in his speech was he that he didn't notice several disturbing things that had never happened before. Instead of listening with rapt and even hypnotic attention as they usually did, a good many of his troops were making sour faces, or snickering, or whispering comments to each other just below the auditory level. A few made obscene gestures for the benefit of their friends. Sergeant Stinson actually went so far as to make a jerking off motion with his hand during the God and conquest sequence. The cheer that went up at the end of the speech was unenthusiastic at best. "Lieutenant Covington," Bracken barked to his newest platoon commander. "Yes, sir," Covington said, straightening up and looking sharp. "Your platoon has the point. Lead us out." "Yes, sir," he replied. "Sergeant Markwell!" "Yes, sir," Turbo, a newly promoted sergeant replied. "Your squad is on point." "Yes, sir," he said. The attack force assembled smartly into marching formation and the order was given. As one, four hundred feet began to march, heading east. Within thirty minutes, they had all passed through the sandbag maze that Jean and Anna had once navigated through and were on their way. ------- Jessica did not see them go. She was in the middle of hanging a huge load of wet towels up on the improvised clothesline deep in the bowels of the high school. No more than ten minutes after their departure however, the word was brought to her by two of her closest associates. Alice and Susan were two young women that had recently been added to the cleaning staff of the high school to replace the two escapees, Jean and Anna. In addition to the change in job assignment, they had also both changed husbands. Since Bracken had been left wifeless by the escape and murder of his previous harem, Barnes had pressured two of the lower-ranking militia members to each "donate" a wife to the field commander. Nor had Bracken and Barnes been satisfied with the simple donation in and of itself. Alice and Susan both had been the pick of the litter of each man's three women. In this case the resentment towards Barnes and his underling had gone in both directions. The two young corporals had both been angry at having their best bitches stolen from them and the two young women had been angry at this further proof that they were nothing but property. Jessica didn't give a damn what the two corporals thought or felt, but the insult to Alice and Susan had helped her recruit them into her inner circle of cohorts. "They're on their way," Alice, a redhead who had once been a hair stylist in Auburn's most fashionable salon, told Jessica. "Good," Jessica said, allowing a little smile to touch her face. "And did all four hundred march out?" "We counted every last one," confirmed Susan, a longhaired brunette. She had once been a bureaucrat in the county administration building. "They made it easy to do that in those neat lines they were in." "And the weapons?" Jessica asked. "Just like they said," Alice told her. "Most of them had regular hunting rifles. We can't tell the difference in the assault rifles, but it looks like they really did leave all of the automatic weapons here." "Just waiting for someone to take possession of them," Jessica said. "I've got close to two hundred women in on this now." "Two hundred?" Susan asked, wondering if she was exaggerating. She wasn't. The uprising that she was trying to ignite would not have been possible two weeks before. But since the group punishment of everyone and the murder of three women because of Jean and Anna's escape, resentment of the men in town that had been only simmering before had boiled over. The realization that anyone, no matter how loyal or obedient to her husband, could be killed or beaten independent of her own actions had had a powerful effect on the Auburn women. Suddenly much of the petty fighting for favoritism and special treatment seemed a joke. The women, instead of competing against each other, began to see themselves as a group, as an oppressed entity, as an us against a powerful them. Jessica had fanned these flames to the very best of her abilities by doing what she was absolutely best at: talking and gossiping. Whenever a group of women gathered somewhere, she was there, whispering things to them, riling them up. Whenever someone expressed doubt about what she was saying, she quickly turned the fury of the group against them, shaming them or even threatening them back into line. "Two hundred," she confirmed. "And that's not all. I've got at least one of my girls in the household of every man that is remaining behind. This will insure our success. Those bastards will never know what hit them. I only wish Stinson was one of the men staying here so I could have the pleasure of cutting his fucking throat myself." "You've been a busy little bee, haven't you?" Alice asked. "It's what I do," Jessica told her. "We'll let the attack force get two days out of town, just to make sure they don't come back unexpectedly, and then, on the third night, while everyone but the guards on post are asleep..." she gave a predatory grin, "We strike." Alice and Susan both shuddered a little, a mixture of excitement and fear. "Are you sure everyone will follow through with it?" Alice asked. "I think so," Jessica said. "After the hangings, I really think that they'll do it." "What about Barnes' women?" Alice wanted to know. "Have you made contact with any of them? How do they feel about this?" "I haven't approached any of them," Jessica said. "They're probably with us but I just couldn't be sure. We'll see what they do when the time comes." "And you're sure that they won't be able to just take the town back from us when they get back?" Susan asked almost timidly. "I mean, I know we'll have the automatic weapons and all, but there'll still be four hundred of them." "Four hundred minus whoever gets killed in Garden Hill," Jessica corrected. "And they'll be tired and low on ammunition from being out there for a month. They'll also have supplies and prisoners from Garden Hill with them. We'll be able to keep them out if we do it right. And when they surrender to us, they'll come back in under our rules." "And the shoe will be on the other foot for once," Alice said, smiling at the very thought. "Exactly," Jessica confirmed. "Our day is coming soon." ------- "Slow up, Brett! Slow up!" Jason barked from the observer seat of the helicopter that night. "Slow way up!" "What is it?" Brett asked, pulling instantly into a near-hover, slowing the aircraft so quickly that both of them were pushed against their safety harnesses. "Do you have something?" "Affirm," Jason said fearfully, seeing the glow of hundreds of people on his scope. "Multiple warm bodies on the roadway, right before the mudfall." They were just outside the one-mile range of the interstate on the west side of the first mudfall. Almost exactly where Brett had predicted the attacking force would stop the first night of their march. It was 9:26 PM. "How many?" Brett wanted to know. "Hundreds," Jason said. "I can't even see them all yet, they stretch from the mudfall to the end of my panning range." "Are they stationary?" "Yes, most of them seem to be lying down. Their signatures are dimmed, like they're in sleeping bags." "Can we move in a little closer?" "A little bit," Jason told him. "It looks like they have a couple of people standing watch just to the south of them but they're only a few hundred feet off the roadway." "Guide me," Brett said. Jason directed him forward and to the west at twenty knots, halting his forward motion at about three-quarters of a mile out. He then told him to hover. "Hovering," Brett reported, wishing he could see, just for an instant, what Jason was looking at. "Be sure to get some film." "Doing it now," Jason said, panning slowly from east to west. "Too many of them to count right now. We'll have to do it back in town. They have two-man guard teams posted north and south of the roadway. Three sets in each direction; one in the middle and one at each end. The rest of them are clumped pretty tight together right on the asphalt. No tents or lean-to's or anything like that, they're just sleeping in the road." "Like they don't have a care in the world," Brett said. "Should we make a firing run on them?" Jason asked hopefully. "I could take out ten or fifteen of them." "Not tonight," Brett told him. "Why not? We have three clips of ammo and they're lying in a nice even row. Maybe they'll turn back in the morning." "They won't," Brett said. "And it's too soon to tip our hand. We need to hit them first in the daylight. If we spend all day harassing them, the realization that we have night capabilities as well will have a much greater effect on their morale. Trust me, that's the way to do it." Jason wasn't entirely convinced of this but he made no further protests. He spent another ten minutes directing Brett from point to point and filming the enemy in infrared. "I'm pretty sure I've got them all on tape," he said at last. "Then let's get ourselves home. We're gonna have a long day tomorrow." ------- Traditionally, the average adult bedtime in Garden Hill had been around nine o'clock or even earlier. In a town with no electricity and with nothing but black darkness outside after sunset, the residents had reverted to the ways their ancestors had used before electrical wires and streetlights and television sets. But since the news that an attack force would be leaving Auburn soon, almost everyone in town had adjusted this early-to-bed credo in favor of awaiting the return of the recon flight around 10:00 PM. Groups of them would gather inside the community center waiting for the radio call to Chrissie from Jason. Even before landing he would give the all-clear signal and the word would quickly be passed. For some reason the townspeople just slept better knowing that they'd been granted an extra day. On this night, however, no one went to bed after the check-in radio report. The all-clear signal wasn't given. Instead, Jason passed on Brett's request for an immediate community meeting. By the time the helicopter was refueled and secured for the night, every adult in town was sitting anxiously in the cafeteria. Brett did not mince words with them. "The attack force has left Auburn," he announced through the microphone. "They are currently camped out approximately eight miles east of their starting point." The uproar was immediate. Though it had a fearful vibe to it, it was not the terror that had come with the initial announcement that an attack was in the works. Now, they were only receiving confirmation of facts that had already been told. "I haven't had a chance to go over the video images that Jason made of the flight yet," Brett said when the voices died down to a manageable level. "But from what he described to me as he was making the video, it certainly appears that our friends Anna and Jean from Auburn were correct in their assessment of the threat against us. There are literally hundreds of troops camped out on the lanes of the interstate, quite probably the four hundred that we've been told about. We have no reason to believe that they are not heading this way and that they do not have evil intentions towards us." Some more uproar came at this revelation. A few questions were shouted to Brett about irrelevant things and he pretended not to hear them. "Now listen up, people," Brett said, gesturing for them to hold it down. Eventually, they did. "We've been through all of this already. We knew they were coming and we have been preparing for them ever since finding this out. This announcement tonight is nothing more than the confirmation of what we already knew. In a way, I'm glad they finally showed themselves to us. Now we know exactly what we're dealing with and we can begin to put our plans into operation. Remember, if they want to fight, we're going to give them a Goddamn fight they'll never forget!" This statement served to boost the morale up a little bit. "All right," Brett said, once it was relatively quiet again. "Now tomorrow is just another day for most of you. We still have at least ten days until they get here, probably a lot more. So trench and sandbag crews, we're still going to need you out there in the morning. Those of you on Steve's detail, we're especially going to need you out there. All township defense teams need to report to your normal duty station at the normal hour, just like always, okay?" The murmurs of assent came babbling upward to him. "However, those of you on the hit and run teams," Brett said with a rather wicked smile. "Report to me at 0600 sharp. We will be starting full operations first thing in the morning." ------- Stacy and Tina had provided them with a large thermos of strong black coffee for their first official briefing. They were in a small conference room that had been decorated with large maps of the terrain between Auburn and Garden Hill. Again, Chrissie and Michelle had been the artisans for this cartographic masterpiece and, using videotape of previous recon missions, had truly outdone themselves. Though the maps were not exactly to scale, they were very close, closer even than their drawers knew. "Okay," Brett said, holding a pointer in one hand and a steaming cup of coffee in the other. "Here is where they are now." He tapped the point where the interstate - represented as a black line - met the mudfall - which was represented as a dark brown blob. "In all likelihood, they will move south from this point, taking the easiest path around this impassible obstacle that blocks the interstate. More than likely they will stick to standard military doctrine and move out shortly after dawn. Obviously, the going will not be as smooth or easy for them in this stretch. If they can make five miles in a day, they would be pushing it. So what we're going to do is set up our first attack about a mile south of the interstate. My suggestion would be to conceal yourselves here." He tapped a series of hills that stood off to the southwest of their path. "Chances are they will march right down this natural corridor. If that is the case, all of them will be to the east of this position. If any of them are to the west of it, you must abort the attack and wait for them to pass. Remember our doctrine here: do not put yourself into unnecessary danger. Having them on both sides of you will impede, if not actually destroy, my ability to pick you up, so don't do it." Everyone nodded his or her understanding of this. "Now what we're going to do on this first day is take full advantage of our mobility and their ignorance to our presence. I'll drop the first team - Chrissie's team - right here." He pointed to a spot just west of the attack position. "And then I will come back and drop the second team - Michelle's team - over here." He pointed to another series of hills further south along the projected path. "You will have your radios with you and I will keep myself in a place where I can maintain radio contact with both of you. Remember your code words! Do not speak in clear-text because we have to assume that the Auburnites are monitoring a scanner. Chrissie, after you make your hit, you withdraw immediately to the place where I dropped you off. I will fly you out of there and drop you to yet another spot south of team two. That way, we'll leapfrog our way along their march all fucking day long. Any questions?" There were none. "Then lets get suited up," Brett announced. "Don't forget to muddy your faces when you get out there. We lift off the moment there's enough light." ------- Breakfast rations consisted only of powdered diet drinks mixed with rainwater. Most of the militia members were out-of-sorts and cranky on this first morning since they had not slept terribly well in the dampness of the outside. Typically it took three or four days for everyone to get reacquainted with the outside conditions that a march imposed upon them. Bracken heard much of the grumbling as everyone packed up their gear for another day's march but he chose to ignore it, knowing it was an integral part of the early days of a mission. His mind did try to let him know that this grumbling seemed worse than it ever had before, that the troops were not trying as hard to keep it under control within his earshot, but he dismissed this as being nothing more than a high amount of newbies on the attack. "Lieutenant Colby!" Bracken barked once all of the packs were reassembled and once all of the rations had been consumed. Colby was the senior lieutenant among the attack force. Though he was technically second-in-command Bracken actually shuddered at the thought of him leading anything. He was a nice enough guy but he was not very experienced in actual fighting or militarism. His pre-comet experience was only the Placer County Militia. He had never actually been in the service. "Lieutenant Colby, reporting as ordered, sir," he said. "Colby, I'm going to have your platoon take point today," he said. "We'll be taking the most direct route around the mudfall." "Yes, sir," Colby said. "Keep you maps open and keep everyone tight. It's easy to get lost out here if you wander too far away from the mudfall." "Yes, sir, I will, sir." "And keep an eye out for the bodies of those two bitches that used to be my wives," Bracken added. "My guess is that we'll find them along here somewhere." "Yes, sir." "Gather your people and let's move out. My goal is to get us halfway around this mudfall by night." ------- The MD-500 was not a very large helicopter. Though the pilot and the observer were able to sit in relative comfort, those assigned to the back found it to be cramped, noisy, and very uncomfortable. And that was when only two people were sitting there. The back had never been intended to hold four people in any arrangement, let alone four fully armed and equipped soldiers, not even after Brett had removed every piece of unneeded equipment and storage. But by cramming, twisting, and depriving them of any personal space or indeed breathing room, Chrissie, Maggie, Mike Monahan, and Maria Sanchez all managed to fit. Chrissie had the door handle pushing painfully into her shoulder on the left side of the aircraft while Maggie, who was actually quite petite, had the handle on the right pushing against her breast. Mike, though he normally might have enjoyed the sensation of his legs intertwined with Maria's, was more concerned with the fact that the magazine of Chrissie's M-16 was pushing against his knees. "All we all ready?" Brett asked, talking to no one in particular but knowing that only Jason and Chrissie had headsets on. "Let's get this shit over with," Chrissie snarled, trying to take a deep breath and failing. "At least on the ground we'll be able to move." "Right," Brett said, diplomatically withholding any sarcastic comments. "Lifting off. We're talking about a twenty minute flight and a five to ten minute check of the area." "Yeah yeah," Chrissie said impatiently, "let's go." He went, applying power and lifting off into the rainy, barely lit morning sky. He approached the landing area carefully, keeping his altitude high enough to see what needed to be seen, but not so high that there was a possibility of the Auburnites spotting the aircraft. Below them the mudfall was a huge, brown expanse of snapped trees and thick, still running mud. He circled around to the far west of it several times while Jason checked everything with the FLIR and his own eyeballs. No sources of body heat were seen except for a small heard of deer that had miraculously managed to survive to this point. "Figures," Jason said bitterly. "We finally spot some game and we can't do anything about it." "Mom wouldn't want you shooting them anyway," Chrissie said. "She'd be real proud if you took their picture though." "Mom never had to eat fucking chicken noodle soup every day either," Jason shot right back at her. Brett listened to exchange and couldn't help but smile a little bit. That was the first time Chrissie and Jason had ever been able to mention their dead mother or her hobby in anything other than a tearful manner. Though no one who survived the crash of Comet Fenwell had been allowed the luxury of a proper mourning period for their loved ones, it seemed that that mourning had come and gone anyway. "We're clear down there, Brett," Jason reported. "Ready to hit the LZ." "Right," Brett said, seeing the hills and the area beyond them that he had pre-planned for the insertion and extraction point. "Let's take us down. Chrissie, get everyone ready for unload. We're going down." Chrissie gave a hand signal to everyone, conveying this information to them. Unfortunately they could not lock and load while still in the aircraft - their simply was not enough room - but they all understood that that would be the first thing they did when their feet hit the ground. Brett made a combat landing, similar to the ones he had made in his army days when he'd flown the Blackhawk. He did not circle around and carefully come down upon the landing zone, he simply dropped down upon it, letting the aircraft nearly fall out of the sky. More than one stomach nearly gave up its breakfast from this maneuver. He pulled up at the last second and someone did lose their breakfast. Chrissie, who was struggling with morning sickness anyway, vomited all over herself and Mike. "Sorry," she mouthed to Mike as the skids touched the ground and the doors were thrown open. Before he could reply or even be properly disgusted by what had happened, they were out the door, their feet on the ground and running towards the safety of the nearest tree line. Once they were clear, Brett lifted back off, keeping low and heading out to the south. He would be heading back to Garden Hill to pick up Michelle's team and drop them off. Within seconds the sound of the helicopter's engine had faded, leaving only the sound of the rain. "All right," Chrissie said, hiccupping once and giving her sour stomach a few rubs. "Sorry about that, Mike. Maybe pregnant women weren't meant to be on special forces. "Hey," Mike said good-naturedly, "it's just extra camouflage, isn't it?" She chuckled, already feeling better. "I guess so. Let's lock and load and get ourselves into position." They locked and loaded and then spent a few minutes putting mud on their bodies and faces to help them blend into the background. Every hand that applied mud was shaky with adrenaline as they all tried not to think of what they were about to do. Soon they all looked like stragglers that had been out in the woods for weeks. They cleaned their hands with baby-wipes and then buried the trash just to make sure no sign of their presence was noted later. "Okay," Chrissie said, holding her M-16 out before her. "I'll take point. The rest of you remember to keep those rifles out of the mud. Remember, they're not meant to be dirty like this thing is." The hill they were planning to occupy was less than a half a mile in front of them. They walked carefully through the pine needles and mud, stepping over logs and between trees, their boots squelching a little with each step. When they got to the hill they climbed up the south face. The going was a little steep but they were assisted by the presence of numerous trees, both standing and fallen. They reached the summit a little more than fifteen minutes after they had first started marching. The return run would have to be even quicker. "Right here," Chrissie said, spotting a series of fallen trees. "Let's check out the view." They took up position and looked through a gap in the trees. Below them they could see the flat ground that lay along the edge of the mud; the most likely avenue of advance of their enemy. "This is perfect, Chrissie," Maggie told her, looking through the gap. "Yes," Chrissie said thoughtfully, looking at everything. "I think you're right. We can hit them from here and the trees will act as cover for return fire. If we egress that way," she pointed to the southwest; "the bulk of the hill will protect us. As long as Brett's there to pick us up, we'll be able to make it to the LZ before they get any troops on our flank." "So this is it then?" Mike asked. "This is it," she confirmed. "Everyone get a firing hole and let's start waiting." ------- Brett and Jason picked up Michelle and her squad and flew them out to their drop zone. Michelle's squad consisted of Leanette, Hector, and Doris Campbell. Their drop zone was a mile south of Chrissie's, along the same path that had been predicted as the Auburnite's avenue of advance. Once they were down and safe Brett, keeping low, zigged and zagged his way between hills until he was close to where Chrissie's squad was positioned. "Hatchling one," Jason said into the radio, "this it mother bird. Are you there?" The response was immediate. "Hatchling one in position," answered Chrissie's voice. "No sign of the wolves yet." "Copy that," Jason told her. "Mother bird is going to nest 3. Repeat, mother bird is going to nest 3. We'll check in with you there." Nest 3 was the code word for a small clearing just on the other side of a row of hills. It was well off the path that the Auburnites would take even under the most wild conditions imaginable but still within line of sight of Chrissie's team and therefore in radio contact. Brett flew there, keeping terrifyingly low to the ground, and landed in a small clearing that was relatively free of mud. Once the skids were on the ground he shut down the engine, letting the rotor wind down to a halt. "Mother bird to hatchling one," Jason said. "Can you hear us?" "This is hatchling one," Chrissie's slightly scratchy, though readable voice replied. "We're here." "We're in nest 3," Jason told her. "Awaiting further. We can be out of the nest in two minutes." "Copy that," Chrissie said. "Still no wolves on the horizon. We'll advise when there are." Jason then checked in with hatchling 2, also known as Michelle and her team, and confirmed a good radio contact with them as well. That done, Jason and Brett began the arduous task of waiting as well. ------- Sergeant Stinson was one of the squad leaders of Colby's platoon and his squad of ten had been chosen to have the honor of taking point on this glorious morning. They were about thirty yards in front of the rest of the formation, walking slowly though not terribly carefully along through the soggy ground. About two hundred yards to their left, the wall of mud and trees rose up nearly a hundred feet into the air. To their right were a series of small and large hills that made up a natural ridge. They marched in a loose wedge formation, their weapons slung low on their bellies, their packs heavy upon their backs. Private Winston, who had been recruited from Grass Valley on the last major raid, was the front man. Stinson himself, like any sergeant, was lingering near the rear of the squad. "God damn, this shit sucks," complained corporal Feathers, a twenty-five year old from Meadow Vista. "How long until we get back to the interstate?" "Late tomorrow if we're lucky," Stinson told him, adjusting his pack a little on his back. "Now stop talking in the ranks." "I got the fuckin' ranks right here," Feathers said, taking his hand off his weapon long enough to grab his crotch. "I could be in some puss right now, instead, I'm walking through the fuckin woods." "Nobody's happy to be here," Stinson said, "but..." "You got that shit right," interjected Private James from in front of him. "But you gotta do what you gotta do," Stinson finished tiredly. "Orders are orders and all that shit. So keep walking and stop bitchin." They walked on, putting one foot in front of the other. Nobody, the point man and the point sergeant included, paid much attention to their surroundings. After all, what could possibly be out there? ------- "I got 'em," Chrissie, looking through binoculars, reported, a touch of excitement in her voice. "Lead elements are coming over the ridge." "I got em too," reported Maggie, who was looking through the scope on her rifle. "In view," confirmed Maria, also looking through a telescopic scope. "Me too," said Mike. "Keep an eye out on the flanks," Chrissie directed as the first ten men came strolling over the hill. "Remember, if they've split up into two elements, we hold here with our heads down." The approaching targets were still more than half a mile away. Group by group of them followed the lead squad over the rise and down the trail until well over a hundred of them were visible. And still they kept coming. Heads would bob up and materialize into men carrying guns. "Jesus, look at them all," Maria said fearfully. It was one thing to hear about four hundred armed men coming at you and it was quite another to actually see them. "Keep chillin," Chrissie said, borrowing an expression from her brother. "Remember, we're not here to fight them, just to sting them a little at a time." As the lead elements came closer to gun range, Mike and Maria kept a close eye on the area to the northwest of their hill. It was very rugged over there but far from impassible. But again, as Brett had predicted, none of them chose to walk there. Every last man stayed in the two hundred yard corridor where the going was easiest. "I'm gonna report in," Chrissie said. "Keep an eye out to see if it looks like anyone is monitoring." She picked up her radio and keyed it. "Mother bird, this is hatchling one." "Go ahead, hatchling one," came Jason's voice. "Wolves are in view," she said. "They're heading for dinner. It looks like we're a go." There was a slight pause. "ETA?" Jason asked at last. "We'll feed them in about five minutes it looks like. We'll re-contact just prior to dinner." "Copy that, hatchling one, we're unfolding our wings right now. We'll be ready." She put her radio back down and gripped her rifle again. "Anything?" she asked her team. There were now well over three hundred Auburnites over the ridge. "As far as I can tell," Mike said, "nobody seemed to react when you were talking on the radio." Maggie and Maria both echoed this sentiment. "Okay," Chrissie said, her pulse beating rapidly with adrenaline. "Apparently they're not listening to a scanner. It looks like we're in business then. We're gonna hit the point elements first this time. A nice easy one for the warm-up attack. Let's assign targets. Mike, you get the point man. Remember, go for a body shot, don't worry about trying to blow his brains out. A wounded man is as good as a dead one." "I'm on the point," Mike agreed. "Maggie," Chrissie said next, "you hit the man behind and to the right of the point. He's your man even if he changes position before firing time." "I got him," she said, already scoping in on him. "Maria, the man to the left and behind the point is yours. Same drill. You keep on the man, not the position." "Got him," Maria said, her voice more than a little shaky. "Let's let them get under two hundred yards," Chrissie said. "Nobody fires until I give the word." The next five minutes passed slowly, almost agonizingly so. Four hands shook on four weapons as four minds contemplated what they were about to do. Would this work? Would they all die? Could Brett really get them out of there in time? Nobody talked. The only sound was the ebb and flow of rapid, adrenaline accelerated respiration and the incessant patter of raindrops. The lead squad of the Auburnites came closer and closer, step-by-step, seeming almost to shuffle along. Finally, at long last, the front men passed into the two hundred yard range. "Everyone on target?" Chrissie asked softly, her M-16 in her hands. She was sighting out over the men behind the front three. "I'm on," said Mike, who was centering his crosshairs on the chest of the man in front. "I'm on," said Maggie, who had her own crosshairs perfectly aligned. "Me too," said Maria. "I don't think I could miss him from here." "Okay," Chrissie breathed, her finger tightening on the trigger. "Let's do it. On the count of three. One... two... three." Three fingers depressed three triggers. The noise of the gunshots sounded as one, a shocking blast in the stillness of the surroundings. Even before the bullets hit their targets, Chrissie was firing lengthy bursts down after them. ------- For Stinson, it was like something out of a nightmare. Since he was not looking in the direction from which the shots had come and since sound travels slower than the bullets that were fired, his first indication that something was wrong came when his point man stopped in his tracks and fell forward. At nearly the same instant the two men immediately behind him both jerked in spasm. They too fell forward, landing facedown on the ground. "What the..." was all he had time for before two more men in the formation screamed and fell to the mud. One of them had a visible wound on his hip that was pouring blood down onto his pants. Things were suddenly whizzing through the air all around him, passing over his head, chipping wood off of the trees, plunking into the ground, and striking other men. Two more of them fell. Just as the sounds of the gunshots began to reach him, a hole in the back of Private James' head opened up as a bullet exited out of it. A fair amount of blood and brain matter splattered on Stinson's face and neck. James dropped lifelessly, joining the rest of the dead and wounded on the ground. "We're under fire!" someone, he knew not who, screamed in a panic. Stinson then saw the flashes of an automatic weapon firing at them from the hill in front of and to the right of them. "Fuck!" he screamed, the fact that they were under attack finally clearing his circuits. He threw himself to the ground, desperately trying to bring his weapon up into a firing position. "Get down! Get down!" he yelled. Corporal Feathers wasn't fast enough. Instead of getting down, he was trying to shoulder his rifle to shoot back. A burst of fire struck him solidly in the stomach and he crashed face-first into the mud. "Return fire!" Stinson yelled at the remaining members of his squad. "On the hillside at two o'clock! Return fire!" But by the time the first man was able to aim up there and unleash a round, the firing had stopped, almost as fast as it had started. ------- "Go, go, go!" Chrissie barked, crawling on her stomach to the downside of the hill. "Let's get the hell out of here!" Her troops didn't need any encouragement. They crawled along with her, their weapons on their back, just as the whizzing of bullets passing overhead reached them. It was only a few at first, but soon there were many. Chips of bark exploded upward as the logs they had been hiding behind were riddled. The sound of the shots reached them a moment later, again, only a few at first but quickly swelling up until it sounded like a shooting range in the midst of a tournament. "Mother bird," Chrissie yelled into the radio as she rolled over and began sliding down the hill on her butt, "this is hatchling one, the wolves have been fed and they're fucking-aye pissed off!" "Copy, hatchling," Jason's voice said. "We'll be at the nest when you get there!" ------- The noise was deafening as the survivors of Stinson's squad and the two squads behind it all fired up into the hillside at the point where the flashes had been seen. "Point, this is Bracken," screamed Stinson's radio. "What the fuck is going on up there?" As a squad leader, he had one of the automatic weapons. He fired another burst up into the hillside and then fished the radio out of his belt. "We're under fire!" he yelled. "We got hit from the hillside in front of us!" "Who the hell is firing at you?" Bracken's voice asked. "How the fuck should I know?" Stinson yelled back. "My whole fucking squad is down from it though!" "How many enemy?" Bracken asked. "I don't know, four or five of them. It was a fucking ambush! They fucking ambushed us!" "Are they still firing?" "No!" he yelled. "Then cease fire!" Bracken ordered. "Don't waste your ammo. We need to flank them!" Stinson looked up and yelled at his remaining men. "Cease fire, cease fire!" It took a lot longer than it should have. He had to scream it several more times before the sound of the gunshots finally echoed away. "Jesus fucking Christ," Stinson said, trying to calm himself. What the hell had happened? Less than a minute ago they were walking along, grumbling and bitching without a care in the world, and now he had at least six of his men shot up. ------- They ran. Once at the bottom of the hill they moved as fast as they humanly could over the muddy ground, their weapons slung over their backs, their breath dragging in and out of their lungs. From behind and to their right, the sound of gunshots seemed to reach a crescendo and then slowly, almost gradually, it tapered off. There were a few more isolated pops and then it was once again silent. Chrissie was in the lead. She ran across a small stretch of open ground and then rounded the base of another of the hills. On the backside of it, about a hundred yards away, was the most welcome sight she had ever seen: the idling helicopter. The doors had been thrown open and she could see Brett in the pilot's seat, behind the controls. "Safe your weapons," she panted to her squad, her words broken and out of breath. Nevertheless, they obeyed, all three of them activating their safeties. Chrissie dove in first, quickly scrambling to the far rear corner. She left streaks of mud and pine needles on the floor. Maggie followed her, scrambling to a position directly opposite. Mike and Maria, after one last check behind them, forced themselves in as well. Having to strain in the crowded confines, Mike shut the door, pulling on it until it latched. "Go!" Chrissie yelled to Brett. He took off as rapidly as his weight-load and his engine would allow, rising fifty feet off the ground and turning the nose to the southwest. He added forward speed and less than a minute after Chrissie's squad had climbed aboard, they were passing between the hills to the south and making their way out over the canyon. ------- "Covington, take your platoon around to the north side of that hill and secure it," Bracken ordered over his radio. He was behind a fallen log three hundred yards to the rear of the area where the fighting had taken place and was watching everything through a pair of binoculars. "On the way," Stu replied, his voice actually sounding excited, like he was having a good time. "Colby, you there?" he then asked the leader of the platoon that had been hit. "Right here, sir," Colby's rather shaky voice replied. "What are your casualties? Give me a report!" "My first squad is all shot up," he reported. "I have six dead and two wounded. The other three squads have moved forward to protective positions." "I understand," Bracken replied, feeling a little numb. Six dead? What had happened? Who had done this? "Hold in place," he told Colby. "I'm gonna move second platoon behind you and off to the left flank of that hill so we can get the fuckers who did this. Give them covering fire when they move in." "Ten-four," Colby said. It took nearly ten minutes to accomplish but it was a well-planned, well-executed attack on an enemy-held piece of high ground. Stu's platoon moved in from the right flank while second platoon moved in from the left flank. Colby's platoon fired up into the position to cover the initial advance. Soon Stu and two of his squads were standing atop the hill reporting back down to Bracken that it had been all for nothing. "They're gone, whoever they were," Stu told him over the radio. "I have nothing but some shell casings up here. Looks like 5.56 millimeter rounds. Thirty of them or so. There are also a few .30 caliber casings that look like they came from hunting rifles. They were hidden behind a bunch of fallen logs and probably fired from between them." "No bodies, no blood?" asked Bracken, still covered behind his own log. "Nope," Stu reported. "I have some fresh tracks heading down the hill to the southwest. I could try to follow them but I'm pretty sure I'll lose the trail at the bottom of the hill where it's not so muddy." "Go ahead and take your platoon down for a look anyway," Bracken reported. "Whoever did this has to be out there somewhere." "On the way," Stu reported. While Stu and his group of forty went tromping off into the woods, Bracken extricated himself from his place of cover and jogged up to where the action had taken place. Had Colby really said six dead? It didn't seem possible. The Placer County Militia had never had a soldier killed. There had been a few minor wounds at the Battle for Colfax and at the Battle for Meadow Vista, but no deaths. And now six at once? While they were still over thirty miles from the target? As soon as he reached the scene however, he saw that no exaggeration or miscommunication had taken place. Six of his men were lying dead on the ground in various places, some lying on their backs, some on their stomachs. Two of them had been hit in the head and brain matter was leaking onto the ground but the rest seemed to have succumbed to body shots. It was a shocking sight to Bracken and it was even more shocking to the other soldiers that were standing around looking as well. Most of them couldn't seem to take their eyes off of the bodies. Lieutenant Colby walked over and offered a salute. His face was drawn and scared. "They hit us without warning, sir," he said. "The first three men were down before we even heard the shots." "An ambush," Bracken said, looking up at the spot from which it had come. "Somebody decided to ambush us. God knows who or why but Covington's platoon is out after them right now. They'll pick them up." "Yeah," Colby said, although it was plain to see that he had his doubts about that. "What about the wounded?" Bracken asked next. "How bad are they?" Colby took a deep breath. "Colton is pretty bad," he said. "He took two in the chest. It looks like his lung is gone. I don't think he'll make it much longer." Bracken nodded sympathetically. "And what about the other one?" "It's Jankowski," Colby told him. "He took one in the stomach. It went in just below his belly button and out just above his butt. We got the bleeding under control." Bracken sighed. "Do you?" "Yes sir," Colby assured him. "We're gonna have to get him back to Auburn somehow. Maybe a litter? It might take a few days but..." "We can't do that," Bracken said softly. Colby looked over at him. "Sir?" "We're too far out," Bracken said. "He might make the trip back... maybe... but he'll just die of infection within a week. As you know our medical facilities are pretty primitive. I'm afraid that we're going to have to put him out of his misery." "But sir..." Colby said, appalled by what Bracken was suggesting. "He was wounded in battle. We can't just..." "We can and we will," Bracken told him. "Be discrete about it though. Don't..." "You want me to do it?" Colby asked, actually feeling ill now. "You're his commanding officer," Bracken said. "Have him roll over like you're checking the exit wound and then shoot him in the back of the head with your pistol. It's quick and painless and he'll never know what hit him." "Sir, I..." "Do it," Bracken said firmly. "It needs to be done." "But the men..." "I'll take care of the men once it's done. Now get over there and do it." He did it. ------- Michelle and her team were using a field of granite boulders for their firing position, each team member crouching behind one of the larger boulders and using the gaps to aim through. It was almost two hours after the first successful hit and run strike by Chrissie and her team and Michelle, though she was about as nervous as she'd ever been, was ready to get on the scoreboard as well. She didn't relish the thought of killing people, not in the least, but she was fully prepared to do it in defense of her town and her friends. "Lead elements coming into view," she said, watching the first few squads of men came walking around an outcropping of rock. One by one her team acknowledged this information. She then checked in with Brett on the radio to let him know that the attack was imminent. "Unfolding the wings," Jason assured her. "Okay guys," she told her team. "Remember what Brett said. We're gonna pound on the point positions for now until nobody down there wants to take point anymore. So let's assign targets, shall we?" ------- Colby's platoon was still on point although Stinson's squad, which pretty much didn't exist anymore, had necessarily been relieved at the head of the line. Stinson himself was walking near Sergeant Butano, whose squad did have the front duties. They had been underway from the location of the first attack for a little more than an hour now and they were still talking about it. "I can't believe he fuckin shot Jankowski," Stinson said for perhaps the tenth time. "I mean, I know he probably wasn't going to make it, but Jesus!" "I never seen any shit like that before," Butano, a native Auburnite agreed. "That was cold. Just stone fucking cold." "It could've been any of us. Any fuckin one. That's what the fuck you get for being part of this great militia? Shot in the head 'cause you get wounded?" "Yep." These sentiments of shock at the way that Jankowski had been treated were not isolated to those - like Stinson and Butano and their men - who had witnessed it. All up and down the formation nearly every man had heard what had happened and was soberly considering what it meant to him. Being wounded meant death? Just how bad of a wound did one have to suffer before being condemned? Would a simple arm wound be enough? Though everyone intellectually knew that Jankowski wouldn't have made it anyway, there was still a strong sense of wrongness to not even trying to help him. It went against every value - including God's law that Barnes and Bracken were always going on about - that these men had been raised with. "And what do you think about that shit Bracken was spouting about isolated stragglers?" Stinson asked next. "Why the fuck would a group of stragglers hit us from cover like that?" "And then disappear without a trace into the woods," Butano added. "I ain't buying it." That was another opinion from Bracken that was not receiving a whole lot of respect from the troops. Bracken - after the dead had been pulled to the side of the road and left there - had assured everyone that some fringe group of comet survivors, probably only four or five strong, had been the ones to attack them. There was no other explanation that made sense, he proclaimed. Except most of the men thought that there was another explanation that made sense. "That was an ambush by the Garden Hill people," Stinson said, articulating what everyone seemed to instinctively know. "What else could it have been?" "Fuckin aye right," Butano said. "I'll bet they used that fucking chopper to drop a hit team in front of us and then picked them up again after the ambush." "How would they know we're coming though?" asked Corporal Rivers, who was marching in front of them. He wanted to believe Bracken. He wanted to but was having difficulty. "Did they just happen to notice us on one of their flights, or what?" "Those two bitches made it to Garden Hill," Stinson said. "That's the only way they would've known." "What?" Rivers said in disbelief. "You gotta be shittin. There ain't no way them two coulda walked all the way to Garden Hill. What would they have eaten? They didn't take no food with 'em." "How do you know they didn't take any food with them?" Stinson inquired. "We don't even know how the hell they got out, but somehow they did. If they were smart enough to get around our security, wouldn't you think they'd be smart enough to..." Before that thought could be completed, the point man suddenly gasped and fell forward. An instant later the two men nearest to him went down as well. Within a second of this, the air was once again filled with whizzing projectiles, flying pieces of bark, and the screams of men being struck by automatic weapons fire. ------- Michelle raked her fire back and forth, concentrated on the large group of men that had been marching just to the rear of the point men. She fired five to six round bursts - just enough to keep the barrel of the weapon from being forced too far upward. Their reaction down there was not very controlled. She saw men scrambling to get under cover, some running blindly into the woods, others falling under the barrage she was sending at them. Two men simply froze in place, neither getting down nor shooting back and they drew her fire as a magnet draws steel. She covered them with her sight and pulled the trigger, moving the barrel back and forth. Both of them dropped to the ground in a very graceless manner. Less than ten seconds after her riflemen had fired the first volley, just as the Auburnites below were starting to fire back, the chamber of her M-16 locked open after ejecting the last of her thirty-round clip. Bullets from return fire were now starting to plunk into the rocks around her and her group. "Let's go!" she shouted at them, shouldering her rifle and scrambling backwards. ------- "Covington!" Bracken screamed into his radio over the sound of the return gunfire. "Get your platoon around on that right flank! Get over there before they pull back again!" "On the way!" Stu's voice came back. "Colby," he screamed next. "Give me report!" Nothing in reply. Had Colby been hit? He hadn't been up near the front of his platoon had he? "Colby! Goddammit, are you there?" "Here, sir," Colby's voice answered up. "My second squad's been hit hard this time! I've got six men down!" "Rally the rest of your platoon now and get around on that left flank!" Bracken ordered. "Covington's moving around on the right. Box those fuckers in!" "But, sir," Colby returned. "My wounded!" "Fuck your wounded!" Bracken yelled, not noticing the glares of those men around him at these words. "Get your platoon over there and get the motherfuckers who are doing this! Do it now!" "Jesus fucking Christ," Colby swore to himself as he pocketed his radio. He stood up and yelled for his sergeants. "Get everyone around to the left flank of the hill right now," he ordered. He had to repeat himself several times before they actually did it. The two pursuit platoons weren't even close to catching Michelle and the others. There was simply too much ground between their stepping-off point and the back side of the hill from which they'd fired. There were too many obstacles for the militia to go over or around, too many potential trails that their quarry might have taken. By the time the two platoons met on the far side of that hill, Michelle and her squad were already climbing into the helicopter on the far side of the next hill. But all was not for nothing this time. Though they were not fast enough to catch them, they were fast enough to see the helicopter buzzing away to the south as it made good it's escape from the area. Stu's lead squad saw it plainly and even popped a few rounds at it despite the fact that it was much to far away to be hit. "Well," Stu said, watching as the small aircraft disappeared over the next set of hills. "It seems that the isolated stragglers theory is all blown to shit, ain't it?" He reported this information to Bracken who replied to it calmly but with an obvious strain to his voice. Stu understood. The spotting of the helicopter changed things. No longer could they delude themselves that they were embarking on a surprise attack upon Garden Hill, that they were going to fall upon an unaware enemy in ten days who would then give up without a fight. Garden Hill not only knew they were coming, they were bringing the fight to the enemy. Stu led his platoon up to the top of the hill on general principals. Once up there they found the signature of the ambush teams: a pile of 5.56 millimeter shell casings and a few isolated .30 caliber casings. The smell of burned gunpowder was still in the air up there. As they were looking this over they heard the sound of single gunshots coming from below as the wounded from the latest attack were "put out of their misery". ------- The Placer County Militia learned quickly as that day wound onward. They learned to fear narrow corridors in the trail, especially corridors that were ringed with hills. They spread out and marched more slowly. They kept their weapons at ready as they walked and their eyes on the landscape. And still they were hit by ambushes four more times before the sun went down. Their reactions were quicker with each attack. The soldiers learned to dive to the ground and find cover the moment the bullets started rolling in. By the third attack, everyone was down and returning fire almost before the sounds of the first gunshots reached them. But they could not prevent or predict the attacks because they did not come at any time intervals that could be plotted. And because of this they could not prevent the first two or three casualties of each attack from occurring. The first warning of an attack would be the dropping of the point man and the two men nearest him. There was not even the hope that you would be merely wounded instead of killed. A wound that was more serious than a scratch was a death sentence, as had already been proven. This led to a near mutiny when the sergeant in charge of the point squad would try to assign someone to the front position. Men flat out refused the order to take up point, even if the face of Bracken's threats to have them shot on the spot. "What the fuck's the difference if you do it or they do it?" one private screamed hysterically at Bracken. "I'm still a dead motherfucker if I'm in the front." Bracken didn't shoot him or anyone else that refused the order to take point. Instead, he came to a compromise of sorts. He eliminated the point position entirely. After the third attack he had the entire front squad spread out in a line with no one man out in front. This was not as effective as far as keeping an eye out to the front went, but it did give those in the first squad the slight sense that they would not be singled out. By day's end the final tally of casualties for the militia was eleven killed outright and nine wounded. Of those nine wounded however, seven had to be "put out of their misery" by their commanding lieutenant. As the militia made camp that night they were a group that was very much on edge. "Is this shit gonna happen all the way to Garden Hill?" a lowly corporal dared to demand of Bracken during dinner break. "Are they gonna kill eighteen motherfuckin people every Goddamn day?" Bracken chose not to be offended by the insolent tone or the insubordination. Instead he gave his humble opinion. "There's no way they can keep up this pace," he said. "They have to be leap-frogging at least two teams just to do what they've done today. I think this is as bad as it's going to get. They'll try this a few more times and eventually we'll get them. I guarantee it." And strangely enough, even though nothing else that he had opined that first horrible day had come true, the men locked onto this thought. They bedded down that night confidant that the worst had passed. ------- On the Garden Hill side of the equation, the troops that were performing these attacks were elated. Not even the quickening reactions of their prey with each successive ambush daunted their rising spirits. They suffered no casualties as a result of their attacks and in fact nothing that could even be considered a close call. They had learned as well. They picked their positions carefully and opened fire from the two hundred yard range. As long as they did not "get greedy" as Brett would have said, they found that they could easily jog back to the safety of the helicopter long before any Auburnites could approach their positions. They started to feel almost invincible. Just before sunset, after his second fuel stop of the day, Brett flew the two teams back to Garden Hill for a hero's welcome by the township. Already the word had been passed that some serious ass kicking had gone on. "All right, Jase," Brett said wearily as he shut down the engine. "The hit squads are done for the day but our work is just begun. Let's give this aircraft a once over and then catch a few hours of shut-eye, shall we? We'll lift off again at 10:00 PM sharp." "Are we gonna use the nape tonight?" Jason asked, excited at the thought. They had done one practice run with it and it had worked like a dream. "Not tonight," Brett told him. "Remember, we want to introduce our surprises to them one step at a time. We want them to think that things can't possibly get any worse and then show them that they can. These are going to be some fucked-up individuals by the time they get here." "Good," Jason said. "Maybe they'll decide not to come at all." ------- Before climbing into an empty cot on the top floor of the community center, Brett gave a briefing to his two ambush teams about their next day's mission. This took place in the weapons storage room while the eight troopers had been disassembling and thoroughly cleaning their weapons. "You can already see that you're having a detrimental effect on them," he said, sipping out of a warm can of diet cola. "As you've pointed out in the debriefing, they no longer keep a single point man on duty and they've spread out their formation considerably. They've changed their tactics a little to adapt to the situation and now we're going to change our tactic as well." He stood up and picked up a pointer, which he carried over to his large map. "Now this," he said, pointing to the area near the southern tip of the mudfall that the Auburnites were currently maneuvering around, "is where we're going to hit next. As you can see, this is premium ambush ground as it has hundreds of small hills overlooking a fairly narrow marching corridor. There's nothing different about that. Only now, instead of hitting the lead elements, you're going to hit the middle of the formation." "Hit the middle of the formation?" Maggie asked doubtfully. "But won't that give them troops on both of our flanks to surround us with?" "It will," Brett agreed, "but as you found over the course of the day, you have the advantage when it comes to making your getaway. You're already gone by the time they start moving their troops to intercept. I'm confident that you can still get clear of the area before they can rally after you as long as you stick to doctrine and make a quick, stinging attack. The purpose this will serve is to destroy the feeling of safety that those troops not in the front are currently enjoying. After your attack you will proceed directly to the rear and I will pick you up there." "Brett," Chrissie said, "that's still quite a close margin for error. What if - God forbid - one of us is wounded? Or what if someone twists their ankle on the way out? If we're slowed up even a little, then we'll be forced to either leave our wounded behind or get captured." Brett smiled. "I understand that," he said. "And that's why I'm going to drop you a little bit earlier than normal and let you make a few preparations to slow your pursuers down a bit." "Preparations?" "Preparations," Brett said. He then explained what he meant. "Steve will be in to show you just how you're going to set these things up. Now we only have a limited number of them, so use them wisely, but use them." ------- "How do you deal with it, Chrissie?" Maggie asked her squad leader about an hour after the briefing had ended. "Killing people I mean." They were in the community bathing room, both of them stripped down to their bare skin, washing their filthy bodies with washrags and cold water from the tub. Both were shivering lightly, their flesh a series of goose pimples from the chilly air, but all the same the desire to get the mud from their bodies overrode their desire to be warm. "I don't look at them as people," Chrissie told her. "I mean, deep down inside, I know they are, but I don't look at them that way, I just can't. They're targets for me to take down. They're things that need to be destroyed in order to keep me from being destroyed. That's how I justify killing them." Maggie nodded doubtfully, not saying anything. She dipped her washrag and scrubbed a little at a stubborn stain near her upper thigh. "Are you feeling guilty for it?" Chrissie asked gently. "Well..." she said, hesitating, "in a way." "In a way?" "I enjoyed killing those people," she said. "I liked it. When I was looking through that scope today and saw those bullets hitting those fuckers, I liked it. That's what I feel guilty about - liking killing someone. I wonder if it means that I'm some sort of... you know?" "Psycho?" Chrissie offered, scrubbing at the slight swelling of her pregnant stomach. How had dirt managed to get there? "Yes," Maggie admitted. "It scares me that I might... well... want to keep doing it after all this is over." "You won't," Chrissie assured her. "I think you're just justifying what we have to do in your mind. We weren't raised to kill people, Mags. And now that we have to do it we have to come up with some sort of way to... what's the word I'm looking for?" "Rationalize it?" "Right," Chrissie said with a smile. "You have to rationalize it." Maggie nodded, feeling a little better. "There's something else that it does," she said. "What's that?" She blushed. "Oh... never mind. It's nothing." "What?" Chrissie asked, suspecting what her friend was talking about. "You can tell me." Maggie giggled a little nervously. "Well... this is embarrassing but... to tell you the truth... it makes me... well..." Chrissie smiled knowingly. "Horny?" she suggested. Maggie let out a laugh, blushing deeper. "Yes," she admitted. "I know it's strange and it probably means I'm deranged, but I've never been so horny in all my life. Why would killing people do that to me?" "It's not killing people that does it," Chrissie told her. "It's the combat itself. It's happened every time I've been in a gunfight, starting with the first time Brett, Jason, and I were attacked on the trail before we even got here. Brett told me that it's a normal reaction to surviving a life-threatening situation." "Really?" she said, relieved at the thought that what she was going through might be normal. "Oh God yes," Chrissie said. "Didn't you get it after we had the gunfight with those hunter assholes before? I boffed the living shit out of Brett after that. That was the day we made up from the fight we'd had over Mitsy. And oh boy did we make up. I would've jumped him tonight as well but he's upstairs trying to get some sleep for his night mission." "Now that you mention it," Maggie said with a giggle, "I was rather randy after that. Only I didn't have anyone to... you know. I do seem to remember going home and having a little session with my best friend that night though." "Your best friend?" Chrissie asked, not getting her. Maggie smiled. "You have a man so you wouldn't know about it," she said. "My long, cylindrical best friend that runs off of batteries." Now it was Chrissie's turn to blush. "I see," she said. "May you never have to rely on such a friend all the time," Maggie told her. "So what I'm getting out of this conversation is that I shouldn't feel guilty about going home right now and breaking him out of the drawer. I think he's going to earn his batteries tonight." Chrissie giggled, still blushing and a little embarrassed, but also suffering greatly from the affliction that she had just described. She found herself looking at Maggie's nude body, at the graceful curves of her form. Maggie, a natural blonde like herself, did not have a natural set of breasts on her. They were the size of softballs and stood out firmly from her chest, a clear valley between them. Her surgeon had done a good job of it. There were no scars visible. Maggie's nipples were standing firmly erect, poking out into the moist, chilly air. Whether it was from the arousal she had been speaking of or from the cold - or perhaps a combination of both - Chrissie did not know. She did know that she had a powerful urge to touch those breasts however. Since she and Michelle had begun sharing certain marital liberties with each other, Chrissie had discovered a latent attraction for members of her own sex. "Well," Chrissie said, taking a step closer to her, close enough to invade the envelope of Maggie's personal space, "I'm not sure you should do that. We are in the midst of a battery shortage here you know." "What?" Maggie said a little uncomfortable, wanting to take a step backward but prevented from this by the bathtub behind her. "What I mean," Chrissie said, stepping even closer, so that the tips of her own breasts were only inches away from Maggie's, "is that if there's another way to take care of these things, shouldn't we conserve our supplies?" "Uh... uh... another way?" Maggie gasped, now backed completely up against the tub. She could feel the cold porcelain against the backs of her thighs. What was Chrissie doing? She wasn't really suggesting... that, was she? "Let me help you, Mags," Chrissie said, reaching out and putting her hands on those breasts. They felt firm to the touch, almost rubbery. Not as nice as Michelle's natural boobs, but not bad either. "Chrissie," Maggie protested shakily, trying not to notice how nice it felt to have someone touching her body - it had been so long, "Maybe I've given you the wrong impression about me, but..." "Shhh," Chrissie said, her mind spinning with impulsive lust now. She did not consider what she was doing to be cheating on her husband, although had it been Brett doing what she was, she would've been furious. She just needed some relief and here, in front of her, was someone who could maybe provide it for her. That wasn't so bad, was it? It wasn't like she was trying this with another man. She lowered her head and took Maggie's nipple into her mouth, sucking it and tonguing it. "Chrissie, oh God, don't do this to me," Maggie cried, feeling tingles running through her body at the feel of a pair of lips on her nipple. The fact that they were a girl's lips seemed to add a perverse thrill to the experience. Chrissie didn't listen. The fact that Maggie had not physically pushed her away in disgust spoke volumes. She switched her mouth to the other breast and began suckling it as well. Her hands slid down Maggie's stomach and into her thick nest of curly blonde hair. Her fingers sought out and quickly found the target she was after. Maggie's lips were already swollen and wet, ready for penetration. Chrissie provided this. She slid her middle finger up into her friend's body, pushing and pulling it in and out until the juices began to drip onto her hand. "Oh God," Maggie moaned, her hips involuntarily pushing against the invading hand. She knew what she was doing was wrong, was a perversion, but it felt so good. She couldn't bring herself to stop her. Instead, she found her hands resting on Chrissie's bare back, actually encouraging her, actually pulling her closer. "Isn't this better than a dildo?" Chrissie whispered, adding another finger to Maggie's wet pussy and increasing the force of her penetrations. She freed her mouth from the nipple and moved it up to Maggie's neck instead. She began to kiss and suck the soft flesh, giving little bites here and there, tasting the salt, smelling the soap. "Yes," Maggie heard herself saying. "Oh yes, Chrissie, but..." "No buts," Chrissie whispered, putting her lips against Maggie's and kissing her. Maggie resisted at first until Chrissie began to lick sensuously at her mouth with her tongue. Gradually Maggie allowed her mouth to open and her own tongue to peek out. The tips touched, just for an instant at first and then for a long, swirling session of saliva exchange. Maggie gave in, pulling Chrissie even tighter against her, feeling the touch of their breasts in intimate contact. She never would have thought that the feel of another woman against her would be so... so... sexy, so soft. They kissed and sucked each other's tongues, Maggie's hands straying down and experimenting with the exploration of Chrissie's pregnancy swollen breasts. Chrissie, meanwhile, continued to slide her two fingers in and out of Maggie's body, angling her thumb upward to caress the swollen clit with each stroke. "Oh, Chrissie," Maggie breathed when the kiss broke for a moment, "that feels so good. It's been too long since anyone's touched me there." Chrissie smiled, giving her upper lip a long, teasing suck. "You ain't felt nothing yet," she said, pulling her hand free. "Sit on the edge of the tub." "What?" Maggie groaned, distressed at the sudden loss of sensation just as she was starting to feel the approach of orgasm. "Do it," Chrissie commanded, taking a half step back. "What are you going to do?" she asked, her nervousness returning. "I think you know what I'm going to do," Chrissie said. "Now sit on the tub." Trembling with desire, fear, and guilt, Maggie sat on the edge of the tub. She let her long, sexy legs fall apart, opening herself. Slowly Chrissie sank to her knees on the ground before her, bringing her face right to the level of Maggie's crotch. Her pubic hair was very thick, especially for a blonde, but her lips were swollen and open, an angry red in color. "I've never done anything like this before," Maggie said weakly, shivering at the look of lust in her young friend's eyes. "That's okay," Chrissie whispered to her. "I have." She leaned forward and put her lips against Maggie's inviting sex. She gave no build-up or teasing strokes first. Things had already gone beyond that. She simply started licking her, running her tongue up and down, inhaling the aroma, tasting the tartness of her juices. "Ooooh," Maggie squealed as she felt the tongue upon her most sensitive parts. She jumped a little, nearly falling backward into the tub at the sheer pleasure of the sensation. She had been licked several times in her life - mostly by her late husband -but never had she felt anything like this. Never had she dreamed it could feel this good. Chrissie lapped her up and down and drove her tongue in and out like a small penis. She rubbed against her throbbing clit with her nose. She seemed to revel in the taste and smell of her pussy. "Mmmmm," Chrissie moaned as she captured that clit between her lips and began to suck on it. She couldn't wait to feel Maggie come in her mouth. The sucking on her clit drove Maggie wild. She began to gyrate up and down, back and forth, making it difficult for Chrissie to keep her mouth where it belonged. She grabbed her legs by the thighs and held them tightly to keep her in one place. It was all over in less than a minute from that point. Maggie felt it building in her stomach and then spreading through her entire being. She screamed into the air as she peaked. When Chrissie finally raised her head out of her crotch she was a panting, sweaty mess. "Feel better?" Chrissie asked, standing up and kissing her lightly on the lips. "Yes," Maggie sighed, already starting to feel guilt at what she had just done. "Now I need a little relief," she said, kissing her again, touching her breasts again. "Chrissie," she said, "I don't think I can... I mean, I'm not really..." "It's okay," Chrissie told her. "It takes a while to work up to that. I know. Just give me your fingers." "What?" "Your fingers," she repeated, taking her left hand. "Put them inside of me. I'll do the rest." Maggie felt her hand being put down against Chrissie's dripping sex. The lips were slippery against her fingers. "Put them in," Chrissie moaned, feeling the first touch. "Please?" Maggie slid first one and then two fingers into that tightness, again feeling a strange sense of excitement and forbiddeness at the act. She felt her clutching at them. "Yes," Chrissie said, starting to gyrate her hips against them. "Now kiss me." "Huh?" "Kiss me while I fuck your hand," she said. They kissed, their tongues once more intertwining and Chrissie thrust her body against Maggie's hand, pushing and pulling the digits in and out of her body. She ground her clit against the heel of her palm, pushing hard enough to cause abrasions to her skin from the friction. Soon she was panting into Maggie's mouth as the sensation of relief began to course through her. ------- "Did you get some sleep?" Brett asked Jason as he flew more than two thousand feet above Interstate 80 that night. It was just after 10:00 PM and they were five minutes into their flight. "I noticed you left the community center sometime after I sacked out." "I uh... had some things to take care of at home," Jason said vaguely. "I got about an hour or so though." "Uh huh," Brett said knowingly. He had a pretty good idea what Jason's "things to take care of at home" had been. His young companion had not had a chance to bathe yet and the smell of sexual musk was radiating off of him quite strongly. "It must be nice to be fifteen." "Well, you know how it is," he said, a little embarrassed. "Oh believe me, I do. I would've had some things to take care of at home as well if I weren't so damn tired. And be sure to thank your wives for that triple strength coffee they made for us. I don't think I would've been able to fly if it wasn't for that." "I'll let them know," he said. "Coming up on a left curve, about thirty degrees." "Thirty degrees left," Brett repeated. "Banking." The flight out to the target area did not take very long. Since he knew the exact location of the enemy formation - or at least within a kilometer or so - Brett did not have to bother with creeping forward at twenty to thirty knots and keeping an eye out for them. Instead, he blasted right along at nearly sixty knots of forward airspeed - about as fast as he dared go under the blind conditions he was flying under - and soon he was over the top of the mudfall the Auburnites were currently negotiating around. His altitude was as high as he dared go without risking icing problems. This served the duel purpose of giving Jason a wider field of view and keeping their engine noise from alerting the enemy if they happened to get too close to them. Once at the mudfall they continued on for another mile and a half and then turned to the south. Now Brett slowed his airspeed up to creeping range as he homed in on the enemy camp. Jason kept him advised of the proper route with the FLIR scope. It was not a difficult task for the young man to do. After all of the drop-off and pick-up runs that they had made over the course of the day, he damn near had the landscape memorized. "Okay," he told Brett after about five minutes of southward flight, "we're coming up on the area where we last saw them. Slow up a little more and maintain course." "Slowing up," Brett said, doing so, "and maintaining heading of 174." They continued on for another minute or so before Jason began to spot the glow of warm bodies on his scope. "I'm starting to pick 'em up now," he said. "There's a cluster of them at eleven o'clock, about a mile or so out." "Eleven o'clock," Brett repeated. "Should I edge out to the west a little more?" "Yeah," Jason said. "Turn about twenty degrees right and slow up some more. I'll find the thickest concentration of them and we'll hit there." "Sounds like a plan," Brett told him. Jason had him make two passes about a mile to the west of the camped out Auburnites just so he could get a good idea of their layout. Like the previous night, they were mostly bunched together in several tight groups, arranged probably by squads and platoons. There were a few guards walking back and forth on both ends and in the middle of the group. Several of the guards could be seen to be smoking - which made bright flares on the display. Jason reported all of this verbally to Brett as he spotted it and filmed all of it with the videotape installed in the FLIR system. "So what do you think?" Brett asked after the second pass. "You ready to wake them up a little?" Jason sighed, having a sudden attack of nerves now that the time had come. He fought it down, successfully for the most part. "I'm ready." "Lead me in." Jason had him circle way around, almost out over the canyon itself, and then double back from the south, so that he was flying over the mudfall itself. He then had him reduce altitude to less than eight hundred feet above the surface of the mud. When they were directly across from the largest concentration of sleeping bagged glows on the display, he had him turn back to the west and hover. "Come off target ninety degrees to the left," Jason directed him as he put a magazine into the mounted M-16 and jacked the first round into the chamber. "Climb up another two hundred feet or so and maintain a due south heading. There's no obstacles higher than that between here and the canyon." "Gotcha," Brett said, watching his instruments carefully. "I'm ready when you are." "Okay," Jason said, gripping the weapon and adjusting it on its mount. "Start the firing run." As the helicopter moved forward at twenty knots, Jason watched his display. The rows of sleeping men didn't stir, nor did the team of guards beyond them seem to raise any sort of alarm. He watched them get bigger and bigger on the display as they grew closer. "Almost there," he said slowly. "Almost there... in range!" He opened fire, watching the tracers arc out on the display. The first burst slammed into the sleeping soldiers almost perfectly in the middle of their group. He began to rake his fire back and forth across them. He knew he was scoring hits upon them but, as had happened with the first daylight attack, their reactions were pitifully slow. His clip was completely empty and Brett was turning off target before any of the sleeping figures that had not been hit started to get up. A few shots came their way from the guards on duty but they were not even close to being on target. "Yes!" Jason said triumphantly, actually pumping his fist in excitement. "Good run. No wasted rounds at all. That was almost too fucking easy!" "Good job," Brett said, elated, imagining the confusion and fear that had just been sewn down below. He flew out to the south and was soon clear of the area. "How about a follow-up run from the south?" Jason asked. "Set it up," Brett told him. "We have three more clips don't we?" ------- To say that the attack had created confusion below was the equivalent of saying that World War II had been a minor skirmish. Screams and curses filled the air as men leapt to their feet and pulled up their weapons, looking for the unseen enemy that had struck them without warning out of the darkness. Several groups imagined that they saw something off to the east and opened fire, sending hails of bullets out into the empty sky. Flashlights came on all up and down the ranks as men peered into the forest and up into the sky, trying to figure out just what the hell had happened. The attack had only lasted six or seven seconds and while almost everyone had heard the chatter of an automatic weapon firing, only those immediately near the impacting rounds had actually seen anything. What they had seen was a haunting vision of red tracers slamming down around them from above. Before they'd had a chance to even bring their weapons to bear, the mysterious attacker was gone. "Everybody, form up!" Bracken screamed, not bothering to use his radio. "Defensive positions! Now!" He himself did not see the attack occur. He had been sound asleep, resting after this trying day, when the screams and the sounds of distant gunfire had awakened him. "Turn those fucking lights off!" Stu ordered those around him. Unlike Bracken, he had been close enough to see the attack and he had a pretty good idea of what had happened. "You're giving them a Goddamn reference point!" Everyone scrambled around in the darkness, trying to find some sort of cover or concealment, many of them running into each other blindly. One young private, who had no idea what was going on except that they had been attacked again, heard the noise of another soldier - one of the guards - running through the trees in front of him. Acting on instinct he raised his semi-automatic AK-47 and began to fire, killing his companion. This triggered return fire from another group of Auburnites that had taken cover in the woods, one of whom had an automatic weapon. The young private was blasted with more than ten rounds. "Goddammit, cease fire!" Stu yelled at the top of his lungs as he saw nightmare flashes of their own soldiers shooting each other in the flashbulb-like strobe effect of the muzzleflashes. "You're shooting at each other, you fucking idiots!" It was a good three or four minutes before everyone calmed down enough to stay in one place and allow some semblance of order to return to the group. Bracken and Stu found each other and Stu was finally able to explain what had happened. "They hit us from the air with the helicopter," he said. "They must have an automatic weapon mounted on it." "Are you sure?" Bracken demanded. "I fuckin' saw it!" Stu told him. "Those tracers came from the west and from the air. They have a Goddamn gunship that they're hitting us with!" "How?" Bracken demanded. "How the hell do they know where we're at?" "It's a highway patrol helicopter," Stu said, feeling stupid for not realizing this before. "I bet it's got an infrared camera on it and that's what they're using to home in on us. Jesus, we need to take that chopper out! They're killing us with that fucking thing." And killing was not an exaggeration. A check of the area where the rounds had impacted - it wasn't hard to find since screams of pain were emanating from it - revealed four soldiers dead in their sleeping bags and three more wounded. Two of the wounded were serious enough that they would have to be put out of their misery. Just as everyone's heart rate began to return to normal, just as everyone started to stir around and regroup, the next attack came. From the south of them the stream of tracers came blasting in, mowing through the people that were standing near the front. More screams filled the air and every last person instinctively dove to the ground. This time more than three hundred people returned fire at the flashing weapon from which the tracers had originated but by the time the first round was fired back, the tracers had stopped and the helicopter was once again invisible. ------- Brett and Jason made one more attack fifteen minutes later, coming in from the north this time. The reaction by the Auburnites below was a little faster on this run, prompting Brett to pull off target before Jason's entire clip had been fired. No bullets struck the helicopter. "Let's head back," Brett said as he climbed back up to high altitude. "I think we've got our message through and there's no sense pushing our luck." "I don't imagine they're going to sleep very well after that," Jason said, pulling the magazine out of his weapon. "Nope," Brett agreed, "I don't imagine they will. They might start to drift off around 4:00 AM or so just from sheer exhaustion though. So what do you say we get up at 3:30 and hit them again?" "I'm up for it," he said with a grin. They flew on into the night and landed safely twenty minutes later. ------- Chapter 16 "You did what?" Michelle asked her co-wife, unsure if she had heard her correctly. Chrissie looked shamefaced. "I seduced Maggie last night," she repeated. "I don't know what came over me. We were washing up together and we were naked and we'd been talking about... you know... how combat makes you horny and all and... well... I kept looking at her and before I knew it..." "Yeah?" Michelle prompted, her eyes wide. "Before I knew what was happening, I was touching her, and kissing her, and then... well... doing other things to her." "Other things?" "I ate her," she admitted, dropping her eyes to the ground. "You... ate her?" Chrissie nodded. "Yes," she whispered. "And then I made her get me off with her fingers." "Jesus," Michelle said, unsure what else to say. It was 6:45 AM, just before first light, and the teams had just geared up for the day's harassment missions. Chrissie had pulled Michelle aside after everyone was equipped, obstinately to talk to her about some tactical matter but in reality wanting to confess her sin of the night before. She had been wracked with guilt all night over what she had done, spending most of it tossing and turning instead of getting needed sleep. Though she had justified her actions in her mind when they were occurring, her justifications had not held up very well afterward. Michelle pondered these facts carefully for a few moments, setting her M-16 down on the locker room bench in the weapons room to free up her hands. She took Chrissie into her arms and hugged her comfortingly, pulling her against her. Chrissie, who's own weapon was already sitting down, returned the embrace gratefully. "I cheated on you guys," she said pitifully. "I'm so sorry." "Shhh," Michelle soothed, stroking her hair with her fingers. "It's all right. Believe it or not, I'm not really that offended. I'm more surprised than anything." "But Brett..." "I don't think he would be that offended either," Michelle said. "It may be a double standard and sexist and all that, but its simple reality. Having a sexual encounter on the side with another woman is not the same as having one with a man. Not in the man's eyes and usually not in the woman's either." "But I betrayed the vows we made," she said. Michelle smiled. "We vowed to honor and respect each other," she said. "We vowed to be loyal to each other. We never actually vowed not to eat out another woman." "What?" Chrissie said. "Well, with Brett, that was kind of implied and with us, it was kind of implied that we not take other men, but we did not actually vow that part. Remember, we discussed the possibility that other women might come into the relationship in the future?" "Well, yes... but... I thought that... well... I mean..." "You didn't think that you would be the one to bring one in, did you?" Michelle asked. "No. But what are you saying? Are you saying that Maggie should be part of our... our marriage now?" "Not necessarily," she said, "but it's something that should be considered, isn't it? I like Maggie well enough and I know that she's lonely. I've also seen Brett giving her the eye on occasion as well. Now adding a member to a marriage is not something that should just be leapt into, but... it's something to think about." Chrissie shook her head a little, overwhelmed. "Wow," she whispered. "This is just too much." "Did Maggie like what you did to her?" Michelle asked. "She was reluctant at first. But she didn't stop me or even push me away." "Did she come?" Chrissie smiled. "Oh yes. You've taught me well. She damn near beat me to death when she came." Michelle giggled, giving her co-wife a last pat and then releasing her. She gave her a quick peck on the lips, a kiss that was just a little bit more than sisterly. "Maybe we'll all sit down with Brett sometime soon and have a talk about all of this. For now, I wouldn't let it stress you. We have plenty of other things on the plate that should be stressing you without adding that to the mix. How's Maggie taking it this morning? Will you be able to work together out there?" "She hasn't said much to me yet, but I haven't sensed any hostility or anything. I think she's confused. The same way I was the first time you and I did that." "Did what?" Michelle said, wanting her to say it. "Made love," Chrissie said, giving her another kiss, a longer one. "She'll work it out," Michelle said, feeling her face flush a little at the kiss. "In the meantime, why don't we go assemble? We have some asses to kick this morning, don't we?" "Yep. Let's go kick 'em." ------- The Placer County Militia soldiers were very slow stirring out of their sleeping bags that morning to eat their meager breakfast and resume their march. To the very last man they were all living on less than two hours of broken sleep, much of which had been plagued by nightmares of the events that had befallen them. Brett and Jason's follow-up air attack at 5:00 AM - while it had only cost three lives - had had the desired effect of shattering the morale once more just when they had started to think that things had slacked off. Bracken, with an untidy growth of stubble on his face and with dark circles under his eyes, gathered up his platoon commanders for a conference just before move out. "We need to stop being so fucking predictable for them," he said, puffing on his third cigarette of the daylight hours. "That's why they're ravaging us so much. We're marching right along a corridor where they know exactly where we are and where they have time to plant their forces in our path. That shit needs to stop." "How?" Colby, who was perhaps the most rattled of all the lieutenants, wanted to know. "We need to spread out," Bracken said. "Instead of marching in a single-file column, we need to expand out to the sides. We're going to divide into two wide columns and we're going to march on both sides of those hills as we go and we need to keep plenty of space between men. Don't let one fucking burst from that M-16 they have take down a whole group." "Navigation will be harder," Stu, puffing a cigarette of his own, said. "Our maps of this area aren't worth a shit." "We have compasses," Bracken said. "And we've marched through this area in the past. It'll slow us down, that's true, but it'll also keep them from picking us off as easily." Stu nodded, seeing the wisdom of this thought. "And there's another thing," Bracken added. "This'll be a little harder for the men. Our ammunition usage needs to decrease. At the rate we're firing off our rounds, we're not gonna have enough bullets for the main attack when we get there. Tell your men that they are not to return fire when under attack unless they know exactly what they're shooting at. If they didn't see the flashes from the attack, don't shoot. We can't afford it." Nobody disagreed with this statement of course - it only made sense - but everyone knew it was a decree that was going to be very difficult to enforce. Telling soldiers - especially conscripts who did not particularly believe in what they were doing - not to shoot when they were being attacked was akin to telling them not to breathe. "And finally," Bracken said, "when we are attacked, we need to react faster in pursuit of the attackers. If we can kill one of these squads before they can get away, I believe we will go a long way towards ending this thing. Even better would be the capture or destruction of that helicopter - capture being preferable of course. So this is what we're going to do. When the attacks come, those soldiers that are immediately in the fire zone need to hit the ground and return fire. Everyone else needs to stay on their fucking feet and move as quickly as possible towards the enemy position to surround it. If your platoon is to the rear of the attack, you fucking run your men there. And I mean run. Run them as fast as you can and get around on the flanks of these fuckers. They're hitting us from two hundred yards or so. If we move fast enough, we can catch them. Is everyone clear on this?" Everyone was clear. "All right," Bracken said. "Brief your men and we'll move out in twenty minutes. Colby, Covington, your platoons will be on the points of both columns." ------- Michelle's team, slated for first attack this morning, had been atop of their hill for well over two hours now and still there was no sign of the approaching enemy. Part of that long delay was that they had been placed a little further south of the enemy than had been standard the previous day. The reason for this was so that they could plant a few of Steve Kensington's mines around the base of the hill and atop it, both to slow down their pursuers and to give them a little added surprise. But still, the Auburnites should have shown by now. Had they been slowed down that much by the previous day's attacks? Or was something else in the works? Michelle didn't know and her lack of knowledge made her antsy. The other members of her team - Leanette, Hector, and Doris Campbell - were similarly antsy with the lack of the enemy's appearance. To help ease this nervousness, the four members of the team made idle chitchat - their voices kept just loud enough to hear each other - about the way things had once been in the world. "Remember those stupid credit card offers?" Leanette asked with a smile, her rifle slung over her knees as her muddied face peered around a large tree trunk to the ground below. "Introductory rate of 5.6 percent! Credit line of five thousand dollars! They used to come in the mail every damn day." "I remember them," Doris said, shaking her head a little. "They got your name from those supposedly private credit reporting agencies and mailed them off to anyone who a good rating." "Yeah," Michelle said, peering through her binoculars to the emptiness below. "And after the three month introductory rate, the interest went up to freakin twenty-one percent." "That's the truth," Leanette said. "I got into so much trouble with those things. I did all the finances at home and I had like six of those things that were maxed out. Here I was, the wife of a man who made ninety thousand a year and I had us more than thirty thousand dollars into debt that he didn't even know we had. Every month I would have to shuffle everything around just to meet the minimum payments and it was getting so that the utility bills and the house payments were getting paid late just to cover it. I was a basket case worrying about when John was going to find out about it." "I wouldn't know about any of that," said Hector, the former landscaper. "If I cleared a thousand dollars a month it was a good month. My name never seemed to get on any of those mailing lists." "See, Hecky," Leanette, one of his wives, pointed out. "You don't know how lucky you were. It was hell being upper class. Absolute hell." "I know," he told her. "You were late paying me more than once, weren't you? Apparently the hired help was low on your list of priorities, right?" "Sorry, babe," she said. "You did do a fabulous job of trimming my bushes though. Still do in fact." Everyone had a laugh at this. "It's funny how important all of that was back then," Doris said. "Money I mean. How much you got, how much you would get next year, whether or not you'd be able to afford that new Mercedes so that the neighbors would know you were still successful. All of that just went right down the toilet when that comet came in." "Hopefully for good," Michelle said. "Things have been reduced to a much more basic need now; the need to survive. Now survival doesn't mean keeping the bank account in the black and the kids dressed in the right clothes so people won't talk. Now it means sniping at invading fascists who are trying to enslave us. All of this in just a few short months." "Who would've thought," Leanette said wistfully. "Someday, if we live through this, we'll tell our children that we used to be able to pick up the telephone and have a pizza at our house in thirty minutes and that we used to worry about things like the rise and fall of the NASDAQ and how it would affect our retirement account. They won't have any idea what we're talking about. They'll be worried about whether the next year's crop is going to feed everyone, whether or not the glacier forming on the mountain is going to crush us, whether or not our gene pool is wide enough to continue the species." "Like you said," Hector said, "we're down to basic survival now. In a way, maybe it's for the best for this fucked up species. You ever think of that?" Before anyone had a chance to respond to this thought, Michelle spotted the first of the Auburnites coming into view to the northeast. "Troops coming into view," she said calmly, though with unmistakable command in her voice. "Everyone get ready." Everyone immediately dropped the subject at hand and picked up their weapons. Rifles were trained out over the terrain and eyes peered into scopes as more and more men came into view. It was immediately recognized that something was different this morning. "They're all spread out," Michelle said, seeing that the tiny figures were stretching all the way across her field of view from left to right instead of marching in a loose line. "It looks like they've learned a few things." "Michelle," Leanette, who was on the far left side of the group, suddenly spoke up. "They're stretched all the way over to the far ring of hills." She looked that way, seeing that Leanette was correct. Instead of merely marching in the relatively flat and featureless corridor along the edge of the mudfall, there were now well over a hundred troops moving over the hilly, rough ground to the west as well. These men also were spread considerably out as they marched, with no two men closer than twenty feet of each other. "Oh shit," she said, feeling a worm of dread working into her. "If they keep coming at us this way, half of them are gonna be on our left flank when they get into range." "Which is probably why they're doing it," Hector said, a trace of fear in his voice. "They're trying to surround the hills we've been attacking from." "They're heading right towards Brett as well," Doris said. "Michelle, what do we do?" "We need to get Brett and Jason the hell out of there," Michelle said. She put down her binoculars and picked up her radio. "But what about us?" Leanette asked. "We hunker down," she said. "This is just one hill out of hundreds. They'll have no reason to climb it to check it out unless we give them one. We stay put until they pass us." Everyone looked at each other nervously at these words. While the militia was passing below, they would be completely cut off from support or extraction. If they were discovered up there on the hill, they would be easy fodder. "Hatchling two to mother bird," Michelle said into the radio. "Do you copy?" "Mother bird here," came Jason's rather tired sounding voice. "Go ahead, hatchling two." "Wolves are in view," she said. "They're spread out widely and they're going to pass on both sides of us. We're not going to feed them. We're going to hibernate instead." There was an extended pause and then Brett's voice came on the radio. "I copy that, hatchling," he said. "Do you need emergency extraction?" "Negative," Michelle said, unfolding her map. "You wouldn't get to us in time. We'll be all right. Their path will take them right to your nest though. You need to unfold your wings and go find another nest." She put her finger on a ring of hills to the far west. "I would suggest going west of the area in grid B-5, that's Bravo-five. That will put you well west of their position. You can circle around from the north to pick us up after they pass." "Copy that," Brett, who was undoubtedly looking at a copy of the same map, told her. "Hatchling one is located at grid Delta-5. Are they in the path of the advance as well?" Michelle consulted her map, tracing her dirty fingernail over the reference grids and quickly locating the small collection of hills where Chrissie and her team had been dropped. "Yes," she said into the radio. "If they stick to the same manner of marching, they'll pass on both sides of that grid as well. You'd better get them out of there." "Unfolding the wings now," Brett said. "Can you give me an alternate drop point for them?" Michelle took a deep breath, not really wanting to make such an important and potentially life-threatening decision on her own. That was Brett's job Goddammit! But she was the one looking at the troops right now, not him, and she was the one in the best position to estimate their advance. She continued to run her finger over the map for a moment, taking several glances down at the slowly approaching soldiers and comparing the terrain with the map. She keyed up her radio. "They seem to be staying east of the edge of the Charlie grid on the map. If you put them on a hill somewhere near B-5 and can find a LZ west of there, they should be able to feed some of them in another hour or so. But have them keep a sharp lookout." "Copy that," Brett said, his voice clearer now and the distinctive hum of the engine noise now in the background. "We're taking off now. Keep hunkered down until they pass and I'll pick you up just to the north of your location. Keep yourselves hidden and let me know if there's trouble." "Will do, mother bird," Michelle said evenly, knowing of course, that if there was trouble, there would be nothing Brett or Jason would be able to do about it. ------- It took the Auburnites more than fifteen minutes to pass their location once they got close enough for detection to be a serious worry. They moved slowly, carefully, their weapons out in front of them at the ready, their eyes searching the hills around them for signs of attack. Each step they took was a cautious one, the steps of soldiers in enemy territory - a sharp contrast from the carefree gait of the previous day. Atop of the hill Michelle and her team were flat on their bellies in the mud, pine needles pulled over the top of them for camouflage, their faces thoroughly covered in mud. They kept their weapons flat against the ground as well, although in easy reach in case a last stand became necessary. At Michelle's direction they lay facing outward in four different directions, their feet forming the hub of a wheel. They watched anxiously as man after man on both sides went by the bottom of their hill on their march. Many of them looked upward towards the hidden squad, their eyes searching for danger, many of them probably seeing the brown lumps that looked like just another collection of mud in the trees without recognizing it was four people in hiding. As they went by, Michelle had a very nasty thought. The mines that they had laid at the base of the hill! What if one of the Auburnites decided to cross from one side of the march to the other at that particular point and blundered across the trap? True, it would disable the soldier in question, but it would also alert the other soldiers that there was something about this particular hill that maybe needed a closer look. Michelle kept this thought to herself - although Hector and Leanette both had it independently themselves - and simply kept watch on her sector. No soldiers decided to cross over. No one went anywhere near where the mines had been set. Finally, at long last, the last groups of widely spread Auburnites marched by. They checked their rear continuously, obviously fearful of an attack from behind, but they continued on, eventually, thankfully, moving off to the south and the tip of the mudfall three miles beyond. "Christ Almighty," Michelle breathed when the last of them were more than two hundred yards away. "I don't ever want to go through that again." "You ain't shittin'," Hector said, rolling up a bit and twisting around so he could continue to keep an eye out on the retreating figures. "Let's keep ourselves down," Michelle told everyone. "They're still way too close for comfort. Leanette, you keep an eye out to the north, just in case they have a rear-guard back there we don't know about." "Right," she said, helping herself to Michelle's binoculars and taking up position. She began to scan the area to the north of them. Michelle pulled out her radio, which she had switched off when the Auburnites had come close to prevent an unexpected transmission from giving them away, and switched it back on. She keyed up. "Mother bird, this is hatchling two. Are you out there?" Jason's voice was full of obvious relief to hear her voice. "We're here, hatchling two. What's your situation?" "Wolves have passed by us without getting a sniff of us. We're ready to head on out." "We're in the air right now, five minutes past dropping off hatchling one at their new nest. We're currently hanging around grid Bravo 4, maybe three minutes from your location. Give us a nest and we'll be there." She unfolded her map and looked at it for a moment, quickly deciding upon the base of a hill that was about a quarter of a mile to the north of them. She gave Jason the coordinates and had them confirmed back to her. Just as everything was set, she had a sudden thought. Why should this entire mission be for nothing? "Stand by for a second, mother bird," she said slowly. She turned to her squad. "How we looking?" "They're still moving away," reported Hector, who was watching the backs of the Auburnites. "How about to the north?" she then asked Leanette. "Empty," she reported. "If they have a rear-guard, they're keeping it way to the rear." Michelle looked out at the wave of troops to her south for a moment. "How far away do you think the closest of them are now?" she asked Hector, who was perhaps the best of them at estimating distance. He shrugged. "Maybe a little more than three hundred yards. Far enough that they shouldn't be a bother to us." "But close enough so that we could still be a bother to them?" she asked. Three faces turned to her, their eyes wide. "You're the riflemen," she challenged. "You think you can hit moving targets at more than three hundred?" Two of them could, aided mostly by lots of shooting practice prior to deployment and the almost complete lack of wind to throw the bullet off course. They made some adjustments to their scopes and sighted in on the backs of three of the soldiers. While they drew beads on their targets, Michelle updated Brett and Jason as to what they were doing. Finally, after assuring each other that they were ready, they counted to three and squeezed their triggers. Leanette's shot passed within six inches of her target, which happened to be none other than Lieutenant Roberts, who was in charge of the reserve platoon. At nearly the same instant that Roberts heard something go whizzing by him, Hector's bullet smashed into the back of Sergeant Lyon's head, carrying a good portion of his brain out through his face. He dropped like a rock, never having known what hit him. Even as he was in mid-fall, Doris' bullet performed perhaps the most dramatic feat. Still traveling considerably faster than the speed of sound, it entered the backpack of Private Henson just below his sleeping bag. It burrowed through a box of 5.56 millimeter ammunition, exploding the gunpowder in several of the shells before burying itself into his right kidney. To those watching it appeared as if a small bomb had suddenly detonated in Henson's backpack. He staggered forward three more steps before falling screaming to the ground. Those in the rear of the militia reacted quickly, throwing themselves down and training their weapons to the rear. Since no one had happened to be looking back at the moment the shots had been fired, no one knew where the attack had come from (which did not prevent five of them from blindly returning fire anyway). Michelle deliberately gave away their location by firing an extended burst with her M-16 at the prone soldiers. She wanted them to know what hill the fire had come from and though none of her bullets hit anyone, the muzzleflashes from her shots served this purpose. "Let's go," she said, scrambling for the far side of the hill just as the return fire started to roll in. They quickly put the hill between themselves and the Auburnites and began to run north, towards their pickup point. A quick circle around the next hill and there was the helicopter, idling on the ground, the doors open. They climbed in, shut the doors, and a minute later they were airborne and out of the area. Five minutes later the entire reserve platoon of the Placer County Militia approached the hill, weapons out and ready. Lieutenant Roberts knew that the attackers were long gone but he had been ordered by Bracken to check the hill anyway, to see if there was any wounded or dead. One by one his troops fanned out over the base and finally, one squad began to ascend it. Roberts, who would be responsible for giving report on what was found, stuck to the rear and then, once they were half-way up, started following them while the rest of the platoon fanned out towards the front. He walked over the same ground that his men had just trod upon but somehow he managed to step in one place where no one else's foot had happened to come down. Without warning, something exploded beneath him with a sharp crack and a bright flash of light. It felt like someone wearing steel-toed boots had kicked him harshly in the balls. He felt an intense burning in his crotch and in the inner portions of both legs. He looked down and saw that his entire lower body was dripping blood onto the muddy ground. His pants had been shredded in the crotch and he could see muscle and fat tissue hanging by pieces of tendon and shredded veins. While the men around him dove to the ground at the sudden explosion, he gasped in shock as the pain intensified. He fell forward, his hands grasping at the bloody remains of his reproductive organs and wished to lose consciousness. Unfortunately, until he was "put out of his misery" five minutes later by his first sergeant, that did not happen. ------- "It's some sort of homemade mine, sir," Sergeant Costigan, the new leader by default of the reserve platoon, told Bracken when he met with him twenty minutes later. "It was buried just under the mud in a small hole in the ground. When Lieutenant Roberts stepped on it... well..." Bracken looked at the remains of the mine that had killed his second most senior officer. The shotgun shell that had been fired by the mousetrap was still wedged into the hole, empty of the powder, wadding, and birdshot pellets. The force of the detonation had cracked the piece of lumber quite badly but, as evidenced by the success the weapon had had, that hadn't really detracted from the effectiveness much. He threw the device down, reluctant respect for the ingenuity of those Garden Hill people worming into his brain. "Clever," he said. "We're dealing with some very devious minds here, Costigan, wouldn't you agree?" "It would seem so, sir," he said, still shuddering at the image of Roberts' shredded private parts. It had actually been a relief to end his suffering, to silence his screaming with a bullet to the head. "What affect did witnessing this have on your men?" "They're rather shaken," Costigan said, giving a rather broad understatement. "It would've been better if that thing would've just killed him outright. Seeing what it did to him... well... it was not very pretty, sir." "No, I don't imagine it was," Bracken sighed. "And you say there was no way of detecting the presence of this thing before he stepped on it?" "It left a hole in the ground after it went off," Costigan said doubtfully, "but no one saw it before that. I don't know, sir. Maybe if we knew to look for things like that, we'd be able to find them. I just don't know." "We're going to have to keep our eyes out for more of these little Garden Hill surprises," Bracken said. "If they planted one, they'll plant others." ------- The militia continued its march around the first of the mudfalls, keeping themselves spread out and straddling the row of hills from which the previous day's attacks had come. The safety that this tactic gave them lasted only as long as it took for Brett and his strike groups to recognize and adapt to it. Here came the advantages of mobility that the helicopter offered. No matter where or how the militia marched, there was always a place to attack them from and it was only a simple matter of predicting their advance and moving a team to a spot where they could get away safely. The mountains were full of such places. Chrissie's squad hit the middle of the advancing militia shortly after 11:00 AM, firing from a well-protected hill to the west of them - the same hill that Michelle had suggested they occupy. Two soldiers were killed outright by the initial shots and one was badly wounded. Chrissie's automatic fire with the M-16 was not as effective as it had been the previous day - the Auburnites had learned quickly to throw themselves down when people started to drop - but she still managed to inflict one more death and one more serious injury before her clip ran out and her squad fled their ambush site. The militia platoon tasked with examining the site of the ambush was wary of the mines that they now knew their enemy to possess. They stepped gingerly around, their eyes searching for depressions in the mud or other signs of the devices. They saw no such thing. Even so, Corporal Janders' left foot managed to find one of the devices the hard way. Though his crotch was spared much of the brunt of the shotgun shell blast it was only because the inside of his left calf and thigh absorbed most of the pellets. Though his favorite appendage was saved from too much harm, his life was nonetheless sacrificed because his left leg was now a bloody mess of torn flesh and shredded muscle. Despite his begs and pleas that he could walk, just give him a chance, he was shot in the head by Lieutenant Powers and, after his weapons, ammo, and food were stripped from him, left to rot there. The next ambush took place a little more than two hours later. Michelle's squad was able to kill three and wound one with the initial attack. Though the militia rushed at them at top speed, as per Bracken's orders, they could not catch anything but another glimpse of the helicopter departing to the south of them. This time Bracken did not allow a platoon to approach the hill from which the attack had come. He wanted to waste no further men to mine warfare and he suspected that they would not have obeyed the order to walk there anyway. Before the sun set that night, bringing darkness to the land, two more ambushes occurred, costing them five more lives. With each attack Bracken tried to shift formations and course of travel but they still happened with frightening unexpectedness from a direction that no one had happened to be looking in. Each time his troops gave pursuit and each time they were able to do no more than catch a glimpse of the retreating helicopter. "It's like we're being attacked by fucking ghosts!" one sergeant, angry and frustrated and scared, proclaimed as he stood over the dead bodies of two of his men. "How the hell can we fight back against this?" "We'll get them," Bracken soothed as best he could. "They'll slip up and we'll get them. This can't go on forever." His words sounded like a lie, even to himself. The militia bedded down at 8:00 PM that night, knowing that the nightmare attacks out of the darkness would surely commence at some point. They spread themselves out widely, over an area of more than a hundred acres, with no man putting himself any closer than thirty feet from another man. Twice the usual number of guards were posted around the perimeter and in the middle of the formation, all of them equipped with automatic weapons and powerful flashlights. They braced themselves for attack and they were not disappointed. The first hit came shortly before 10:00 AM, from the north of them. There was no warning beforehand, no sound of a helicopter engine, nothing. Suddenly tracers were slamming down into the ground, moving from one sleeping bagged figure to the next with devastating accuracy. The attack lasted less than five seconds, just long enough for the guards to begin returning fire. Entire clips of ammunition were blasted into the dark sky in the general direction that the tracers had come from, but with no aiming point and no visual reference, none of them came within twenty yards of the helicopter. Just as the guards were reloading and starting to take count of the wounded, more tracers slammed in, this time from the northwest. The guards themselves were now the targets and two of them were mowed down by lightning bursts of 5.56-millimeter shells. And again, before an accurate defense could be initiated, the attacker disappeared. Follow up attacks took place at 12:30 AM and at 3:00 AM, each of them killing an average of two soldiers per firing run. It wasn't a lot, but it was enough to keep the militia awake and trembling, to keep most of them on edge and scared. By the next morning the exhaustion that resulted would start to affect judgment. And little did the militia know that back in the town they had left behind, other events were taking place that would have a profound effect on their future. ------- Lieutenant Livingston was currently second-in-command of all the troops remaining in the Auburn township - second only to Barnes himself. He was a long-standing veteran of the militia, his service in it stretching considerably back to before the fall of the comet itself. He had personally led the assault on the town of Colfax and Grass Valley. He had once served in the United States Army as a military policeman. At 1:45 AM, while the rest of the militia was lying awake some fifteen miles to the southeast, trembling in fear of another air attack, he was sound asleep and snoring in his bedroom, Mindy, the favorite of his three wives, sleeping soundly beside him. Mindy was naked, as was Livingston himself - they had engaged in a lengthy session of sexual congress before retiring four hours before. Mindy had no idea what was about to occur - she was not one of Jessica's inner circle. Livingston certainly had no idea either. The door had been left open as they slept but neither heard the stealthy footsteps of Madeline, the junior of the three wives, and Kendall, the senior of them, as they crept out of the bedroom down the hall and made their way down to the kitchen. "Are you sure," Kendall, who had never been more scared in all her life, asked her companion quietly, "that the other women are going to go through with this too? If they don't, we're going to be burned at the stake in the morning." "We're going through with it, aren't we?" Madeline, or Maddie, as she was known, asked with cold logic. "The others will do it too." "But if they don't?" Kendall asked. "What happens then?" "Then all is lost. It's a chance we'll have to take. To tell you the truth, it'll be worth it in any case. Now let's get it done." Kendall offered no further protests. Slowly, carefully, Maddie opened a kitchen drawer and removed a huge butcher knife of the sort that was usually used for chopping very large cuts of meat. It was a knife she had spent a good portion of the previous day rubbing obsessively with a whetstone and it was now nearly sharp enough to shave with. She hefted it, testing its weight for a moment and liking the way it felt in her hands. "Let's do it," she said, holding it down near her side. She opened another drawer and pulled out a two-cell flashlight. She handed this to Kendall, who took it blankly, keeping it turned off. Without waiting to see if her companion would follow, she began tiptoeing towards the stairs. Kendall, feeling her body surging with nervous adrenaline, feeling her very hands trembling, started after her. The dice had been thrown. They made their way upstairs and then down the hallway until they were standing outside the darkened master bedroom. They could see nothing but they could hear Livingston snoring lightly and both knew the interior of the bedroom intimately. They made their way to the side of the bed and paused. They didn't talk, didn't make a sound until Maddie, the knife in her left hand, gripping it by the handle, said: "do it." Neither Livingston nor Mindy reacted to the voice. Both however, reacted when the flashlight was suddenly switched on, its beam spearing Livingston's head with illumination. Their eyes flew open at the sudden barrage of light but neither had any time to react to what happened next. Livingston was lying on his back, the covers pulled up to his shoulders, his arms beneath them. While he blinked in confusion and his sleep-muddled brain tried to figure out just what the hell was going on, Maddie reached forward with her right hand and grabbed him by the hair on the top of his head. With a sharp jerk, she yanked his head backward, exposing his neck. While he tried to free his hands from beneath the covers to fight back at this sudden attack, Maddie chopped downward with the butcher knife, it's edge slamming into his throat, just below the bulge of his Adam's apple. With a vicious, powerful stroke, she pulled it across, slicing deeply into his neck, severing his trachea as neatly as she would have the neck of a chicken. Blood began to spray into the air, both from the gaping wound and from a partially severed right carotid artery. She finished her swipe and then stepped backward, out of reach, her knife blade now red and dripping. Livingston sat up in bed, his eyes wide in disbelief and fear, his hands abandoning their attempt at defense and going to the wound on his neck. He tried to scream but no sound came out but a pitiful, dying gurgle. He tried to inhale and found it impossible. His eyes grew wider, his hands tightened around his throat, trying desperately to repair the irreparable damage. "There, you motherfucker," Maddie spat, her eyes blazing. "There's the motherfucking God's law for your ass!" "Maddie!" Mindy suddenly screamed, her face a terror as she saw the second mouth that had been added to her husband, as she saw the blood spurting out onto the linen. "What are you doing?" "I'm killing this piece of shit," she said. "Now shut the fuck up unless you want some of it too." "But..." "Shut up!" Maddie barked. "You just sit there and don't say a fucking thing!" While Mindy trembled in place, uncomprehending at what was taking place, Maddie and Kendall watched Livingston's desperate struggle on the bed. He flopped up and down, raising and lowering his head, his eyes growing wider and wider as he slowly suffocated to death. The only sound was the banging of his feet on the bed and the pathetic gurgling and whistling of his severed windpipe. Shortly he began to seize, his body flopping up and down as his oxygen-starved brain began to send misfired signals down his spinal column. In less than three minutes, it was over. Either the hypoxia or the blood loss - which was considerable - got the better of him. He gave one last tremendous flop and then he lie still, his body in the middle of the blood-soaked mattress. "My God," Mindy cried, her hands at her face, her own eyes bugging out in disbelief. "What have you done? They'll kill you! They'll kill all of us!" "Keep your voice down," Maddie said, wiping her knife on a relatively clean part of the mattress. "But you killed him! You murdered him!" "Yes we did," she said. "And it felt good too. I almost came in my panties watching that fuckhead flopping around. I only wish it could've taken longer." "Maddie, Kendall, what are you doing? Why did you do this?" "Shhh," Kendall said, stepping forward, her trembling hand still holding the flashlight. "We're not the only ones." "Whu... whu... what?" "This is happening all over town," Kendall told her. "At least we hope it is." "All over town?" she asked, trying to grasp what she was being told. "It's a revolution," Maddie said. "Soon, this entire town will be in our hands." "Our hands?" Mindy asked, still unable to keep from staring at the dead body of her former husband. "The women's hands," Maddie clarified. "And it's about Goddamn time. Now the question you have to ask yourself, Mindy, is are you with us or are you with the men? You need to decide right here, right now." She left unsaid just what would happen if Mindy declared that she was against. Mindy, one of the tattletale variety in the past, had been left out of the conspiracy for this reason. But now it was all or nothing. Maddie was fully prepared to dispatch her in a way very similar to Livingston's own murder if she did not agree to go along. Mindy continued to stare at the corpse of the man who had raped her on a nearly nightly basis, who had put himself into her ass, who had beaten her, slapped her, kicked her, who had sprayed his semen all over her body and face. She was certainly not upset at the fact of his death in and of itself, only of the possible ramifications of it. Could what Maddie was saying possibly be true? "Well?" Maddie said, her hand gripping the knife a little tighter. "I'm with you," Mindy said. "We'll probably all die, but I'm with you." ------- As Maddie had said and as Kendall had hoped, the same scenario was being repeated all over town, in every house where a man lay sleeping. In every case at least one woman was a firm member of Jessica's clan; in most, two of three or four wives were in on it; and in one case, all of the three wives were in. Not every attack went as smoothly or as silently as the attack upon Livingston had, nor did every recruitment of the wives not in on the plan go as easily. In Sergeant Preston's house, the good sergeant was awakened by the sound of his wife entering the bedroom to perform the deed. This forced her to move a little quicker, a little more frantically than she'd planned and Preston managed to get his hand on her wrist just as the knife came whistling in. Fortunately the wife that had been lying next to him was in on the scheme and was able to temporarily disable him - by means of grabbing his testicles and squeezing as hard as she could - long enough for her to break free and drive the knife into his chest. She was then forced - while the other wife held her hand over his mouth to keep him from crying out - to worm and squirm the blade back and forth until enough blood vessels and vital organs were ruptured to cause unconsciousness secondary to blood loss. In Sergeant Bristle's house, surprise was achieved but the initial knife thrust was not deep enough to either sever the trachea or rip open a carotid artery. Bristle screamed and fought for the better part of ten seconds before the tip of the sharpened knife was finally thrust directly into his Adam's apple hard enough to lodge into the cervical spine behind it. In Corporal Patton's house, the assassination went off without a hitch but the entire rebellion was nearly exposed when Cindy, the senior wife, who was not in on the plot, tried to run screaming into the night to find the roaming interior patrol and alert them. Cindy was stopped at the door by having the knife driven into her shoulder blades and then she was choked to death in the entryway. In all, however, despite a few close calls, every woman that had agreed to perform their deadly task acted upon it and every man targeted, one way or another, ended up dead. In the space of fifteen minutes, thirty of the remaining forty-five soldiers (this count did not include Barnes himself) were dead along with three wives that elected not to participate in the uprising. It pained the conspirators to have to kill their fellow women - in no case did they enjoy doing it - but they all did it without hesitation. Though a few screams and bangs and frantic struggles managed to sound outside the walls of their houses, the five-man patrol of men that was wandering through the night streets, searching for potential escapees or infiltrators, were never close enough to hear them. They continued on their rounds, unaware that their minority status in town had just become considerably more minor. ------- Many of the women that had participated in the killings simply held in place, awaiting the next stage of the developments. Where it was possible, one representative from each household in which a sleeping man had been dispatched made their way to the rallying point just adjacent to the high school building. This only occurred in the households where more than one wife had been in on the plot from the beginning. In those houses where a single wife had done the deed, that wife stayed put in order to keep an eye on the recently recruited co-wives. In other houses, houses where the men were off on the Garden Hill mission but the women were part of Jessica's plot, those women slipped out and made their way to the rallying point as well. These women - sixty of them had been chosen to participate in the next phase - came armed with knives and clubs but no firearms. As per Barnes' long-standing order, no firearms were stored in houses. All of them were either in storage in the high school building or with the guards on post. The women made their way carefully, stealthily through the darkened streets, keeping well clear of the roving patrol for the time being. This was easy to do since the patrol used flashlights to illuminate their path. Whenever the bobbing of lights was seen in the distance, or the clanking of the automatic weapons that they carried was heard, the woman would simply hunker down somewhere and wait for them to pass or move away. By 3:00 AM, the agreed upon time for rally, all sixty women involved had checked in with Jessica, who had been waiting anxiously in place since shortly after 2:00. Jessica, though the tacit leader of the revolt and the inspiration behind it, was not the operational leader. She had learned enough about her own shortcomings to delegate that to others who were more knowledgeable about fighting and strategy. Five of the women in her phase two group had served in the military in their pre-comet lives. Though, being women, none of them had been combat soldiers, all had gone through basic training just like the men had. The fact that Jessica had allowed this portion of the plot to be planned by and placed in the hands of others was perhaps a testament to how badly she had been stung by her Garden Hill experiences. She knew that there was but one chance for this and one chance only. As it happened, Madeline was the designated leader of the operational portions. She had served two terms in the army, rising to the rank of sergeant in charge of a supply loading operation. Still she had qualified as expert with her weapon consistently in training and had taken many of the advanced leadership classes offered to her. "Okay," Jessica whispered to her after roll call had been taken. "We have confirmation that twenty-three of the thirty are dead. Of the other seven, we can probably assume that most, if not all of them, are dead as well. No alarm has been raised and the patrol has been spotted circling normally around town." Maddie nodded, still gripping the knife she had used to kill Livingston with. "I don't like to assume things," she said. "But in this case, I guess we don't really have a choice. Is Carla here?" "She's here and ready for action," Jessica said. "Shall we move in?" "Let's do it," Maddie agreed. "Put Carla out in front and the rest of us will hang just outside the arc of the light." ------- Sergeants Schuyler and Dewey were standing guard in front of the main entrance to the high school. They had been on shift since 6:00 PM the previous evening and were not due to be relieved until 6:00 AM. The twelve-hour guard shifts were something new - a result of the majority of the men being away on the Garden Hill mission. Both of the senior sergeants, aside from feeling extreme fatigue and boredom, thought it beneath them to be assigned to such a lowly post for so many straight hours. But both knew better than to nod off or do anything but stand at attention before the door. Barnes was known to make unannounced visits to the posts, particularly this one since he slept right upstairs. The penalty for being inattentive on duty was three days of house arrest and reduced rations. The penalty for sleeping on duty was death by hanging. "Three more fucking hours," Schuyler groaned, looking at his watch. "I can't take it. I'm going batshit here." "No shit," Dewey agreed. "I'd almost rather be on the march than pulling guard duty." He considered for a moment. "Almost." "You got any more smokes?" Schuyler wanted to know. "I ran out an hour ago." "It ain't my fuckin fault you smoked up your rations. Don't even think you're getting any of mine." "Hey fuck you," Schuyler said angrily. "Don't be so stingy. Don't you remember when..." He stopped as Dewey suddenly hit him on the shoulder and leveled his rifle foreword. "What? What is it?" "Who goes there?" Dewey said, his finger tightening on the trigger. The figure approaching out of the darkness was obviously female, and females were forbidden from being out after 10:00 PM for any reason. "Answer up now!" Schuyler leveled his own weapon and reached for the radio on his belt. It was tuned to the frequency of the guard posts and the interior patrol and could summon them in a matter of seconds. Barnes also monitored the frequency when he was awake. "Don't shoot!" a meek, feminine voice pleaded. "It's me, Carla." "Carla?" Schuyler said, recognizing the voice of his junior wife. He lowered his rifle a little. "What the fuck are you doing out here? You know that's a beating offense!" "I'm sorry," she said. "I had to." She walked closer, her hands empty, nothing the least bit suspicious looking about her. She seemed genuinely scared. "You had to? What the fuck for?" Schuyler demanded. "Get your ass over here and start making some sense right now!" She walked over, coming fully into the cone of light that was cast by a security spotlight mounted on the roof. "It's Jan and Laura," she said, seemingly near tears. "They're... they're..." She stopped, apparently too emotional to go on. "They're what?" Dewey, impatient said, staring at her. "Tell us what the fuck is going on or I'll beat you myself!" "They're gone," she said. "I woke up to go to the bathroom and they weren't there! I think they're trying to escape." "Oh Jesus," Schuyler said, shaking his head. Several of the militia members had been afraid something like that would happen while the bulk of the forces were gone. The temptation to make a run for it would be just too great. He reached for his radio to alert the interior patrol, not knowing that he had already fallen for the ruse his wife had set for him. Carla was simply a distraction, something to detract the attention of the two guards during a critical minute. That critical minute had passed. Before he could get his hand on the radio, before either of the men could swing their weapons upward or even comprehend what was going on, more than fifty women suddenly rushed at them from just beyond the edge of the lighted area. They were on them in a second, knocking them flat to the ground. Hands pinned their legs while other hands forcibly pulled their arms out to the sides, slapping them to the cold cement. Before either man could cry out, other hands put knives against their throats. "Don't say a fuckin word, either of you," ordered Carla, standing over the top of them, her voice no longer meek and mild. "That's right," said Jessica, coming up behind her. "If so much as a squeak passes those lips, your throat will be cut so fast you won't know what hit you." Both men looked up into the hostile sea of female faces in fear. Both wondered what the hell was going on here. How could something like this happen? What were these women doing? This was impossible! It was more than possible as they both quickly figured out. The women moved quickly, rolling them over onto their stomachs and pulling their rifles free of them. Maddie and one of the other women with military experience were given possession of the weapons. Their sidearms were stripped next and these were given to two other women, Jessica being one of them. She held a gun in her hand for the first time since she'd tried to kill Brett back in Garden Hill. Ironically, or perhaps not, it was the exact same type of weapon. Her hand shook a little and then she put it in her waistband, making sure the safety was on. "Get them inside," Jessica said. "Search them thoroughly and then tie them up. Keep them under guard downstairs and kill them if they so much as twitch." "Gladly," Carla said, stepping up to Schuyler, who was being jerked to his feet by four women. She walked up to him and spat in his face. "Just give me a reason, fuckface," she told him. "I'd love to be the one to cut your fuckin throat." ------- While Schuyler and Dewey were being tied and gagged and hauled off to a downstairs storage area, Maddie and Janice, the other automatic weapon bearer, took up position where the guards had been. They were both wearing bulky clothing that was quite similar to what had been worn by the two guards. They had taken possession of the guards' baseball caps and rain slickers and had tucked their hair underneath. They stood at attention, one of the portable radios in their possession, and waited. From a distance, they looked exactly like Schuyler and Dewey. Meanwhile Jessica was leading a group of five women up the stairs towards the sleeping quarters of Barnes himself. She had her gun out now and the safety off. Walking next to her, holding the other gun, was Alice, the women who had been recently "donated" to Bracken to replace his lost wives. They had flashlights but they kept them turned off, finding their way by means of the ambient lighting leaking in from the spotlights outside. Soon they were outside the closed door. "You ready?" Jessica whispered to her team. They agreed that they were. "Then let's do it." Alice went first. She opened the door and immediately reached for the light switch on the wall - knowing where it was because she was the woman responsible for cleaning this room. She flicked it up and the overhead fluorescents - powered by the generator outside - flared to life, illuminating the former vice principal's office that had been converted to a luxury bedroom. Barnes was lying in a large oak bed with a canopy over the top of it. Silk sheets and a down comforter covered his body as well as the bodies of two of his four wives (the other two wives were in a separate bedroom at the moment - there wasn't room for all of them in the bed). All three of them blinked in confusion at the sudden change in lighting. Barnes attempted to sit up. "Don't you fucking move, asshole," Alice told him, leveling her gun at him. The two wives both screamed at the sight of firearms being pointed at them. "You two stay where you are," Jessica said. "Nobody moves!" "What the hell is the meaning of this?" Barnes asked, glaring at them, as of yet more outraged than scared. "This is what's known as a hostile takeover," Alice said, stepping closer. "If you move, you're dead." "Are you out of your fucking minds?" Barnes asked toughly. "You'll burn for this!" "Someone's gonna burn," Jessica said. "But I don't think it's gonna be us." She directed her gaze at the two wives. "Get out of that bed. Keep your hands up in the air." "What are you doing?" Tiffany, the buxom blonde that was Barnes' favorite wife asked tearfully. "You can't do this." "We are doing this," Jessica told her. "We'll have the entire town by sunrise. Now get out of the bed and lie down on the floor." One by one the two women, both of whom were naked, were proned out on the floor on either side of the bed. Barnes watched all this without expression, his eyes looking for any advantage he could take. He said nothing. "Now you, Barnes," Jessica told him. "Keep your hands up and come to the foot of the bed. I know you have a gun hidden in here somewhere, but don't even think about going for it." "You're making a very bad mistake," Barnes said, emerging naked from his bed, his hands up, his wilted penis shrunken between his legs. "It wouldn't be the first time," Jessica said. "Now move." ------- Barnes was tied and gagged (still naked - his captures saw no need to allow him to dress) and placed in the same room with Schuyler and Dewey. Alice and her pistol stood guard outside of the room with the assistance of two other women. They kept the portable radio that had been found in Barnes' room with them to monitor any developments with the guard force. Tiffany and Candice, the two naked wives, were allowed to put clothes on and they were led to a separate storage room where they too were locked up and guarded. They would be dealt with later. Meanwhile Jessica and the rest of the women made their way to the weapons storage room on the bottom floor of the administrative building. This room had once been the teacher's cafeteria. It had two entrances, both of which had been installed with steel security doors to which Barnes had the only key. A quick search of his desk in the principal's office revealed the ring to which it was attached. Less than five minutes of trying different keys in the lock was required before the mechanism clicked and the door swung open. Though most of the storage racks in the room were currently empty, not all of them were. The vast majority of the town's weapons were either out on the march with the attack team or in the hands of the various guards in town. But of the weapons that were left in there, many of them were fully automatic M-16s, AK-47, or other, more exotic varieties. Barnes had held these weapons in reserve in case of an attack on the town while the troops were away. In all, there were more than thirty available right here in the room for the use and enjoyment by the rebellious women. Nor was that all. Though all of the semi-automatic weapons and most of the hunting rifles were gone, there were still more than twenty shotguns and nearly a hundred pistols. The ammunition supply was also in pretty good shape. Thanks to reloading equipment and a dedicated team of loaders, nearly half of these shelves were full of every needed variety. "Get everyone who knows how to use a gun armed up," ordered Gail Haxton, one of the other women with military experience. As it happened, most of the women in the group of sixty knew how to shoot. They were foothill and mountain women in their previous lives and had been taught to shoot by their fathers, husbands, brothers, or boyfriends. They filed in one by one and armed themselves up, most of them taking the automatic rifles (even though most had never fired one before), the rest taking shotguns or the few remaining hunting rifles. They found backpacks and loaded up with extra ammunition. They loaded shells into magazines and internal chambers. Everyone grabbed a pistol as well. In addition to the weapons and the ammunition, there were fifteen of the portable radios that the guards used and more than enough fresh batteries to power them. Gail distributed these as well, dividing her women into several groups. "Okay," Gail said, once everyone was armed, divided up, and a chain of command was established. "I think we're ready to rock." ------- Schuyler, the senior guard that had been on duty at the front of the high school, had his gag removed by Alice and a pistol placed against the side of his head. "All right," she said, before he had a chance to say anything. "This is the deal. At 4:00 AM and 5:00 AM, the interior guard positions and the perimeter guards are all going to check in with you to make sure everything is okay." Schuyler's eyes widened a little as she told him this. She had not been asking it as a question, she had been stating it as a fact. How the hell had she known that? Women were not supposed to know what the operating procedures of the guard positions were. "When they do," Alice continued, "you're going to answer that all is well. Those will be your exact words - all is well - you will not say the trouble phrase. In case you forgot, that phrase is: everything is in order. Do you understand me?" Schuyler actually gasped. She knew the trouble phase as well! How? How did they know so much? Had the men really been that careless around these women? Had they? "If you do not do exactly as I say and say the proper phrase in the proper tone of voice, I will kill you. Do not think for a moment that I don't have it in me. On the contrary, it would give me immense pleasure to do so. If, on the other hand, you do do as I say, you will live. You will remain a prisoner until the revolt is over with, but you will live. Do you understand?" "You won't get away with this," Schuyler said. "You can't." "I'm not interested in your predictions of our success," Alice told him. "What I am interested in is whether or not you understood what I said. Answer me or I'll kill you right now and then have this conversation with Dewey over there." "I understand," he said immediately. "And what will say when the routine check occurs?" "All is well." "Very good." She smiled a little, borrowing a term that was popular among the men of Auburn when talking to one of the "bitches". "You're a smart little piece. Keep it up, and you'll go far around here. Maybe we'll even let you clean up the high school someday." ------- The 4:00 AM and the 5:00 AM radio checks went as they normally did. Sergeant Poole, who was in charge of the interior patrol, called in at the top of these hours and heard that all was well from all four of the manned guard positions as well as the high school guards. At 5:45 AM, he and his troops were just a quarter mile from the high school, still without the slightest idea that things had taken a drastic change in their town. "Interior to admin," said Poole wearily into his radio. "We're heading in." There was a longer than usual pause, almost long enough that Poole was about to retransmit his message, thinking it hadn't been received. But finally, Schuyler's voice replied to him. "10-4 interior. All is well." As the group of five headed towards their base of operations, Poole looked at his men. "Did Schuyler sound a little strange to you guys?" he asked. "He always sounds strange to me," Corporal Winters said grumpily. "Yeah," Sergeant Frank agreed, shifting his rifle on his back a little. "He's been standing out there for twelve hours. I'd sound strange too." They continued their short walk, no one else mentioning the strange lilt to Schuyler's voice. He had given the proper code phrase after all. What could be wrong? When they were within sight of the main entrance, close enough to see the two figures that they presumed where Schuyler and Dewey standing in front, a sudden noise to their right made all of them jump. It was the sound of footsteps, many of them, moving over the wet pavement from the deep shadows. They swung their flashlights instinctively in that direction and illuminated a group of ten women, all of them pointing assault weapons or shotguns at them. The men began to reach for their weapons as adrenaline flooded through them. "Don't do it," said Jessica, the bitch from Garden Hill. She was in the front of the line of women. "If you try to bring those weapons down, you'll be shot to pieces." While they digested this piece of information, flashlights suddenly lit them up from the other side, revealing yet another group of women armed with guns. And that was not all. From behind them, another group lit them up. "You're surrounded completely," Jessica told them. "Now drop those weapons to the ground and move away from them." The five-man group looked helplessly at the two guards in front of the high school. They were now trotting towards the scene of the ambush, flashlights and weapons in their own hands. The women surrounding them did not seem to be paying any attention to this. The reason why became clear a moment later when they came closer. They were not the guards at all but two more women dressed to look like the guards. "Put the guns down slowly," Jessica repeated. "Don't reach for your radios or anything else. You do as we say, and you'll live." Left without anything else to do - and all of them figuring that this was some ill-planned rebellion that would quickly be quelled - they dropped their weapons to the pavement. "Now the sidearms," Maddie, coming close enough to take over the situation, told them. "Do it real carefully. Believe me, we'd love to smoke some of you. We're just itching for a reason." They dropped their sidearms as well. "Now start walking towards the high school," Maddie ordered, keeping her weapon trained on them. "Walk slowly and don't make any sudden moves." "You won't get away with this," Poole told her, repeating the most often-heard sentiment muttered by the surviving men that day. "We already have," Maddie told her. "Now march." ------- Once the interior patrol was tied and gagged inside the storage room with the rest of the surviving men, the only free people with penises were those that were manning the external guard posts. There were eight of them on duty, spread throughout four different positions in teams of two - about half of what was normal when the full militia was in town. Each team was equipped with a radio and each man was equipped with an automatic weapon. In addition, considerable stocks of ammunition were stored at each post. And the guards would be expecting their relief to arrive in less than ten minutes. "All right, girls," Maddie, taking charge again, told her group of forty. "You know the drill. You're divided into four teams. All of you have a radio, right?" The leaders of each group held the radio up for her perusal. "Let's do it. Remember, you need to be in position before six o'clock. So let's hurry, shall we?" They hurried. By 5:58 AM each guard position had a group of women in the shadows below it. Barnes had set up his guard posts well as far as keeping people from attacking them from the outside went. Each one was atop a hill on the outskirts of the town (with the exception of the bridge position - it had been moved into a building on the Auburn side of the canyon for the duration of the march and the manpower shortage that had resulted). But Barnes had never counted on his positions coming under attack from the inside. As a result, the women were able to easily position themselves at the main egress points for each place. When 6:00 AM came and went without any sign of relief showing up, the guards manning these positions began to get a little antsy. They did not think that a revolt had occurred in town of course, the very thought was beyond absurd, but they did wonder what the hold-up was. Each team was under the impression that their position was the only one not relieved. All had been on duty for twelve hours and were more than ready to go home and get some sleep. Showing up late for guard duty was not a common occurrence in Auburn since the penalty for such a thing was three days of house arrest. None of them, however, considered leaving their posts. The penalty for that was hanging. It was Sergeant Pillows at guard post number three, which guarded the west side of town, that finally broke the silence. He keyed up his radio. "Post three to admin," he said, fighting to keep annoyance out of his voice. "We're still in position here. Is there a holdup with our relief?" There was no answer. "Well what the fuck?" Pillows said. He was about to key up again when another voice came on the radio. It was Sergeant Strickland at post one, which guarded the east side of town and the entrance maze. "Post one to post three," he said. "We haven't been relieved either. No sign of them in fact." That was when Pillows started to feel a little worm of dread in his stomach. "10-4, post three," he said into the radio. "Let's try and figure out what's going on. Admin, are you there?" Nothing. "Post one and post three," said another voice. "This is post two. Something must be up. We haven't been relieved either." "This is post four," said yet another voice. "We're in the same boat out here. I think maybe there's a problem of some sort down there." "You are correct, gentlemen," said a female voice, one that a few of the guards monitoring the radios recognized as belonging to Maddie Livingston. "Something is up down here." Pillows and his partner looked at each other in disbelief for a moment. "What the fuck?" Strickland said. He keyed up the radio. "Whoever the bitch on our frequency is," he demanded, "identify yourself immediately. And you'd better have a damn good reason." "This is Madeline Crandall," Maddie said, using her previous name, the name that had been banished with the comet. "I am speaking on behalf of the women of this town. We have taken control and you are now our prisoners." Pillows' jaw dropped, as did the jaw of the other seven men listening in. "Now listen up," Pillows said after composing himself. "I don't know what kind of game you're playing down there, but you've already earned yourself a severe beating from your husband for talking on the radio. Now tell me what you are doing down there." "That piece of shit that used to rape me is dead," Maddie's voice replied calmly. "So is every other man that was off-duty last night. We cut their fucking throats in their beds and they're all rotting there now. In addition, we have taken Barnes, the interior patrol, and both of the admin guards into custody. You eight men are the only ones left." "You did no such thing," Pillows said, refusing to believe it. "Then how do you explain the lack of relief?" Maddie asked him. "But that is neither here nor there. The reason I am talking to you all now is to inform you that you have a group of women below each of your positions that are armed with automatic weapons and the odd rifle. You will drop your weapons immediately and surrender to them or you will die." Pillows stared at his radio for a long time, long enough so that someone else picked up the thread of the conversation for him. "You're out of your fucking mind," said Strickland. "You'll hang for even saying such a thing. I don't know how you got your little bitch hands on a radio or how you managed to keep our relief from showing up, but you'd better get our relief out here within the next two minutes or you're gonna burn." "Perhaps," Maddie's voice said, "a little extra proof is needed. Stand by for that." The radio link clicked off and then, a moment later, it clicked back on. "This is Sergeant Schuyler," said a male voice, obviously strained, but obviously Schuyler's. "I'm inside of the high school building right now. The women have seized the building and they are in possession of the weapons in the supply room. They have taken myself, Dewey, Barnes, and the entire interior patrol into custody and we are currently tied up to chairs. She is..." his voice broke a little "is telling the truth." "Holy shit," Pillows said. He keyed up his microphone. "You won't get away with this," he told Maddie. "I would suggest you surrender now before things go too far." Maddie was laughing when the link opened from her end. "Tough talk doesn't work any more, dickwad," she said. "Now listen up, all of you on this frequency. We have you pinned down and covered. You can stay up there if you want, but eventually you're going to have to come down for food, aren't you? There aren't many provisions up there and we're prepared to stand guard below you for as long as is necessary. You can try to fight your way down if you think you can take out our teams, but let me warn you, they're well hidden and they're well led. Apparently many of you have forgotten that women were allowed in the army as well and that most of us in the foothills here knew how to shoot. Don't force us to remind you. Do the smart thing and come down right now. You'll be held prisoner until this revolt is settled one way or the other." "Give this up now!" Pillows warned them. "Don't you know what's going to happen when the militia returns from Garden Hill? They'll massacre you!" "That's for us to worry about, not you," Maddie told them. "Now make up your minds. Are you coming down, or are you going to go the hard way?" ------- Two of the teams chose the easy way. Post one and post four both dropped their weapons into their bunkers and made their way down to the waiting women, their hands high in the air. All four of these men figured that the militia would easily take the town back when they returned and that their best chance for living to see that was to cooperate for now. They were taken into custody and quickly spirited off to the high school where they joined their comrades under guard. Post two elected to call what they thought was a bluff. They began marching down the hill, their weapons out in front of them, prepared to blow away any bitch that dared fire upon them. They were cut to pieces before they made it halfway down, the women below waiting until they were just into view in the darkness and then illuminating them with powerful battery-operated flashlights. The two men managed to fire a total of ten rounds back at their attackers before they fell dead to the ground. None of the women were hit. "What was that firing?" demanded Pillows, at post three, as the sound of automatic weapons fire reached him. "That was Law and Weatherly being blown to shit," Maddie's voice replied. "Are you ready to go next, Pillows?" In the end, Pillows and his partner stayed up there until nearly one o'clock in the afternoon. By that time, the complete recruitment of all of the remaining women in town was in full swing. Finally, conceding defeat - at least until the rest of the militia returned from Garden Hill - he formally surrendered and was taken into custody along with his partner. The town of Auburn was now completely in the hands of the women. ------- It was one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time, particularly to sleep-deprived, adrenaline charged minds that were trying to come to grips with a worsening military situation. Stu was the one to suggest it but Bracken, after hearing the proposal, quickly adapted it on an experimental basis without stopping to completely examine the ramifications. "Let's send a squad out in front of us," Stu told him at breakfast that morning. "We'll lighten them up by taking their packs away from them, arm them up with five of the automatic weapons and five of the semi-autos, and then have them try to ferret out these ambush teams before the main group gets to them." "Ferret them out?" asked Bracken, whose face was gaunt and worried. He was living on less than two hours of broken sleep in the last forty-eight. "Right," Stu said. "They'll move faster than the rest of the group. They can circle around and up on some of those hills before we get there. They'll be a scouting squad able to locate attack zones in advance of the main group." "A scouting squad," Bracken said, rolling those words around on his tongue. He liked the sound of it. With a minimum of discussion, such a squad was quickly formed, equipped, and enlisted with their new mission. Nor did the squad, which consisted of ten of the most experienced troops below the rank of officer, pause to consider the wisdom of what they were being ordered to do. They knew it was marginally dangerous of course, but then simply walking to their destination or sleeping in their sleeping bags was dangerous these days. They felt like they were doing something to strike back at the ghosts that had been tormenting them. And they would be armed with the very best weapons available. The mission gave them a sense of elitism, of special privilege. The fact that they would be more than a half a mile in front of the main group and the support that it offered just didn't enter into their calculations. And so it came to pass that ten of Bracken's best soldiers trotted off in front at 7:00 AM, moving at a near jog, where they began traipsing up and down and all around the hilly terrain southeast of the first mudfall, searching for hidden ambush teams. It wasn't long before they found one. ------- Chrissie's team was up for the first mission that morning. Brett and Jason had dropped them off just after sunrise near a group of hills a mile and a half from where the militia had spent its restless, often interrupted night. It had been almost taken as a given that Chrissie and her squad would do nothing more than recon for this mission. They figured that the militia would either split into two groups, surrounding the hills as they had done at the beginning of the previous day, or that they would tighten up and move along another corridor to the east, therefore putting them out of range. The job of the first group would be to pinpoint the direction of their march so that the second group, Michelle's squad, would be able to set up a better ambush point. It was therefore a great surprise for Chrissie and her team to see a group of ten men, moving quickly in a wedge formation, coming towards them by means of darting in and out of the hills. "What the hell are they doing?" enquired Mike Monahan, looking at them through the scope of his rifle. Chrissie was watching them through her binoculars. They were still nearly a mile in the distance. "They're checking the hills," she said in wonder. "They sent a squad out in front of them to check the hills." "Where are the rest?" Maggie asked. "They wouldn't send them out there all by themselves, would they?" "You wouldn't think they would," she replied. "I'm not a great military genius or anything, but even I am not dumb enough for that. Those guys are completely cut off from support." "What do we do?" Maria asked, taking her eyes of her own telescopic sight to look at her leader. "Let's let them get closer," Chrissie said. "Just keep an eye on them and keep a watch behind them. This might be some sort of trap." The group of ten men continued to get closer and closer to the hill where Chrissie and her team were hidden among fallen logs and boulders. When they got within a half a mile it became apparent that they were all packing assault rifles, probably the automatics, and that they were traveling without packs. It also became apparent that the rest of the militia was far behind them. Only when the advance team closed to within 500 yards did other members of the militia begin to appear in the distance. Chrissie reported all of these developments to Brett and Jason, who were parked two miles to the east, near the rim of the canyon. "Are you sure?" Brett asked her. "We're sure, mother bird," she said. "They're heading right our way. The main formation is nearly three-quarters of a mile back." "I copy," Brett said. "What are your intentions?" She told him. Though he was worried for her safety, he did not disagree with her. It was simply too good of an opportunity to pass up. "All right, guys," Chrissie said as she watched them close even further. They were now two hills over, checking around the perimeter, their guns at ready. "Are you all up for this?" "Hell yeah," Mike said with a grin. "I'm actually going to enjoy this." The others all echoed this sentiment. "Remember," Chrissie said, digging in her backpack and pulling out two more banana clips full of ammunition, "we let them close to within sixty yards, until they get into that bare patch where there's nothing for them to hide behind. Stay under your cover and use your scopes once they hit the mud. Now let's assign first targets and second targets." Once it started, it was all over in less than a minute. Just as the militia recon team began to approach the base of the hill where Chrissie and her team were sequestered, three rifle shots rang out and three of the men dropped lifelessly to the mud, drilled through with devastating body shots. No sooner had those bullets left the barrel than Chrissie was raining 5.56 mm shells down upon the survivors with her M-16. Though the militia members were quick about hitting the dirt once the shooting started, it didn't really matter in this case. They were far too close to where the fire was coming from and there was absolutely nothing for them to use to hide behind. Even before they began to return fire, Chrissie had taken out two more of them. Bullets began to slam into the logs they were hiding behind and to plunk into the mud and trees around them but they ignored them, having picked their own positions well. Instead of retreating as they usually did, the three riflemen jacked new rounds into their chambers and took aim at the heads of the crouching soldiers below. From this distance it was almost impossible to miss. Three more rifle shots rang out and three heads exploded into blood and brain down below. This left only two of the original ten alive. Chrissie ejected her empty magazine and quickly shoved in a fresh one. She jacked in the first round and aimed back down below. One of the two men had stood up and was attempting to flee. She sighted on him and squeezed off two quick bursts, sending six rounds into his back and dropping him lifelessly back to the ground. The other man, still lying on his stomach, was desperately trying to reload his own weapon. Before he could even get the empty magazine out, Chrissie turned her sights to him and began to fire. Simultaneously Mike and Maria both scoped in on him and fired as well. He jerked and rolled as he was struck from several different angles and then it was over. The sound of the final shots rolled off into the distance and then all was quiet. "Goddamn," Mike said, his body trembling with adrenaline. "That was some shit." Chrissie, also quite jazzed by her adrenal glands, looked off to where the rest of the militia was advancing. The closest of them were still nothing but tiny figures rushing in their direction, well out of firing range. "Shall we boogie?" asked Maria, anxious for the safety of the helicopter. "Not yet," Chrissie said. "We have a few minutes. Let's go get those weapons they had." "What?" Maria asked, as if Chrissie was mad. "They had four or five automatic weapons down there," Chrissie said. "Let's get them." And so they rushed down the hill, their own weapons out before them, and stripped the bloody, dead or dying men of their rifles and ammunition. They considered taking their sidearms as well but there was not quite that much time. "Lets go," Chrissie said when the deed was done. Her hands were bloody and she was carting three rifles in addition to her own. Her team did not need to be persuaded. Their own bloody arms full of stolen rifles, they made a run for their pick-up point where Brett was already touching down. ------- The sight of their ten best soldiers lying dead in the mud, their bodies stripped of their weapons, had a powerful effect on the members of the militia who saw it. The glaring mistake that had been made in sending them out in front of the main group became painfully obvious in retrospect, even among those men who'd thought it a good idea initially. "What the fuck was Bracken thinking?" asked one sergeant to Lieutenant Colby. "He sent those men out to slaughter." "I don't know," Colby said, shaking his head a little and wondering if it was really worth it to keep going on. "I just don't fucking know." Bracken himself took this mistake especially hard since he was the one who had ordered it. Why had he done it? Why hadn't the thought that he was cutting off and isolating a group of his men occurred to him until after the disastrous results? Was he that tired, that shell-shocked? It was only the third day of the march. There were at least eight more to go. What other mistakes would he make? How many other men would die? He found himself walking next to Stu about an hour after leaving the sight of the massacre. Though it was against their current doctrine for two people to walk close enough to each other to be taken down in one burst, experience had taught him that they had another hour at least until the next attack. Stu, though rough and unrefined, was a competent soldier and one of the men he confided in. "What do you think?" he asked him, shifting his rifle from one side to the other. "About what?" Stu said, spitting a stream of tobacco juice into the mud. "About this mission," Bracken said. "We've already taken twice as many casualties as my very worst case estimation. Twice as many and we're still at least eight days out, maybe more at the pace we've been slowed to. We're starting to make mistakes because of fatigue. That little recon group is a prime example. We've lost five of our automatic weapons. The men are grumbling and scared and discipline is starting to slip." "What are you saying?" Stu asked. "I'm saying that maybe we should abort," he said, putting it into words for the first time. Stu shook his head vehemently. "Allow me to speak freely," he said. "By all means," Bracken told him. "We've gone too far to stop now. Sure, we've taken losses and we'll probably take more if they keep hitting us like that, but we have to push on." "Why? What's the point? There's only two hundred or so women in that town and a helicopter. They don't have a very big food supply for us to take. What's so damn important?" "It's gone beyond what's in that town," Stu told him. "If we go slinking back in defeat, we'll have a discipline problem that will make what we have now seem like a West Point senior class in comparison. We're talking about the fucking honor of the militia here man. Sure, the men are grumbling now. But no matter how many sneak attacks those fuckers make on us on the way, they can't kill us all. They can't. There'll still be enough of us to take that fucking town when we get there and when we do, when we kill every last one of those fuckers that have done this to us, when we cut off their fucking dicks and shove them up their asses, when we rape every fucking one of those cunts in that town, then the men will have their honor back. We have to do this. We have to. If we don't, we'll fall apart." Bracken took this thought under consideration. He mulled it over until the next attack came two hours later, killing another four men. ------- Despite the violence and suddenness of the Auburn takeover, Jessica insisted that the change in government, as it were, be democratically approved. At 5:00 that evening, just as the militia was preparing to bed down for another night of attacks, all of the women in town gathered in the bleachers of the high school. By that time every one of them knew what had happened in the town and the talk that day had been of nothing else. Jessica and her military leaders, Maddie chief among them, mounted the podium where Barnes had once ordered the hanging of women and addressed the crowd. "As you are aware," she told them, "we have taken control of the town of Auburn from the men that had been running it and, as of this moment, we are in command." The cheer that erupted with this statement served to convince Jessica that she would have no problem with what she was about to suggest. When it quieted down, she continued. "Now most of you were not in on the planning or execution of this takeover," she said. "Most of you did not even realize it was going on until you woke up this morning for your normal duties - duties assigned by those vermin that used to rule us. I apologize for leaving you out of this but it was simply not possible to include everyone in the plot we were hatching both for security and for logistical reasons. But now that it has taken place, we must have your approval to continue upon this path." Another round of cheers erupted, this one louder than the first. "So what I propose now is a vote," she said. "The question we must decide is whether or not to retain control of this town by any means necessary in the future. If we do this, we will have to fight when the rest of the men return. We will have to prepare for this fight and execute it despite losses. We will have to defeat that very army that marched out of here to attack our neighbors in Garden Hill. If you vote aye on this proposal, we will do this. If you vote nay..." she trailed off, letting those words sink in, "then we will release the men that we have captured and turn control of the town back over to them. Those of us in on the plot will undoubtedly be punished harshly if we remain, so I will ask that if you vote against us, that we be allowed to leave the township before the others are released. Now for a vote of this magnitude and with these far-reaching implications, I must insist that a two-thirds majority be reached. This may require paper ballets, but let's at least see where we stand at this moment, shall we?" She paused, already knowing what the result was going to be. "Those in favor of retaining control of the town and fighting to maintain it, please say aye." The ayes were loud enough to be heard in the farthest reaches of the town. There was not even a need to ask for those saying nay. That done, Jessica moved on to the next portion of her plan, the portion she was not so sure about. "Now that we've decided to govern ourselves," she said, "we must have a leader." It took less than ten minutes of coy talk and innuendo about leadership qualities before someone nominated Jessica to the post. The nomination was quickly seconded. No one stepped up to run against her. Five minutes later she was overwhelmingly approved as the leader of the new Auburn. "Thank you," she said, gushing at the crowd, acting as if overwhelmed. "I really want to thank all of you for your support and trust in me. I promise I'll do my best to lead you. Now, for my first act as leader, I would like to put a proposal before you. All of you have suffered greatly over these past few months at the hands of the men in town. Now most of these men are not here right now and most of the ones that were here are dead. Of the rest, we have captured them and are holding them in the high school building for the moment. Now it is not my suggestion that we harm these men - after all, they do serve a few purposes, don't they? But there is one man in there that is directly responsible for much of the suffering we have been under. There is a man in there that ordered the deaths of many of our friends. That man is Barnes." Cries of outrage met his very name. "It is my proposal that we deal with the crimes this man has committed against us right now, this very night! That way, if - God forbid - we should lose our battle to retain control of this township when the full militia returns, we will have at least enacted some justice for our struggle." She gave another pregnant pause. "I suggest that we try Barnes tonight, right now, for crimes against womankind, murder, rape, and human rights violations." The approval that this suggestion garnered from the crowd made a vote unnecessary. "Of course," Jessica said, once the noise died down, "the punishment that he receives if found guilty should be both appropriate, and severe enough so that those who come after will think twice about such things. Hanging is simply not good enough for him. I think that they very thing that he threatened us with so many times should be his sentence." Again, no vote was needed. The approval was obvious. ------- Earlier in the day the rest of the men in the supply room had been moved out, leaving Barnes by himself. He was still as naked as he had been when he'd been forced from his bed early that morning and still fastened to the same wooden chair, although the ropes had been replaced with a set of handcuffs at some point. Unable to make his way to a bathroom, Barnes had both urinated and defecated upon himself for lack of any other option. He smelled horrible and looked worse. How had this happened? he kept asking himself. How had the ignorant bitches in town managed to outsmart the highly trained and equipped militia teams left to police them? Granted, the women had the overwhelming strength in numbers, but the men had had the guns. How had unarmed women taken men with guns? It was bewildering to him, completely unfathomable, as if a law of physics had been broken somehow. Like the rest of the men in town, he had complete confidence in the fact that the returning militia would easily re-capture the town and put things back to the way they were supposed to be. But what would happen in the meantime? What would become of the men - particularly himself - that had been left behind? He would never find out the fates of the other men, but he soon found out his own fate. At 5:30 that afternoon, just as the light was fading from the sky, the door to his storage room was opened and four women, all of them armed with automatic weapons, came in. The leader of the group was Maddie Livingston, whose husband had been in charge of all of the security details. "Jesus Christ, you stink," Maddie told him, leveling her weapon at him. "And you have a small dick too. No surprise there." "Are you ready to give this up?" Barnes asked toughly, although he could plainly see that they weren't. "Here's how ready we are, Barnes," she said. She stepped forward towards him and swung the butt end of her rifle at his head. It struck him in the left temple hard enough to break open a cut and send a spray of blood out into the air. While fireworks exploded in his vision, his chair was knocked over, landing him in the puddle of his own urine. Blood poured from his head out onto the floor. "Goddamn, that felt good," Maddie smiled. She looked at her three companions. "Uncuff him from the chair and then cuff his hands back behind his back again." "What are you going to do?" Barnes, still trying to clear his head from the blow, asked weakly. "We're going to court, baby," she said, aiming her rifle at his lower body. "Now don't try anything funny or I'll blow that little dick right off of you." He didn't try anything funny. He was uncuffed from the back of the chair and then quickly re-cuffed police fashion, hands behind his back. The steel bracelets were wrenched brutally tight. Two of the women, their rifles now over their shoulders, their hands wearing latex gloves to keep from touching his filth, roughly jerked him to his feet. "Come on," Maddie said. "It's showtime." He was dragged out of the high school building into the dark, rainy night. He tried to talk once, to tell them that they wouldn't get away with this, but before the first syllable left his mouth, Maddie's rifle butt swung again, this time striking him squarely in the testicles. He emitted an almost bovine scream of pain and doubled over. Vomit, which mostly consisted of stomach acid, sprayed from his mouth. "Walk, asshole, or you'll get another one," Maddie told him. He walked, assisted by the gloved hands pulling him along by his biceps. He was led out onto the football field where all of the lights had been turned on and all of the seats were filled with the women in town. His feet squelched wetly through the mud that the field had become. Cries of hatred and death threats immediately began to come from the crowd once he was visible to them. He saw that Jessica, the Garden Hill bitch he had once debriefed at length, was standing behind the podium; his podium. "Put him in the chair," she said, looking at him in a cocky, arrogant manner. Maddie's women set him down - not terribly gently - in a card-table chair next to the podium. What followed was a trial of sorts, about as fair and impartial of a trial as... well... as he used to give women accused of trying to escape. He was given no defense council of any kind. He was not allowed to speak on his own behalf. The entire thing consisted of Jessica and two of his wives describing every crime that he had ever committed in their presence. His wives - whom he had always assumed to be loyal to him (after all, they had special privileges) seemed to take particular pleasure in describing everything from statements he'd made in their presence about controlling the women to his actual sexual shortcomings. "Did you ever consent to sexual relations with this man?" Jessica, serving as judge and prosecuting attorney all in one, enquired at one point. Gloria, the wife in question, actually scoffed at this. She was a beautiful redhead who had once been Miss Placer County. "As if I would every let this little wimpy piece of shit into me by choice," she said. "Not that he ever hurt me that bad. As you can see, his dick looks a little like a golf pencil." Derisive laughter met this comment and Barnes began to sense that he was in serious trouble. The trial (for lack of a better term) went on for less than twenty minutes. In the end, Barnes was found guilty of all charges. "The town has spoken, Barnes," Jessica said, giving a signal to a few women that were hovering just out of sight. "Now punishment will be passed." "Don't I get to speak on my behalf?" Barnes asked, not even wanting to contemplate what these women had in mind. The answer to this question was not verbal. It consisted of another blow to the forehead by Maddie's M-16, a blow that opened a fresh cut and sent him thunking to the ground. Two women picked him up and dragged him over to the scaffold where women had been hanged in the past. Barnes actually felt a sense of relief that they had chosen this method of execution for him. After all, it was apparent that he was about to die and hanging was actually one of the quickest methods. But when the noose was looped around the chain of his handcuffs instead of his neck, he realized that he was not going to get off so easy. "What are you doing?" he asked. "We're passing sentence," said Maddie, who was in charge. "But we have a few things to do first." "What?" he said, near hysteria now. No one answered him. "It has been suggested," said Jessica, speaking through the public address microphone once again, "that we should help ourselves to a small memento of this occasion before the sentence is carried out. This will be something that we can put in a future museum as a sacred object, as a reminder of this troubled time. I, as your newly elected leader, agree wholeheartedly both with this notion and with the object in question. I will leave the collection of this object to the woman that suffered the most under this monster, Gloria Ferguson." "Thank you," Gloria said, a wicked smile upon her face. She raised up a butcher knife and showed it to the crowd, eliciting cheers of approval. "What are you going to do with that?" Barnes screamed, already having a pretty good idea. "Not much," Gloria said, stepping towards him. While four other women held him in place, Gloria grasped his wilted penis and testicles in one of her hands. "No!" he screamed, trying desperately to struggle. "Yes," Gloria said, bringing the knife down. It took nearly a minute, a minute that seemed to go on for an hour to Barnes. The pain as she sawed through his penis and scrotum was incredible, easily the most horrid thing he'd ever experienced. He felt blood running down his legs, felt waves of agony shooting up and down them. He could not bring himself to look at his demasculination. Finally, with a final few sweeps of the knife, the deed was done. Gloria held his bloody penis and testicles aloft in her left hand, the dripping knife in the right. The crowd scream in orgasmic ecstasy. "Let this pitiful objection live forever as a symbol of male infamy!" Gloria screamed, not using the loudspeaker but with her voice loud enough for everyone to hear anyway. Barnes was now panting in pain and fear, feeling the emptiness below, feeling the blood pattering onto his feet. He now wanted to die, wanted it to be over. "And now," Jessica said, "the rest of the sentence will be carried out. "Release the scaffold!" A woman pulled the lever that released the trap door, dropping Barnes down three feet before the rope jerked him to a halt. His arms were forced upward by the weight of him, instantly dislocating both arms from the shoulder joint. He screamed again as fresh pain went shooting through his body. Slowly, he swung back and forth, his feet five feet off the ground. "Douse him," Jessica said next. A bucket full of liquid was poured over his body, running down his chest, his back, trailing down to his legs. None of it, not a single drop, landed on his face or his head. The sharp, rich smell of it told him instantly what it was. It was gasoline. "No!" he pleaded. "No no no nooooooo!" "Yes," said Maddie, who held a red freeway flare in her hands. She pulled the cap off of it and used it to strike the end against. It flared to life with a bright red glow and a whiff of burning. She handed it to Gloria. "Would you care to do the honors?" she asked her. "Gladly," Gloria said, taking the hissing flare. Gloria had a flare (as it were) for the dramatic. She held it aloft for a moment, causing the cheers of the crowd and further screams from Barnes. Finally, winding up like a pitcher, she tossed it at her former husband, striking him directly in the chest. Barnes felt it strike and then suddenly he was burning as the gasoline flared to life, moving both upward and downward. Intense, barely imaginable pain seared through every nerve ending as the fire engulfed him from shoulders to feet, blackening his skin, making it tighten and contract. The pain lasted forever, for an eternity before the hot gasses entering his lungs finally, blessedly brought him to the final unconsciousness. ------- Chapter 17 "Brad, this shit is fuckin' crazy. I can't fuckin' take it anymore," said Private Rodney Lexington, one of the most junior members of the Placer County Militia. He was talking to his best friend, Brad Zachary, also a private and also a junior member. The two men had grown up together in Grass Valley and had been captured together there when the militia took that particular town. They had been assigned to entirely different platoons within the militia at the beginning of the march but the high rate of casualties had forced much reorganization and they were now both assigned to Colby's platoon, though in different squads. It was just before sunrise on January 20, the seventh night of their march. The two twenty year olds were in the process of dragging one of the latest victims of the ambushing helicopter from Garden Hill away from the main group. The corpse they hauled had once been corporal Staleworth. He had taken three slugs in the stomach and one in the hip during the strafing run, wounding him severely enough so that a fifth bullet, this one to the head, had been required to end his suffering. As had become customary in the last few days on the trail, Staleworth had supplied the lethal bullet himself, using his own handgun. It was perverse but it had somehow evolved as the final test of manhood that wounded men perform the deed themselves. Those that did it were considered heroic; those that did not (therefore forcing a sergeant or a lieutenant to do it for him) were considered pussies. Both of the young privates dragged Staleworth by an armpit with one arm while holding a flashlight before them with the other. Both had their duty weapons - semi-automatic AK-47s - over their shoulders. They kept their lights trained in front of them, not looking at their package. "This shit just ain't right," Zachary said as they reached a small area around the back side of a pile of fallen pine trees. "I mean, we don't even bury them. We just leave them here for the fuckin animals to eat." "And they'll do the same to us," Lexington said solemnly as he let go of the body. "If we get killed out here, they'll do the same to us. They'll give us a fuckin pistol to shoot ourselves with and then drag us off into the trees." "It ain't right," Zachary repeated. They both looked at the rapidly stiffening corpse of Staleworth for a moment, seeing the coagulating blood from the exiting .45 caliber bullet on the top of his head. Until the comet neither of them had even seen a dead body before. Now they were surrounded by them and forced to constantly worry that they would be the next. "I'm not gonna let this shit happen to me," Lexington said quietly. "I'm not gonna end up as some fuckin corpse in the woods because that asshole Barnes wants to score some fresh pussy and his own personal helicopter." "What do you mean?" Zachary asked. "I'm gettin' my ass out of here," he said. "Fuck this shit." Zachary looked at him nervously, trying to read his face in the meager backwash of their flashlights. "What the hell you talking about? Where are you going to go? There ain't nothing but Garden Hill and Auburn left." Lexington shook his head. "That's where you're wrong," he said. "The militia done took everything in the neighborhood, that's true. But there's more than just this neighborhood. They haven't been past Grass Valley. There's all kinds a little towns north of there. Somewhere, some of them have to still be alive." "What if there is? What makes you think they'll take you in? And how will you feed yourself long enough to get there?" "Food ain't a problem," he replied, lowering his voice even further. "I'm a food supply carrier. I have enough to last two men for more than a month if we ration it." "We?" Zachary said. "You want me to go with you?" "You pack the ammo," he told him. "And there's safety in numbers." "I don't know," he said, shaking his head. "What if we don't find nothing? We'll die out there." "And we'll probably die if we stay," Lexington reminded him. "It's gotten to the point that I think the devil we don't know is better than the one we do. If you wanna get blasted apart on the trail or have your fuckin nuts blown off by one of those mines, than you just stay. Me, I'm going. I'd rather starve to death twenty miles away from here than have to put a pistol to my own head and get eaten by raccoons and rats." Zachary was not convinced, but he was swaying. "It's a better fuckin chance than what we got here," Lexington told him. "We've been through some shit, you and I, you know that. Come with me. We'll make it. And if we don't, we'll at least die like men." He took a breath, lowering his head a little. "How?" he finally said. ------- It was almost absurdly easy to get away. The next morning, twenty minutes into the day's march, just as everyone was starting to worry about when the first hit and run attack would come, Lexington broke formation and trotted over to Stinson. "I gotta take a shit, sarge," he told him. "I'm gonna lag back for a minute." Stinson, who, like everyone else was strung out with nervous fatigue, looked at his private in annoyance. "Why the fuck didn't you take one after breakfast like everyone else? Jesus Christ, Lexington." "I didn't have to go then," he said. "I'll just be a few minutes." Stinson shook his head. "Hurry the fuck up," he said. "We ain't slowing down for your ass. Be back in formation in ten minutes or I'm gonna cut your lunch rations." "You got it, sarge," Lexington told him reassuringly. "Thanks." With that, he trotted off to the side, his weapon held at the ready, his sleeping bag and his fifty-pound pack of rations on his back. He darted into the middle of a group of trees and squatted there, not bothering to pull down his pants, just waiting while his comrades passed on both sides, none of them even noticing his presence so widely were the troops kept spaced. Stinson's squad was near the rear of the formation that morning. It took less than five minutes before the rest of the group passed by him. He waited another five minutes and then stood up, edging out of his hiding area and looking around. No one else was in view. He was alone. Moving as quickly as he could, he moved back in the direction from which they had come and then darted into an area of thicker trees near a minor mudfall. He then began to move north, quickly disappearing into the dense forest. He moved from tree to tree, over hills, through thick mud, pushing himself to the limit of his physical limitations. By the time Stinson noticed that he had never returned to his place in the march twenty minutes later, he was nearly a mile away. He climbed to the top of a large, heavily wooded hill. He and Zachary had managed to meet briefly just after breakfast and had decided upon this location as a rally point. Once atop it he waited nervously for another ten minutes before the sound of wet footsteps and a clanking rifle reached his ears. He trained his rifle out over the approach, vowing that if it were the militia giving pursuit he would go down shooting. It wasn't. A minute later the familiar form of his friend, very out of breath and moving only on reserve energy, appeared. Zachary had used the same ruse to escape from his squad, which had been marching a little closer in towards the front. Again, this was something that probably would not have been possible had they been in a tight formation such as the one they'd left Auburn in, but Bracken's rules were no less than fifty feet between soldiers at all times. This allowed many gaps to be used and exploited. The two men shook hands warmly at the top of the ridge. "No one's behind you?" Lexington asked. "No," Zachary breathed. "Not as far as I know." "Good. Let's get moving before there are. I don't think they'll bother looking for us, but the farther away we can get, the better." He nodded, exhausted from carrying his own sixty pound pack full of ammunition, but determined. They went down the far side of the hill and then began to work their way north. ------- "Sir," Stinson said as he approached his lieutenant, "can I have a quick word?" "Sure," Colby said, slowing up a little. "But make it fast. God only knows when those fucks are going to start hitting us and I don't want to be standing next to anyone when they do." "Well, sir," Stinson said, trying to think if there was a delicate way to put this. There really wasn't. "The fact is that one of my men... well..." "What?" Colby demanded, in no mood for word games. "One of your men is what?" "Missing, sir." "Missing?" he asked. "You mean we missed a KIA from the attacks last night?" "No, sir," Stinson told him. "He wasn't killed last night. It's Private Lexington. He was marching with us less than thirty minutes ago. He told me he was going to hold back for a minute to take a shit and then catch up. He never did." Colby scratched his head a little, his muddled brain trying to sort through this. "Thirty minutes ago? Are you sure he didn't accidentally form up with the wrong squad? A lot of the guys are kinda loopy lately." "I checked the squads immediately around mine, sir," Stinson told him. "He wasn't there. I'm wondering if maybe he... well... kind of ran off." "Ran off?" "Deserted, sir," Stinson said. "There hasn't been any gunfire from behind us. I simply can't think of any other reason that he wouldn't have come back. If he fell and injured himself or was attacked, he would've fired off a shot, wouldn't you think?" "Now let's not start jumping to conclusions," Colby said, although what Stinson was saying made perfect sense given the current climate. "Maybe he's..." "Sir," said Sergeant Standish from third squad as he came trotting up behind them. "Can I have a quick word with you?" Colby looked at him, annoyed. "Can it wait for a minute? I'm already dealing with something here." "Not really, sir," Standish said. "You see, one of my men seems to have wandered off." ------- Five minutes later the march had been halted and the two sergeants and their lieutenant were talking with Bracken. Bracken questioned them thoroughly and, upon discovering that the two men had disappeared independently of each other by using the exact same excuse convinced everyone that desertion was what they were dealing with. "Shall we try to find them?" Colby asked. "They should be hanged as an example to the other men." "They should be," Bracken said, "but I don't think there's any point in looking for them. They could be miles away by now in any direction." "So we just let them go?" Stinson asked. "There's nothing else to do," Bracken told him. "Let's get everyone moving again. I want to put some miles behind us. In the meantime, keep this quiet. I don't want to give the other men any ideas." Had he not been so tired he probably would have realized the futility of this. Already the word had been passed both up and down the ranks. ------- They lost seven more men to ambush attacks during the course of that day; a little less than what had been average. Though fatigue had slowed them down in almost every other action, getting their asses down on the ground when the bullets started coming in was not one of them. Many times the people in the vicinity of the attack were able to spot the flashes of the rifles shots and hit the dirt even before the initial shots could take them out. As a result the average number fell a little each day, with this day being the lowest yet. At night too they had found a way to decrease the amount of people killed and wounded by the strafing attacks. Though they could not eliminate them entirely, they had found that by setting up their camp against the base of hills, they could at least cut in half the potential directions from which those attacks came, therefore making them more predictable. This served two purposes. One, it saved time when the guards returned fire. Instead of having to search 360 degrees of surrounding area to spot where the attack was coming from, they only had to search 180 to 220 degrees. This factor led directly to the second advantage - that the helicopter had to fire from further back to avoid being hit, thus decreasing the accuracy of the fire. At night the Garden Hill helicopter was lucky if it could hit one person per firing run, thus cutting the average men hit to around six or eight per night. That was still a considerable rate of attrition, but it was not nearly as bad as the first few days had been. But still, the threat and the reality of random, unpredictable death was undeniably there as the militia made camp on this night. They did not know that Brett and Jason had stood down the helicopter at 4:00 PM that afternoon for a maintenance regime and to get some much needed rest for themselves. The militia only knew that they enjoyed an unheard of ten-hour period without being attacked in any way, shape, or form. Though nobody got much rest because of the anticipation of attack, the tracers did not roll in for the first time until just after 2:00 AM. There were only two follow-up attacks after this. In all, only four men were killed and one slightly wounded in the hours between sunset and sunrise. But in the morning, as they pulled themselves out of their sleeping bags and came off guard detail to face a new day, it was discovered that three more men were missing nonetheless, they, their weapons, and their packs all vanished, there whereabouts unknown. With them had gone more ammunition, another of the precious automatic weapons, and nearly seventy pounds of rations. ------- It had been five days since the uprising that had placed Auburn in the hands of Jessica and the rest of the women and still the town was a flurry of activity. Jessica had appointed Madeline - who had the most military training and experience - as the commander of the Auburn defense forces and her titular second-in-command. Although Madeline had no real power to make town decisions (Jessica had seen to that), she had almost complete autonomy when it came to raising, training, and equipping those women who would be responsible for firing the guns at the returning militia when that happened. Luckily Barnes and company had already taken care of the most basic part of the defenses: the fixed bunkers and trenches from which the battle would be fought. At every one of the major access points to the town was an impressive array of sandbagged trenches atop of hills, many of which were protected by barbed wire mazes. These defenses had been constructed with the purpose of repelling a group at least as large as the militia itself. Would they think it ironic when those very defenses, those very emplacements, those very guns, were used to chop them up? Perhaps. Or perhaps they would be too busy dying to notice. On this rainy, dreary morning, while Jessica pulled herself out of bed at 9:00 AM and made a mad dash to her private bathroom, the sound of gunfire could be heard coming from the training ground out beyond the high school. It was the popping of M-16s and AK-47s mostly. Usually it was the single pops of semi-automatic fire that went with basic aiming and shooting practice but every once in a while there would be the extended bursts as the women practiced on full automatic. It was Maddie's intent to qualify as many of the women as possible in the time that she had left (which was estimated to be about three to four weeks). From her best shooters and leaders, she would then construct a chain of command by choosing lieutenants and sergeants to lead the corporals and privates. "Oh God," Jessica moaned as she dropped to her knees in her bathroom and put her head into the toilet of water. She retched several times, sweat breaking out on her brow, but nothing more than a little bit of bile came up. She coughed and choked for a moment and then, almost as fast as it had hit her, the nausea was gone, leaving her a little shaky but otherwise all right. She rubbed her stomach a few times and then stood up, wiping her forehead with her forearm. Her stomach had been very unstable lately, ever since she'd taken the first overt steps towards the rebellion that was now over and done with. She would be going about her business as usual and then suddenly, from out of nowhere, the nausea would hit, sometimes with enough suddenness that she was unable to get to the nearest bathroom or garbage can in time. She had attributed these bouts to nervousness as her plan approached the zero hour, but now that the plan had been successfully carried out, why was she still having it? It didn't make sense. Barnes was dead, his blackened but still recognizable skull hanging on a spike outside the main entrance to the high school. He wasn't a worry. The other men were firmly under control, used as slave labor during the day and locked securely up in storage rooms under guard at night. They weren't a worry either. Nor were her worries about acquiring and maintaining power in town. That had certainly come to pass with unbelievable ease. If there was one thing Jessica knew how to do, it was take charge of and lead groups of women. So what was the problem? Why was she still having crippling fits of nervous nausea? As she poured a bucket of water down into the toilet to flush it she figured that it was the upcoming battle with the militia that had her worried. That must be it, she told herself. She did not stop to think that there had been one other time in her life that she had felt like this: a time three years before the comet. ------- Jessica had taken over both Barnes' office in the principal's office and his bedroom in the former vice-principal's office (although she had changed the bed). She brushed her teeth with water from the sink and then stepped out to the doorway where Alice, her personal assistant, stood by with a gun strapped to her waist. "Good morning, ma'am," Alice addressed her, not actually saluting but certainly coming to attention. "How was your night?" "Very good, Alice," she told her. "Who do you have on cleaning detail today?" "Pillows and Staleworth," she said. "They're working on the downstairs right now. The rest of the men are out chopping firewood or hauling propane or diesel fuel over." "Good," Jessica said with a smile. "I want to be sure to keep this building heated and lighted. I'm sick of sleeping in the damn cold. And it's nice to have a damn computer working again." Alice nodded, not pointing out of course that Jessica was the only one in town now that had the luxury of a propane fired furnace and electric lights. She didn't feel a lot of resentment about this. After all, Jessica was their leader, the woman who had led them to this point, and didn't leaders deserve special privileges? "Have Pillows come in here right away and clean up my quarters," Jessica said. "And have that other asshole, who was it?" "Staleworth, Ma'am," she said. "Right, have him run a hot bath for me in the bathing room. I'll be down there in ten minutes and I expect it to be ready when I get there." "Right away," Alice said, picking up her portable radio. She said a few words into it and Jessica's orders were carried out. Prior to the uprising there had been no baths in Auburn. The men, when they bothered at all, had used the shower attachments in the locker rooms which had been set up to be powered by electric pumps run from the generator. The women had been forced, for the most part, to sponge bath themselves with cold water from collected rain barrels. That had been one of the first things to change. Now the bathing area of the Auburn high school was in the female locker room. As in Garden Hill, a large marble bathtub had been moved in from one of the nicer of the abandoned houses and placed with its drain directly over the shower drain. Unlike in Garden Hill the water was heated with propane instead of firewood, but the principle was the same. The town was under the impression that this innovation was Jessica's idea. She felt no need to correct this notion since it was unlikely that Paul would ever contradict her when he showed up here after the militia captured him. As she entered the room Staleworth, the former sergeant, was just finishing the task of adding the hot water. Bubbles covered the surface of the water and steam rose lazily into the air. The smell was of rose blossoms. Cindy Mahoney and Laura Jones, two of the women who had been assigned to interior guard detail, were standing close by, keeping their eyes on Staleworth's every move. To say that the women were nervous about having men walking around free after their recent ordeal was a vast understatement. Both women were armed with semi-automatic rifles that they kept their hands on at all time. "How's the water, asshole?" Jessica asked him, stepping close. She was still wearing her pajamas and had an armful of clothing in her hand. She set the clothing down on a shelf near the tub. "It's fine, ma'am," he replied, responding to her just as he had been taught to respond to any woman in town now. To not do so was to risk having a rifle butt up the side of his head. To fail to do so twice was to have it swung into his testicles. She reached over, taking no particular precautions to stay away from him, and dipped her hand in. It was steaming hot, nearly hot enough to bar entry. Just the way she liked it. "Very good," she said, starting to undo the buttons on her top. She turned to the two women. "Leave us." They looked at her as if she were mad. "I beg your pardon, Ma'am," Cindy said, "but I don't think that's a really good..." "Don't worry," Jessica said. "Put yourselves right outside the door. If there's trouble, I'll let you know." "But..." "Leave us," she said, more firmly this time. They gave her one last look and then reluctantly did as she asked. They walked to the door and stepped out of it, shutting it behind them. Staleworth and Jessica were now alone. She looked at the male who she had personally chosen to be a member of the interior staff. He was tall and very good looking, had been a personal trainer at one of the local gyms before the comet. His hair was blonde, his features Nordic. His arms and chest bulged with muscle. He looked back at her nervously, not knowing what to expect but thinking very uneasily of what had happened to Barnes. Jessica continued unbuttoning her top, letting it drop to the ground, wincing a little as the material grazed across her nipples, which had been ultra sensitive lately. She then pushed her bottoms down, leaving her standing only in a pair of cotton panties. She dropped these as well, revealing her sex. Her pubic hair, which Stinson had insisted she kept shaved, was just starting to grow back and was now a fine fuzz of black hairs. She sat on the edge of the tub. Staleworth cast his eyes away from her as she undressed, not because he found her unattractive - she was still quite appealing to look at - but because he was deathly afraid of offending her. "Look at me," she told him. Trembling a little, he did. Her legs were spread and he could see that she did not seem to be in a state of particular arousal. Her nipples were flaccid against her breasts and her vagina was closed, the lips not the least bit swollen or wet looking. "You used to rape Cathy, Lorene, and Nancy, didn't you?" Jessica asked, her fingers dropping down to her sex and beginning to idly play there, the tips stroking up and down her dry lips. Staleworth swallowed a little. "They were... uh... my wives before..." "You raped them," Jessica said, raising her voice a little. "They were not your wives. They were assigned to you by a lottery or traded to you by the other assholes in this town. They never consented to sex from you, you simply took it because your... species held the power. Isn't that right?" "Well... I suppose that's one way of looking at it," he finally stammered. Was it only a short week ago when he could have had this woman hanged for talking to him like this? "They tell me that you were quite the ass man," Jessica said, continuing to play with her vagina as she talked. Now the lips were starting to moisten a little. "Stinson, that fuck, was like that as well. He liked to put his cock up my ass. A lot of you were like that." Staleworth had no answer for her. It seemed safer somehow not to talk. "Come over here," Jessica told him, spreading her legs a little wider. Her fingers began to pick up speed between her legs. Her nipples finally started to harden. She was not the least bit attracted to Staleworth in a physical sense, but the thought of what she was going to have him do, what she was going to do to him, of the power that she held over him, was starting to turn her on greatly. Staleworth slowly walked over to her, stopping, as directed, three feet before where she was splayed out obscenely on the edge of the tub. "Take off you clothes," she said. "All of them." Staleworth nodded and then began to remove the shirt, jeans, and T-shirt he wore. His body was very impressive to behold but Jessica didn't waste much time looking at it. And despite his fear at what was to come, at the bizarre circumstances that he found himself in, his cock had hardened. Jessica saw this when he dropped his underwear. "You will do exactly what I say without question," Jessica told him. "If you do not, or if you try any sort of violent move with me, I will scream and those two armed women outside the door will be in here within a second. They will drag you off and by nightfall you will meet the same fate as your glorious commander did. Do you understand?" "Yes, ma'am," he said, looking at her a little more hungrily now. After all, if Jessica wanted him to fuck her, that wasn't the worst duty in town, was it? But Jessica didn't want him to fuck her. "Kneel down between my legs and lick my ass," she said. He looked at her, his mouth opening to give protest. "Not a word," she said, glaring at him. "Just do it. You like asses so much, it shouldn't be much of a problem for you, should it?" "No, ma'am," he said, feeling his gorge wanting to rise a little. He could plainly see that her ass was not terribly clean. Nevertheless, he sank to his knees before her, his face between her spread legs. Her lips were very swollen and wet now, exuding the powerful odor of feminine arousal. "Get to it," she told him, spreading her legs a little further, until they were as wide as she could make them. "And make sure it's sparkling clean." He began to lick, plunging his tongue up and down through the crack of her ass, over and under her anus. The erection he'd had wilted as he felt the surprisingly unfeminine roughness of that area of her body. Jessica, on the other hand, felt true pleasure at his work, enjoying it on a physical level as well as a degradation level. "Yes," she told him, her hand grabbing a handful of his hair and jerking it roughly. "That's a good asshole, make it nice and clean." He licked up and down until it was clean and slick with his saliva. But she wasn't done with him yet. "Now stick your tongue in it," she told him. "As far as it will go. Clean the inside too." He was able to get his tongue surprisingly far up into the orifice thanks to the regular reaming of it that she'd received from Stinson and several of his friends. While he licked and probed at her she put her fingers back to her pussy, playing with her clit. Soon she was crying out in orgasm, the first she'd had in a very long time. "Now get up," she told him once the last of the spasms eased off. He brought his wet and dirty face out of her crotch and stood before her once more. He was panting a little and still struggling with his gorge. The taste of her shit was in his mouth! "Just stand there," Jessica said, sliding backwards into the blessedly hot water of the tub. "I'm not done with you yet." She luxuriated in the warmth of the bath, feeling the bubbles caress her skin, feeling the heat draw away the aching in her muscles and the soreness of her breasts. While Staleworth stood there before her, she used a sponge to cleanse her legs, her breasts, her arms. At some point, while he was watching her do this, the revulsion of what he had just done gave way a little to arousal as he watched her glistening skin. He began to stiffen once more. Jessica had been waiting for this, had deliberately encouraged it. Wordlessly, she reached for his crotch and grabbed him by the testicles. She squeezed as hard as she could, grinding them together and sending immense pain shooting through Staleworth's body. He squealed and dropped to the floor, vomit spraying from his mouth. No sooner had the scream come out of his mouth then the door slammed open hard enough to nearly rip it off of its hinges. Cindy and Laura bursting through it, their weapons ready for action. "It's all right," Jessica told them before they had a chance to get more than three feet into the room. "Staleworth just had himself a little accident. Go back out." "Are you sure?" Cindy asked, seeing the naked, curled up Staleworth on the floor, writhing around. "I'm sure," she smiled. "It won't happen again. Now leave us." Once again they reluctantly exited the room and closed the door, where they immediately began speculating on just what was going on in there. "Stand up," Jessica told him. "I... can't," he whined. "My balls..." "Will be cut off and fed to you if you don't stand up right now. Now do it!" He pulled himself to his feet, standing before her once more, his legs somewhat wobbly. He was no longer erect. "You ever get a hard-on watching me again, I'll twist those fucking things right off your body," she said. "How dare you. And if you make so much as a squeak again, I'll let those guards take you out to the scaffold and execute you just like Barnes. Do you understand?" "Yes," he grunted, feeling agonizing pain still coiling in the pit of his stomach. "What?" Jessica said. "Yes, ma'am," he corrected. "Good," she said. "Now fill up my bucket with water so I can wash my hair." He filled up her bucket - walking somewhat with a limp now - and, at her direction, poured it over her head, thoroughly wetting her blond with brown roots hair. She then had him pour shampoo onto her head and massage it into her scalp. He felt himself starting to get erect again despite the pain but his mind, fearful of another attack on his balls, quickly countered with a burst of adrenaline from the sympathetic nervous system. In only one episode of testicle twisting, a Pavlov type response had been formed. "Now rinse me off," Jessica told him, closing her eyes while he brought a fresh bucket of water. She kept them closed for two rinses, confident that he would try nothing violent towards her. He was in her power now. Once her hair was free of lingering soapsuds she picked up the shampoo container and looked at it. It was cylindrical, about three inches in diameter and about nine or ten inches in length. The lid was bullet shaped. She held it in her hand for a moment, testing its weight and girth, hefting it up and down a few times. She smiled. "Turn around and bend over," she told Staleworth. He looked at the container in her hand nervously. "What are you going..." Her hand shot out as quick as lightning and grabbed him by the testicles once again. She gave a little squeeze, just enough to get his attention. "Do we need another little lesson in obedience?" she asked him. "No, ma'am," he said instantly, feeling those powerful fingers ready to grind and squeeze again. "Then do as you were told," she said, releasing him. Shaking and trembling, he turned around and bent over. "Spread 'em," she said next. He spread them, revealing his hairy, quite unattractive anal opening for her perusal. Jessica was not entirely without heart. She opened the shampoo first and squirted a considerable amount of it in the crack of his ass before she crammed the shampoo container up there. She inserted it in one brutal stroke, the same way that Stinson used to insert himself into her back passage. Staleworth grunted in pain at the intrusion but held still. Jessica slammed the container in and out of his ass for the better part of five minutes, until he was weak-kneed with pain and blood was dripping down on the floor. She sincerely hoped that Stinson would survive the battle of Garden Hill and the subsequent battle with her own forces (she was already thinking of them as her forces). She wanted to repeat this action with him, only with something bigger and less smooth. Finally she pulled the container free and dropped it on the floor. It was bloody and fecal stained. "Pick that up," she told Staleworth, "and clean it off with your mouth. Isn't that how you used to make us women clean your cocks when you were done?" Wordlessly he did as he was told, once again almost vomiting several times. "Now get your clothes back on," she told him when he was finished. "Once you're dressed, you can return to your normal duties. Be sure to come back in here and clean up the mess later." "Yes, ma'am," he said, his voice barely audible. "And get yourself a tampon out of the supply room," she told him helpfully. "It works good to stem up the blood. I should know." "Yes, ma'am," he said, picking up his jeans. Once he was gone, Cindy and Laura came back in, looking at their leader a little strangely. Both noted the drops of blood on the floor and the fecal odor in the air. "Is everything okay?" Cindy asked carefully. "Everything is just perfect," Jessica said with a smile. "I was just showing one of the assholes his new place in this town." "I see," Cindy said, not failing to note the shampoo bottle on the floor as well. She had a pretty good idea of what had been done with it. "I'm going to be in here for a while," Jessica said next, leaning back and submerging everything but her head. "Is there any of that canned tomato juice left in supply?" "Yes, ma'am," Laura said. "Good," Jessica told them. "Can you mix some of it with the vodka in the supply room for me? I can use a bloody Mary about now. And be sure to put in some of the ice from the freezer. I hate warm drinks." "Right away, ma'am," Cindy said. ------- Hatchling two, commanded by Michelle, had been in place atop of their hill for a little more than an hour when the first of the militia came into view. Their position was a good one. An anonymous looking hill covered with fallen and standing trees as well as mud hills and berms. It was directly in the path of the enemy advance although far enough to the edge of it so that the soldiers would not pass on both sides. It stood three hundred feet above the ground where the enemy was marching. It was the third drop of a team that day, although, if successful, it would only be the first attack. On day nine of the war, with the militia little more than halfway to Garden Hill, it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep up the pace of killing that they had enjoyed in the beginning. The militia had learned and adapted somewhat to the forces opposing them. They were now well beyond the first mudfall but they had not angled back towards the Interstate, where the pickings would have been absurdly easy. Instead, they were sticking to a northeasterly course through the thickest of the woods, spreading themselves widely out and frequently zigzagging around to make predicting their march difficult. It was now taking at least two recon drops before an optimum attack position could be found. Though the attacks still continued, they were more difficult to pull off and took much more advance planning - planning which was becoming more difficult to do with the factor of their own fatigue thrown in. In addition to the difficulty in planning and execution that the fatigue caused, it was also taking its toll on the accuracy of the shooting that they did. Hands trembled a little more on weapons and eyes found it harder to focus through scopes. Target assignments were not always completely understood and occasionally two people fired at the same man (on a few occasions, both of them missing him). This, coupled with the fact that militia were now hardened veterans of the hit and run attacks and therefore much quicker in hitting the dirt and diving under cover, meant that the body count was steadily dropping day by day. But still, the two ambush teams kept their spirits high and carried on. Though they were tired and somewhat disconcerted with their decreasing effectiveness, they still were making hits and steadily decreasing the numbers of troops that would eventually attack their town. The difference that they were making could easily be seen whenever the full force came into view during the morning recon drops. Though an accurate count was impossible to achieve due to how widely spread the Auburnites kept themselves, it was plain that well over a hundred of the original four hundred were no longer in the march. "All right," Michelle said, watching through her binoculars and stifling a yawn, "it looks like we have good positioning for this one. If I'm reading right, the closest of them are gonna pass a little under two hundred yards from us." "Just inside the safety margin," Hector said, telling her nothing she didn't know. "If they're too close we'll abort," she said. "There's always Chrissie's team on the next hill." "Where are we going to hit this time?" asked Leanette, gripping her rifle and peering through a gap in the logs. "We'll hit about three-quarters back this time," Michelle answered. "We've pounded on the point squads and the rear guard and the middle pretty consistently. Let's shift a little and throw them off guard even more." "Good idea," said Doris, stifling a yawn of her own. "Those in the middle of the middle might be thinking they're safe." "Exactly." Michelle updated Brett over the radio with their intention to attack, giving an ETA of approximately fifteen minutes. She promised that she would give another update when they were less than five. She talked in code of course but they had long since figured out the either the militia was not capable of monitoring their radio frequency or it had just not occurred to them to do so. Probably the former. Though the Auburnites clearly had radios of their own (Brett and Jason were able to routinely monitor their transmissions on the citizen's band) they probably did not have a VHF scanner with them that was capable of picking up the fire department tactical channel that Garden Hill used for their communications. Group by group, squad by widely spread squad, the militia marched by. Some of them came very close indeed, well inside the hundred-yard range as they passed the hill. But as the formation continued to go by, its outside elements were a little tighter, putting most of them about a hundred and eighty yards distance. "All right," Michelle said as one squad passed and the next started closing. "Let's hit that bunch there. Any disagreement?" There was none so Michelle radioed to Brett that an attack was imminent and that he should fire up the engine and lift off for the pick up. The pre-arranged extraction point was still valid and she let him know this as well. "Target time," Michelle said once this was done. "Hector, you take that guy on the far left, closest to us. Leanette, you take the man to his right and behind him. Doris, you have the guy immediately behind him. Everyone clear?" Everyone was clear. They continued to wait, watching as their targets grew closer and closer. The men they were planning to attack edged to within one hundred and sixty yards, well inside the safety margin, while those that would be supporting them, stayed about one hundred ninety to two hundred twenty yards out, right on the safety margin. "Be sure to hit your men," Michelle intoned in the final seconds. "They're a little too close for comfort." Three faces that were glued to three riflescopes replied that they would. Michelle, gripping her own weapon and ready to unleash her barrage, counted to three. When the magic number was reached, three rifles were fired, sending three .30 caliber bullets out at supersonic speed towards three men. As had been happening increasingly frequently lately, the targets saw the flashes and tried to dive to the ground before the bullets came in. They did not have as much time to react however since the range was closer and only one of them made it. Michelle clearly saw one of the men's head rock back in a spray of blood and the other take his shot in the upper chest. The third - Doris' target, managed to get down quick enough so that the bullet intended for him passed less than five inches above his head. His reprieve from death was only temporary however. Before he could even fire back, the bullets from Michelle's M-16 riddled his face and upper body. Michelle switched fire to the man closest to Doris' target. She expended the rest of her clip taking him out and then rolled her left, popping her magazine out and cramming it into her waistband. Above them the return fire was just starting to come in, the sound of bullets whizzing through the air reaching their ears. The militia was getting very fast indeed at responding to the attacks. "Let's get the hell out of here," Michelle said, reaching for a fresh magazine. She slammed it into place and then began to crawl down the protected side of the hill, confident that her team members were doing the same. The plinking of bullets against the logs that they were using for cover picked up in intensity as more of the squads below reacted to the attack. Michelle's team all knew that those platoons behind and forward of the squad that had been attacked were now rushing at top speed towards the rear of the hill, trying to cut them off as they retreated. It was something that they had never even come close to doing yet but still they tried every time. It was as Hector turned to begin his own trip down the hill that the seemingly impossible happened. A 5.56 millimeter bullet, fired randomly and without even really being properly aimed by a squad sergeant down below, just happened to pass perfectly through the same eight inch gap that Hector had just fired through. Hector was, at that moment, on his hands and knees facing downhill, just starting to crawl out of the danger zone. The bullet struck his left buttock, moving parallel to his torso. It chewed through the muscle tissue with ease, glanced off the curvature of his pelvis, chipping a large bone segment off, and then drilled through his left kidney before exiting in a spray of blood from his lower back. "Ahh fuck!" Hector screamed, falling forward as he felt an intense burning pain spreading through his lower body. "I'm hit! I'm hit!" "Hector!" Leanette, his wife, screamed, instantly abandoning her own egress and crawling over to him. "Goddammit!" Michelle yelled, turning and taking a quick look at the damage. She saw a small blood stain on his butt and a larger one on his back. "Hector can you move?" "Fuckin' aye!" he yelled, continuing to crawl down the hill, Leanette pulling him by the arms. Above them the bullets continued to slam into the hill and pass overhead. With Leanette and Doris' help, they managed to get him lower down on the hill so that he could try to stand. Here is where real trouble struck. He tried to stand to make the run to the chopper but his left leg would not support him. Searing, unbelievable pain went shooting through his pelvis as soon as he put weight on that side. "Leanette, get on the side of him!" Michelle ordered. "Come on, we need to get out of here!" Leanette got on his left side and allowed him to put his weight on her. Together, they began to move down the hill, heading for the helicopter a quarter mile away around the base of the next hill. Unfortunately, they were not moving very fast. "Faster Goddammit, faster!" Michelle screamed, firing a burst at a group of Auburnites that were just appearing on the left flank. Though they were still well over three hundred yards away, her fire served its purpose. They all dove to the ground. Doris grabbed Hector's other side and helped pull him along, thus increasing the speed of their retreat. Michelle trotted behind, constantly checking the rear for more militia troops. She pulled out her radio and keyed it up. "Brett, Jason," she said into it, abandoning the code for the moment, "Hector's been wounded by return fire. We're slowed down a little. Be ready to launch the second we get there!" "Copy," said Jason's remarkably calm voice. Another group of militia came rushing around from the right side of the hill. They were less than 250 yards away. Michelle sent them diving to the ground with another burst of her weapon. She cursed herself for going forward with the attack when the support elements had been so close. "Faster!" she intoned to her team. They managed to gain a little ground but just as they got to the base of the hill they had to go around, bullets began to whiz in from their pursuers. They were poorly aimed shots - that was true - and most of them were well off to the left or well over their heads, but a few went by close enough for the team to hear their passage. Michelle fired a few more bursts, falling a little behind her team members. Her fire was not as effective this time since all of the militia was now proned out on the ground, having the advantage of a low profile. They ignored her ineffective bursts and continued to fire and eventually, just as Hector and his supporters reached the turn around the hill, one of the bullets found its mark. It was a .30 caliber bullet from a hunting rifle and it hit Leanette squarely in the center of her back. It drilled through her spine, snapping it and the spinal nerves that it protected, neatly in two. From there it was diverted slightly to the left and upward where it tore the side of her descending aorta, punctured her left lung, and finally left her body just below her left breast. She dropped instantly to the ground, dragging Hector and Doris down with her. Hector screamed in pain at the sudden impact upon his wounded pelvis. Doris gave a startled squeal as the air was blasted out of her lungs by the impact against the ground. Leanette made no noise at all; she simply fell, already feeling dizziness from blood loss and shortness of breath from her lung injury. But that was not the worst. Below her belly button, she felt nothing at all. Michelle, seeing that another one of her squad had been hit, fired the rest of her clip at their attackers and then rushed over to see how bad it was. She saw the bloodstain spreading across Leanette's back and she feared the worst, thoughts of Dale's injuries coming immediately to mind. She knelt down next to her team members, right in front of Hector and Leanette, ignoring the bullets that were still passing all around them. "Come on," she intoned, pulling her magazine free and dropping it to the ground. "Doris, help Hector, I'll help Leanette." "Come on, Len," Hector, panting with exertion, pain, and now worry, told his wife. "Let's go! We gotta get the fuck out of here!" Leanette's face was already pale and sweaty, her breathing ragged, obviously each inspiration causing pain. "No," she said. "I'm done for. Leave me here. Get Hecky out!" "Stop talking like that!" Michelle yelled at her as a few bullets passed alarmingly close. "We'll have you in El Dorado Hills with the doc in fifteen minutes. Now let's go!" "I can't move," Leanette said, the words coming between breaths. "Everything from the stomach down is numb. I can't move my legs and I... I can't breathe." "Len," Hector cried at her. "The doc will fix you up. Come on!" "Nothing to fix up," she panted. "I'm done for. Now go! Don't get killed here with me." "Leanette," Doris said, tears on her face. "You can't..." "I'm dying," she said frantically. "I know it. I can feel it. Now go! Please?" "Len, I'm not gonna leave you here," Hector said, tears on his face as well. "I can't leave you here!" "You have to," she said. "Take care of Maria." "No, Leanette!" Hector cried. "No!" "They'll capture you," Doris told her. "God only knows what..." "They won't... won't... capture me," she said, each word becoming increasingly difficult. "Leave me my pistol. I'll... I'll hold them off for you. I'm done for. Now go!" "Len..." Hector started. "Get her weapon," Michelle, making one of the most agonizing decisions of her life, told her team. "Leave her the pistol." "What the hell are you talking about?" Hector demanded. Two bullets slammed into the ground less than four feet from them, kicking up mud that sprayed in the air. The militia was moving forward once again, advancing upon them. Soon they would be in range to accurately hit their targets. "We can't help her," Michelle said. "Can't you see that? We don't have any other choice. Now let's go!" "Listen... to... her," Leanette said, blood now running from her mouth. "Please, Hecky. Get away from here. I... know... what I'm... doing." "Oh God," he cried, bending down and kissing her face. "I love you, Lenny. I'll always love you." "I... know," she said, kissing him back, leaving bloody lip marks on his face. "And I love... you. Now go." They went. They stripped Leanette of her rifle but left the .45 caliber pistol. Michelle took it out of its holster and put it in her hand. "Don't let them get close," she said, her tears falling on her friend's face. "I won't." With only a few looks back, the three members continued their trip to the helicopter, Michelle and Doris helping to hold up the injured Hector. Thirty seconds after leaving Leanette in the mud, they made it to the backside of the hill and were dragging themselves towards the waiting helicopter. ------- Leanette lay on the ground, breathing raggedly, the pain in her chest increasing with each breath she took. The dizziness too continued to worsen as her lifeblood leaked out of her main artery into her abdominal cavity. The .45 was gripped tightly in her right hand, which she kept curled beneath her. She feigned death, watching as the militia platoon advanced towards her, their weapons out before them, most of them pointed at her. "Please," she whispered to herself. "Just a few more seconds." Either through random chance or answered prayers, she was granted that extra few seconds. The front elements of the militia continued to close with her, walking carefully instead of running, allowing precious time for the rest of the team to reach the safety of the helicopter. Just as they closed to within pistol range of her, she heard the gratifying sound, faint though clearly audible, of the turbine engine winding up to takeoff speed. The sound grew and then faded as the helicopter flew away. "Thank you," she breathed, watching the two closest members of the militia through her partially opened eye. "Oh my Lord, I thank thee. Please forgive my sins in the name of Jesus, amen." With her final prayer articulated, she used the last of her energy to roll her upper body up onto her side, leaving her useless legs to lie in place. Her hand shot out and leveled the pistol on the closest of the men. He was close enough for her to see his eyes, which just had time to widen in surprise before she pulled the trigger, sending a bullet right into his chest. She shifted her aim to the next closest, firing again and striking this unfortunate in the knee. Two seconds later the rest of the platoon opened up on her with a variety of automatic, semi-automatic, and single shot weapons. More than thirty bullets slammed into her, obliterating her consciousness in an instant. ------- "Where the hell is Leanette?" Brett yelled as Hector was thrown into the helicopter, Doris and Michelle following him inside. "She's done for," Michelle said, tears still running down her face. "We had to leave her." "Shit," Brett said. "Is she dead?" "She will be," she told him. "There was no choice, Brett. No choice. Now get us out of here. They're right fucking behind us!" He lifted off, spinning the helicopter to the southwest and putting on the speed, keeping low and passing between another group of hills before gaining altitude. Doris opened up a first-aid pack that Paul had prepared and began to pull bandages and tape out. Michelle helped her, leaving Brett in the dark about what had happened because she didn't put on her headset right away. "Jason," Brett said, "call Chrissie on the radio and tell her to abort her mission and hunker down. We'll be back to pick her up later." "Right," Jason said, his mind somewhat shocked, his eyes unable to drag themselves away from the blood running down Hector's back or the tears running down his companions' face. He keyed up his radio. "Mother bird to hatchling one, do you copy?" "Hatchling one here," Chrissie said a moment later. "Go ahead." "Abort your mission and hold in place. I repeat, let the wolves pass and hold in place. We will be unable to extract you. Hatchling two has taken casualties and we need to fly to the MASH unit." There was a long pause, long enough so that Jason was forced to ask his sister if she had copied him. "I copy," she said in a slow voice. "What are the extent of the casualties?" Jason looked at Brett, quietly questioning whether he should provide this information to them. Brett, a believer in the truth, nodded. "Leanette is dead," Jason said, his voice breaking a little. "Hector is wounded. We'll get back to you as soon as we can." Chrissie's voice was audibly upset when she answered. "I copy that, mother bird. We're holding in place." Brett brought them up to an altitude of five thousand feet and accelerated up to 110 knots, as fast as the helicopter could go. He glanced back every minute or so to check on the status of Hector, who, although he was now bandaged up, was very pale and seemed to be flirting with unconsciousness. Michelle had finally donned her headset and she was able to tearfully tell Brett the story of what had happened. It was quite obvious, listening to her, that she blamed herself for what had happened. "Michelle," he said, firmly, "this is not your fault. You did the best you could." "Brett," she said, shaking her head violently, "one of my team is dead. I had to leave her out there with the militia!" "You did what you had to do," he said. "This is war, hon, and things like that happen in war." "You told us that we had the safest fucking job!" she accused, looking for a target to discharge her grief and anger upon. "You told us that this wouldn't happen!" "I told you it shouldn't happen," he corrected. "And I'm sorry that it did. But its over now and we have to take care of Hector." She had no answer for him. She simply buried her face in her hands and cried. ------- "El Dorado Hills, this is Garden Hills helicopter, do you copy?" Jason asked on the frequency assigned for that particular communication. They were currently passing over the eastern guard positions of the town, flying at a relatively low 1500 feet above the ground, slowing, but still moving at well over ninety knots. The reply took a minute but at last the familiar voice of Pat came on the frequency. "This is El Dorado Hills," he said. "Go ahead Garden Hill. It looks like you wish to land?" "That's affirmative," Brett said, taking over the communications channel. "We have a wounded man from a skirmish. He has a gunshot in the back. Can you assist?" "Bring him down," Pat said without hesitation. "Go ahead and land in the parking lot outside. I'll get Renee moving." By this point, nearly twenty minutes after being shot, Hector was barely conscious, his usually dark complexion pale and clammy, his eyes glazed. His breathing was rapid and deep, as if he couldn't get enough air. Brett circled once around the parking lot just to make sure that there was no one lingering near his landing zone, and then brought them down quickly, almost as if he were doing a combat drop. He quickly began the engine shutdown procedure. Before he was even halfway through it, a group of men and women came running out of the school admin building. The rolled a gurney that looked as if it had come from an ambulance with them. Renee the doctor was among them. By the time the engine wound down, leaving the rotor blades spinning freely and silently to a halt above them, the group was at the side door. Michelle, still with tears running down her face, opened the door for them. Renee was the first to stick her head in. "Is he breathing?" she asked. "Yes," replied Doris, who was cradling him and holding pressure on his bleeding back. "He looks like he's working to do it, but he's breathing." "Okay," Renee said, more to her people than to Brett's, "let's get him out of there." Three people, all of them wearing latex gloves upon their hands, reached in and pulled Hector free of the helicopter, dragging him directly onto the ambulance gurney. No sooner was he out of the aircraft then Renee was looking him over, her eyes searching for the source of the bleeding. Brett, watching all of this, noticed that her hands were shaking a little. "How many shots?" Renee asked, addressing no one in particular. "Just one," Michelle answered. "It hit him in the butt and came out his back it looks like." "Any idea of the caliber?" she asked, feeling at his wrist for his pulse. She frowned a little at what she felt. "No," Michelle said. "The militia uses M-16s, AK-47s, and hunting rifles mostly. It was a lucky shot." "Okay," Renee said. She looked at Hector's face. "Are you with me?" she asked him in a loud voice. He mumbled back something that sounded like: "I think so," but his voice was very weak, his words thick and slow. "Let's get him into the treatment room," Renee told her people. "Sally, get some blood from him right away and put it through the type and cross, just like I taught you. Do it twice just to be sure and then start looking through the index cards for a donor. It looks like he's gonna need it." While Sally told Renee that she would get right on that, the entire group began trotting towards the front of the building, four of them holding onto a corner of the gurney. Within twenty seconds, Hector had disappeared through the doorway, leaving his team and his pilots behind. Pat had wandered out at some point during he activity and he remained behind. He was dressed in the customary rain gear and had a pistol strapped to his waist, although he carried no rifle. His face was concerned as he walked over to the group of four climbing free of the helicopter. He shook hands with Brett. "They'll give him the best care possible," he said to Brett, although his words were meant for everyone. "We've been drilling and preparing for just such an emergency." "It shows," Brett said. He had been expecting a frantic clusterfuck upon landing but had instead been treated to a well-disciplined and seemingly competent medical team. "We appreciate your help." "It's the least we could do," Pat told them. "Renee has been reading through her texts on the treatment of traumatic injuries ever since we agreed to help you. She's also blood-typed everyone in town so we'll have donors once we figure out what kind of blood your man has." "Very smart," Michelle, seeming to calm a little, said. "And again, thank you very much." "Why don't we go inside?" Pat suggested. "We'll have some tea and wait for the word to come down. And you can tell us how your war is going. Obviously it's started, right?" "Oh yes," Brett said. "It's started all right." ------- Hector was wheeled into what had once been the school nurse's office but was now the primary treatment area for the town doctor. It was a room that had electric lights powered by the outside generator and cases and shelves of medical equipment scavenged from Renee's office prior to it being washed away in the first of the landslides. They kept Hector on the gurney they had brought him in on, not wanting to risk moving him again. Renee was terrified of what she was about to do here. Though on the outside she was doing an admirable job of projecting the calm, coolness that was associated with a MD after her name, inside she was on pins and needles. For some reason the public - meaning, to her, all those who had not been to medical school - was under the impression that a doctor was a doctor was a doctor and that no matter what they specialized in, they would automatically know how to handle anything medical that crossed their path. Some doctors actually believed this themselves. But it was simply not true. She was a Goddamn family practice specialist, not a trauma surgeon! True, she had dissected cadavers in med school more than ten years before and true she could tell the difference between a kidney and a spleen and a liver once she was looking at them, but she had never done anything like operating on a gunshot wound victim before. She had never even cut into the abdominal cavity of another human being before except to perform the occasional C-section of a delivering mother. She was not a surgeon. Her specialty had been treating runny noses, ear infections, sore throats, hypertension, depression. She had diagnosed pregnancy and provided pre-natal care, she had looked after babies and small children, she had taken care of sore backs. For everything more complicated than that, for everyone that needed to be admitted to the hospital down in Folsom (a hospital which had been washed away by the breaking of the dam), she had referred people to specialists. But now there were no more specialists. There was only her and her undertrained team and this man would live or die because of what she did now. "Renee, are you okay?" asked Jenny, who had been her office assistant in pre-comet life. Renee looked up at her, the second most highly trained medical specialist in El Dorado Hills - a woman who had a six-week course from a tech school under her belt. Jesus help us. "I'm okay," she said. "Get him on his back and let's put him out." "Right." "You get the IV," she said (that had been part of the training they had gone over since learning they would be treating the Garden Hill casualties). "Be sure to use blood tubing and the largest diameter IV needle you can get into him. We'll use that line to sedate him so I can intubate him. Once that's done, I want you to start a second line in the other arm with more blood tubing. Sally's already working on cross and type. Chances are, we'll need to give him a lot." "I'm on it," Jenny said, pleased to have something to do. There were three other helpers in the room, none of them with previous medical experience, all of them members of the crash course in emergency medicine. Renee had them strip off Hector's muddy clothing and then had John, the only male member of the team, set up a ventilation bag while someone else tried to get a blood pressure. It was 70/24, not particularly encouraging in light of a bleeding injury. Jenny stabbed in a large gauge IV catheter and began running fluid into Hector's damaged circulatory system. Using this IV line, Renee injected a strong paralytic drug into Hector's vein that rendered him completely unconscious and brought his breathing to a halt. Working quickly she opened his mouth with a laryngoscope and inserted a breathing tube into his trachea. She tied this down with a length of tape and then had John attach a ventilation bag to it to begin forcing air down into his lungs. Since their oxygen supply was very limited she was stuck with using only room air, which was not the desired method of ventilation but you went with what you had in this world. Once Hector was securely intubated, she injected a more powerful, longer-lasting anesthetic (something which had been part of her office inventory but she never, in a million years had thought she'd ever actually use) into his IV to keep him under indefinitely. Renee spent a few minutes arranging instruments and supplies that she thought she would need on a table next to the gurney. She had scalpels, retractors, sterile swabs, various varieties of stitching threads, a tissue stapler, bottles of betadine and saline, an electric cauterizer. As she arranged them in the order she thought she would need them, her hands continued to shake. Everyone noticed this. No one commented on it. Finally she instructed her team to carefully roll Hector onto his stomach, taking care to not dislodge the breathing tube. She cleaned the area around and between the two wounds - which were both steadily oozing small amounts of blood - with betadine, sterilizing it. And still her hands continued to shake with nervous fear. At last she was ready to begin. This man would now have his life placed in her hands, having to rely on skills and procedures that had been explained to her during a few classes in med school but which she had not studied since and which she had never practiced. She picked up a scalpel and moved it towards the larger of the two wounds, the one on his back. That would be where the worst injury was, probably the kidney, and that would be where the blood loss was worst. As she prepared herself to make the cut, a strange calm seemed to come over her and her mind cleared. Her hand stopped shaking and she made the incision. ------- "A bitch!" Bracken said, looking down at the bloody mess that had once been Leanette. She was splayed out on her stomach, her face and head almost unrecognizable since at least six of the bullets from the final barrage had struck her there. The .45 pistol she had used to kill one of the men and disable the other enough so that he had been forced to kill himself, was lying two feet to the right of her, having been kicked from her lifeless hand by the first soldier to reach her. "They're using fucking bitches on their hit teams? Bitches!" he screamed, strangely offended by this fact. "She wasn't the only one," said Livingston, whose squad had been in on the final pursuit. "I'm pretty sure that two of the other three were bitches as well, including the one with the M-16." Bracken shook his head. "This is just unbelievable. Not only are they arming their bitches up, but they're using them as special forces teams as well. And they're fucking kicking our asses!" In a rage he delivered a stern kick to the bloody, lifeless head of Leanette, sending a good-sized chunk of her skull flying through the air. "And look at this, sir," Colby said, holding up the bullet-holed remains of her backpack. The fleeing hit team had stripped her of her rifle but had not had time to take her pack with her. He opened it up and carefully pulled out two of the mines that had plagued them earlier. "The shotgun shells aren't in them but they're in the pack, just ready to be used. And look at this." He pulled out a crumpled, bloodstained piece of paper and unfolded it. "It's a map of the area around here. A very detailed map that looks like it might even be to scale. It's divided into very small grids." Bracken took the map from him, unmindful of the blood that covered much of it, and took a look. Sure enough, there was the mudfall they had gone around a few days before and there were the various hills around their current position. "They made this by taking aerial shots of the area," he said. "I'll bet you anything they're sending out a recon team in the morning to plot our advance and then using their radios to drop the next team right along it." "Will those maps help us, sir?" Livingston asked. Bracken shook his head sadly. "Not if we can't monitor their radios," he said. "Obviously they're not using the Goddam CB bands or we would've picked them up by now. They're probably using a VHF direct band that links to the fuckin helicopter." "But we killed one," Stu, who had wandered over after bringing his platoon back from the pursuit, said helpfully. "Maybe two of them. Livingston said that they had a wounded man when they went around the hill. At least we've gotten on the fuckin scoreboard." Bracken looked at him with disgust. "The fuckin scoreboard?" he asked viciously. "You wanna hear about the fuckin scoreboard? We had a head count of 276 men this morning. That's one hundred and fucking twenty-four killed or deserted! And in exchange for what? For two of theirs! Maybe you think that's an acceptable ratio but it sounds suspiciously to me like we're losing about seventy-five men for every one that we take of theirs!" "They can't keep this up," Stu said, unoffended, at least visibly, by the rebuff. "They just can't. And we're learning. We lose less with each attack. We're almost there, sir. Almost fucking there. And when we get there, we'll make them pay for what they did. We'll kill every man in that town and rape every woman before we kill them too. They're doing this because they know they can't beat us!" "They are beating us, Covington," Bracken said. "Can't you fucking see that? They're kicking the shit out of us!" "Sir," Stu said, "we have to push on. We have to. At least give it a few more days. Like I said, now that they've taken casualties, they'll be more cautious. Our losses have been bad, that's true, but we're getting the upper hand now. Trust me, the attacks will slack off now." "Shit," Bracken mumbled, shaking his head, uncertain what to do. He looked at the faces of the men around him. It was obvious that they didn't want to push on any further. "Just a few more days," Stu repeated. "All right," Bracken said. "Let's move out. Form up again and we'll get the hell on our way. We need to increase the rate of our zigzagging as we march." He didn't hear the groan of the men listening with his ears, but he heard it with his mind. ------- An hour went by, and then another, still with no word on what was happening with Hector in the makeshift operating room. Pat and two other members of the El Dorado Hills team sat in the conference room with them, all of them sipping tea, Brett updating them on the status of the war so far, with contributions from everyone but Michelle. Michelle simply sat, staring at the wall, occasionally crying softly to herself. At one point, about twenty minutes into the operation, Sally, the girl who had been ordered to test Hector's blood and find donors, shot by in the hallway with four people, two women and two men in tow. She took them to the room next door and drew a pint of blood from each of them, storing it in empty IV bags before carrying it next door to the operating suite. Everyone took this as a good sign that Hector was at least still hanging in there. Finally, when conversation lapsed for a few minutes, Brett said, "I need to go extract Chrissie and her team from their location. The militia has probably passed them by now." Pat simply nodded and Jason, the designated radioman, started to get up. "Why don't you stay here, Jase," Brett suggested. "I think Michelle should come with me on this flight." Jason didn't protest but Michelle certainly did. "No," she said firmly. "I'm staying here until I find out how Hector's doing." "I'll bring you back with me," Brett promised. "Come on. I think we need to talk." It took a few more minutes of convincing and a direct order from Brett, who as military commander of Garden Hill, technically had that right, but finally she agreed. They left the school building and went out to the parking lot, climbing into the front of the helicopter. Brett said nothing to her as he went through the start-up procedure and the abbreviated pre-flight check. He lifted off into the rainy sky and then headed northeast, towards the hill where hatchling one had been dropped. It was only after leveling off that he began to speak. "You want to quit being a hit team leader," he said, not phrasing it as a question. She looked over at him, this man that she loved, that she shared a bed with, amazed at always at the ability he had to read her mind at times. "I made the decision to go ahead with the attack," she said. "I knew that the militia was inside the safety margin, but I went ahead anyway. I fucked up, Brett. I'm not fit to command a team." He didn't contradict her, not directly. "You made a decision," he said. "Whether it was a fuck-up or not, who knows? From what I understand, they weren't that far inside the safety margin. I can't say that I would've chosen any differently." "Brett," she said, "one of my people is dead! We had to leave Leanette out there to commit suicide in front of those fuckers. And Hector might die as well. I made a decision and now I've lost half of my team! I can't go back out there and do that again. I can't!" "You can," he said. "And you have to." "I can't!" "You and Chrissie are the most experienced team leaders we have," he said. "Our survival counts on you doing your job. We need you out there, Michelle. Don't dwell on what happened today. It's a part of war. Think about the thirty or so missions that you did pull off successfully, where you did get your whole team out in one piece after leaving five or six of those fascist fucks dead in the mud." "You don't understand how I feel," she accused. "You can't possibly!" "Can't I?" he asked. "Did you think that you were the first person that something like this has happened to? Do you think you're the first person to make a decision in combat that you think cost someone their lives?" "What do you mean?" she asked, wiping at a tear. He sighed a little. "January 27, 1991," he said. "I was with the 3rd ACR flying out of a forward air base in Saudi Arabia, just a few miles from the Iraqi border. I was the pilot of an Apache and Jim Summers was my gunner. We flew out at 1:00 in the morning on a strike mission to try to take out some Iraqi tanks that were supposed to be holed up in defensive positions just on the other side of the border." "Brett," she said, "I don't see what..." "Just listen," he said, taking his eyes off the instruments and the windshield for a moment to look at her. She stopped talking and listened. "We didn't have GPS in our Apache," he said. "That was back in the days before they had put them in every aircraft. All we were using for navigation was the inertial systems that operated by a computer tracking how far we'd gone from our starting point. These were far from perfect navigation systems and what happened to me and Jim are a big part of the reason that every attack craft did have GPS by the year 1996. "It was a windy night, about twenty knots sustained with gusts up to forty at times. That should've clued us in to what was going to happen. It didn't. We flew out to the target area just across the border and started looking for those tanks or for anything else Iraqi that we could blow the shit out of. Visual navigation was pretty much a joke out in that desert, especially at night looking through the FLIR since everything looked the same. A bunch of flat sand, scrub brush, and small hills and that was Iraq and Saudi for you. We couldn't find our targets so we went back and forth along the border, staying just to the north side of it, inside Iraq. We would stop and hover for a long time, panning back and forth, trying to see something, and then we'd do it again a few miles to the side. "After about an hour or so of this, just as we were starting to give up hope of finding anything, we spot four tanks moving right to left in the distance, apparently shifting from one place to another. It was hard to identify the type exactly because the wind was kicking up sand and degrading the effectiveness of the FLIR. The image was a little blurry. But we knew they had to be Iraqi armor because they were north of the border, right? I mean, the ground war hadn't started yet and there was no reason that our tanks would've been in Iraq. "So Jim locks 'em up on the weapons panel and assigns them target numbers. He arms up the Hellfires and gets ready to fire and we contact our controller to tell him we're about to make an attack. The controller asks if we have positive ID on type and we have to reply that we don't, that the image isn't clear. But we give him our position, which, according to our nav computer, is more than three kilometers inside of Iraq. The controller boots the decision to attack to us, which, as aircraft commander, falls to me, even though Jim is the one that will actually be firing at them. So, confident that I'm looking at enemy tanks, I give him the go ahead to launch." Brett sighed again, feeling physical pain at the recall of this memory, which he had fought long and hard to suppress over the years. "The missiles go flying out and blow the first tank all to shit. The second one goes up just as easily. You could actually see the turret go flying into the air from the explosion. The third one takes a hit but is only disabled. The fourth one does the same. Pretty soon, while we're watching these tanks burn, we see the figures of the crews climbing out of the two disabled ones and trying to run off into the desert." Brett shook his head a little. "They didn't have anywhere to hide. I flew in closer and Jim fired up the cannon on the nose of chopper. The sight was hooked into his helmet display so that everywhere he turned his head, the crosshairs for the gun followed. He mowed those men down, one by one, blowing them into little pieces. We yelled and screamed in triumph over the radio that we had just single-handedly taken out four Iraqi tanks and their crews. "And then..." a long pause as he wiped a tear running from his own eye, "and then the air controller put out a report that four American tanks had just come under fire from an unknown source. They said the report was several miles south of our reported position but it was far too close to be a coincidence." "It was you?" Michelle asked, eyes wide. "It was us," he confirmed. "We didn't realize it at the time, but every time we had stopped and hovered to check for the Iraqi positions, that wind was blowing us backwards and our nav computer didn't realize it. By the time we encountered the tanks we were back inside Saudi Arabia thinking that we were in Iraq. We massacred four of our own tanks by mistake and killed sixteen American soldiers." "Jesus, Brett," Michelle said. "But you didn't know..." "No," he said, "I didn't know. I made a decision though and I sent sixteen young kids home in coffins with American flags wrapped around them. As soon as I realized what had happened, I almost lost it. I started babbling on the radio, asking permission to land to check for survivors. I was ordered back to base but I could barely fly. The controller had to calm me down and talk me in, that's how bad I was. "I was ready to turn my wings in that night, as soon as I landed. I was ready to get my court martial and go to Leavenworth. I thought I deserved it." "But you kept flying," Michelle said, starting to see the point of his story now. "I kept flying. During wartime the inquiries went fast. It took them less than three days to clear us of criminal negligence or any wrongdoing. It was just one of those things, was what we were basically told. As soon as we were cleared, my CO ordered me back into the air on another tank strike mission." "And you went?" Michelle asked. "I didn't want to," he said. "I didn't think I was fit to serve anymore. I was terrified of making the same mistake again, but he insisted and I went up. My hands shook and I nearly threw up as we crossed the border. But I did my job that night and I did it every other night and day until that stupid war was over. I learned from what had happened and I didn't quit because I couldn't quit. I just couldn't." "And that's stayed with you ever since?" Michelle said. He nodded. "It's stayed with me ever since. And what happened to your team today will stay with you forever, don't think that it won't. But you can't quit, babe. We need you out there. We need you. So you have to put it behind you for now." ------- The pick-up of Chrissie's team went off without a hitch. They made radio contact with them and learned that the militia had passed by their position uneventfully more than forty minutes before. Brett landed in the pre-arranged pick-up location and they climbed aboard, their faces solemn, their weapons unfired. Maria in particular was taking it very hard. "How did she go?" she asked tearfully as Brett lifted off. Chrissie had allowed her the use of the headset. "She went like a warrior," Michelle said, crying again. She told the story of Leanette's last stand with a halting voice. "She had a set of balls on her," Maria said, sniffing a little. "I always knew that, ever since she tried to steal Hector from me. And how's Hector doing? You said he was wounded?" "He's in El Dorado Hills," she said. "He took one in the back. The doctor there is taking care of him." The rest of the flight was strangely silent until they neared Garden Hills and made radio contact with Paul, who was in the community center worried sick about how long the helicopter had been out. Michelle, taking on the duties of radio operator in the absence of Jason, informed him of what had happened. "We're standing down the attacks for the rest of the day," she finished. "We're going to refuel and then head back to El Dorado to check on Hector." "I'm going too," Maria said. "I want to be there with him." Nobody disputed her. Word spread quickly through the town about the casualties that had been taken. Almost before the rotors had wound down and the refueling process had begun, everyone from the kitchen staff to the trench diggers and mine layers knew what had happened out in the woods. They took it harder than they probably should have, the death and wounding of some of their people bringing the unpleasant fact of their own mortality home to them in a way that the previous attack on the town had not been able to. Leanette was dead, killed by Auburn bullets fired from the advancing militia. If Leanette could die in this war, then so could anyone else. The work slowed down a little as conversation, much of it angry and scared, took its place. The helicopter stayed in town only long enough for Brett to refuel it and for Michelle to give an extended debriefing to Paul. Within thirty minutes of landing, it lifted off once again, Michelle and Maria its passengers, heading back to El Dorado Hills. ------- Brett addressed the town at an after-dinner meeting that night. "By now," he told them over the public address system, "I'm sure that all of you have heard both about the death of Leanette and the wounding of Hector in a hit and run battle this morning. Let me start off by giving you the good news about Hector, which I'm also sure that you've heard rumor of by now. It looks like he's going to make it." A cheer went up from the crowd as they heard their first good news of the day. "Dr. Renee Sawyer, the physician in El Dorado Hills, spent nearly two hours operating on him after we took him there. You'll be pleased to hear that she has taken her agreement seriously when she said she would treat our wounded in this conflict. She has studied up extensively on traumatic emergencies from her medical texts and trained up some of her fellow townspeople as nurses and assistants. She has also blood-typed every person in that town so she was instantly able to find donors for Hector for the surgery. This pre-training in advance of us actually bringing her someone to work on is undoubtedly what saved Hector." There was some babble of admiration for a moment that Brett let continue until it quieted down. "What I was told by Dr. Sawyer," he continued, "was that the bullet entered Hector's derriére on the left cheek at an upward angle, fractured his pelvis, and passed through his left kidney before exiting out of his body. He was bleeding internally when she got to him and she was forced to remove that kidney due to the damage. Fortunately the good Lord saw fit to give us two of that particular organ so nothing vital was damaged. Hector has a lot of drains and tubes and a bunch of other shit coming out of his incision, but he was awake and alert when we talked to him and, barring any complications like infection, he should recover completely in time. He'll have to stay in El Dorado Hills for a while on IV antibiotics and such, but that is to be expected." Another cheer greeted this news. "And then there's Leanette," Brett said next, instantly quieting everyone down. He took a few deep breaths and then slowly, mechanically described what he had been told about Leanette's death in the field. As was his nature, he pulled no punches, letting these people know exactly what sort of battle they were involved in. "It was nasty," he said. "There's no doubt about that. And it was painful to have to leave her out there, a decision that I know is preying upon the minds of everyone in that squad, particularly Michelle's, the commander of the mission. But I'm here to tell you, as a man of military experience, that there was no other choice in the matter. Leanette was paralyzed and mortally wounded. To try to drag her out of there would not only have been futile, but would have probably cost the other members of the team their lives as well. Michelle, Doris, and even Hector did what they had to do and so did Leanette. Her last request was that they leave her pistol with her so that she could maybe take out a few more of those fucks before she went." The silence continued as everyone solemnly considered his words, most of them, once again, thinking of their own mortality. "She died a hero as far as I'm concerned," Brett told them, "and I would be lying to you if I said that she will probably be the only one. Others will die in this conflict, of that you can probably be sure. We're fighting for our very lives here, people. Remember that. "It is my suggestion that we put a cross up in the school yard near the graves of those killed in our first battle. Though we don't have her body to bury, we have her spirit and she, as well as anyone else that falls fighting this menace, should be memorialized forever. God willing, there won't be many of those crosses when this is done and most of us will still be here to look at them." The silence was broken with encouraging agreement with his words. "And now," Brett finished, "we should all get a little bit of sleep. Perimeter teams, nothing has changed. We have an enemy on the way and you have work to do in the morning. Hit and run teams," he said next, looking at Michelle, who was sitting in the front of the room, and Maria, who had reluctantly returned to Garden Hill to carry on at Hector's urging, "you have your normal missions in the morning. Michelle and Chrissie have called up two replacements for Hector and Leanette. And Jason," he shifted his gaze towards his young protégé. "We take off in three hours for our regular nightly fun." ------- The militia enjoyed one entire day without being attacked after killing one of the ambush "bitches". Their morale actually improved a little as they marched on, covering nearly six miles through the woods, without being molested or shot at in any way. People began to think that maybe Bracken was right after all. Maybe the Garden Hills fucks had been demoralized by the death of one of their bitches. Maybe, despite the loss of more than a quarter of their soldiers, things had gotten as bad as they could get and were now on the upswing. No one deserted that day and a little of the discipline returned to the ranks. And then, at 9:10 that evening, just as everyone except the guards had bedded down for the night and were anticipating what might be their first uninterrupted sleep since their first night, the tracers came rolling in, killing four with the first attack. Follow-up attacks at 12:30 AM and 4:20 AM killed five more. The next morning, at 9:50 AM, as they were marching through a thin layer of woods, shots rang out from the hillside beyond them, dropping two more and wounding one. It seemed that their reprieve was over. For the next four days they marched onward, moving only by force of will and threats from their commanders. They stuck to the heaviest woods they could find and spread out as much as practical. None of it did any good. Always when they were least expecting it shots would ring out and people would start to drop. Pursuit would be launched, but never again did they hit anyone, never again did they come even close. And in addition, a new tactic was being used as they entered the heavier woods. The Garden Hill teams began randomly setting mines in the trees that they were marching through. They were similar to the ground mines that had been planted at the bases of the hills from which ambush attacks had come but they were smaller. These mines were usually mounted at chest level and camouflaged by branches. Trip wires just under the layer of pine needles and forest debris set them off. When the wire was stepped on it would fire a shell into the chest or abdomen of the man walking by, usually from a range of less than five feet. As a general rule, this shot would not kill the man but would leave him gravely wounded and screaming - forced to kill himself. That the Garden Hills teams had deliberately set the mines to wound instead of to kill (which putting them at head level would have done) was quite obvious. Though only a small percentage of the total casualty count was because of these mines - either the ground version or the tree version - it was they that the soldiers lived in fear of almost more than anything else. They could be anywhere and they were almost impossible to detect before detonation. The night attacks were also kept up, sometimes coming only twice but sometimes coming as many as four times between the hours of 9:00 PM and 6:00 AM. Though each run usually only killed a single person, two if they were lucky, these numbers added up, steadily decreasing the force, night by night. Nor were the casualties the only thing bringing down the numbers as time went on and the attacks continued. Desertions began to occur with greater frequency, usually during the night hours since Bracken had pretty much closed the loophole by which Lexington and Zachary had wandered off (requests to go take a shit while marching were greeted with much more skepticism now). At night the guards simply could not police every soldier to make sure he was staying in place. It was an impossible task considering how widely spread everyone had to be to avoid being chopped up in the helicopter attacks. So what usually happened was a single deserter, sometimes a pair, always taking his weapon and pack with him or them, would quietly creep away in a pre-arranged direction, moving step by step until they were far enough away to use their flashlights without detection. They would then put as many miles between themselves and the militia as they could. Each night they lost at least one person to desertion. Most of them, having the same idea as Lexington and Zachary, headed north, thinking of the mountain towns beyond Grass Valley. Others just wandered off with no particular place in mind, knowing that they were probably going to die of starvation soon, but glad to be free of random attack anyway. It was as the sun left the sky on Jan 25 that Stu and Bracken sat down together near the center of the formation. They smoked from their dwindling cigarette supply as they leaned against a redwood tree. Both had their weapons lying next to them and were, for all intents and purposes, alone. Though intellectually the men knew that the first of the helicopter attacks would not come for at least an hour, instinctively they did not want to be anywhere near another person for fear of becoming an easy target. "You heard the count we took just before dark?" Bracken asked, taking a particularly deep drag. "I heard it," Stu said. It had been 221 men present and accounted for. "We've lost almost half of our people, Stu," Bracken told him. "We've shot up more than a third of our ammunition, consumed or just plain lost so much food that it's debatable that we'll get back without severe rationing, and we've lost nine of our automatic weapons to those Garden Hill teams and to deserters." "We still have the advantage though," Stu said. "We still have more than twenty automatics and a buttload of semi-autos. And as for food, we'll just use Garden Hill's rations to bring us home with." Stu sighed. "Do you remember what our objective was when we started out on this march?" Bracken asked. "Do you remember?" "To take that fucking town," Stu said, seeing the worried expression on Bracken's face in the glow of his cigarette. "That's still the objective." "The objective was to overwhelm them," Bracken corrected. "We were supposed to arrive there and take them by surprise, hopefully fast enough and with enough power that they would surrender without a fight. That's how we always did it before and that's how we were going to do it here." He took another drag, blowing the smoke out into the rain. "We don't have that element of surprise anymore. And it's quite obvious that they're not going to surrender. And they've killed or driven off nearly half of our force. We still have at least three more days of marching before we even get within range of that town. We'll be lucky if we have a hundred and eighty by then." "And we'll still outnumber and outgun them," Stu said. "It's bitches that we're fighting, remember? There is no way in hell that bitches can defeat two hundred men with automatic weapons. No fucking way! This march is going to be the worst part of this mission. Once we're there, we'll kill them in no time." "No," Bracken said. "We're not going to do that." Stu couldn't believe his ears for a moment. "What do you mean?" he finally asked. "We're defeated," Bracken said. "We're approaching fifty percent casualties, morale is falling apart, our squads and platoons are now jumbled up units because of the attrition. It's time to cut our losses and head back. Tomorrow morning, we're going home." "You can't be serious," Stu said. "I'm as serious as I've ever been," Bracken assured him. "What if they hit us on the way back?" Stu asked. "What if they pound on us and ambush all the way home? We'll lose less by going three days forward than we will by marching ten days back. Sir, we have to take that town, if for nothing else just to put that helicopter out of commission." "We're not going to be able to do it on this trip," Bracken said. "I've made up my mind, Stu. This is the way it's going to have to be. I don't believe that the Garden Hill people will attack us anymore if they see that we're pulling back." "Why wouldn't they?" Stu asked. "They would have us vulnerable. That's the perfect time to attack us!" Bracken shook his head. "They're just not that kind of people," he said. "They're reacting fiercely towards us because we're planning to invade their homes. They're willing to lay their lives on the line to protect that. But once they see us heading back the way we came, they'll have accomplished their mission. They won't risk themselves to hit us as we retreat." "What are you, a fucking psychologist?" Stu asked. "No," Bracken said, tossing his cigarette down into the nearest puddle of water. "I'm just a soldier." He started to get up. "I need to brief in the other platoon commanders on my decision," he said. "Why don't you head off behind us and round the ones up over there? I'll go get the ones up near the front. We'll meet back here in twenty minutes for a conference." "Right," Stu said slowly, getting up as well. He took one more puff on his smoke, sucking on it hard enough so that the glowing of the tip provided enough light to show him the outline of his commanding officer. Armed with this reference, he moved quickly, picking up the automatic M-16 he carried and turning the butt towards Bracken's head. He stepped forward and slammed it into his skull as hard as he could. It struck just above the base of the neck, the weapon clanking loudly. Bracken fell forward, his consciousness instantly driven from him by the blow. He landed face down in the mud with an involuntary expellation of the air in his lungs. "What the fuck was that?" someone yelled from about fifty feet away. "Nothing," Stu calmly yelled back towards the unseen speaker. "I tripped over a fuckin rock. I'm all right." This was not questioned since it was something that happened many times a night out in the woods. The voice inquired no more. Stu set his rifle down on the ground and then kneeled down by Bracken's unconscious form. Not being able to see, he felt his outline, finally finding the wet, bloody mess that had become the back of his skull. Bracken was still breathing and starting to stir a little. Soon he would wake up. Taking his hands off of Bracken he felt along the ground around him until he located a puddle of rainwater. Thanks to the constant precipitation it did not take him long to find one. It was shallow - maybe only four or five inches deep and about three feet square - but it would serve his purposes. He grabbed Bracken by the shoulder and dragged him over to it. Once he was there, he pushed his face down into the water and held it there with both hands. Bracken struggled a little, but the blow had weakened him and it didn't last long. When he finally stopped moving, Stu continued to hold him under there, counting slowly to himself until ten cycles of sixty seconds had gone by. Finally, satisfied that there would be no coming back, he rolled him over onto his back again. "Sorry I had to do that," he told the body of his commander. "I really am. But that town has simply got to go. You understand, don't you?" Bracken just lay there, unanswering. "I thought you would," Stu said. He grabbed Bracken by the armpits and dragged him back towards the tree, where someone would be unlikely to stumble upon him. Stu sat there for the next ninety-three minutes, his M-16 in his hand, his ears open for the sound of anyone searching for the commander. He heard the sound of men climbing into their sleeping bags (everyone had their own theories on the best way to position your sleeping bag to ward off attack) and men walking back and forth at the guard positions. Nothing came up during the course of that time that required Bracken's attention. Finally, what Stu had been waiting for occurred. From the south of them the night's first helicopter attack came. The stream of tracers blasted out in two short jabs, impacting some sixty yards to the west of Stu and the recently dead Bracken. As with the daylight attacks, the response by the militia had evolved to the point that it was very quick indeed. The guards opened up on the place where the tracers had come from, their guns echoing from all directions. Even as they fired back, the rest of the militia was sitting up in their sleeping bags, their own rifles in their hands, ready to join their fire when the next attack occurred. They did not have to wait long. The next firing run came from a position about an eighth of a mile from the first, again the stream of tracers stabbing out, blasting some poor soul to bits, and then disappearing. This time the return fire was much louder, as nearly the triple the guns shot back. It was during this barrage that Stu acted. He turned his own weapon towards Bracken and, using the flashes from the rifles around him to sight in, fired a three round burst directly into his chest. He then moved as far away from the body as he could possibly get. The helicopter made one more firing run and then disappeared. It was nearly ten more minutes however before everyone was convinced that it was gone for good and started taking count of the latest casualties. Flashlights came on as men moved towards the screams and cries of the wounded. The scene was not quite the chaos and confusion that had come with the first attacks from the air, but it was not exactly a calm, cool, rational discourse either. It was another five minutes before someone found Bracken's body lying in the mud. Corporal Waters basically stumbled across it by accident. Until that point no one had even realized that Bracken was missing. "Hey," he yelled, shining his flashlight down at the body, seeing the holes. "We got a problem here!" It was yet another three minutes before he was able to find an officer and drag him over there. The officer in question happened to be the man who was next in command: Lieutenant Colby. "Holy shit," Colby said, looking down at the body. He did not have the least bit of suspicion that Bracken's death had been anything other than a result of enemy fire. Although none of the tracer streams had hit anywhere near this place, Colby did not know that, nor did anyone else. It was impossible to remember just where the attacks had hit or even just how many of them there had been. And of course a forensic pathologist would have taken one look at the body and known that the bullet wounds had been inflicted post-mortem, but Colby was not a forensic pathologist. Soon a fairly large crowd of soldiers was gathered around their fallen commander. Had the Garden Hills helicopter chosen that particular moment to return, it would have found a tantalizingly close group to fire at. They stared down at him, illuminating him with their lights, looking at his dead face, at the bullet holes in his chest, wondering what came next. Many of them were relieved. Surely they couldn't go on now that their commanding officer was dead, could they? Stu wandered over, as if he was just happening across the scene. He looked down at Bracken, as if seeing him for the first time. "Looks like you're in charge now," he said to Colby. "Me?" Colby said, terrified at the very thought of leading this beaten army into battle. "You," Stu confirmed. Later he would take Colby aside privately to let him know that he would offer any assistance necessary to carry on Bracken's plans. "I'm here for you," he told him. "If you need help, just ask." A grateful Colby thanked him graciously for his assistance. ------- Chapter 18 The altimeter on the helicopter's instrument panel read 6300 feet above sea level, about three hundred feet above the point where the rain turned to snow. This put him almost two thousand feet above the rooftops of Garden Hill, high enough to see the entire subdivision and the surrounding landscape. Of course what he was doing would not have been possible even a month ago. The snow would have quickly iced up on his rotor blades, degrading their aerodynamics, eventually enough so that they would no longer be capable of providing the necessary lift to hold up the aircraft. Nor would he have been able to see anything, even before the icing became a problem. But over the past month the precipitation had slacked off some. Not a lot. It was still a moderate rainfall down in Garden Hill and a moderate snowfall at elevations above 6000 feet, but it was certainly not the heavy rain that had been the norm since the crash of Fenwell and the aftermath. It was moderate enough that Brett could risk being up above the snow level for a while. "We've been some busy people down there," Brett said in admiration as he hovered in place and looked below at the impressive array of trenches and fortifications that the townspeople had been digging and constructing since the news of the Auburn attack force had reached them. "No kidding," said Jason, who was also looking down from his position in the navigator's chair. He had a large map of the area around Garden Hill, an update of the one that Brett had used to brief everyone in before the attacks had begun, unfolded on his lap. The reason for this flight this morning was no more or no less than an area familiarization. The remains of the Placer County Militia were just breaking camp a little more than seven miles to the east of them. After being harassed and hindered for the past fifteen days and nights, they were now in striking distance - about to enter the ring of the Garden Hill main defenses. Brett would be responsible for directing the battle that was imminent in no more than a day or two and - so busy had he been ferrying strike teams and flying night missions - he had not been able to keep as close an eye on the new defenses as he would have liked. He and Jason were now comparing the terrain below them with the map, making sure the two were compatible with each other and that Brett would be able to reference correctly when a troop movement needed to be made. The work done by the women and men of the trench teams was admirable indeed. To the north of the wall, towards the interstate, was the area that Brett had always considered their most vulnerable to mass attack. The landscape between the wall and the lanes of the highway was marked by gently rolling hills dotted with pine trees and the occasional redwood. To the far east of this area and to the far west of it, close in towards the wall, were the taller hills that served as the main guard positions. Between these two hills, which were not close enough to each other to provide overlapping fields of fire, the majority of the trenches had been dug, starting from just south of the freeway and stretching all the way to within fifty yards of the wall itself. Each trench was, of course, atop of a hill and well covered by trees and fallen logs. The trenches themselves were lined with sandbags made out of dirt and pillowcases for the most part and could hold ten to fifteen troops. If the militia chose to advance through this corridor - which would seem the easiest route to them - they would meet some very nasty surprises. To the west - their second most vulnerable avenue of attack - the hills were a little higher and steeper, covered with denser layers of trees. The going would be somewhat rougher for the militia over on this side but there was also a much wider corridor through which they could potentially travel. It was also the closest approach to the wall and the community center, around which the final defense lines were even now being dug. There were not as many trenches dug over on this side and they were both smaller and with greater distance between them. The trade off was that if the militia attacked from this direction, many of the defending troops could station themselves atop of the various hills and snipe at them as they advanced before falling back into a solid network of bunkers a quarter-mile from the roadway and the western wall. Unfortunately, Brett saw that there were a few large gaps that could potentially be exploited if the militia knew about them. Though it was almost impossible to approach the town from the east due to the cliffs on that side, a group could conceivably hook around from the north and penetrate along the east side of the subdivision between the wall and the cliffs. They would have to pass very close to the large hill on that side of the town to do this and would take considerable casualties from that alone, but once past that hill, no trenches had been dug and a defense would be very difficult indeed. Another such gap was along the southwest corner of the subdivision, near the canyon itself. If a group marched along the rim of the canyon and penetrated from this direction they would once again find their only major obstacle to be the hill that guarded the southern tip of town. Brett was uncomfortable about these gaps and, had he been given the time, he would have done his best to close them, but he had not been given the time and he had felt it more important to shore up the areas where the militia probably would attack from. He took a little comfort in the fact that it was unlikely that the men commanding the Auburnites would attempt such feats in the absence of any intelligence that such a thing was actually their best bet. It was a gamble, but Brett was reasonably certain that the attack would come from one of the two predictable directions. Nevertheless, trying to cover all of his bases, his mind began turning over just how he would react if they did do the unexpected. "What about the old grocery store and the gas station and all that?" Jason asked, looking at the roofs of those buildings off to the northwest. The entire strip-mall, home to the hair salon and the Starbucks and the Raley's, was still there, just outside the wall and across the road. Though a few of the roofs had collapsed from the constant rain, the buildings would still make an ideal cover point for an attacking army if they could reach it. "Hopefully they'll never get that far," Brett said. "If they do, you can see there's a final network of trenches just on the north and east of it. The troops will hold them from there and then retreat inside the wall if they manage to close. Paul and his team have rigged up the inside of those buildings with more than a few of Steve's mines and some other booby-traps he came up with. The militia would find that occupying those buildings would be a rather bad mistake." "Cool," Jason said, smiling a little at the thought. "My feelings exactly," Brett said. "So how's that map looking? Are you able to figure out the trench numbers and compare them with the actual ground?" "Yeah," he said, looking from one to the other. "They did a good job on this map. It's almost perfect." "Good, because when we're in the middle of this thing, I'm going to be relying on you quite a bit. Both of us are going to have to multi-task up here big time. I'll need you to report to me what trenches our troops are in and where the militia is advancing. I'll need you to give me this information by map grid and trench number as soon as I ask for it and then, while I'm looking at the map, I'm going to need you to keep an eye on the instruments for me to make sure I'm staying in a hover." "No problem," Jason assured him. "Goddammit, I wish we would've had time to get you checked out on flying this thing," Brett said, shaking his head a little in frustration. "That would've made things so much easier. I could've had you fly while I watched everything from your chair." "I know everything about this helicopter," Jason said, his tone sending a message. "You've taught me all of the instruments and what they do, you've taught me how it flies, why it flies, and how you make it fly. All I haven't done is actually put the controls in my hand." Brett looked over at him for a moment. He shook his head, answering the unasked question. "Unfortunately, that's the most important part," he said. "You can't just jump behind the controls of this thing and start flying it, no matter how much you've watched someone else do it. There's just no margin for error. If we had even a week to practice up, I'd get you up to speed. But we don't." "It was just a thought," Jason said, disappointed but not terribly surprised either. "And a good one, I'll admit, but there's just too much risk. You could probably fly this thing right now straight and level and you could probably make turns without too much problem either, but hovering in place for a long time is one of the more difficult maneuvers and that's how a lot of the ops in this battle are going to be done." "Like I said, just a thought. But as soon as we kick these assholes out of here, how about we have some hands-on lessons." "It'll be the first thing," Brett said. "Now lets get finished up here. We still have one more day of hit and run drops to make." ------- The hit and run teams were only able to hit the militia twice during that day, costing them only four men. This close to Garden Hill there simply wasn't all that many places that drops could be made safely without their enemy being able to see and/or hear the helicopter. But still, despite the relative break that the militia got, the main function of the hit and run strikes - that of slowing down the advance - was accomplished. Though they had started the day off only seven miles away from the wall itself, by nightfall they had only marched a little more than four miles. The main lines of defense started a mile and half outside the wall on the west and two miles out on the north. The militia made camp that night to the northwest of town, still more than a mile away from where their real resistance would start. Brett stood down the helicopter after one final high altitude flight at 5:00 PM. Dinner was served in the cafeteria and, as mad as it seemed, all of the traditional guard posts were left unmanned for the duration of the briefing after it. It was another gamble. Brett thought it unlikely that the militia would be able to move in on them in the darkness and he did not want them listening in on the transmissions from the radios that were used to transmit such meetings to the guards. As such the cafeteria seemed unusually full that night. Every table was full of men, women, and children, many of them dirty and looking tired. Dinner was yet another batch of canned soup and spinach, served cold of course, and baked bread that had been made two days before. "Okay, everyone," Brett, looking more than exhausted himself, said into the public address system. "Let's call this meeting to order. In all likelihood, this will be the final briefing before the real fun starts. As I'm sure you've heard by now, the militia is camped out a little more than three miles to the northwest. From their current position it is but a short march to our defense lines and I expect that contact will be made sometime around 10:00 AM tomorrow." Some nervous chatter met these words. "Jason and I went over the tapes from our recon missions of the militia tonight," Brett went on. "While it is impossible for us to get a completely accurate count of their numbers, we do have a very good estimate of their current strength. It appears that there are about two hundred of them facing us." There was some more nervous chatter as well as many expressions of disbelief at that number. "Two hundred?" several people groaned. "Jesus. Two fucking hundred?" Brett called for quiet before the grumbling could get out of control. "All right, you pessimists," he said. "You're looking at the glass as half empty. You're saying to yourselves, 'my God, there are two hundred of them out there'. But remember, when they started their march, there were four hundred of them. Four hundred fairly well disciplined men with guns bearing down on us. In the past fifteen days our two groups of hit teams and Jason and I on the night missions - at the cost of only one death and one injury - have killed or caused to desert half of that force. Not only have we done that, but you can bet your ass that those remaining troops are demoralized, exhausted, and not able to think very clearly. By no means are they looking at a pushover. And also keep in mind that two hundred remaining troops is a conservative estimate on my part. The actual number may be even lower. "Now back when we first heard about Auburn's apparent vendetta against us, we knew that they once sent an attack force of one hundred and sixty people which they turned around at the last minute. You may recall that I've said on multiple occasions that if they had attacked us with that force at that time, they would have beaten us. Maybe some of you out there are thinking that that same thing applies here, that the militia now has forty more people so that maybe they'll be even more likely to come away the victors." He shook his head strenuously. "That is simply not the case. Had those one hundred and sixty men attacked us the first time, they would have found nothing but our basic defenses. Now, they will find trenches and a coordinated defense and some women and men that are ready to kick some fucking ass!" His words stirred them up a little, alleviating some of the doubts. "Now I know the numbers don't sound all that great," he said. "We have a town population of one hundred and seventy-nine people at this moment, not including Hector over in El Dorado Hills. That's eighteen men, one hundred and four women, and fifty-seven children under the age of seven. What that leaves us with is one hundred and twenty-two people that are capable of fighting these fuckers. Only, as you're aware, we can't all do that at the same time since we only have eighty-six rifles, semi-automatic weapons, or automatic weapons to fight with. "But people, you've trained to fight with those numbers and those disadvantages. You've been formed up into squads and you know what your job out there is going to be. One of the most important rules of warfare that you need to remember is: the advantage goes to the defender. That is certainly true in this case. Though the militia has a better than two to one numerical advantage, they are going to have to fight their way across open ground while you will be concealed in trenches. In addition to that, you will have Jason and myself in the air above you, feeding you information on their movements and concentrations. While we won't be able to provide fire support during the daylight hours - the danger of having them bring us down is too great - we will be able to deliver some of our other nasty little surprises to them. "But most important of all perhaps, is the fact that we have the will to fight. We are defending our homes, our town, our children while they are just following orders. They don't have a lot to gain by fighting us and they have much to lose - namely their lives. We, on the other hand, don't have much to lose by fighting since we know the fate that awaits us if we are defeated and we have everything to gain by fighting as fiercely as we are capable. "Ladies and gentlemen - we will prevail." A large cheer rose up at this. Brett almost felt ashamed at it, thinking that he would've made a good recruiter had he stayed in the army. Now that the patriotic, morale-instilling part of the speech was over, he got into the meat of the matter. "Now everyone already knows their jobs," he said. "But why don't we go over the main battle plan one more time, just for clarity. From this point on until this thing is over with, I want everyone to stay here in the community center. If you need to make a quick trip home after the meeting for some essential supplies, by all means, do so, but everyone sleeps in here tonight, okay?" There was a little bit of good-natured grumbling but no one disagreed with this. "In here you're all within reach of the weapons and we're all within instant, unmonitored communication with each other. Now Jason and I plan to hit them from the air several times during the night. There's no sense in letting them get much sleep now, is there? But you folks, I want you to get to sleep as soon as you can tonight. Get as much rest as you possibly can. Tomorrow is apt to be a long day. We will get up before dawn in the morning and those of you in the primary squads - those that will be carrying the weapons - will assemble and get ready. Paul will get his medical teams ready to help any wounded and then we will do what the majority of warfare consists of: we will wait. "We will need to wait so that we can see how the enemy is going to attack us. At this point we do not know from which direction the attack will come or if it will come from two directions at once. If I were the commander of that group, I would hit us from the north and the west simultaneously, therefore splitting the defenders in two, but there's no telling what their leadership is thinking. We can be pretty certain that they will not be able to hit us from three directions as Jean and Anna, our newest citizens, have told us they planned. They simply do not have enough troops for that any more. "Whatever their plan is however, I will discover it before they get close because of our helicopter. Once I know what they're planning, I will direct your three platoon leaders - Chrissie, Michelle, and Matt - to deploy you in whatever trench complex - or complexes if they hit from more than one axis - will provide the best defense. You will assemble there and I will do my best to keep you updated on the enemy's progress and I will shift you if need be. Remember that we must talk in code during unit-to-unit broadcasts! While we believe that the helicopter to platoon leader communications are secure, the unit frequency is nothing but citizens band - the same band that the militia uses. Don't give yourselves away by talking in clear text, no matter what kind of shit is hitting the fan. "When you finally spot the enemy visually, hit them the moment they get into range. Don't just go blasting away at everyone in sight though. Pick them off using the "sector of responsibility" tactics that you were taught. Those of you with the single-shot hunting rifles, you're the workhorses of the battle. You'll be able to hit them from a much greater range than those with the semi-autos and the autos can. Use those scopes and don't forget to lead your target and to allow time for the bullet to reach. Those of you that do have the assault weapons, use them inside the two hundred and fifty yard range. Hit people that are clumped together. Don't waste a whole clip blasting after one man unless there's nothing else to shoot at. "When it comes time to retreat, do it orderly. One squad will provide cover fire while the other retreats and so on and so forth. When you have wounded, call for Paul's team. They'll be lingering in the rear ready to pull casualties off of the line. Remember the key word here - wounded. As distasteful as it may sound and as disrespectful as it may seem, you need to leave the dead where they lie. Paul and his people will be rushing in through open ground. I know we all know each other and care deeply about each other, but be realistic in your assessments and don't risk our medical teams by having them come and pull someone out that is dead. It does neither the dead person nor the rescuer any good. "Are there any questions?" There were many, so many in fact that the meeting lasted another hour. And even then, most of the people weren't sure if they had all of the information that they needed. Everyone had doubts about what was going to happen tomorrow. ------- While the pre-battle briefing was occurring in the Garden Hill community center, another meeting was taking place in the hills to the northwest of town. Most of the troops had bedded down for the night (although anxiously awaiting the first of the air attacks - they had no reason to believe they would stop tonight). Others were walking the perimeter, taking their turn at guard duty (one of these was actually in the process of slipping away - he wanted no part of what was to come). Near the center of the mass of soldiers, three of them were sitting dangerously close together in the partial safety of a grove of trees near the base of a hill. These three were the only surviving lieutenants of the Garden Hill expeditionary force: Stu, Colby, and the technical second-in-command, Lieutenant Mitchell. "There are 188 of us as of nightly role call," Stu said, taking a slug of water from his canteen. "That'll be more than enough to take that little shitpot town in the morning. Especially now that we've reorganized the squads and the platoons again." "I agree," said Colby, who agreed with almost everything Stu said. "We'll split into two elements at dawn and hit them from the north and the west." "I'll lead the group from the west," Mitchell said, his fingers nervously playing with his own canteen. Mitchell was a competent enough tactician, having served a tour in the Marines in his former life. He was also, like most former Marines, an expert with his rifle. "We'll stage just on the outside of the far ring of hills and then move in once the other group is ready." Before they could discuss any more elements of this plan, Stu broke in and scuttled it. "I don't think that splitting the men up is a good idea," he said. "We've lost enough of our numerical advantage that we should just charge in as one big group." Mitchell looked over at him (or at least in his direction - he couldn't actually see him since it was dark) as if he had gone insane. "What the hell are you talking about, Covington? If we split ourselves into two elements, that means the enemy will have to split into two elements to counter us. It'll make it twice as hard for them to coordinate and each of our own groups will be up against less resistance." "That does make a lot of sense," Colby said, uncharacteristically agreeing with someone other than Stu for once. "It'll also make it much harder for us to coordinate with each other," Stu said. "We need to take the most advantage we can here and charge them from the north, where the going is the easiest. We send the bulk of the troops right through the gap between their guard positions." "That doesn't make tactical sense," Mitchell said in bewilderment. "You should know better than that." "Actually," Stu countered, "it makes a lot of tactical sense. The northern route has much smaller hills and a lot fewer trees. There's less room for those bitches to hide and snipe at us. If we get them to dedicate their entire force in that area, it's just a matter of clearing each hill with flanking maneuvers. Remember, we're dealing with bitches here for the most part. They'll cut and run as soon as we close with them." "That doesn't have anything to do with dividing into two or not," Mitchell said vehemently. "Jesus fucking Christ, the same principal applies to both plans. We need to hit them from both directions so that their forces are split. It's the only thing that makes sense!" The argument raged for better than thirty minutes, with neither Stu nor Mitchell giving any ground. Colby seemed to swing back and forth in opinion, tending to agree with whomever had just finished talking at any given time. He made a few points of his own from time to time, but nothing that was original in thought. "Look," Stu finally said when things started to get really heated, "why don't we just shelve this discussion for the moment and get some sleep? The air attacks are going to start any time now and we're all bunched up." "We need to make a fuckin' decision before morning," Mitchell said, directing his comment at Colby, who was the one that would ultimately have to do that. "Well..." Colby started. "We can sleep on it," Stu insisted. "We'll be able to make better decisions in the morning and we'll still have time to brief in the troops before we move out." "What?" Mitchell said, wondering what kind of madness Stu was talking now. "Yes," Colby said. "I think that's a good idea. We'll pick this up in the morning, before daylight." "We need to decide this now!" Mitchell said. "Goddammit, we..." "In the morning," Colby said, more firmly this time. "The air attacks will be starting soon and we don't want to be bunched up like this. Let's separate for now." And so they separated, each of them moving far enough away from the other so as not to invite the attention of the gunship. The decision remained unmade for the time being. It is debatable which decision Colby might have made. Mitchell's arguments were based on solid military logic and carried much weight, perhaps enough to swing the favoritism that Stu enjoyed. As it turned out however, Stu's plan was the one that would prevail. Stu knew that this plan entailed more military risk but he was afraid that a mass desertion - perhaps led by Mitchell himself - would take place if the militia were split in two. Again, whether or not this would have occurred is very debatable. But after the first air attack of the evening - which took place shortly after 9:00 PM - Lieutenant Mitchell was found to be among the three dead, a victim of three rounds in the chest that were assumed to be from the helicopter gun. His body was stripped of weapons and supplies and then dragged off to the side with the rest. As with Bracken before him, no one noticed the blood on the back of his head. Stu was now second-in-command of the remaining militia and the sole military adviser to Colby. ------- The community center was quiet but restless as 10:00 approached. Most of the Garden Hill residents were sleeping downstairs, either in the cafeteria or the adjoining rooms. They were laid out on the floor, covered with blankets, their heads on pillows, their bodies tossing and turning on the edge of slumber. They tended to be bunched together by the squads and platoons they had been formed up in, adhering to the bonding that comes in such circumstances. A few of them however, had slipped off with their spouse or spouses to other parts of the building, knowing that this would be the last chance they had to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh before the battle tomorrow. Steve Kensington and his two wives were in an upstairs storage room, all of them naked. Sarah and Lori, the wives in question, were not into lesbianism and, as such, Sarah was patiently waiting her turn at the throttle while Steve pounded in and out of Lori atop their blankets. In yet another upstairs storage room, Ted Eljer and his wife Carrie were busily involved in a threesome with Jenny O'Riley, who they had been having such relations with for the past week. Ted and Carrie had no intention of inviting Jenny permanently into their relationship at any point; they were just enjoying the freshness of her young body. They had gone through several such third persons in the last month, doing the Garden Hill equivalent of playing the field. Jenny, though she desperately wanted to be a part of their union - of anyone's union - knew that they were just using her for their own enjoyment but she consented to it anyway. She craved the release of sexual congress as much as anyone. Especially on this night. In the main food storage room, which was the domain of Tina and Stacy, the two women were using their privileges to pass through the locked door to full advantage. Some weeks before they too had discovered the joys of female-to-female sexuality and often they indulged in sessions of heated passion both with and without Jason. In this case Tina was kneeling between Stacy's legs, licking her contentedly while running her hands over her huge belly. Stacy's due date was February 4, just over a week in the future, but her impending delivery did not detract from her sexuality. She had to muffle a scream as she came, her hands tearing into Tina's hair. When Jason arrived a few minutes later, fresh off his first mission of the night and under orders by Brett to get some sleep, he quickly joined in the fun, sliding himself into Stacy from behind while she returned Tina's favor. And down in the cafeteria, near the corner where Jessica had once tried to kill Brett, another such pairing was in the works. "Chrissie," Maggie whispered, having slid her body a little closer to her squad leader's. "Are you awake?" "I'm awake," Chrissie whispered back, opening her eyes to look knowingly at her friend. The ambient light drifting in from the lanterns in the nearby locker room was just enough to see the hungry look on her face. "What's up?" "I... uh... need someone to hold me," she said softly, putting emphasis on the word "hold". Chrissie knew well what she meant. Since their first episode nearly two weeks before, after their first day of hit and run missions, Chrissie had made love to Maggie five additional times. They never talked about it, never made allusions towards it. Maggie still pretended each time that she had not planned on it occurring. But she always asked for it the same way - telling Chrissie that she needed some comforting, that she needed someone to hold her. Maggie trembled in nervous, guilty excitement as Chrissie smiled at her and told her that they should go find an empty storeroom. "You wouldn't want anyone to see you while you're... uh... upset, would you?" "No," Maggie said, slipping out from beneath her blankets. "I wouldn't want that at all." And so the two women, both dressed in clean pairs of jeans and heavy flannel clothing (after all, the call to arms could come at any moment) but absent of boots and socks, padded upstairs, slipping silently between the groups of other people on the floor. Maggie was under the impression that no one knew where the two of them were going or what they were going to be doing - or at least she pretended to be. Chrissie was under no such illusions. Garden Hill remained a very small town where everyone knew everyone else's business. The storage rooms of the community center had long been a place for illicit or semi-illicit sexual activity. This practice stretched all the way back to the days before Brett, Chrissie, and Jason showed up in town. Since most of the rooms did not lock, a system had developed by which lovers inside the rooms could let others know that they were occupied and therefore avoid the embarrassment of being walked in on while work was in progress. This system developed without anyone ever verbalizing it to anyone else or writing it down, almost by telepathy. "Can't use this one," Chrissie whispered upon coming to the first door. The sign of occupancy was clearly visible in the light of the candle she carried. A hair scrunchy that belonged to one of the women inside (it was Jenny's) was hanging from the doorknob. In the Garden Hill community center this served the purpose of a motel's DO NOT DISTURB placard. They moved further down the hall, coming to another storage room. The doorknob was empty on this one and Chrissie opened the door, allowing her candle to show the inside. This room was about twelve by twelve feet and had once housed spare linen. It was now nearly empty of this supply since much of the linen had been converted into sandbags for the trenches. "This should be good," Chrissie said, standing aside and allowing Maggie to enter. "We'll be able to... talk... without being bothered by anyone." "Yes," Maggie said with an almost straight face. "I'd hate to have anyone walk in on us while we were talking." Chrissie took off her own hair scrunchy, allowing her blonde strands to fall to her shoulders. Her scrunchy was very distinctive looking. Instead of a solid color favored by most of the town women, it was red and pink and had a small silk bow sewed into it. She twisted it around the doorknob and then entered the room, allowing the door to shut behind her. Once inside she set the candle down on an empty shelf. Maggie was standing nervously just behind her, biting her lip a little and wringing her hands. "Come here, Mags," Chrissie said gently, holding out her arms to her. "Tell me what's on your mind." The two women embraced, Maggie burying her head against Chrissie's neck, her body already heating up as she felt the press of breasts against hers through their clothing. "I'm just anxious about tomorrow," she said, smelling the scent of her friend and trembling, telling herself that she really did just come up here to talk and to be held. "There's nothing to be anxious about," Chrissie told her, guiding her over towards a pile of old towels in the corner. She ran her hands up and down her back, caressing her in a manner that was more than just friendly. "We're gonna kick ass. Don't worry." "I know," Maggie said, enjoying the sensation of the hands upon her. "I just get... you know... scared." "There's nothing to be scared of," Chrissie told her, turning her face to hers. She leaned forward and kissed her gently on the lips, lingering just long enough for the tip of her tongue to dart out for a second. "Mmmm," Maggie sighed before pulling back a little. "Chrissie, I just wanted to talk. We can't... you know..." "I know?" Chrissie asked, pulling her closer, kissing her on the chin. "What do I know?" "You know? Like we did those other times. That was a mistake. It was wrong." "Was it?" Chrissie asked her, letting her tongue slide down to Maggie's neck. She began to kiss and suck there. She had Maggie's number down by now. Maggie liked to pretend she was an unwilling participant. Part of it was guilt at enjoying the touch of another woman. Part of it was the love of being seduced. "It was," Maggie insisted, craning her head backward as she felt that soft, wonderful mouth on her neck. "I just... I mean we shouldn't... ohhhh." Chrissie nibbled her way over to Maggie's ear and began licking at the lobe. She whispered into it, caressing her with her words and her breath. "You want me to suck your boobies, don't you, Mags?" "No," Maggie insisted, her hands pulling Chrissie tighter against her, her chest thrusting into her. "That's wrong. I can't... we shouldn't..." "I'm gonna do it," Chrissie told her, sticking her tongue into Maggie's ear for the briefest moment. "I'm going to take your shirt off and suck your nipples for you and you're going to love it." "No," Maggie said, shaking her head, her voice clearly saying "yes". "Yes, you're going to love it," Chrissie told her, feeling the wetness gushing into her own being. She put her hands to the buttons on Maggie's flannel shirt and began to undo them. Maggie protested verbally but not physically. Soon the shirt was all the way open, revealing the white T-shirt beneath. The nipples on Maggie's store-bought breasts were sticking out plainly against the cotton. Chrissie pushed the shirt off of her back, letting it fall to the floor behind her. She ran her hands over her breasts, marveling, as always, at the springy feel of them. "Chrissie, we can't do this," Maggie said, leaning forward and kissing Chrissie's neck for a moment. "Lift your arms," Chrissie commanded, pushing at them a little with her own hands. Maggie lifted her arms, allowing Chrissie to pull her shirt up and off, leaving her standing in her white bra. Chrissie stepped forward again and began kissing the tops of her breasts, running her tongue all over the pale flesh, while her hands went for the bra clasp in the back. "Mmmmm," Maggie moaned. "I just wanted to talk, Chrissie. I just wanted to talk." "We're talking now, Mags," she said, opening the clasp and pushing the bra free. It joined the T-shirt and the heavier shirt on the floor, leaving those orbs naked before her. She lowered her mouth and took a nipple into it. "No," Maggie sighed, her hands going to Chrissie's hair. "We shouldn't." Chrissie pushed her to the floor on her back, landing her in the pile of towels. Her mouth never left her nipple as she performed this maneuver and she ended up lying partially atop of her. "Shut up, Mags," she said from around the nipple. She went back to licking at it with her tongue. Maggie snuggled into the towels and enjoyed the blissful sensation of her nipples being suckled. Though they were not as sensitive as they had been before her breast enhancement surgery (or, boob job if you prefer the non-PC term), they were still equipped with enough nerve endings to send tingles down to her vulva and clitoris. She ran her fingers through Chrissie's hair and only protested a little when Chrissie took off her own shirts and bra. "I like to feel my boobs against yours," Chrissie told her, lying down atop of her. "And I like to kiss you. You're a good kisser." "Oh, Chrissie," Maggie cried as she leaned forward and put her mouth against hers. They slid their tongues together passionately, slipping them in and out of each other's mouths, sucking on each other's lips while their nipples ground together. Maggie ran her hands up and down the soft, bare flesh of Chrissie's back while Chrissie plunged her hands through Maggie's hair. "I can never resist it when you kiss me," Maggie said breathlessly when the kiss broke for a moment. "You drive me crazy, Chrissie." "I know," she said, licking at her upper lip, giving the tip of her nose a soft nibble. "And now, I'm going to take those pants off of you and give you what you really want." "Ohhhh," Maggie moaned, pushing her downward. She felt the buckle of her belt being opened, felt the icy coolness of the metal touching her stomach. She felt Chrissie's hands fumbling with the button on her jeans and finally opening it. The zipper slid slowly down on its track and then Chrissie's warm fingers were in the waistband, grabbing the jeans and the panties at one stroke. She lifted her hips so they could be pulled off. A moment later she was naked. She spread her legs, feeling the wetness between them, waiting for the exquisite touch upon her pussy. Usually Chrissie teased her for a while first, licking her thighs and blowing soft air on her vaginal lips until Maggie actually had to beg for her mouth. This time she didn't bother. No sooner had the pants been discarded behind her than Maggie felt that blonde hair tickling her thighs, felt that wonderful tongue lapping up and down her slit. She moaned and raised her hips, increasing the pressure. Oh God, how guilty she felt when she did this. But oh God, how heavenly it felt. Chrissie ate pussy as if she had been born to do it, as if she had been doing it all of her life. "Oh yesss," Maggie moaned. "Oh, Chrissie, that's so good." "Mmmmph," Chrissie mumbled from between her legs. So far Maggie had never returned the favor for Chrissie. She would bring her off with her fingers while sucking on her boobs, but she had not been able to gather the courage to actually put her mouth upon a vagina. To do so would mean that she was really a lesbian, wouldn't it? Chrissie hadn't pushed her on this unequal game of give and take, not yet. Maggie wondered how long it would be until that changed. True she really was curious what it would be like to eat another woman - she always had been - but when push came to shove, she just... just couldn't. She had no idea that just on the other side of the storeroom door was someone who was going to help push the issue. Michelle had finally found the distinctive scrunchy hanging from the doorknob after first checking just about every other damn storage room in the building. Chrissie had worn that particular scrunchy on purpose, knowing that Maggie was bound to break and ask for a session this night, wanting something to signal her partner in crime with. Michelle smiled, feeling wetness between her own legs as she heard a soft, passionate moan come drifting through the wood. It sounded like Chrissie was doing her usual good job in there. Since licking Michelle that first time, Chrissie had become a pussy-eating machine of admirable efficiency. She could deliver an orgasm quick and hard, with less than three minutes of licking and sucking, or slow and soft, with more than twenty. It sounded like she was about halfway between the two at the moment. Michelle was very anxious to join the fun. She put away the penlight she had been using for navigation through the building and slowly turned the doorknob until it stopped. She pulled softly on the door, taking care not to allow it to squeak. When it was about two feet open she stepped inside, sliding the door back shut behind her. In the faint candlelight she could see the erotic sight of Chrissie, still in her jeans but absent of clothing above the waist, lying with her head between Maggie's widely spread legs. Her blonde head moved back and forth and wet, slurping sounds drifted from the junction. The smell of musk was very heavy in the unventilated room, giving Michelle an extra little charge of excitement. Maggie herself had her eyes tightly closed and was completely unaware of the additional presence in the room. Her fake boobs heaved slowly as she rolled her body back and forth to the rhythm of Chrissie's tongue. Michelle couldn't wait to get her hands and mouth on those boobs. She had never sampled fake ones before and was curious about them - especially after being told by Chrissie how different they were. She quickly and silently undid her shirt and dropped it to the floor. Her T-shirt and her bra joined it a moment later. It was the jingling of her belt that finally gave her away. As her pants dropped it sent it's musical chime into the air and Maggie's eyes opened with a start. "Oh my God," she squealed, her panicky hands pushing Chrissie away from her. "This isn't what it looks like!" "No?" Michelle said with a smile, continuing to step out of her pants and panties, until she too was nude. "It looks like there's some fun going on in this room. Or am I wrong?" "Hi, Shellie," Chrissie said casually, as if nothing unusual was going on. "Did you need to talk to me to?" "In a bad way," Michelle said with a grin. "What are you doing in here?" Maggie asked, covering her breasts with her arm. "Why are you naked?" "Chrissie's my wife," Michelle said simply, walking over to the two of them and kneeling down. "We share everything. Don't we, Chrissie?" "Everything," Chrissie agreed. "I'll leave you guys alone," Maggie croaked, trying to get up and keep her body covered at the same time. "I... well... things kind of got out of hand here. I should just..." "You should just lay back," Chrissie said, gently pushing her back down. Unlike what was usual, she actually had to apply some force this time. "Enjoy the fun. Believe me, three is better than two." "No," Maggie said. "You don't understand. I'm not really a les... a les... you know?" "Neither are we," Michelle told her, taking up position between Maggie's legs and looking hungrily at a fresh, new vagina. "We're just playing around because our man happens to be crashed out downstairs at the moment. It's no big." "No really," Maggie said. "I don't know what..." "Hush," Chrissie said, helping to hold Maggie's legs apart. She looked at her co-wife. "Give her your best, Shell." "You know it," Michelle said. With a final lick of her lips she lowered her face down and went to work. "Oh God, no, no, no!" Maggie yelled, feeling a strange tongue touching her center. What was going on here? She had just wanted to be held, to be comforted, to talk and now Michelle was... was... eating her pussy! But it was only a few seconds before that tongue between her legs, despite its strangeness (or perhaps because of it) began to feel really good. Michelle was aggressive in her licks, going so far as to plunge in and out. And her hands! Her hands were working on her boobs while she ate, pinching the nipples, squeezing the orbs. "Feels good, doesn't it, Mags?" Chrissie asked, letting go of her legs and leaning down to kiss her on the mouth. Maggie tasted her own musk on Chrissie's lips and clinging to her tongue. Without even realizing she was doing it at first, she sucked the tongue into her mouth and licked at her lips. "Oh God," she said helplessly as the sensation of two mouths upon her took her away. "I'm sooo sick." No one agreed or disagreed with her assessment of her mental health. They just continued to make love to her. Michelle began lapping at her engorged clitoris, driving Maggie nearly insane it felt so good. Chrissie broke the kiss and then attacked her breasts, pushing one of Michelle's hands out of the way to take a nipple into her mouth. It was less than a minute before the first orgasm went rolling through her body, hitting her like a highballing freight train. She screamed loud enough for Jenny, Carrie, and Ted down the hall to hear. And still it went on. Michelle abandoned her clit for the moment and went back to licking her lips and plunging her tongue in and out. Obviously Michelle intended to pull another come from her and knew just how to do it. "Oh God," Maggie moaned, running her hands through Michelle's hair now. "This is so depraved." "And nasty," Chrissie agreed, sitting back up. "That's why we love it. And it's time for you to get even nastier." Maggie barely heard her, so caught up in the sensations going on below was she. But she couldn't fail to notice that Chrissie was now unbuckling her own pants and pushing them off. "Yes," she said. "Give me your pussy. I'll get you off with my hand." "The hand's not got gonna cut it tonight, hon," Chrissie told her, wriggling out of her pants and panties. "Tonight, I need a little bit more." "What... what do you mean?" Maggie panted, her eyes locking onto Chrissie's blonde bush and the pink, swollen lips peeking out from it. "You know what I mean," Chrissie whispered, sidling a little closer. "I... I... I can't..." she stammered. "I've never... I mean I don't..." "You want to Maggie," Chrissie told her, speaking what Maggie knew was the plain and simple truth. "You want to eat my pussy. You just don't want to admit it to yourself. Well now, you're going to." She raised up and swung one knee over her head, forcing Maggie to look at and smell the object of discussion from less than four inches. An actual drop of moisture dripped out of it and onto her face. "Chrissie..." Maggie tried, her voice lacking the slightest bit of conviction, "this is..." "This is how it's gonna be," Chrissie finished for her. And then she lowered herself down, her front facing Michelle. For Maggie it happened in slow motion. She saw Chrissie's pussy grow bigger and bigger in her field of view and then suddenly it was pressing down on her face, smearing fragrant wetness over her chin and lips. She tasted the tang of those juices and was overwhelmed by the odor of them. Instinctively her tongue reached out and took the first lick, sliding along the slippery membranes of her inner folds. After that, she was lost. She plunged her tongue inside and began to lap madly. Soon she had Chrissie panting and sweating from the pleasure. For more than an hour they pleasured each other, making love in every possible combination. When Michelle and Chrissie were done ganging up on Maggie, Maggie and Michelle ganged up on Chrissie and then Chrissie and Maggie did the same to Michelle. Every few minutes someone would scream out in orgasm, usually as a result of a mouth on their clitoris while another mouth kissed them or sucked on their nipples. By the time they finally collapsed into a naked, sweaty heap on the floor, exhausted, the room was as hot as a sauna and almost as humid. "I'm a lesbian," Maggie said as they cooled off. She was between the two other women, their legs intertwined with hers. "I guess I should just admit it. I'm a fucking lesbian." Chrissie giggled a little, rubbing her thigh against Maggie's. "You're not a lesbian," Michelle told her lightly, planting a wet kiss on her cheek. "You're just a sexual creature, like we are." "But I liked what we did," she protested, shaking her head a little. "Don't you understand? I liked it!" "I would hope so," Chrissie said. "I gave you my best work." "Me too," Michelle told her. "I think I'd be kicking your ass about now if you told me you didn't like it." Maggie was confused, much the same way that Chrissie had been confused the first time such a thing had happened to her. "But... but..." "No buts," Michelle said, slapping hers a little. "We just had a little fun between the girls. It's nothing to trip about. It was nice. It was really nice. I like those bolt-on titties of yours, Mags. Very springy." "I'm going insane," Maggie said, near tears now. "I'm questioning my sexuality and you're telling me that what we did is normal?" "Normal for this reality we find ourselves in," Michelle said. "Maggie, we're in a town where not only are there four times as many women as men, but where we all just survived a global catastrophe and where we're all facing a potential town catastrophe. Sometimes pleasures like sex are all we have to keep away the madness we're facing. Don't you understand that?" Maggie looked at her, wanting to find comfort in what she was saying but having difficulty. "We're just having fun together," Chrissie said, putting it into simpler terms. "There's so little fun in this world, you just have to catch it when you can. So what if the old world would've thought we were sick for what we just did? The old world is dead. If you enjoy something - smoking pot, drinking, having sex with a woman - why not do it? What's the harm?" Maggie knew there had to be some harm in there somewhere. Her religious upbringing had assured her of that. But she just couldn't say what that harm might be. "Listen," Michelle said, toying with Maggie's nipple and making it erect. "Do you still think you'd like to have a nice hard dick in that pussy?" "What?" Maggie said, shocked. "Do you still want to get fucked by a man?" Chrissie re-phrased. "Is that still what you want sexually?" "Well..." she considered, imagining a nice, firm cock sliding into her. Yes, that is what she wanted. "Yes," she finally said. "So you're not a lesbian," Michelle said simply. "You're just a sexual creature. So stop feeling guilty about making love to us. We don't feel guilty." "Well..." she said, starting to feel convinced a little. "And I think that maybe Brett would be happy to provide that nice hard dick for you," Chrissie said. "Don't you, Shellie?" "I don't think he'd protest too much," Michelle agreed. She whipped her head back and forth, looking at each of them. "What are you saying?" she finally asked. "Well," Michelle said, "if Brett's agreeable, maybe you'd like to join in our marriage. What do you think?" ------- At almost the same moment, in the gymnasium of the high school in Auburn, a party of sorts was going on. The lights blazed brightly, using almost all of the generator's output but illuminating the large room in wonderful, pre-comet brilliance. The heater cranked away as well, burning many gallons of precious propane but raising the temperature inside to a balmy 72 degrees. Trays of food constructed out of the supply room staples by the kitchen staff sat on a large cafeteria table near the front of the room while bottles of liquor and mixers and buckets of ice sat on a similar table next to it. The table with the liquor was by far the more popular of the two. Upwards of two hundred women were in the room, most of them drunk, a few of them actually passed out. Most were sitting on the bleacher seats that had been folded down from the southern wall of the room, watching the "entertainment" that their glorious leader had organized for them. For the most part the women in the room were those closest to Jessica, those that were her inner and outer circles of gossip. Madeline had been invited to the party of course. She, as the military leader of the town, was most definitely inside of Jessica's inner circle. She had politely declined the invitation however, citing her ongoing training of the guard details and the security apparatus as an excuse. In reality, she simply thought such a party was a horrible waste of their supplies and the proposed entertainment was nothing short of barbaric. But when three of her nightshift guards failed to show up for their 11:00 PM crew change at the bunkers, she was forced to make an appearance. The hoots and cries of intoxicated females echoed throughout the room as she opened the door and entered it. Many of them were shouting: "Cin-dee, Cin-dee, Cin-dee!" over and over again in delightful glee in response to the current "participant" in the games: Cindy Miles. Madeline tried not to watch what was going on in the middle of the auditorium - which was the stage area - but her eyes were automatically drawn to it the way they once were to traffic collisions along the freeway. You didn't want to look but somehow you had to. "Oh Jesus," she said, shaking her head in shocked disgust. To hear about what Jessica had planned was one thing. To actually see it taking place... that was quite another. A wrestling mat had been placed in the exact center of the gymnasium, right in the circle where the tip-off was performed during basketball games. On his hands and knees on this mat, completely naked, his hands clenched tightly into fists, was Ron Schuyler. His face was currently buried in Tiffany Jenkins' crotch. Tiffany was naked from the waist down and seemed to be semi-enjoying the licking that he was giving her (or perhaps it was the attention of the crowd she enjoyed). But the real focus of the show was Cindy Miles, who was kneeling behind Schuyler. She too was naked except for a large strap-on dildo connected around her waist. The dildo was enormous, probably meant more as a gag-gift than as a practical penile substitute for lesbians, but apparently no one had told Cindy that it was for display purposes only. She was ramming it brutally in and out of Schuyler's anus, using exaggerated pelvic-thrust motions that seemed an obscene parody of the male thrust. Even from sixty feet away Madeline could see that the huge instrument had split him along the perineum. Droplets of blood pattered slowly but steadily to the blue mat, where a puddle had been formed. Madeline tore her eyes away at last, knowing that Schuyler would quite possibly die from the injuries that were being inflicted upon him. Tearing the rectum and the tissue around it could easily lead to infection, particularly if the wound was not repaired. And there was no way in hell that Jessica - who had put herself in charge of supply allotment - was ever going to kick loose any of their antibiotics for a man. She tried to put these thoughts out of her mind. What point was there in thinking about it right now? She had neither the power nor the support to put a stop to it. Stung by the way they had been treated by the men of Auburn, most of the women were enthusiastically in favor of a little payback, most of them pretending to not realize that there were turning out just the same as their former masters. And we're supposed to be the fair sex? Madeline sometimes wondered. She walked along the far wall of the gym towards the bleachers, her eyes looking for her missing guards. She knew they were here of course, most of the guards had been invited since most of them had been in Jessica's little takeover plot from the beginning. She found the first of them - Rhonda Marx - after less than a minute. Rhonda was sitting in the same row as Jessica herself, right up front and center of the action. She headed over. "Hi, Maddie," Jessica said as she saw her approach. "Decide to join us after all?" Jessica's eyes had a slightly glassy sheen to them. She was drunk and had been spending much of her time that way since the revolution that had put her into power. She started off with three or four bloody Marys in the morning and graduated to rum and cokes by afternoon. Madeline often wondered what she was going to do when the liquor supply finally ran out. "No," Maddie said, looking at her leader for a moment. "I came for Rhonda here. Her and some of the other girls seem to have forgotten to show up for their shifts tonight." "Oops," Rhonda giggled, the odor of whiskey wafting off her in a wave. "Am I bad?" "You're drunk," Madeline said, shifting her gaze and glaring at her. "I told you not to drink before your shift." "I just had a few," Rhonda said with another giggle and a playful slap that landed hard enough to cause pain. "Son of a bitch," Madeline muttered. She increased the power of the glare a little. "Get your ass home right now and sleep this off. You're pulling a double shift tomorrow for this crap." "Maddie!" Rhonda protested. "I didn't..." "No you didn't," Madeline said. "And now Karen is going to have to work a double shift tonight because you couldn't keep your hands off the booze. In fact, I think two nights of double shifts oughtta be your punishment. Karen certainly deserves a night off for something like this, doesn't she?" Before Rhonda could answer, a hand touched Madeline's arm. It was Jessica's. "Don't you think you're being a bit harsh on her?" she asked, favoring Rhonda with a conspiratorial look. "Harsh?" Madeline asked, fighting to maintain a proper tone. "For getting drunk and skipping guard duty? I think not." "Well I do," Jessica said, taking a sip out of her latest drink. "My God, you act just like Brett sometimes. Lighten up a little." She turned to Rhonda. "Rhonda, you pull a double shift tomorrow for Karen, okay? In the meantime, since you're already unable to go out there, just relax, have another drink, and enjoy the show." "Thanks, Jess," Rhonda said happily, giving a vindicated glance at Madeline. Madeline was shocked at this public mockery of her authority. "Excuse me, Jessica," she said, still fighting to keep her tongue civil, "but the guards and their schedules are my responsibility. I believe that disciplining them is my responsibility as well." "This entire town is my responsibility," Jessica said firmly, her eyes daring Madeline to contradict her. "And you'll do well to remember that, little missy. I think you're being too hard on poor Rhonda here and I'm vetoing your decision, as is my right as leader of this town. Do you understand?" "Jessica," Madeline said reasonably. "I don't think you understand..." "I understand everything," she said arrogantly. "But what I asked is if you understand? Do you?" Madeline sighed. "I understand." "Good," Jessica told her. "Now leave poor Rhonda alone and don't go chasing down any of the other girls that are here either. Just cover their shifts and have them all work doubles tomorrow. It's fair for everyone. Stay and watch the show if you want, but otherwise, leave everyone alone." Madeline bit back a number of angry replies. It took some work. Finally she just said: "As you wish" and left the room. ------- "What's the count?" Stu asked Colby first thing in the morning, after the customary roll call. "182," Colby said. "Four killed in the raids last night and two desertions." Stu nodded as if he'd expected that. "That's enough," he said. "Again, as long as we stick to the single thrust from the north." With no one to counter this notion, Colby quickly agreed to it. "Let's start briefing the squad leaders," he told Stu. "We'll move out in thirty minutes." ------- At 8:00 that morning Brett and Jason were up in the helicopter, hovering 2000 feet above the west side of town. Brett was reasonably well rested as far as current standards went. They had flown three night attacks in the previous twelve hours and he had gotten a little more than five hours of broken sleep. Jason had a little less sleep under his belt - he had spent a few hours experiencing the finer things in life - but he was younger and able to utilize it better. "There they go," Brett said, holding his hover while his eyes watched the tiny figures of men marching through the trees far below. "They're heading north," Jason said, examining them through the FLIR, which gave him a better count. "Towards the interstate." "And no one's heading for the west side," Brett said. "It looks like they're intending to keep together for the attack." He shook his head a little. "Don't know what their commander is thinking, but he's sure as shit giving us a break." "Should we get our people down in the trenches?" Jason asked, eager to give the deployment order over the radio. "Not yet," Brett told him, glancing for a second at his instruments. "Let's wait until they cross the interstate and start heading east. Once they do that, they'll be pretty much committed." So Jason gave an update on the troop movements below to Paul, who was monitoring the helicopter channel, but told everyone to hold in place for the moment. They watched the troops continue to march north below them while in the community center, the Garden Hill army continued to sit restlessly in the cafeteria. ------- "I don't like that fuckin helicopter watching everything we do," Colby told Stu over the radio. "Isn't there anything we can do about it?" The helicopter was plainly visible off to the east, hovering over the western wall of the town, its nose pointed towards the formation. "It's too high to shoot," Stu replied. "Even if a bullet somehow manages to hit it, it won't do any damage. They're more than 2000 feet above us. That almost 700 yards straight up." "I don't like it," Colby repeated. "It gives them too much of an advantage." "So they can see us?" Stu answered. "It's no big deal. We knew that would be a problem all along. Remember that we have the gun and numerical advantage. And we're men for God's sake, not a bunch of bitches with rifles." "I suppose," Colby said, continuing to put one foot in front of the other. He was having a bad feeling about all of this. A very bad feeling. ------- Up above, Brett and Jason were hearing every word that was being said on the Auburn communications channels. This was a simple matter of setting their radio to the citizens band frequencies and putting it on scan. And the militia was dumb enough to talk in the clear. Were they completely unaware that they were being monitored? Or were they just arrogant enough to think that it didn't matter? Brett favored the latter suggestion. The statement that "bitches" were inherently inferior at combat than "men" was the clincher. Didn't this idiot know that modern combat with guns did not rely on physical strength, the only thing that the fairer sex was lacking when it came to comparison? Didn't he know that a good portion of the VC that had kicked the shit out of the US army in Vietnam had been women? Apparently not. If so, his blindness would be his undoing. ------- Thirty minutes later the lead elements of the militia climbed up a small embankment and onto the asphalt lanes of the freeway. They came out less than two hundred yards from a sign that the Garden Hill squads had put up three days before, especially for this occasion. It was a large white placard with neatly printed, almost gothic script upon it, composed by one of the more artistic members of the community. The sign was almost humorous in nature, quoting from "The Wizard of Oz". ENTERING GARDEN HILLS TERRITORY I'D TURN BACK IF I WERE YOU The militia did not find it very funny however. When Private Williams, at the order of Colby, approached the sign to knock it down - a completely unmilitary goal - he stepped on a trip wire and set off a mine that was mounted eight feet away on a pine tree beside the road. The pellets blasted out and ripped a hole in his side, causing him to utilize his pistol three minutes later. The rest of the militia, shaken and scared, continued forward. The sign remained in place. ------- "They're across the interstate," said Jason's voice over the VHF radio in the cafeteria. "The rear elements just made the crossing. The lead elements are turning east." "We copy that," replied Paul, who was in charge of monitoring the frequency. "Begin deployment in the north bunkers," Jason said, obviously repeating instructions given to him by Brett. "Platoon one and two, occupy the bunkers in grid C-charlie six and D-delta six. Platoon three, occupy the bunkers in the rear of D-delta six. Estimate ninety minutes to contact." "All right, people," Paul shouted after acknowledging and repeating the transmission. "The time has come. Form up and get out to where you need to be. God be with us!" Now that the initial phase of waiting was over, the troops moved in a very efficient, very disciplined manner. They had practiced just such a thing many times in the past. The squad leaders gathered their men and women and told them to arm up. The platoon leaders watched, making sure that everything went according to plan. Guns were put over shoulders and backpacks, heavy with ammunition, water canteens, and first-aid supplies, were strapped to backs. Each of the squads was in possession of at least one of the automatic weapons that were available. Each of the automatic weapon carriers was in possession of a full clip of tracer rounds in addition to a box of extras. Each platoon leader - Chrissie, Michelle, and Matt - was carrying a VHF portable so that communications with the helicopter were possible. They also carried a CB portable to talk to their squad leaders. As a group they donned their rain gear and headed out the door, walking in formation through the paved streets of Garden Hill towards the gate that guarded entrance to it. They were silent, contemplative as they marched, but determined. They exited the gate and then walked along the walls, using the road to travel on. Above them they could see but not hear the helicopter, their eye in the sky, hovering. No one waved at it, no one really even wasted time looking at it. It was comforting enough just to know it was there. They reached the northern wall and continued forward for another fifteen minutes, until they were approaching the Interstate. Then they headed off into the woods and the gentle hills there. Within thirty minutes of getting the orders, they were climbing into their trenches and assigning areas of responsibility. They loaded their weapons and began to wait. Paul and his medical team, which consisted of three of the women, climbed into the hauling truck and drove it out to the road, parking it along the northern wall. In the back were sheets and some makeshift carrying cots as well as field packs of medical supplies. A plastic cover tied over the top kept everything dry. When there were wounded (he could not, no matter how much he tried, think if there were wounded) he and his team would go out and haul them in. Another team was standing by in the community center to care for them further - hopefully keeping them stable until Brett could fly them to El Dorado Hills. ------- They staged for a few minutes just north of the interstate, reforming into their squads and platoons for the coming march. Everyone drank out of their canteens and checked their weapons. Squad leaders made a final inspection while the platoon leaders - all of them except Stu and Colby hastily promoted sergeants - tried to offer some encouraging words. "All right, guys," Stu said, addressing the men while Colby stood beside him. "It's time for the final push into this town. Somewhere across that freeway, probably rather close to the wall itself, we're going to hit some resistance from these bitches. I expect it will be little sniping attacks at first, maybe a little heavier as we get to the wall. The hit and run attacks that they've been pulling all this time are no longer effective so it's time to tighten up again, close enough to hear orders. "What we're going to do is spread into a wide front and move in quickly, almost at a run if we can. When they fire at us, we'll send platoons to advance on their positions while other platoons provide fire support. Again, speed is our ally here! We need to move quickly and wipe out the resistance as soon as we hit it. Surround their positions when we identify them, that's the key." He looked up and down the ranks, at the filthy, tired men that had managed to survive the hellish march. For the first time there seemed a certain eagerness in their eyes. At long last their goal was in sight and with it, a chance for revenge upon their tormentors. "If we do this right," he told them, "we'll be inside that wall in less than an hour. An hour after that, we should be outside that community center itself. Now these bitches are gonna scatter when we charge them, especially inside the wall, but have no fear. We'll hunt every last one of them down and we'll have ourselves a fine party tonight. There should be just about one for each of us, how about that?" There were some grins and sounds of enthusiasm from the ranks at his words. "Now remember, we try to take that helicopter intact if we can, but don't hesitate to bring that fucker down if you get a shot. That chopper is their only advantage over us - their only one - and if we take it out our job will be that much easier. So... is everyone ready to march?" They all yelled that they were. It almost sounded sincere this time. "Then let's move out. Remember, keep your dicks in your pants until tonight." At that, the militia began to move. They crossed the freeway and began to close with the Garden Hill positions. ------- "They're moving in," Brett, who had taken over the radio from Jason, told his platoon leaders down below. "They're crossing the interstate right now in a line stretching across grid D-delta three. They've tightened up considerably and are layered in platoon-sized formations. Estimate contact in twenty minutes - that's two-zero minutes. Chrissie, if they keep moving on their present course, they're gonna reach your position first." Chrissie, Michelle, and then Matt all acknowledged this information and relayed it to their troops, using their voices instead of their radios. Eighty-six sets of hands tightened their grips on eighty-six weapons. Eighty-six sets of eyes peered over the mud and through the trees, waiting to spot the invaders. "We're gonna get to shoot first," Chrissie told her people, her heart hammering in her chest. "Let's keep sharp and remember what Brett told us. Stick to your sector of responsibility if you can, both at the squad and the individual level. Remember, the riflemen fire first, as soon as they're in range. Those of you with the automatics, don't waste ammo. Short, controlled bursts when they're close enough to hit." ------- "Look how much they're bunching up down there," Brett said, alternating glances between his instruments and the advancing line of militia. "They think they're out of danger now that they're close." "If only they knew," Jason said with a grin. "When are you going to show them they're wrong?" "Soon," Brett said. "When they make contact they're gonna be pinned down behind those hills over there. That'll be the time. In fact, it's about time to head down for some fuel anyway. See if you can get Steve on the tactical net and have him get ready for us." "Right," Jason said, switching the frequency button. "And remember," Brett said, "code words only. They're probably monitoring the CB channels." Jason looked wounded at the suggestion that we wouldn't remember something so elementary. "I know," he said indignantly. "Sorry," Brett said, favoring him with a fatherly glance. "It's best not to leave anything to chance." This helped Jason's pride a little. He keyed up the microphone and said: "This is mother bird calling Edison, are you there, Edison?" "Edison here," replied Steve after a few moments. Edison was Kensington's code name, picked because of his propensity for invention and assembly. "Go ahead, mother bird." "Mother bird's coming down for lunch," Jason told him. "We'll be needing an egg while we're down. Can you get one ready for us?" "One egg, coming up," Steve said, obvious pleasure in his voice. "And I'll get your lunch crew ready to rock too." "You're the man, Edison," Jason told him. ------- "What the hell does that mean?" asked Colby, who had heard the conversation on his scanning CB. It was the first time they had picked up anything but clicks and static. "What's an egg? Who's mother bird? Who's Edison?" "They're using code," replied Stu, who was marching near him in the center of the formation. "Obviously mother bird is the helicopter. You could hear the engine in the background. And I would guess that 'going down for lunch, ' means that they need fuel." "And the egg?" Colby repeated, finding something sinister about that very word. Stu shrugged. "No way of telling," he said. "But I wouldn't worry too much. That chopper's not good for anything but recon during the day unless it wants to get close enough to get its ass shot off." "I have a bad feeling about this," Colby muttered, watching as the lead elements continued to close. "Don't sweat it," Stu said. "In two hours this thing will be all over." ------- Brett touched neatly down forty feet from the shed where Kensington's magic was made. While the fuel truck, which had once been a water truck, came rumbling over to fill the helicopter's tank, Steve and his crew emerged from the shed with one of their "eggs" attached to a handcart. The egg was actually one of the gas tanks that had been removed from the cars in town. Steve had cut it in half with a torch and then welded it back together using a strip of thin metal to adhere the pieces. It was a strip that would easily come off if enough pressure were put on it in the right way. The top of the tank had two hooks welded onto it as well. One hook was in the center of the tank and the other was attached to the thin strip that held the two halves together. Inside of the tank was a mixture of gasoline from the railroad tanker and Tide laundry detergent from the tractor-trailer. The concoction was nothing more or less than a very simple form of napalm. While the fueling crew put the hose in the helicopter's inlet and began to pump, Steve maneuvered the handcart next to the right skid and set the egg down on the ground so that the two hooks were facing upward. Behind him two of his helpers were carrying an enormous coil of rope. This coil contained fifteen hundred feet of rope and was neatly wound up so that it would (probably) play out without snagging or hanging up. This was no small accomplishment considering that the rope was not all one piece but many spliced together from scavenged supply rooms and garages throughout the town. It was not even all the same diameter. In the test run however, it had worked perfectly, the coils unwinding just as Paul - their rope expert - had told them they would. "Let's get these doors off," Brett told Jason as they climbed out. "Steve, can we borrow a couple of socket wrenches?" "Help yourself," Steve told them, waving them towards the shed. It took five minutes to remove the two side doors from the aircraft, ten minutes to fuel it up, but by the time that was done, the egg was still not attached. Brett sat in the cab of the aircraft, nervously monitoring the VHF frequency. So far nothing had come across. "I don't mean to rush you or anything, Steve," he said worriedly, "but they're about to make first contact out there." "I'm going as fast as I can," Steve said. "Don't worry, they'll be fine." With the assistance of his helpers Steve hung the tank from the cargo hook on the bottom of the helicopter, utilizing the larger of the two hooks that had been welded to the tank. It hung there neatly, swaying back and forth a little bit but otherwise not moving. Once that was accomplished, Steve tied one end of the long coil of rope to the smaller of the hooks, the one that was on the welded strip of metal. The other end of the rope, which came from the inside of the coil, he stretched out and passed under the helicopter, threading it between the bottom and the hanging tank. He then passed it through the two open doors and tied it off, using a knot that would not easily come loose when jerked from below. The rest of the rope was set in the passenger compartment of the helicopter and strapped down with bungee cords. "You're in business," Steve told Brett. "Make it count." "You know it," Brett replied, climbing back into the aircraft. He made no move as of yet to go through the start-up procedure. "Aren't we gonna go back up?" Jason asked. "The battle's about to start." "Not yet," Brett told him. "We'll stay down until it's time to make a nape run. We don't want them to see the egg until we're just about to use it. Get on the radio and let them know that we're standing by for an air strike when they need it." ------- Matt, who had been the one to exercise and train with the ground forces over the last two weeks, was technically in charge of them at that level. He was in one of the trenches with eight other people, holding on to one of the automatic weapons and trying to keep himself calm. He listened to Jason's report over his VHF radio and acknowledged it. "Did you copy that, Chrissie?" he asked his second in command, the leader of the platoon that was going to make first contact. Chrissie and her understaffed platoon of twenty-four women and three men were deployed in a series of three trenches atop of two hills overlooking the alleged avenue of advance. Though Brett had assured her that she would be the first to engage the enemy, there was still no sign of them. "I copy," she said. "And I'm still clear on the horizon." She sighed a little, wishing for the comfort that came from having Brett and Jason hovering above them, keeping an eye on things. Though she understood why they were holding back at the moment, she still didn't like it. She felt out of touch. "Movement ahead," said Anna, who had once lived with these monsters and who was now assigned to Chrissie's platoon. She was in the adjoining trench but her voice carried easily over. "Three men, coming around the hill at eleven o'clock." Chrissie, along with everyone else, turned her eyes that way and, after a moment, spotted the men. They were about ten feet apart, rifles held out before them. Their formation was somewhat loose and they were moving very rapidly, almost at a run. Within a few seconds, other men began to appear, both from around that hill and the hills to the sides of it. They passed out of the gaps and moved forward, all of them moving at that rapid, almost careless pace. As Brett had said, the line stretched for a considerable distance. Chrissie reported her sighting over the VHF frequency. "They're outside of firing range right now but closing fast," she said. "Estimate contact in two to three minutes. We'll hit near the center of their line but the flanks are out of our range. They stretch all the way over to..." she consulted her map for a moment, "to grid D-delta five. Michelle, you'll be able to hit their left flank when they move in." "Copy that," Michelle said, her voice almost supernaturally calm. "Matt, their right side should swing right towards you if they keep on course," Chrissie said. "Copy, Chrissie," he said, his own voice a little more tense. "They'll probably move to flank you when you start firing though. We'll hold here and catch them in a crossfire if that happens." "Copy," she said, putting her radio down. She looked over the muddy hills and the trees to her soldiers. "All right," she told them. "The fun's about to start. Riflemen, start picking targets." Those with the hunting rifles aimed out through firing ports in the camouflaged sandbags and began to scan their area of responsibility. The automatic and semi-automatic riflemen also put their barrels through firing ports but they knew that it would be a few minutes until their time came. Everyone watched tensely as the men continued to advance towards them. They moved through trees and over small mudfalls, weaving in and out but always getting closer. "Hold your fire until I say so," Chrissie said. "We'll wait until they're inside three hundred yards." They waited, fingers tight upon triggers, eyeballs glued to scopes or peering over sights. They watched as the men who wanted to enslave them, to rape them, to steal their food and take their children advanced in a neat, rapidly moving line. Soon the first of them crossed the invisible line that marked the three hundred yard range. And then more passed over it. "All right," Chrissie said, just loud enough to be heard. "From this point on, we're off radio silence. Riflemen, fire at will!" More than twenty fingers squeezed twenty triggers, all within a second of each other. The noise was tremendous, a shattering, drawn out explosion that rolled off across the landscape. Before the first bullets even hit, the riflemen were working their bolts, putting in the next rounds. ------- The front lines of the militia easily saw the muzzleflashes of the first barrage. It would have been quite hard to miss it. As such, most of them dove to the ground before the bullets could arrive on target, their instincts hurling them into the mud almost before their brains could comprehend why. Several people however, either did not see the flashes or did not react to them quickly enough. Of these, two of them were hit, the bullets slamming into their bodies with meaty thuds. "Take cover!" squad leaders yelled as whizzing projectiles came flying in. "Get the fuck down!" The shots landed in the mud and plunked into trees, coming in waves as the enemy on the hillside ahead fired and then jacked in new rounds. Those in the open began to crawl for cover, looking for anything that would shield them: a rock, a tree, a hole. Most found such things but a few were hit as they scrambled along the ground. One corporal had his head blown clean off by a shot from a .460 magnum rifle. Another took two .30-06 rounds in the side. Stu and Colby, both of whom were safely out of range of the gunfire, took cover behind a fallen log. They watched as the first few volleys came rolling in and as the men up front tried to get out of the path. The sound of the gunfire echoed around them, badly out of synch with the pattern of flashes because of the range and the slow speed of sound. This sound was contrasted by the sharper cracks of the militia rifles as the men began to return fire. Stu didn't even bother clearing his orders with Colby. He simply grabbed the radio and began to bark into it. "First platoon," he yelled, "pour fire on that fuckin hillside. Third platoon, you guys move up and get ready to advance to the right flank. Fifth platoon, you get ready to advance to the left flank. Everyone else, you'll be covering fire for the advance. Let's get to it. We need to take that fuckin hill now!" Colby simply watched in amazement as the men scrambled around and got into position in response to Stu's commands. It simply didn't occur to him that he was supposed to be the one giving the orders. ------- "Keep the pressure on them," Chrissie yelled into her own tactical radio. "Keep firing. Try to hold them in place." No one answered her but they all did as she asked. The riflemen worked like machines. They aimed out over the area where the return fire was coming from, unleashed a round, worked their bolt, and then did it all over again, setting a pace of only a few seconds per shot. Every fifth or sixth round, depending on the size of their magazines, they would reach down to a box of shells between their knees and shove in a fresh load. They had no way of knowing if they were hitting anyone, but the barrage had already had the desired effect. It had stopped the advance of the militia, forcing them to start setting up a charge to take the hill. The return fire was quite intense. From below the sound of uncountable rifle shots and the chattering of automatic assault weapons could be heard crackling like firecrackers. Bullets slammed into their positions ruthlessly, riddling the sandbags that they hid behind with holes and making frightening thuds each time one hit. Other bullets whizzed over the top of them or slammed into the mud around them. So far, the sandbags were doing their job and no one had been hit. Chrissie watched through her firing port, her own weapon unfired as of yet. She saw well over a hundred muzzleflashes winking at her from down below and she took a moment to worry that one of those bullets just might find its way through the small hole and into her face. The odds were against it, that was true, but that was how Hector had been hit. She put this out of her mind as an irrelevant worry and hauled out her VHF radio. "We're in contact," she said into it, mostly for Brett's benefit since the other platoons would easily be able to see and hear what was going on. She did not identify herself on the radio because she knew that everyone who was listening to this frequency would recognize her voice. "They're pinned down at the moment behind the hills to the north of us. Heavy return fire, no casualties at this point. It looks like they're setting up for an envelopment maneuver to the east and west of us." "We'll hit 'em as soon as they start to move," Michelle's voice assured her. "How's that left flank looking though?" "We'll be able to hit them from here," said Matt, who was stationed on that side. "Chrissie, once they start to swing around on my side and we engage them, we'll lay a crossfire down on them. Try to hold your position but don't hesitate to get the fuck out if they close to within a hundred yards." "Got it," Chrissie said, wincing as a bullet zinged off the top of the sandbag above her, showering her with a small spray of mud. "Brett, are you there?" "I'm here," he said. "We're firing up the engine right now." "We could use a little air strike if you're ready," she told him. "Just tell me the place," he said, "and I'll be there in three minutes." ------- Brett lifted off carefully, mindful of the tank of explosive material slung just beneath them. Jason was strapped into his usual place on the passenger side and Sherrie, one of Steve's assistants, was holding on to the bungee cords that secured the rope for dear life. Sherrie's leg had healed up enough for her to walk but not enough for her to participate in combat out in the trenches. After her last pitiful performance under fire, she sought redemption by volunteering to be the spotter and rope gatherer for the drop missions. This was only her second flight in the chopper and she was still quite terrified of it. Especially with no door on and especially in combat conditions. In her mind she kept seeing them crashing to the earth and burning to death. "How you doing, Sherrie?" Brett asked her over the intercom. "Just bitchin," she said, her voice broken. "Glad to hear it," he told her. "Three minutes to target." Brett flew to the south of town, out over the canyon, and brought them up to an altitude of 6000 feet above sea level, which would put them about 1800 feet above the battle area. He then cut back to the north, heading for the battle zone at forty knots. Jason had the master map spread out before him. Due to the wind in the cabin that taking the doors off had produced, he was having a little difficulty keeping it flat. Brett took a few glances at the map as he flew, matching the terrain below him with the features on the map. Though he could plainly see the flashes of gunfire from the trenches and the answering fire from the militia, he wanted to take no chances on dropping in the wrong place. He was going to put his load exactly where Chrissie wanted it. There would be no repeat of his Iraqi experience here. As he came over the battlefield itself, he was able to see the tiny figures of the militia below them. They were huddled behind the trees and hiding behind logs, firing back at the hillside that they had been engaged from. As Chrissie had theorized, it looked like they were setting up to try to flank the hill on both sides, unknowing of course that there were occupied trenches on both of the flanks. Well, they would find out about that the hard way, wouldn't they? He saw his target area ahead. Behind a group of logs and small hills directly across from Chrissie's platoon were twenty or thirty Auburnites. They were part of the group providing covering fire for the coming advance and were much closer together than was healthy for them. They were the group that had been hit first it seemed. He could see a few dead bodies lying in front of them. No more than three feet separated most of the men. Brett flew towards them, slowing his airspeed. His intent was to hover right over the top of them. "You ready to spot for me, Sherrie?" Brett asked her. "It's what I live for," she said, reluctantly releasing her hold on the rope and crawling forward. As horrid a thought as it was, she pushed her face outside of the missing door and peered downward. Brett and Jason, while hovering directly over the target, would not be able to see it, but she would. The wind buffeted her violently, threatening to rip the headset from her head. Ice crystals pelted her neck painfully. Below she could see the entire battlefield, stretched out like some three-dimensional map. She plainly saw nearly two hundred militia in various positions, many of them with rifles winking at the trenches where the Garden Hill forces were deployed. Brett described for her what the target area looked like, explaining that he was now almost directly over the top of it. She looked at the confusing blur of brown and green below and finally spotted what he was talking about. A group of men huddled behind some logs, firing their guns. "I've got them," she said into her headset. "Are you sure?" he asked her, not meaning to be insulting, just wanting to be sure. "I'm sure," she said. "Go forward a little and to the right." Brett, who was now in a hover, eased forward and edged the machine just a tad to the right. ------- Stu had taken note that the helicopter had returned a few minutes before but was otherwise ignoring it. Instead he concentrated on whether all of his men were in position for the flanking attacks he was about to send into motion. Everything looked about right so... "What the fuck is on the bottom of that helicopter?" Colby asked, putting a set of binoculars to his eyes. "What?" Stu asked, alarmed. He looked up and was able to see that there was a definite change in the normal shape of the aircraft. It was hovering, moving slowly over their troops, as if... as if positioning itself. What the hell? "It looks like a gas tank out of a car," Colby said, shaking his head. "What the fuck?" At the words "gas tank" Stu stiffened. Anything that the Garden Hills fucks made out of a gas tank and suspended above troops with a helicopter could only be something bad, something that went bang. He looked directly below where the machine was positioning itself. "Oh shit," he muttered, grabbing for the radio. "First platoon," he screamed into it. "You need to pull back now!" ------- "Now," Sherrie said when he was directly overhead. "Right now!" "Got it, Sherrie," Brett said calmly, his hand reaching for the lever that released the hook. Before pulling it he keyed his radio, which was set on the VHF frequency. "Are you ready, Chrissie?" he asked her. "We're ready," she assured him. "It's on the way," he said and pulled the lever. The tank dropped like a rock, straight down, picking up speed according to the laws of gravity. Below, the men were trying to get turned around so they could crawl free of the drop zone but they would not, could not have enough time. The tank pulled the rope out behind it, uncoiling it neatly just as Paul had intended. When it reached the end of the rope the 120-pound tank jerked to a sudden halt from more than a hundred miles per hour. This was more than enough pressure to rip the flimsy piece of steel down its weld like a zipper. The tank ripped in half and fifteen gallons of napalm spread out and began to fall 300 feet above the retreating troops. Just before the terminal snap of the tank released the gelatinous concoction, Chrissie and two other squad leaders opened up with their M-16s, aiming for the area just below the tank. All had switched their magazines over to ones containing tracer rounds only. The red phosphorus streams looked almost like laser beams. Two of them intersected the falling napalm and set it alight. There was a solid whoomph sound as the weapon ignited and a second later the burning gel fell over the formation below. Three of the men were completely engulfed in flames, dying right were they lay. Two more were partially engulfed and they ran screaming into the woods. They tried to do as they were taught back in school and stop, drop, and roll, but that would not put out the fire. Their clothing, hair, and flesh burned away in only a few moments. They screamed wildly, frantically until some horrified soldiers gathered their wits enough to shoot them. Two others got slightly hit from the attack, sustaining second and third degree burns that would eventually kill them from infection but that allowed them to fight on for the moment. In the air above, Brett spun the helicopter around and began to move slowly off to the south once more. Sherrie, after confirming a good drop, began to pull the rope back inside. Paul himself had taught her how to do this and within ten minutes she would have all fifteen hundred feet of it ready for the next drop. ------- "What the fuck was that?" Colby yelled, smelling the strong gasoline odor mixed with the stench of burning flesh. The ground around the drop zone was still ablaze, though weakening. The two halves of the tank had dropped to the ground just on the sides of the position. They too were burning. "Holy shit," Stu said, stunned and doubtful for perhaps the first time. "Fuckin' napalm. They dropped fuckin napalm on us!" "Napalm," Colby said, nearing hysteria. "Where the hell did they get napalm?" "It's homemade," Stu said. "They're dropping it out of gas tanks and igniting it with their tracers." He shook his head a little. "Clever fuckers, aren't they?" "How the hell can we win against someone with napalm?" Colby asked. "Maybe we'd better pull back and think about this a little." "No," Stu said. "We need to push forward. They only have one chopper and it takes time to load those things up. They won't be able to use it that often." "But..." "We need to clear that hill and push on," Stu said. "The quicker we get inside that wall, the quicker we'll be safe. They won't drop that shit in their own territory. Now let's get those troops moving." Colby said nothing, just continued to stare at the smoking corpses in fear. What a horrible way to die! Being burned alive by jellied gasoline dropped from the sky. Stu didn't wait for his acknowledgment or his consent. As far as he was concerned, Colby was just a useless appendage at this point. He keyed up his radio. "First platoon, get back into position and start shooting. Third and fifth platoons, get ready to move in. We'll cover your advance while you close in on the flanks. Everyone else, covering fire on that hill, right now!" The volume of fire at the hillside picked up to a ferocious level as more than a hundred guns opened up on it. "Third platoon, fifth platoon," Stu ordered, "go, go, go!" ------- "Holy Jesus," Chrissie said as the barrage came rolling in. Sandbags exploded, spraying dirt everywhere and it sounded like a swarm of angry insects was buzzing overhead. There was a thud and a scream from the end of her trench and she looked over to see that Sally Brigham had taken a round right in her face, blowing the back of her head off. The scream had come from Laura Mint, who was looking at her former friend in horror. "Oh my God, Sally!" Laura screamed, edging over to cradle her. "She's dead," Chrissie yelled, unable to feel anything but fear at the moment. "Get back to your position. They'll be moving in on us!" Sally gave a terrified look at Chrissie, a longing look at Sally, but did as she was told and got back to her firing port. A moment later Maggie, who was in the next trench over in charge of a squad, reported on the tactical radio that she had one of her troops wounded. "How bad?" Chrissie yelled into the radio. "Shot through the shoulder," Maggie's voice said, abandoning code for the moment. "She needs to be pulled out. She's bleeding bad." "Copy," Chrissie said. "Get some bandages on her and get ready to evac her. As soon as the firing slacks off, get her out of here." While Maggie acknowledged this, Chrissie put her head back to her firing port. She saw what seemed to be hundreds of flashes down below and an actual haze of gunsmoke over the enemy positions. Bullets continued to slam in all around her, shredding her protective sandbags even more. From the right side of the militia line a large group of men, about forty or so, suddenly broke from cover and began to dash towards the eastern side of her hill. At the same time another group of forty to the west broke cover and began running towards that side. "They're moving in," Chrissie told her platoon. "Shift fire to the flanks!" Everyone in the three trenches abandoned the effort to pin down the platoon in front of them and moved their guns either to the left or the right to engage the men trying to envelope them. From the distance they were at their fire was not very accurate and only a few men on each side fell, the rest continuing to rush forward. It was terrifying to watch. In a set of trenches a quarter mile to the west, Matt's platoon watched this advance and tracked targets with their weapons. They were about to give the charging Auburnites a big surprise. In yet another set of trenches to the east, Michelle and her platoon were preparing to do the same. It was Michelle's group that opened up first. The advancing fifth platoon nearly ran right into them. When they were less than three hundred yards in range, the riflemen opened up. This time surprise was almost complete. So intent was the enemy on reaching their objective and getting around behind it, that they didn't notice the flashes off to their left until four of their number suddenly fell to the mud. And even then it took them a minute to figure out that the shots had not come from their objective. By that time they were well inside two hundred and fifty yards and easy fodder for the semi-automatic and automatic weapons of Michelle's squads. They opened up with a harsh chatter, spraying bullets down all over the formation. More men fell, their heads splitting open, their chests riddled with bullet holes. Others, finally figuring out that they'd been trapped, dove to the ground and began returning fire. Their own shots were ineffective, doing nothing but slamming into sandbags and mud, but they themselves were caught between two groups of armed enemy and the crossfire on them was murderous. More men fell as aimed rifle shots and bursts of automatic weapons fire raked over them. Within three minutes more than half of the forty-man platoon - including the leader - was dead or dying and more than ten of the remaining twenty was wounded. ------- Sergeant Stinson had started off the march as nothing more than a simple squad leader. Now, with more than half of the army dead or deserted, he was the commander of a rag-tag platoon that had been formed from pieces of other platoons. It was a responsibility that he had never hoped for and that he did not enjoy, especially not on this mission. It was his platoon - the third platoon - that was tasked with hitting the right flank of the hill. He was near the rear of the formation as they jogged across the uneven, muddy ground, heading towards a gap between two hills. Bullets from the objective zinged in at infrequent intervals but the range was at the extreme to hit moving targets. Still two of his men, he didn't have time to identify just who, had been felled by lucky shots. "Almost there," he yelled encouragingly as they continued their run. "Keep it up!" No one answered him but they kept running, more out of fear for their lives than his command magnetism. Just as they began to think that they were going to make it to the relative safety of the gully between the two hills, bullets began to hit them with frightening accuracy. Three men dropped within two seconds, two from body shots, one from a leg shot. Two more quickly followed, thumping to the mud and sliding on their faces. Stinson just had time to wonder how the troops firing from the objective were getting so lucky all of a sudden when the automatic weapons fire began to rake across them. Three men were cut down in two seconds, one of them screaming as he fell. It was then that he saw the flashes coming from the hill to the right of them. They had been tricked! "Get down!" he screamed, throwing himself into the mud and trying to scramble behind a tree. All around him other men were doing the same, more because they had come to the same realization as he had - that they were caught in a crossfire - than because of his order. He made it behind the tree and managed to successfully place it between himself and the direction that the most accurate concentration of fire was coming from. The problem was that there was no way to protect yourself from both angles at once. Though he was not hit it was only through providence - he was horribly exposed. Others around him were not so lucky. Private Jennison, who was lying on his belly preparing to return fire, was hit right in the face, blowing his head apart. Corporal Preston, who was less than six feet away from him, took a four round burst in the chest. From behind him he heard the screams of several others as bullets plowed into them. "Stinson!" Stu's voice yelled from his radio. "What the hell is going on? What's your situation?" "Return fire," Stinson yelled at his men, terrified, sure that he was going to feel a bullet thudding into him at any moment. "Return fire at the closer ones!" He pulled the radio out of his belt and keyed it up. "Stinson here," he said into it, his voice broken with fear. "We're taking heavy fire from the hill west of the objective. We're also getting hit from the objective itself. We're taking heavy casualties." There was a long pause and then Stu's voice replied something but Stinson didn't hear what it was because the booms of return gunfire from the men around him drowned it out. "What was that?" Stinson asked. "Repeat?" He turned up the volume on the radio. "I said retreat!" Stu's voice yelled back, obviously disgusted by the failure. "Get the hell out of there and back to the main formation!" A bullet drilled into the tree right above Stinson's head, dropping a large piece of bark onto his helmet. He jumped a little, his heart hammering even faster. "You got that shit right," he said and then rolled onto his back. "Retreat!" he yelled. "Everyone, get back to the formation! Retreat!" ------- Circling high above in the helicopter, Brett and Jason had a bird's eye view of everything. They saw the two flanking attacks by the militia surge forward and then watched the hidden positions on the hill pummel them. From up above it was a strangely surreal scene. They saw tiny figures rushing in and out of trees and over brown ground, they saw flashes coming from the trenches, and they saw some of those figures fall. They saw no blood, not even Jason who was watching through the FLIR, and they heard no gunfire, no screams. "They're retreating," Brett told the platoon commanders below. "Both of the attacking platoons are withdrawing in disarray. Estimate at least fifty percent casualties in both. We held them!" First Matt then Chrissie then Michelle acknowledged his observation. "Are they forming up for another run?" Matt asked. "We have two wounded that we need to get out of here." The mention of friendly casualties served to take a little of Brett's enthusiasm away. "You have a clear corridor to the rear," he replied. "And it doesn't look like they're going to be attacking again at least until they get their troops back and have a chance to regroup. Evacuate your wounded now. Contact Paul's team on the VHF for a meeting place." "Got it," Matt answered. "We also have one dead. Should we pull her body out while we have a break?" "Negative," Brett answered regretfully but immediately. "We can't spare the manpower to move a body. Sorry." "Understood," Matt said, a little regretful sounding himself. A moment later, while the Auburn troops were still rushing back the way they had come, Brett saw two figures being taken from the trenches. One of them, from Chrissie's platoon, was walking and being escorted by only one person. The other - Brett didn't know who it was or how bad the injury - was from Matt's position and was being carried on a litter by two people. "Assholes," Brett said, shaking his head a little. "I think we need to make another nape run while they're regrouping. Keep them from getting too comfortable in our territory and maybe break up their rhythm a little more." "Fuckin aye," Jason said. He turned to Sherrie, who was holding tight to the bungee cord of the rope coil again. "We all wound up?" "Ready for action," she agreed. "Cool." He turned back to Brett. "Want me to get Steve on the VHF?" "Do it," Brett said. "If we need to airlift those casualties to El Dorado we'll have just enough time to make one run." Jason called Steve and used the code phrases to tell him to get another "egg" ready to drop. By the time they landed four minutes later the canister was on the handcart and waiting to be mounted. Brett touched down and let the engine idle but he didn't shut it down. He stepped out onto the wet parking lot and waved Steve's team over. "We're gonna hot load it," he told them as they rushed over. "I want to be back in the air in three minutes." "Right," Steve said. He turned to his team. "Let's get it on!" They quickly shoved the tank under the belly of the chopper and then crawled under there after it. Two of them lifted up on the sides on a count of three and, with grunts of exertion, maneuvered the bulky tank until the hook caught on the cargo hook. "Give me the rope," Steve yelled up at Sherrie, holding out his gloved hand for it. She passed the end of it down and he pulled it through, tying the end onto the weld strip. No sooner had he fastened the knot in place than he was scrambling out from underneath. "You're in business," he told Brett. "Good job," Brett replied, giving him a thumbs up. He climbed back into his seat and strapped in. As soon as Steve and his team cleared the rotors he was putting on the power and lifting back into the sky. By this time, Paul and his team were with the two casualties and dragging them back to the truck. Since they were in possession of one of the scarce VHF radios, Brett contacted them as he pulled up to bombing altitude over the canyon. Paul himself answered the hail. "What's the word on the wounded?" Brett asked him. "Do I need to make a run to El Dorado Hills?" "That's negative," Paul responded, sounding somewhat dejected. "I have Susan Michaels with a shoulder wound. It's painful but she can wait for evac to the doctor's office for a while. The other is Helen Johnson. She's... well... she took one in the chest. I don't think that she'll be needing evac either." "I see," Brett said slowly, clearly reading the message that Paul was sending about Helen. A chest wound that wouldn't require evac to the doctor could only mean one thing. Helen would not live long enough to make the trip. "Keep us updated on Susan's condition. Bring us in if it gets worse. Remember, priority for the aircraft goes to the wounded." "I'll keep you updated," Paul promised. "And she will have to go there eventually." "Understood," Brett replied. He looked over at his altimeter, which was coming up on 6000 feet. He then looked over at Jason and Sherrie. "Are we ready to rock?" They agreed they were ready to rock and Brett, putting thoughts of Helen Johnson out of his mind, turned to the north and the battle area once again. ------- The militia's ranks were once again gathered in force behind the hills and trees of their embarkation line. Isolated pops of gunfire came from both sides as they sniped at each other, neither side suffering any casualties. The troops themselves were in a semi-chaotic state, stinging from being repulsed in their first attack so soundly (by bitches no less) and at the cost of nearly forty soldiers. Some of the wounded were being tended to by those with medical training just behind the main groups. Though some of them would have qualified to be put out of their misery on the march, they were now being spared on the theory that soon the Garden Hill community center would be in their hands and they could now be cared for. Stu and Colby stood near the wounded area, Stu talking hastily to his platoon leaders, Colby still trailing behind him like a pet dog, contributing nothing to the discussion. "Stinson," Stu barked, "we're going to combine the remnants of your platoon and fifth platoon. You'll be in charge of it. You'll still be designated as third platoon. Get your men together and reorganize your squads as quick as you can. I want to be able to attack those positions again in twenty minutes." "Yes, sir," Stinson said, not bothering to salute or even sound enthusiastic about his orders. He had nearly died out there, was still alive only by virtue of random chance after the disastrous first charge. He wished Colby, who was really supposed to be in charge of this abortion, would step in and put a stop to this madness before they lost everyone. But as a simple sergeant he did not question. He trudged off and began gathering his new men into one group so he could pick new squad leaders. With that taken care of, Stu called over the platoon leaders of the other platoons. "All right, guys," he said, "this is what we're going to do next. We need to..." "Incoming napalm run!" someone screamed, pointing into the air at the approaching helicopter. Fear rippled through the ranks as everyone saw that it did indeed have one of the gas tanks slung beneath it and that it was indeed heading right towards them. "Shit," Stu muttered, trying to gauge the speed and distance of the aircraft. He guessed it would be over the top of them in less than a minute. "Take cover!" he yelled to the troops. "Don't bunch up!" Those that were standing or kneeling or lying near each other quickly began to scramble around, trying to put as much distance between themselves and anyone near them. For the most part this accomplished nothing since many of them, in their panic, ran into each other instead. Several of the front soldiers that had been trading shots with the enemy were hit with gunfire as they exposed themselves in their efforts. "Goddammit," Stu screamed in frustration, "if you're in the front, keep your asses down, you morons!" The troops were still in a state of flux when the helicopter banked and began to move slowly right over the top of them. Faintly a face could be seen leaning out one of the doors, obviously to guide the drop. Stu screamed again for everyone to move faster but there simply wasn't enough time. The tank dropped while the helicopter was still moving forward, falling down at an angle behind the aircraft. Because of the motion it was very difficult to see just where the tank was going to hit. Again, just before it reached the end of the rope, solid streams of tracers blasted out from the enemy positions, four of them this time. The tank jerked roughly and ripped in half, spraying a wide pattern of the napalm out over the top of them. The tracers hit it, there was another one of those whoomph sounds, and the burning concoction landed, spraying over a thirty-foot area and igniting everything within it. This attack was not as devastating as the first had been, but it was still a horrible thing to witness. One man was completely engulfed and two more were liberally doused on the head and torso. They, like those before them, ran screaming in circles as their clothing and flesh burned away. Gunshots rang out from the soldiers nearby, mercifully putting them down, but still they burned, as did the ground around them and the two halves of the tank, which fell just to the sides of the main impact. The smell of gasoline and roasting flesh filled the air. "You're gonna pay for that, motherfuckers!" Stu yelled up at them. "Do you hear me? You're gonna pay for that shit! I'm gonna stick a motherfuckin flare up your ass when I catch you!" The helicopter moved off indifferently to the south once more, pulling into a hover over the town, unimpressed with his threats. Stu continued to look at it murderously. "Stu," Colby said, tapping him on the shoulder. "Maybe we should think about..." "Not now, Colby," Stu responded in irritation, shaking off the hand. "We need to get this next attack organized. The first thing we're gonna have to do is spread out to flank those outside positions. I'll use..." "Stu," Colby said, more firmly now. "We need to talk." Stu looked up at him impatiently. "What?" he said. "You wanna talk, then talk." "Over here," Colby said, jerking his head towards an area of privacy. He'd intended it to sound like an order but instead it came out sounding like a request, and a very meek one at that. "All right," Stu sighed, walking over that way. "But let's make it fast. We can't let those fucks dig in any further than they are." Colby followed him over and turned to face him. "I think we need to pull back," he said. Stu looked at him as if he were an idiot. "We already did pull back," he said. "Now we need to regroup and push forward." "No," Colby said, shaking his head. "I mean pull all the way back. To the highway and then... and then to Auburn." Stu digested these words for a moment and then took an angry step forward. "Are you out of your fucking mind?" he asked. "Pull back when we're almost within sight of the wall? What kind of shit are you spouting?" "They're killing us, Stu," he told him, a little more conviction in his voice now. "We just lost an entire platoon worth of soldiers in less than ten minutes. This was just the first battle. They're in prepared positions on top of the hills. They can shoot at us almost with impunity and they can drop fucking napalm on us from higher than we can shoot. We can't win!" Stu stepped forward and pushed him roughly, sending him against a tree. "Are you pulling that from the deep depths of your military experience?" he asked with vicious sarcasm. "I know I'm not very experienced," Colby said, holding his ground. "But I've been on this particular campaign as long as you have. I've seen just as well as you what these Garden Hill people are capable of doing. They've got an organized defense here, Stu and the only way we're going to get through it is to sacrifice almost all of our men." "They don't have that many people," Stu insisted, continuing to glare. "All we have to do is keep flanking them and we'll get around. We'll clear those fucking hills with the next attack." "There's not going to be a next attack," Colby said. "We're pulling back to the highway and we're going home. I'll take full responsibility for the decision, don't worry about that." "You'll take full responsibility?" Stu asked, his voice becoming strangely calm all of a sudden. "That's right. I'm in command and those are my orders. If Barnes has a problem with it, then it's me alone who will take the heat." Stu raised his rifle up and pointed it at Colby's head. "Here's some fucking heat for you, Colby," he said. "Stu," Colby said nervously, looking at the bore of an M-16 pointing at him, "what are you..." "I'm doing what I have to do," he said and pulled the trigger. A single shot cracked and suddenly there was a hole in Colby's forehead and a splatter of blood and brains on the tree behind him. Colby remained standing for the briefest of instances, an expression of terrified surprise upon his face, and then he fell forward to the ground. Stu looked around, seeing that everyone within view had stopped what they were doing and was staring at him. Even those who had been firing back at the enemy, even they were looking at him in stunned disbelief. Slowly, carefully, he lowered his rifle back down. "Platoon leaders," he yelled. "Form up on me, right now!" It took a moment but finally, one by one, they filtered over, the sergeants and even the odd corporal that had been put in charge. They looked at him fearfully and with anger. What he did in the next minute was going to decide his fate. "What did you kill Colby for?" Stinson asked, his hand gripping his weapon, his eyes demanding answers. "I had to," Stu said. "He was going to get all of us killed." "Oh?" Stinson asked, his finger edging a little closer to his trigger. "He was going to order a repeat of the last attack," Stu told them. "I was trying to tell him that it would only get more men killed, that we had already figured out that it wouldn't work that way, but he wouldn't listen to me. He wasn't fit for command so I relieved him the only way I know how." "He was going to order us to rush those hills again?" Sergeant Vickers asked in disbelief. "Jesus fucking Christ!" "He was going to order it with the same amount of troops," Stu said. "I don't know what he was thinking or why he wouldn't listen to me, but I'm in command now and we'll do it the way it's supposed to be done." "The way it's supposed to be done?" Stinson asked, his finger not moving much. "And what might that be?" "We're going to send two platoons to each side," Stu answered. "That's eighty men on each side. The rest of us will stay back here and provide covering fire." Everyone looked at each other, their expressions varying between confusion and outright fear. Feeling a little more confident now, Stu shouldered his rifle. "Let's get ready," he said. "Everyone gather around and we'll go over the plan. I want to be on the move in the next twenty minutes." Slowly everyone did as he said. They gathered around and sat down next to him for a briefing. After a moment Stinson let his finger off the trigger and joined them. ------- Chapter 19 "Sir," Corporal Wilhelm, the leader of third platoon, spoke up hesitantly. "What?" Stu asked, annoyed at being interrupted while making attack plans. "Do you have something to add?" "Well, sir," Wilhelm told him, "we don't... uh... have quite enough men to do what you're planning." "What?" Stu asked, glaring at him. What the hell did he mean, not enough men? He had five fucking platoons didn't he? One less than he had started the battle with, but still five. "My platoon is down to about sixty percent strength," Wilhelm reminded him. "I only have twenty-five guys left after the air raids last night and sniping runs the day before. And I was already understrength to begin with. I also lost one to desertion last night." "I'm in the same boat, sir," Sergeant Lima, of first platoon reminded. "Remember, my men took the brunt of that first attack and those two napalm runs. I have only twenty-eight left." "All of the other platoons are understrength as well," Stinson added, wondering if maybe he should have just shot the crazy son-of-a-bitch a few minutes ago when he might have been able to get away with it. He had been close, very close to doing it. Only fear of Barnes and what would happen to him upon his return to Garden Hill had kept him from it. After all, he had no proof of what had occurred between Stu and Colby. "My reorganized platoon only has thirty-six men, including myself." Stu took a few deep breaths, looking at the men around him, seeing their doubting expressions. Now that they had said it aloud, he realized that they were right - they did not have the numbers that he had thought they had. And he should have known that! Hadn't he been the one to conduct roll call that very morning? It had to be the fatigue getting to him. He had only had about six hours of sleep in the last three days. "Forgive me," he said, his mind clicking along. "You're right of course, I don't know what I was thinking. But in the end, it doesn't really matter." "It doesn't matter?" Stinson asked. "We'll reorganize again," Stu said. "We'll move our men around so that each platoon has twenty-eight people. The rest will be in the reserve squad that will provide covering fire. That's fifty-six men on each flank to get around the outside of those hills and into the enemy rear. That will be enough." "Sir..." Stinson started, not the least bit confident in this plan. "It will be enough," Stu said. "Remember, they're sitting up on those three hills over there. We're not going to rush right into them; we're going around to the back where they're not protected. But we need to do it fast before they think to shift their forces around. So let's get it done. Here's the plan..." He began to talk. Though none of the leaders liked his plan very much, they listened. ------- "Okay," Brett said as he looked at the mass of Auburn soldiers down below. "It looks like they're gathering into two larger attack groups. They're gonna try to outflank us again." Jason was half watching the instruments on the panel to make sure they didn't drift up or down from the hover and half watching the view outside. Inside, Brett's hands were instinctively keeping them rock solid in place, the altimeter and the forward airspeed indicator not moving a micrometer. Outside, the plans of the militia were obvious even to him. The tiny figures below could be seen to be gathering into two distinct groups. They were marching either to the east or the west of their central position, moving through the trees and behind the hills outside of the sight of the friendly forces in the trenches. They left a small group of ten men or so in the center but the rest were taking up positions well to the outside. "Matt, Chrissie, Michelle," Brett said into the VHF frequency. "Get ready to shift positions. They're planning a flanking attack on both sides of you, looks like fifty or so men on each flank." All three platoon leaders acknowledged his transmission and told him they were standing by for movement orders. Brett took his eyes off the view outside and consulted the map, pulling it over to him from Jason's lap and trusting him to keep an eye on their flight status. "All right," he said into the radio, his eyes tracking over grids and trench numbers. "Michelle, move your platoon over to grid Delta 7 and spread out equally through trenches 20, 22, 23, and 25. If they move forward from their push-off point, the troops gathering on that right flank are going to come directly at that position." "Copy, Brett," she said. "We're on the way." "Be sure to have at least one automatic in each trench if you can," he advised. "Will do." "Did your replacement for Helen show up?" he asked next. "Affirm, Janice Milligan took over her gun. We're ready to rock." "Good," Brett said. "Get going." He looked at the map again for a moment and then back outside, comparing the features on paper with the terrain where the troops on the left flank were gathering. He traced the most likely avenue of advance around the hill where Matt and his platoon were currently in place. "Matt," he said after a few moments of thought. "I want you to deploy to grid Delta 2 and occupy trenches 3, 5, 7, and 9. That'll give you a good spread to hold them against the left flank attack." "On the way," Matt said. Brett continued to stare downward for a few moments, continuing to allow Jason to monitor the instruments. What he was doing was yet another gamble and this time it wasn't such a sure thing. He had just spread out the two flank guards to a point far away from Chrissie's position. If this gathering below was a ruse designed to trick him into doing just what he was now doing, the entire force of the militia would be able to quickly switch back to where they had been and drive right at Chrissie and her people. 120 or so men attacking a single, unprotected position at once would surely overwhelm them, even with air support. He did not like leaving so much to chance. He did not like having to guess whether or not the fatigue that the militia commander or commanders had to be experiencing was preventing them from coming up with a complex plan like that. Was there anything to be done about this? "You okay, Brett," Jason asked, taking his eyes off the panel to look at him. "You seem a little... well..." "Hesitant?" Brett asked, giving a weak smile. "Yeah." "I'm all right," Brett said reassuringly, troubled both by the gamble and by the fact that the troops he was commanding were obeying his orders so blindly. "I'm just trying to think through something. We never have a General Patton around when we need one." "What do you mean?" Jason asked. "Never mind," Brett told him. It was never a good idea to let the troops know that their commander was having doubts. "I'm just a little tired like everyone else. Am I still on VHF?" "Yeah," Jason confirmed. "And you're starting to drift forward a bit. Might want to pull back a little." Brett glanced at his forward airspeed indicator and saw that it was indeed starting to creep up a hair. "Thanks," he told him, making the correction and stabilizing them once more. He keyed up the headset again. "Chrissie, you there?" he asked. "Right here," she said, her own voice sounding more than a little tired. "And I have two fresh replacements for my casualties as well." "Copy that you're up to strength again. I'm gonna spread your platoon out a little bit to try and get you closer in to where the action is going to be. Split in two and occupy the trenches to the east and west of you. That'll be 12, 14, 15, and 17. Once you're there you'll be able to provide a little crossfire on both sides of you. However, if they change their minds and come up the middle, you're gonna have to try and hold the whole shebang back until the flanks can get back over to reinforce you." "What do you think the odds are that they might try that?" Chrissie asked, obviously uncomfortable with the though of holding the whole shebang back with only 27 troops. "Slight," Brett assured her. "But this is war and anything's possible." "Copy," she said. "We're moving." Brett watched them move. From the friendly positions the Garden Hill soldiers began to scramble out to the rear. They looked like ants leaving an anthill from his altitude. They moved quickly, not quite in formation, trotting back for sixty or seventy yards and then moving parallel to the trench network towards their new assignments. Brett, watching from above, could plainly see that the hills and trees of the terrain were between they and the peering eyes of the enemy. He was reasonably certain that the shifting of forces would be unobserved and therefore unexpected. It took the better part of ten minutes for all of them to make the shift. During this time Brett saw no noticeable change in the Auburn formations, which were still in the process of moving themselves. "It looks like we pulled it off," he told Jason. "Now let's get Steve on the horn and tell him to get another egg ready for us. We won't drop it yet, we'll just hover up here with it to intimidate them." Jason grinned. "I'd hate to have you fighting against me," he said, reaching for the radio controls. Brett returned the grin silently, only hoping he was worthy of this praise. ------- Brett touched down a few minutes later, reasonably confident that the battle would not start without him. While Steve and his crew wheeled over another napalm tank and began to attach it, Brett stepped out of the helicopter, leaving the engine running. He stretched his cramped muscles, feeling a little twinge in his back. "I'm gonna go drain some fluids while we're down here," he told his own crew. "Be right back." He trotted across the parking lot, his feet splashing through the perpetual puddles in the asphalt, and in the side door of the community center. He headed for the nearest bathroom, which was just off the staircase, and went inside. It was very dim in the room, the only lighting coming from a small window over the urinals. He ignored the stand-up fixtures and went instead to the stall, where the inevitable hose assembly and bucket of water was in place for ease of flushing. After draining his bladder into the toilet and going through the flushing procedure, he went back out into the hallway. Instead of heading back to the parking lot right away, he headed in the other direction, towards the makeshift hospital room that had been set up in the former conference room. He opened the door slowly and stepped inside. The room had been stocked and set up well in advance of the battle. Ten cots or rollaway beds had been placed side by side in rows with only narrow corridors between them. In one corner of the room a large shelf had been constructed and it was full of linen, bandaging material, IV bags from the helicopter, and various medications. Currently only one of the beds was occupied. Susan Michaels lay with a sheet and blanket pulled up to her mid-chest, just above her breasts. She was awake but appeared to be heavily medicated. Her eyes were half-lidded and, despite the wound she had suffered, there was a slight smile on her face. A heavy trauma dressing had been taped to her right shoulder. Little spots of dark blood stained its otherwise white surface. Hanging from a makeshift pole on the left side of the bed was an IV bag. The tubing ran down to her left arm. Janet, who had been moved from the childcare detail to the medical detail for the time being, was sitting in a stool next to her. "Hi, Brett," she said, smiling a little as she saw him. "What are you doing down here?" "We're down getting another air strike ready," he replied, "so I came in to tap a kidney. How we doing in here?" "I'm hangin in there," Susan said, her grin widening a bit. Her words were thick and slurred, as if she was drunk. "I can't move my arm any more but Janet here gave me some really good dope to help me out." "Oh yeah?" Brett asked. "Did you give her some of the morphine?" El Dorado Hills, though they had not volunteered to allow their physician to fly out for the battle, had donated considerable medical supplies for stabilization and pain control. Morphine, Dilaudid, and Demerol - all heavy narcotics - were among those staples. Janet nodded. "And a few other things," she said. "She let me burn a joint in here," Susan said. "Some of the good shit too. I'm flyin higher than you were." Brett laughed a little. "I'm glad you're feeling okay, Suse," he said, reaching down and giving her good hand a squeeze. "I'm sorry you had to get shot up to have it happen." "Fuckin bullet just came flyin in there," Susan said. "Boom, and next thing I know, I'm bleeding all over the damn place. Some soldier I am." "It's not your fault you got hit," Brett told her. "You did good out there. You guys threw back that first strike and put a serious fucking hurt on those assholes." "Good," she said. "I only wish poor Helen would've been as lucky as me. I saw her when they brought us in." She shook her head a little, a tear forming in her eye. Brett had noted the absence of Helen in the room when he came in. "Did she go easy?" he asked Janet. "As easy as could be," Janet told him. "She was still awake but couldn't breathe very well. I... well... I gave her morphine to quiet her." She paused a little, a tear forming in her eye as well. "A lot of morphine." Brett put his arm around her and gave her a comforting hug. "That's all you can do, Janet," he told her. "It's better that way." "I know," she said softly. "I just wish I knew why we're going through all of this. Why are those men attacking us, killing our people and making us kill them? What's the point of it all? Haven't enough people died from the comet?" "I don't know, Janet," he said. "It doesn't make a lot of sense to me either." They stood that way for a moment, Brett's arm around her, both of them silently watching Susan, who had lost track of the conversation and was staring intently at a Thomas Kincaid reprint on the wall. "I'd better get back up there," Brett said at last, breaking the embrace. "Part two is about to start." "What kind of casualty count are we looking at?" Janet wanted to know. He shrugged, unable to give her even a guess. "As few as possible I hope," he told her. ------- "Another napalm canister on the chopper, sir," Corporal Andrews said, pointing up at the aircraft that was just now spiraling up to altitude from the direction of the town. "Jesus," Stu said, shaking his head and looking at it with fear. "How many of those fucking things do they have?" He was gripping his rifle closely as he lay on his stomach behind a fallen log three hundred yards from the center hill held by the Garden Hill bitches. Around him, on both sides and utilizing every piece of cover they could find, was every man that had not been sent out to accomplish the flank attacks: a grand total of ten uninjured and twelve that were too wounded to participate in the attack but well enough to fire a gun. He and this rag-tag understrength collection made up the new fifth platoon of the militia and their job would be to put covering fire on the center hill during the attack. "What should we do?" Andrew asked fearfully, wanting very badly to bolt and run as far away as he could. "Hold here until they start to close," Stu said, lifting up his radio. He keyed it up. "Heads up everyone," he said into it, transmitting his words to all squad and platoon leaders, "the chopper is back in town and it has another canister beneath it. Keep an eye on it and scatter if it tries to close with you. Remember, do it organized and that thing can't hurt you. Panic, and it'll kill you." No one acknowledged his words but he knew that everyone had heard them. He continued to watch the helicopter and it's deadly cargo, waiting for it to start an attack run. But it didn't. It simply took up a watching position over the Garden Hill positions and went into a hover. "Come on, asshole," Stu challenged. "You want to hit us, then do it." The chopper didn't budge. Soon Stu was forced to conclude that it was holding its canister in reserve. Probably, he figured, because they didn't have any troops near the main concentrations to fire the tracer rounds that would ignite the napalm. Maybe they were even now moving those troops over! "Sir?" Andrews said, breaking his concentration a little. "Shut the fuck up," Stu barked at him. "I need to get this attack rolling before they think to shift their positions around." He keyed up his radio again. "Stinson, Lima, are you in position?" "We're formed up over here," Stinson's voice said. He was in command of the troops hitting the left flank. "What's the word on that helicopter? Is it going to hit us again?" "I don't know what the fuck its gonna do," Stu barked into the radio. "Do I look like a fuckin psychic? Just get ready to move in." There was a crackle of static on the frequency and then a prolonged pause with the carrier open. Finally Stinson's voice replied: "Sure, we're ready when you give the word." "Good," Stu said. "Lima, you there?" "Here, sir," Lima, who was a little greener than Stinson, replied instantly. "We're in position and ready to advance." "All right," Stu said. "We're going to start putting fire on that hill in front of us to keep their heads down. Once you hear our gunshots, both of you move in. Keep me advised on your progress. I want to be standing on top of those fucking hills looking down at a bunch of dead bitches in less than thirty minutes." After both leaders acknowledged his orders he turned to his own men. "All right," he told them. "Let's start shooting." They opened up, most firing single-shot rifles, a few with semi-autos, and Stu with his fully automatic M-16. They peppered the ground on the hill before them, the concussions from the shots stinging their ears. They had absolutely no idea that there was not a soul in occupancy on the hill they were firing at. On the flanks the two groups of fifty-six men heard the echo of the fire reach them. Their commanders gave the order - in both cases with a distinct lack of enthusiasm - and they stood up and began to move. They formed up loosely, as they had before, with no clear point position and with their numbers spread widely, only a few layers deep. They moved at a near run, their weapons held at the ready, their eyes searching the terrain before them for the telltale flash of weapons firing. Though they were anxious, none of them thought that they were going to be fired upon until they were well forward and starting to come around behind the outside positions that had pasted them so soundly in the first attack. They were at the far end of the range of those hills. None of them, not a single one, seriously considered the thought that their enemy might have shifted place to put themselves in front of them once more. ------- "They're moving in," Brett's voice announced over the VHF radio a moment later. "Estimate fifty to sixty troops heading rapidly towards both flank positions. Matt, Michelle, get ready for them. You should have a visual any second now." Michelle spotted her quarry first, or at least one of her women did. Within a few seconds, everyone had spotted the line of dirty soldiers trotting towards them through the mud and around the trees. Weapons came to bear and safeties were clicked off. Everyone felt the anticipation of battle slip away to be replaced by the almost relieving adrenaline rush that came with the actuality of it. They watched silently as the line continued to close in, not needing to assign targets since everyone already knew their sector of responsibility. Michelle gave no last minute reminders to her troops as she had the first time. Her troops were veterans of this technique now and to do so would be insulting. Finally, after three agonizing minutes, the first of the enemy crossed the three hundred yard-yard barrier. Michelle waited until nearly half of them had crossed over and then gave the order: "Riflemen, fire at will." Rifles began to crack and bullets began to fly downrange. Even before the first bullet hit, the enemy were diving into the mud. Before the second volley was sent out, they were returning fire. Within one minute of the first shot from Michelle's position, Matt's position a half a mile to the west opened up on the group advancing on them as well. The second battle had begun. ------- Four of Stinson's men had been taken down with the initial volley and an additional two since then. Now everyone had found reasonably good cover behind rocks or trees. Stu's voice was screaming over the radio, demanding to know what the hell was going on but he ignored it for the moment. He fired a short burst at one of the flashes coming from the hill, knowing he probably wasn't hitting anything but doing it anyway. "Goddammit, Brandon," he shouted at one of his corporals, "easy on that automatic. Bursts you asshole, bursts! Don't fire a whole fuckin clip off at once!" Brandon ignored him completely, slamming another magazine in and firing half of it off with one trigger pull. Perhaps the first three bullets went where he had aimed them but the rest flew well over the top of the hills as the barrel was forced up. Stinson ignored the fact that he'd been ignored and turned his attention elsewhere. Two of his squads were still lingering in the rear, where it was reasonably safe. "Sanders, Jackson," he barked at the leaders of those squads. "Get your people the fuck up here and help us put fire on that hill! Get in the fuckin war why don't you?" They at least did as he ordered, bringing their understrength squads up to covering positions. One of them, a young private from the Grass Valley raid, didn't move fast enough or crouch low enough and was drilled with two bullets. Stinson shook his head a little, wondering just what the hell was going on. What were they doing out here, having a gun battle with a bunch of women? What was the damn point? "Stinson, Lima," Stu's voice barked from the radio once more, "what the hell is going on out there? Report!" "Asshole," Stinson muttered, ducking as the next volley of fire came rolling in from in front of them. The tree he was hiding behind took several shots right on the other side of his head. It was becoming such a common occurrence that he hardly jumped. He pulled out his radio and keyed up. "Stinson here," he said, shouting into it so he could be heard over the noise of gunfire, "we're taking fire from the hills at our one o'clock. I estimate platoon strength up there at least." "Who is firing from up there?" Stu demanded. "They don't have that many people!" "Well they sure as shit dug them up from somewhere!" Stinson yelled back. "Or maybe we're imagining all this fucking lead flying at us!" "You watch your mouth with me," Stu said angrily. "Remember who you're talking to!" "I remember," Stinson said. "We're pinned down at the moment but seem to be safe. The fire has slacked off some. I've got seven casualties." "Hold in place for now," Stu told him. "And conserve ammo if you can. Lima, are you there? What's your situation?" Lima's voice came on the air a moment later. He was very excited and gunfire could be heard in the background. "We're under fire from the hills," he yelled. "We're also taking crossfire from the left! I have nine dead and four wounded!" There was a long silence over the airwaves as Stu pondered this new information. Finally he came back on. "Stinson, Lima," he said, "you need to move your troops forward. Split your commands in two and advance half at a time! One group gives covering fire while the other group moves forward and then you do it the other way." Stinson looked at his radio in disbelief for a moment. Around him, those squad leaders that had radios were looking at theirs as well. Was Stu insane? Advance into that fire? The bitches hadn't even pulled out their automatic weapons yet. "Stinson, Lima, Goddammit, did you copy me?" Stinson keyed his radio up, not sure what was going to come out of his mouth. "Stu," he said into it. "With all due respect, we'll take very heavy casualties if we try to advance against them. They're behind heavy cover and they have automatic weapons." "I agree with Stinson, sir," Lima cut in before Stu had a chance to reply. "I'm not sure we can take this hill with the troops we have available." "Now listen up, you two," Stu growled back at them. "You will advance to those hills now! At this very fucking minute! We need to take them and get rid of this resistance while we have a fucking chance to do it, before they shift their forces around again and make it even harder. The covering fire from the static half of the advance will keep their heads down while the other half moves. You won't just be charging into a slaughter. Now fucking do it or I'll see every one of you that lives through this hang when we get back to Auburn! Or better yet, I'll fucking shoot you myself right here!" There was another pause and then Lima's voice said: "Copy, sir. We'll be moving in." Stinson continued to stare at his radio, shaking in fear and rage. "Stinson," Stu's voice barked, "did you copy your orders?" His men were looking at him, waiting for him to do something. Finally he did. He was naturally the type to avoid confrontation with others, particularly those in power over him. True, he had become somewhat more aggressive over the course of the march, he had even mouthed off to Stu just now. But when push came to shove, when the time for a real decision came, he found himself unable to deny the authority. "I copy," he said into the radio. "We'll be moving in shortly." He actually heard the collective gasp of his remaining men as he said these words. He could feel the burning of their murderous glares upon his face. He was suddenly very scared, and not just of being killed in battle. But he allowed no fear to show on his face. Calmly, he turned to them. "You heard the man," he said evenly. "First, second, and third squads, get ready to advance. Fourth and fifth squads, get ready to lay down some covering fire." Nobody moved, they all continued to glare at him. He stared back. "You guys want to mutiny?" he asked them. "You want to disobey orders and pull back from here? Go ahead if you dare. Just remember, you may be saving your asses for the moment, but we have to go back to Auburn eventually. You'll live through the battle but you'll hang for mutiny." Uncertainty showed in most faces at his words. They realized there wasn't really much of an option. As perverse as it sounded, their best chance of long-term survival meant rushing into the onslaught of rifle fire. "Let's get it done," Stinson said, sensing the change in mood. "We don't have all fuckin day. Fourth and fifth, covering fire!" A rifle popped from one of the men, sending a bullet towards the Garden Hill positions. Another pop followed. Soon, nearly twenty rifles were firing at them. "All right," Stinson said over the tactical radio, "first, second, and third squads, move in!" They obeyed him. Though they had been on the very verge of mutiny a moment before, thirty men now pulled themselves to their feet, hefted their weapons, and began rushing forward. The covering group fired as quickly as they could, plastering the hillside with bullets in an attempt to keep the enemy's head down. It worked to a certain degree but not quite as well as was hoped. The flashes of return fire still appeared only not as intense as the initial barrage. Men in the advancing platoon began to fall. Two of them fell down about thirty yards in and then another three went quickly after this. One more crashed to the ground at about the fifty-yard line. "Get down," Stinson ordered over the tactical radio. "Get down and take cover!" The men didn't have to be told twice. They hurled themselves into the mud and found whatever piece of shelter they could from the rain of lead that was hitting them. No sooner had they settled in however, than bullets began to plink in from another direction; from the hillside to the right of them. "Goddammit," Corporal Givens, one of the squad leaders from the advancing half of the platoon, yelled into his radio. "We're taking fire from our two o'clock. They've got us in a fucking crossfire again!" Even as these words were leaving his mouth, the man to the right of him suddenly gasped and slumped forward as a bullet smashed through his shoulder and into his chest. "Hold in place," Stinson yelled back. "Start putting fire on the hill in front of you! The sooner we make it to that hill, the sooner they stop shooting at us." Givens heard this and shook his head in disgust. "What the fuck are we doing this for?" he mumbled to himself. To his men, he yelled: "Covering fire on the hill, right now!" The rifles began to pop as the lead group took over the job of keeping the enemy occupied. Stinson gripped his rifle and looked at the men with him. "Let's go," he told them. "We'll advance to the left of Givens' group and take up position fifty yards in front of them. Go fast and keep low." They began their dash. Stinson, as any commander would do, waited until they were all under way and then brought up the rear. His feet pumped up and down and his back cried in protest from the hunched over gait. Mud splashed up over his legs and onto his feet. He stepped over the top of the bodies that had fallen in the first advance, not giving them a second glance, not even Private Landau, who was still screaming for help. Two of his men went down with body shots before they even reached Givens' position. But it was when they passed this point and began to move into new territory that the punishment really started. The defenders on the hill opened up with their automatic and semi-automatic weapons. Stinson clearly saw the rapid, flashbulb-like flashes from the gaps in the cover. He kept running. Three of his men were peppered with bursts of fire, blood flying out of holes ripped in their backs, brains flying out of smashed skulls, bodies thumping into the mud. He stepped over them and kept going. Two more men were mowed down - one with legs cut out from beneath him, one with a gut shot that exited just above the buttocks. Stinson himself felt a sting across the side of his face, had an impression of something whizzing just under his ear. It took him a moment to realize that a bullet had just kissed him, digging a furrow in his face but not penetrating. He ran faster, wanting desperately to dive down and take cover. At last it was time. When two more men were down and the rest were sixty yards closer to the hill, he gave the order. "Down! Take cover!" Within a second every last one of his men was face down in the mud, scrambling for cover. Stinson found shelter behind a large rock. A bullet zinged off of it, chipping a piece of stone free. He touched his face and his hand came away bloody. His body tried to react to the thought that he had come within a millimeter or so of having a bullet drill right through his face, but he refused to allow it. This wasn't over yet. He pulled out his radio and keyed up. "Givens, are you there?" "Here, sir!" Givens' voice replied. "Advance to the left of us," he ordered. "Same drill. We'll keep fire on the hill for you." "Yes, sir," Givens answered, obviously not happy about this order but not protesting it either. "We're moving in." Stinson looked to his men. "Covering fire!" he screamed. ------- On the other side of the battlefield, Lima's group was advancing as well, although they were taking a few more casualties. The left side of Chrissie's platoon was in a better position to provide a crossfire and Chrissie, taking advantage of this, had most of her automatic weapons shifted over there. This forced Lima's group to place their covering fire in two different directions at two different targets. It also forced them to make shorter hops. In all, Lima's group lost sixteen men in the first hundred yards, nine of them killed outright, the other seven lying defenseless in the mud, bleeding from their wounds and, in some cases, pleading for help from their comrades. But still they advanced, steadily closing the gap between the positions they had held all morning and the hills beyond where the Garden Hill defenders were entrenched. Back at the main line, where Stu and his covering platoon were still uselessly firing upon empty hills, Stu was listening to the reports on the radio and becoming excited. Sure, the casualties were a little heavier than he'd expected, but they were advancing. They were going to take those hills and rout those bitches all the way back to the walls of the town. He had every confidence that he would still be inside of that wall and in possession of that community center within two hours. High above, Brett, Jason, and Sherrie watched the steady, though costly advance as well. As before it seemed almost surreal watching from 2000 feet over the action. All they saw were flashes from the weapons, a haze of smoke over the area, and the tiny figures of men dashing through the mud or crouching in it. Brett could see that the group attacking Matt's position on the left flank was having a much harder go of it than the bunch attacking Michelle on the right. Part of this was that they did not seem to be as ably led. Another part of it was that Chrissie's left side positions, being closer, were putting much more accurate fire on them. He could also see that it would soon be time for the friendly forces to pull back. "They're closing too fast with too many surviving men," Brett said, looking as the covering group jumped up and began to dash forward. "On both sides but particularly on the right." "Are they gonna take the hills?" Jason asked, a little alarmed by the thought. "They're not gonna take them," Brett replied, "but it looks like we're going to have to give them away in order to avoid close contact. We need to delay this a little if we can, give our people time to pull back." "We have the napalm still," Jason said, telling him nothing that he didn't already know. "Yes we do," Brett agreed. "Get Michelle on the VHF. It's time we took a little more active part in this thing. Chances are, they're too busy down there to notice what we're doing." "Right," Jason said and immediately he began hailing Michelle. "Sherrie," Brett said, looking back at her for a moment, "get in position. I want to drop on the group that's covering after the next advance." "You got it," she said, crawling across the floor. Brett slowly turned to the right and then began to gingerly move in a large circle, bringing the helicopter around to the side of the men on the ground. As he expected, no one on the militia's radio frequency sounded an alarm at his movement, so wrapped up in the battle were they. He looked below, his eyes making quick shifts from the terrain to his instruments. Down below the next dash was just taking place, with the group in the rear rushing up to leapfrog their cover positions. "Right there, Sherrie," Brett said. "That group of that's in motion. As soon as they hit the dirt to take over covering fire, we'll egg them." "I got 'em," Sherrie said, her voice shaky but determined. "Michelle here," Michelle said in his headset in response to Jason's hails. The stutter of gunfire and a few screams could be heard in the background. "Are you gonna give me an air strike?" Brett handled the communication now that she was on the air. "That's affirm," he told her. "I'm gonna drop on the covering group. Get ready to light them up." "Changing mags now," she said. "Hurry it up! They're getting a little too close for comfort and we're taking casualties! We're gonna have to pull back from here in a minute." "Copy," Brett said, watching as the advance came to an end and the group - minus three more of its members - dove to the ground once more. "We're moving in now. As soon as the shit flies, start your pull back to trenches 23, 26, and 28. Do it by the book, wounded out first, pull out the rest in thirds with heavy covering fire." "By the book," Michelle confirmed. ------- Stinson was lying behind a small rise, firing his automatic at one of the flashes before him, trying desperately to take the Garden Hill forces down a few notches before they killed every one of his men. They were still over a hundred and fifty yards away and already he had lost nearly twenty of the original fifty-six that had made the attack. Would they be able to press the advantage even if they did make it up there? It seemed less and less likely by the yard. "Fuckin clusterfuck," he mumbled, firing another burst and having his action lock open, indicating an empty magazine. He ejected it to the ground, not bothering to pick it up, and pulled another from his pack. He felt only two more in there. Would that be enough? It would have to be. He slammed it in place, closed the chamber, and then fired another short burst. Ahead of him the front half of his platoon was just about to take cover again. Vaguely he registered that the helicopter had moved from the position it had been in a minute before but somehow he did not assign alarm to that observation. There were so many other things that could potentially kill him and his men in the next two minutes that the helicopter was near the bottom of his list of things to worry about. Nor did he pay any attention to the frantic hails of Stu on his radio. He barely even heard them. The fucking prick probably wanted to have a Goddamn status report while they were in the middle of the bloodbath that this battle was turning into. Fuck him. He could have his motherfucking report when it was over. The thought that Stu might be seeing the helicopter positioning itself over the top of his men and that he might be trying to issue a warning never came close to crossing his mind. Up ahead, the charging group finally reached the limits of their advance and threw themselves down where they began scrambling for trees and rocks to hide behind. They were five less the number that they had started that charge with, three of them dead on the ground, two of them screaming on the ground but incapacitated. As Stinson watched, a burst of automatic fire reached out and finished the job on one of the wounded ones that had been foolishly trying to get to his feet. "Fucking idiot," Stinson muttered, feeling a fleeting moment of sadness and then dismissing it. He looked at his men and took a few deep breaths to brace himself. "Let's go!" he yelled at them. "Leapfrog to the left. Now, now now!" The front group began to provide covering fire and his group, one by one, drug themselves to their feet and began to rush forward once again. As before, Stinson waited until they were all underway and then he too jumped up and began to follow. Bullets began to whiz past once more, flying to the sides of him, over the top of him, plunking into the mud before him, but somehow not hitting him. In front of him two of his group went down in the first thirty feet but surprisingly the return fire was a little lighter than it had been on the last charge. It seemed like the Garden Hill defenders were not using their automatic weapons at the moment. Why not? Were they out of ammunition for them? If that was the case then things could maybe be turning around. Could their luck really be changing for the better? Could it? The answer came in very dramatic fashion a moment later. Three solid streams of tracers suddenly lanced out from the hillsides, all of them converging in mid-air in a spot high above the covering group's positions. Too late he realized what the significance of that was. He looked up just in time to see the napalm tank split in half 300 feet above and disgorge it's deadly contents. He was close enough this time to feel a blast of heat as the mixture ignited. Burning gasoline gel rained down on top of the prone soldiers, hitting the center of their group with unnatural accuracy. Five of them had been lying less than four feet apart, putting gunfire on the hillside before them. They ignited instantly, their bodies engulfed in the flame. It was by far the most devastating airdrop yet. "Motherfucker!" Stinson screamed, feeling the heat wave singe his face a little, watching his men burn. They didn't even move from where they lay, didn't even try to get up and run. Goddammit, these Garden Hill fucks weren't fighting fair! How could they fight against someone who could drop napalm upon their positions with impunity? His men reacted with horror at the attack. Of those that had been providing the covering fire - those that hadn't been hit directly with the napalm - several of them stood and tried to run from the conflagration that had been their comrades. They did this without thinking, purely out of horrified instinct. And they paid the price for it. The moment they stood the guns of the enemy sought them out. The tracers that had just ignited the napalm reached out and swept across them like a futuristic ray beam, cutting them instantly down. "Goddammit, stay the fuck down!" Stinson yelled over his radio. He was obeyed, again more because of the observed results of disobedience than anything else. "Keep putting fire on that hill," he ordered next. "Shoot, you fucking idiots, shoot!" They shot and Stinson ordered his own group forward. One more fell to enemy fire but within ten seconds he and his men were lying down near the scene of the napalm attack, trying to regroup. The stench of burning was very strong and the heat from the fire was uncomfortable upon their faces. It caused steam to rise from their wet clothing. "They're fucking killing us!" Givens yelled as he crawled over from his own position. "Goddamn it, they fucking napalmed us again!" "No shit," Stinson said, trying to keep his eyes off the burning bodies. He looked instead at his second-in-command, noting that he had been wounded by the attack as well. A small patch of his right arm had been burned, charring his clothing away and leaving a hole the size of a silver dollar. "Are you all right?" "It hurts like a motherfucker," Givens told him. "We need to pull back! Christ!" "We can't," Stinson said. "We need to push on. We're almost there. How many do we have left?" "Fuck," Givens spat, taking a few breaths to calm himself. He looked around and began to count the ragged, scared group. The count turned out to be twenty-eight men still capable of fighting. Fully fifty percent lost. "Okay, here's the deal," Stinson said. "I'll give you six of my men and that'll even us up at fourteen apiece. Same drill. Half covers while half advances. We're at least out of the crossfire now and since we're less than 150 yards from the hills, the covering fire should do a better job of keeping their heads down. We'll do it in thirty yard dashes instead of fifty." Givens looked downright miserable at these words. "I didn't sign up for this shit, Stinson," he said. "What the fuck are we doing this for?" "No one ever said it made sense," Stinson told him. "And for what its worth, I didn't sign up for this either. I'd much rather be back in Auburn fucking my bitches right now. But we're stuck with what we're stuck with, ain't we? And we're almost there now." "Yeah, only a hundred and fifty fucking yards to go," he said. "We lost half in the first hundred and fifty. That leaves the other half for this run, don't it?" Stinson had no answer for him. Instead he barked out the names of six of his men and told them they were reassigned. ------- Michelle had watched the results of the napalm attack with nothing short of savage glee. She did not care that fellow human beings had just been roasted alive to die a horrible, painful death. All she cared about was that four or five of the faceless enemy that were trying to attack her town, that had caused death and injury to her platoon, were gone and no longer a threat to her. When the panicked men in the vicinity of the flames had leapt to their feet to flee the area she had unhesitantly cut them down with left-over tracers in her weapon, actually cheering in satisfaction as she saw the red streaks intersect human bodies. Though she would probably feel guilt about this glee later - if there was a later - she refused to let these thoughts intrude right now. This attack had been more costly than the first one. The bullets of the enemy had been better aimed from closer positions and more of them had found their way around or through the sandbags that were their protection. Mike Orland, one of the men in her platoon and the husband of two of the women in Chrissie's platoon, was dead in the trench, a bullet through his head. In the next trench over Julie Sanders had been killed by a shot to the throat. There were two major injuries as well. Sarah, Steve Kensington's wife, had taken a burst of automatic weapons fire in the upper chest. She was conscious but having considerable trouble breathing, probably experiencing a slowly collapsing lung. Lucy Strang, who had once been a hairdresser, had taken a rifle bullet in her right breast. She was also conscious but also having trouble breathing. In addition to the major injuries there was Lori Stanislaus, Ted's wife, who had had a lucky round smash through her upper arm, rendering it useless. Michelle herself had felt bullets pass within inches of her face on several occasions, had felt the wind generated by the displacement of air caressing her cheeks. This was something else that her mind was probably going to be obsessing over later on but, as with the deaths she had caused, it was not something she had time to analyze just now. It was time to get the hell out of Dodge. "Okay, people," she said over her tactical radio, the one that the Auburnites could potentially be monitoring. "It's time to initiate our prime directive. We're gonna go with plan A. Squad leaders, do you understand?" Plan A was the controlled withdrawal in thirds utilizing covering fire. The squad leaders all reported their understanding. "Okay," Michelle said next. "Let's have the sick birds go first. You know what to do." They did. The evacuation of wounded in preparation for withdrawal was something that they had practiced repeatedly during the training phase. They had even gone so far as to carry simulated victims during those sessions. Without any further direction, the platoon swung into action. Sarah and Lucy had each been placed on makeshift litters that had been constructed out of sheets. Handles had been sewn into the corners, allowing them to be carried. The squad leaders assigned two people per litter and told them to get ready. The other wounded, Lori Stanislaus, was well enough to evacuate herself. When everyone reported readiness the word was passed to Michelle. "Okay," Michelle said over the tactical radio. "Let's lay it on them!" Everyone who was not involved in the actual withdrawal began to fire down at the enemy positions, providing their own covering fire. The explosions of gunfire began to echo once more and the trenches filled with gun smoke. Michelle did not have to give the order to go. They already knew that the shooting was their cue. Sarah and Lynette were hauled from the rear of the trenches and the litter bearers, keeping their heads and bodies well down, dragged them down the hill. Lori, despite considerable pain that moving her body in any way caused, rolled out under her own power and followed them. Once they were all below the summit of the hill and out of line of sight of the enemy, they stood up, the stretcher-bearers grasping their loads and moving as quickly as they could to the rear. "Brett, this is Michelle," she said into the VHF once they were on their way. "We're starting our pull-back. Wounded are on the way. Can you contact Paul for us and let him know to meet them?" "Don't bother," Paul's voice immediately spoke up. "We're already on the move." "Copy that, thanks, Paul," Michelle said. "I copy too," Brett's voice said from the radio. "Michelle, it looks like your friends down there are starting to regroup for another advance. Keep the fire on them as much as you can and get the hell out pronto." Michelle clicked her radio instead of verbally replying and then picked up her tactical set again. "All right," she said into it. "Keep up the fire," she said. "First squad, do your thing. You're going to taking number 23. I repeat, 23. Get going now!" First squad did not have to be told twice. While the rest of the platoon kept up the gunfire on the enemy positions, they slid out of the trenches, taking their personal weapons and the weapons belonging to the dead and wounded, as well as their packs, with them. They slithered down the hill until they were able to stand and then they headed for trench 23 at a fast run. When they were halfway there, Michelle told second squad to do the same. The volume of covering fire naturally eased off but still the enemy kept their heads down and didn't try to push in. Within a minute of the order being given, all of them were gone. "All right," Michelle said to her squad, not using the radio or code since all of them were within earshot. "Now the rest of you. We're taking trench 28. I'll cover for you with the automatic for about twenty seconds and then I'll be right behind you. Now go!" They went, sliding out of the trench and disappearing down the hill. Michelle fired an entire magazine while they did this, using two and three round bursts. There was some light return fire but nothing terribly concentrated. As soon as her magazine was empty she reloaded and followed her troops to the next position. ------- From above, Brett watched the orderly pullback with satisfaction. He could see them trotting in three distinct groups, heading for the array of trenches a quarter of a mile to the south of the ones they had just been in. Ahead of the group, moving much quicker than he would have thought possible, he saw the stretcher bearers hauling the wounded towards Paul's team, who were running over the open ground to meet them. "We're really going to win this thing," he said to Jason and Sherrie. "We're really going to." "You think so?" Sherrie, who was still winding in the napalm rope, asked hopefully. "I know so," Brett said. "They can't take another advance that costly. They simply can't. I'm amazed that they're still pushing forward as it is. They have to know that's it's useless." "Maybe they think they've gone too far to stop now," Jason suggested. Brett nodded thoughtfully. "Maybe," he agreed. "If so, they're making a very big mistake." With his philosophical musings now out of the way, Brett turned his attention to the other side of the battle, where Matt's group was still locked into an ongoing gunfight with the leapfrogging attackers. Over there the going had been even rougher, the advance even more costly, but amazingly enough, they were still pushing forward as well. They were now, with more than half of their number dead or incapacitated, approaching the 150-yard range as well. "Matt," Brett said into the radio, "are you still with me?" As it had been with Michelle's, the transmission was filled with the background noise of gunfire. "I'm still here," he said. "I've got one dead and two wounded that need to be taken out. The enemy is making short hops but they're starting to get kind of close to us." "Understood," Brett said, watching as one group hit the mud and another began to rush forward. "I think it's time to pull back before you get any more casualties. I want you to withdraw to trenches..." he consulted his map for a moment, "33, 34, and 36. Start as soon as you can." "Copy that," Matt answered, unmistakable relief in his tone. "We'll be on the move in less than a minute." "Chrissie," Brett said next, "are you down there?" "Right here," she said immediately. "Have the squads on the right side of your deployment pull back to trenches 40 and 42. Keep the squads on the left side in place and help cover the withdrawal of Matt's platoon. As soon as they're all out of there, take the rest of your people over to trench 46." "Copy," she said. "Any wounded on your side?" he asked her next. "Negative," she said, obviously pleased by this. "We have zero casualties of any kind." "That's what I like to hear," he said. "There's a good chance you're gonna be on your own for a bit after this. It sounds like some of the wounded from the other sides are going to need medivac to EDH. I'll make it as quick as I can." ------- "Squad two and three," Chrissie ordered over the tactical radio. "Prime directive time. Two to 40, three to 42. Plan B, now!" Plan B was the code for an immediate withdrawal, without the benefit of covering fire. It had been intended for a grave situation such as the militia advancing quicker than could be dealt with, but in this case, with those squads absent of any enemy contact, it seemed appropriate as well. The squad leaders of two and three both acknowledged her order and then went about initiating it. They slipped out of their trenches and headed towards the next complex. "Everybody else," Chrissie said to the remaining eight people in her own trench. "Keep plastering that group. Matt's platoon is withdrawing." The battered group of militia that was attempting to leapfrog its way up to Matt's position was about three hundred yards away on average. Far enough so that fire was not terribly accurate but close enough so that it did cause casualties. Chrissie and her people aimed out over the edge of their position at an angle and shot at anything that moved down there. There was a lot of movement. "What about us?" Kathy Smith, one of Chrissie's people, wanted to know. "We're pulling back to 46 as soon as Matt's out of there," she answered, giving her trigger a squeeze and sending four bullets down range. "How long?" Kathy asked. "They're gonna be awfully close to us if they take that trench before we can get out of here!" "As long as it takes," Chrissie said, watching as another dash began among the enemy. "And if you'd stop talking and start shooting, maybe we could slow them down a little bit more. Come on!" Kathy gave a nervous, sour look at the young girl that was in command of their fate but did as she was told. She aimed her semi-automatic AK-47 down towards the aggressors and squeezed off three quick shots. ------- "Get around there!" Stinson yelled as the front group closed to within fifty yards of the trench. "Goddammit, flank them on that left side and get up on top of that position!" He leapt to his feet and waved his own men forward as he yelled this, feeling genuine excitement for once. They had not lost a single man on the last three charges. Not even one. In fact, it almost seemed as if the Garden Hill defenders had stopped firing altogether. It seemed that their covering fire was getting very accurate indeed. The front group scrambled around to the left side of the hill, their weapons ready. A few of them were firing upward towards the shredded sandbags that they could now see. "Come on, guys," Stinson yelled to his own half. "Move around to the right! Let's get the fuck up there and get this over with!" The enthusiasm was contagious. The fourteen men of his team rushed around to the flank of the nearer hill and then started up the steep slope, several of them falling down when they lost traction but quickly getting to their feet again. It was almost strange to not have bullets whizzing at them as they moved, to not hear the meaty thud of some unfortunate getting hit, to not hear the screams that followed. Above them and to the south, the helicopter was still hovering, watching over the events. Both groups reached the top of the hill at almost the same time. Once up there they closed in on the first of the trenches from the sides, their guns pointed at it, fingers tightened on triggers. Stinson wished for some hand grenades to help clear the way but that simply had not been in the Auburn inventory. They had had some of those tear gas guns and flash-bangs from the Sheriff's department but they had not carried them with them on this particular campaign. Stinson and the rest of them waited for the barrage of bullets to come flying at them as the terrified defenders in the trench made a final stand. They waited, but it never came. At last they were standing over the trench itself, twenty-eight men who had survived hell. "Son of a bitch," Stinson said, looking down at what was revealed. There was a dead body in the trench, that of a woman. There were hundreds of empty shell casings of various caliber. There were dozens of empty boxes that had once contained ammunition. There was a canteen that had a bullet hole in it. There were a few puddles of watery blood. Other than that, there was nothing, nothing at all but a bunch of muddy footprints. On the backside of the trench were more footprints and some slide marks. It didn't take a genius to figure out that the occupants had scrambled out the back a few minutes before. "Get over to those other two hills they were shooting from," Stinson ordered half of his men. "Check those trenches as well." Two of his squads, shaking their head in disgust, began to move unenthusiastically in that direction. "Stinson," Stu's voice demanded over the radio. "Answer me! Give me a fuckin report!" Stinson sighed, pulling out his radio. He had finally updated Stu just after the napalm attack, just before the final charge to the trench. Stu had agreed with his plan of action and had ordered him to carry it out. He keyed up now. "We're on the hill," he said softly. "No casualties taken in the advance. The enemy forces have pulled back." "You mean they ran away?" Stu said. "I mean they're not here," Stinson said. "Call it whatever you want. We have one body in this trench, no wounded, no weapons, no supplies. I have people checking the trenches on the other hills now as well." "Trenches?" Stu asked. "Did you say trenches?" "You heard me right," he replied. "They've got fucking trenches dug in these hills, complete with sandbags and a shitload of ammunition. And they aren't makeshift trenches either, they're almost as solid as the ones we have back in Auburn. That's why we had such a hard time hitting them." "Understood," Stu said, his voice sounding strangely gleeful. "And now that we've chased them out of their trenches, the going should be a lot easier now." Stinson didn't even bother answering that one. ------- On the other side of the battle, Matt's last group was just leaving their trench to head for their new position. Their situation was just a little more perilous because John Whitcoff, one of Matt's men, had been hit just after the second third of the platoon had made their getaway. A bullet had come drilling through one of the firing ports and into his back, dropping him to the bottom of the trench. "Go, go," Matt ordered, firing his M-16 down at the advancing militia, the closest of whom were now approaching one hundred yards. "Get him down there with the others. Get a move on!" They hauled him out of the trench, not bothering to waste time putting him on a litter, and bodily dragged him down the hill. Matt kept firing down, thankful that Chrissie and her group were still in position on the next group of hills over. If not for them, they would've been overrun a minute or so ago. "Matt," Chrissie's voice said over the radio, "are you out of there yet? They're getting a little too close for comfort." "Pulling out now," he said. "We have another wounded man from the withdraw. Our last group is gonna be a little slow getting out." "Copy," Chrissie said. "We'll stay here and keep shooting at them as long as we can. But you need to go, now!" "Consider me gone," Matt said. He stowed his radio, fired the remainder of his magazine down at the advancing men, and then scrambled out the back of the trench. Five seconds later he was sliding down the back side of the hill on his butt. ------- "Chrissie, what the hell are you doing?" Brett's voice asked over the VHF. "Get your ass out of there!" Chrissie fired a long burst before she picked up her radio. She keyed it up. "Matt's last group has a wounded man," she told him. "We need to keep them delayed as long as we can so they have a chance to get away!" "If you stay there much longer," Brett answered, "you are not going to be able to get away. You'll be in plain view of Matt's trench when you withdraw. If they go after you they'll be able to slip around in front of you." "No choice, Brett," Chrissie said. "We'll move out when Matt is clear." "Pull out now, Chrissie," Brett said. "That's an order!" "Just a few more minutes," she said. "Don't worry. We'll be all right." She continued to fire, ignoring further hails from him. ------- "Goddammit!" Brett yelled. "What the fuck is she doing? This isn't the time for fucking heroics!" "She's always been kind of stubborn," Jason offered, watching as the attacking militia closed in on the empty trenches below. "Too stubborn for her own good. She's gonna have trouble when she pulls out of there. If she doesn't leave before they get to the top of that hill, there's gonna be no way they won't see her when she leaves." "It's her choice," Sherrie said, feeling the need to defend her. "Her choice yes," Brett agreed, "but she's risking her squad along with her." He keyed up the radio again. "Chrissie, get the hell out of there. Now!" No answer, just more flashes from her position. "Shit." ------- The fire coming from the hill at their ten o'clock did have one significant effect on Lima's group of twenty-two attackers. It forced them to climb the hill from the right side only instead of attacking the trench from both sides as Stinson's group had done. They combined their two groups into one and made an end-run around that side, scrambling up through the mud and around the trees on the hillside. Like Stinson and company had before them they found nothing on the top but a trench full of expended shell casings, empty boxes, blood, and one dead body. But unlike Stinson's group, they had a good view of at least some of their tormentors when they reached the summit. ------- Chrissie waited until the group they were firing at actually went out of sight on the far side of the hill before she ordered a cease-fire. "I hope we gave them enough time," she said. She turned to her people. "Let's go. Pull back to trench 46, as fast as our little legs will go." There was no dispute with this plan. They climbed out of the trench and started down the hill. ------- "Shit on a shingle," Brett said, looking at the figures of Chrissie and her team moving south from the top of the hill. "I hope those fuckers on Matt's hill are tired of the chase by now. If they're not, there's no way that Chrissie's gonna get away without shooting it out with them." "They're probably tired," Jason said, watching them to see what they would do. They seemed to be checking out the trench at the moment, ignoring the trenches on the adjoining hills where Matt's other squads had been stationed. "And they need to clear all of those hills first, don't they?" "They don't have to do anything," Brett said, taking a quick glance at his instruments and then continuing to watch the events unfold far below. ------- "Sir, over there!" one of Lima's men yelled, pointing at the downside of a hill about 350 yards away. "The bitches that were shooting at us are moving down that hill!" "Shoot at them," Lima said instantly. A second later twenty-two guns were firing at the muddy figures that were moving to the south. Lima himself expended an entire clip at them, knowing that the range was quite extreme for these weapons, but also knowing that with that much lead flying there was a better than even chance that at least one slug would find one body. It was a good gamble. ------- The unlucky person was Rhonda Bellingham, one of the town's many single women. She had once been part of Jessica's inner circle back in the old days, a blue-blooded lawyer's wife. After the first battle of Garden Hill she had converted to one of the most fervent supporters of Brett's reforms in security and had been one of the first to go through his advanced training class when it was offered. She had fought bravely and well in the second battle of Garden Hill and she had been just starting to think that everything was going to be all right when two bullets slammed into the high part of her back, just to the right of the spine. She squealed in pain, feeling a burning spread throughout her chest and suddenly her legs would no longer hold her up. She went down, face-first into the mud. "I'm hit," she yelled. "Oh God, I'm hit!" "Shit," Chrissie barked, stopping in her tracks. She looked down and saw the bright red flowers of blood spreading out on Rhonda's rain gear. She kneeled down next to her and rolled her up, hoping that the wounds weren't fatal. "Rhonda? How bad?" she asked. Rhonda's face was a mask of misery and fear. Tears were running down her eyes. "I can go on," she panted. "Just help me to my feet." Chrissie looked at the rest of her troops and saw that they had all stopped with her. They had stopped and bullets from the enemy were still plinking into the ground and whizzing by all around them. "Barb," she yelled at Barbara Hennesy, one of her better soldiers, "help me with her. The rest of you, get the hell out. Keep going as fast as you can!" Barb came over to help pull Rhonda to her feet but the rest of her team hesitated, clearly not wanting to abandon anyone. "GO!" Chrissie yelled, reaching down and grabbing Rhonda by the armpit. "Go before you get your asses shot off!" They went, most of them giving one last glance behind, but not lingering any longer. Within twenty seconds they were all out of sight behind the next rise. "Come on, Rhonda," Chrissie said, pulling her up. With the assistance of Barbara, they got her to her feet. Before they could turn to run however, another bullet found a mark. There was a wet thud and suddenly Barbara's head rocked violently back. Blood and brains sprayed all over Chrissie and Rhonda, splattering their faces, stinging their eyes. Barbara slumped ungracefully to the ground. "Oh God, Barb!" Chrissie cried in horror. It was easy to see that there was nothing to be done for her. "Barb?" Rhonda squeaked, her breath getting shorter by the moment. "Oh Jesus. Can we help her?" "There's nothing to be done," Chrissie said, feeling tears in her eyes. "Come on. We need to get out of here before they cut us off." Without so much as a glance at their fallen companion, Chrissie and Rhonda started heading for the next set of trenches. Chrissie was practically dragging the wounded girl and they weren't moving very fast at all. ------- The main group of Garden Hill people had already passed beyond the first hill but the two stragglers in the rear, one of them obviously helping a wounded companion, were still in range and visible. As such, Lima's group, encouraged by the downing of one of the others, continued to shoot at them. They staggered onward defiantly, moving at a snail's pace, but somehow, almost miraculously, they weren't being hit by the dozens of bullets that were being fired at them every second. It was only as they passed around the barrier of the first hill and out of sight that Lima realized that a mistake had been made on his part. While they had been plunking away at the two women in the rear, they had missed their golden chance to hook around to the front and cut off the main group as they retreated. By now, that group would be well beyond their reach. "Shit," Lima said, lowering his weapon and cursing himself for his tunnel vision. He had just blown a chance to make a major ding in the enemy. "What now, sarge?" one of his men asked him. "Should we go clear those other trenches?" Lima licked his lips a little bit. "First squad can do that," he said, coming to a snap decision. "Second squad, come with me. We're gonna go capture those two bitches that we were just shooting at. Come on, they can't get too far moving as slow as they are." For once nobody argued or whined about their assignment. Everyone was up for capturing a few of the enemy. Especially when they were females. Lima personally led the group as they scrambled down the far side of the hill and cut to the right to hook around in front of them. ------- Brett had watched the entire episode down below from his perch 2000 feet above the action. Though the players in the drama were no more than tiny dots moving on a muddy backdrop, so small that sex could not even be determined, and though he had had no radio communication with his second platoon since his last order for them to pull back, he knew, he simply knew that Chrissie was the one helping the injured party. When he saw ten men from the group that had taken the trenches on the right suddenly peel off and head south around the western hill, he also knew what their intention was. Though they had hesitated too long to catch the main group of second platoon, they would easily be able to sweep around and place themselves directly in Chrissie's path. "This is not good," Brett said, his mind trying to think of a solution. "Brett," said Jason, who had also watched the entire thing, and who also knew that it was his sister down there. "What do we do? They're gonna get Chrissie! They're gonna cut them off!" Brett didn't answer. He keyed up his radio, which was still set to the VHF frequency. "Chrissie!" he barked into it. "Are you there? Chrissie, they're trying to cut around and get in front of you! Move faster!" Chrissie's voice answered a moment later. It was very out of breath. "We're going as fast as we can," she said. "Rhonda's wounded bad. I need to get her to Paul." "Chrissie, drag her faster!" Brett commanded. "You have to. They're going to cut you off!" Chrissie didn't answer again, perhaps not wanting to expend the energy to do so. What she did manage to do however, was pick up her pace a bit. Brett saw that the tiny dots that were the woman he loved and one of her soldiers started going just a little faster. It was plain to see, by comparing their pace with the other tiny dots that were the militia group, that it still wouldn't be fast enough. "Brett, what do we do?" Jason asked. "They'll kill her! Or worse, they'll rape her! Can you land and pick them up?" "We can't land," Brett said, shaking his head. "There's too much mud, too many trees, too many hills. No clearance for the blades and no ground firm enough to take our weight. They're gonna have to get out on foot." "We have to do something," Jason pleaded. "We can't just let them get taken!" Brett took a deep breath and looked at his young friend and protégé, knowing he was right. He could not, would not sit up here in watch while they were captured. "Load up the gun," he told him. "We're going down." Jason looked back at him seriously. He had been around long enough to know that venturing too close to armed troops during the daylight hours was a very bad idea - one of the worst. Nevertheless, he nodded and reached into the storage compartment for a magazine of ammunition. "Let's do it," he said. "What are we doing?" Sherrie, who was a reluctant passenger in the vehicle, wanted to know. Her voice conveyed the message that she hadn't liked the tone of the conversation a bit. "Chrissie is trying to get a wounded person out of the area," Brett told her. "She's about to be cut off by enemy forces and captured unless we can do something about it." "And what are we going to do?" she wanted to know. "We're going to dive down on them and put them in the dirt," Brett said. He looked back at her. "It's dangerous. There's a good chance they'll shoot us, maybe even shoot us down. If you have any objections to this, let's hear them. I'll take them under consideration." This was his roundabout way of saying that he would not risk Sherrie's life to save his wife's and another's without her permission. Sherrie understood this. She didn't hesitate for a second. "Is there anything I can do to help?" she asked. "Just hold on tight to something," he told her. "We're gonna be doing some pretty violent maneuvering." She barked a short, nervous laugh. "Consider me hung," she said, grasping the hooks to which her bungee cords were attached. Brett gave her a smile and then looked back over to Jason, who had just slammed his magazine into the weapon and loosened up the clamps so that it could be easily turned and twisted. "We ready?" he asked. Jason twisted and turned the weapon back and forth a few times, getting the feel of it, making sure it was just right. He nodded in satisfaction. After two weeks of night runs at the controls of the mounted M-16, it felt as familiar in his hands as the PlayStation controller that he'd once obsessively used back in Berkeley before the comet. "Ready to rock," he said, jacking the first round into the chamber. "Let's do it then," Brett said, taking another look down at the advancing militia troops. They were approaching the halfway point around the first hill in their path, moving at a run. "You hangin on, Sherrie?" "As tight as I can," she confirmed. "Hang even tighter," he told her. "In a second it's gonna feel like gravity just up and disappeared on you." Before she really had a chance to ponder those words, Brett began the attack maneuver. He spun around to the south, towards the canyon and put on some forward speed. Once they were moving at about fifty knots he basically let them fall out of the sky. "Oh my Goddddd!" Sherrie screamed in terror as she felt herself go virtually weightless. Her stomach was suddenly in her throat. It felt a little like an amusement park ride that she had once been on, one in which the passengers were dropped from several hundred feet in the air before their fall was arrested by a curved track at the bottom. It felt like that in an abstract way, but it also felt a hundred times worse. There was no sense of control to this particular ride, no sense that it would be over in a second or to, no sense of security from having a ridiculously large, padded harness over her shoulders. This was a violent freefall in an aircraft with no doors on it, a fall that would only end amid a group of armed men who would be shooting at them. She burped a little and suddenly vomit was spraying from her mouth, splattering over her headset microphone. Even Jason, as accustomed and enthusiastic a passenger as he usually was, was scared shitless by the sudden dive. It felt for all the world like they were in a death spiral, that they were a hair's breadth away from smashing to the ground in a violent explosion. He moaned a little, his hands gripping the weapon tightly, his eyes trying to keep track of his targets through the bouncing windshield. Brett let them fall until they were less than 600 feet above the ground and then he pulled up sharply, slamming everyone violently back down at nearly 3Gs. The nose came up, the tail went down, and the engine screamed in mechanical protest as the design limitations of the small helicopter were pushed to the very limits and beyond. The moment the chopper was in level flight once again he banked sharply to the right and put on the speed, accelerating up to the maximum that the aircraft was capable of. The hill that the targets were moving around was now directly in front of them, its summit just below them by no more than a hundred feet. "Make this count, Jase," Brett said as he cut around the side of the hill, still accelerating. "Put those fuckers on the ground." "Just get me in range," Jason answered. They passed almost directly over the top of Chrissie and Rhonda, close enough to see them staring upward at them in surprise, and then Brett banked sharply again, spinning them around the hill and towards their quarry. He sharpened the bank a little, causing Sherrie to upchuck the rest of her breakfast behind them, and then suddenly the figures of ten men spun into view from the right. "There they are!" Brett yelled, cutting back to the left and straightening out. "Mow 'em down!" Jason began to fire, watching through the windshield instead of the FLIR screen as the tracers shot out. They were moving nearly a hundred nautical miles per hour and the window of opportunity that he had was only a second or two, but it was enough. He adjusted the stream and raked his fire over them, knocking two of the startled militiamen down before the rest managed to dive to the mud in terror. "Yes!" he yelled triumphantly as they zoomed over the top of their targets. "Fuck you, motherfuckers! How do like that on your ass?" Brett cut sharply to the left the moment he was past them and shot between two hills to the south of them, quickly getting them out of range. He pulled up just a little, cut back to the right to get around another set of hills, and then began a steep bank to spin back around for another pass. "Brett," Chrissie's voice said over the radio. "What the hell are you doing? Are you crazy?" "No crazier than you are, babe," he told her. "We're keeping them occupied while you get out of there. Keep moving as fast as you can. We're gonna make another run." "Brett, they'll shoot you down," she protested. "Just go!" he told her. "The sooner you get out of there, the less times we'll have to do this. Now do it!" ------- One of the men made a check on the two that had been shot by the helicopter and found that both of them, while still technically alive at the moment, were quite beyond salvation. Both had been peppered by multiple rounds about the torso. Both were gasping out their last. Finch, the private that reached them first, didn't even bother putting bullets into their heads. They were beyond even that. The attack by air had come as a complete and total surprise, even though everyone had SEEN the fucking thing diving down at them from the first moment. They had thought that the aircraft that had been tormenting them for so long had suffered an engine failure, so rapidly had it come down out of the sky. There had been cheers of joy from Lima and his men as they had waited for the smash and the eruption of flame. And then suddenly it had pulled out of the fall and disappeared behind the hill. And then, while they'd still been trying to figure out the meaning of that, it was strafing them. No one had even managed to get a shot off at the cursed thing. "Engine noise," one of the men suddenly yelled now. "Coming from that way!" He pointed off to the southwest, the direction the thing had disappeared in after the attack. Lima listened, looking in that direction, and after a moment heard the whine of the helicopter's turbine engine. It was a high-pitched sound, audible only because the machine was cranked up to top speed. It was swelling rapidly, growing louder by the second. "Get down," Lima yelled out, waving everyone back into the mud that they had just crawled out of. His men, those still alive, didn't have to be told twice. They threw themselves down and then quickly spread out, keeping distance between themselves and their companions so as not to become an easy target. "Here it comes!" someone said as the sound grew louder. "One o'clock low!" "Shoot it," Lima commanded, raising his M-16. "When it comes at us, everyone shoot at the motherfucker! Bring him down!" ------- "There they are," Brett said as they passed over the last rise. "Eleven o'clock. Lay it to 'em, Jase!" "On target," Jason said, squeezing the trigger and releasing his clip of ammunition. Once again he raked his fire over as many as the prone figures as he could in the two seconds that they were in his sights. He thought that he might have hit one or two. This run however, something new was added. Their targets were shooting back at them. As Brett flashed by them at 96 knots and three hundred feet above the ground, the flashes of weapons could clearly be seen. A second later there was a loud bang from underneath the helicopter and Sherrie screamed. "What is it?" Brett said, banking severely to the right to clear the target area. "Are we hit?" "A bullet just came up through the floor!" Sherrie told him. "Are you hit?" he asked. "No," she said. "I just..." "Is anything in the chopper hit?" he interrupted. "Uh... no, I think it ended up in the rope coil." "Good," he said, banking back to the left. "Then don't worry about it." Brett kept them low to the ground and their speed high as he raced back around the hill towards the other side of the hill. Green trees and large patches of brown flashed by beneath them in a blur of motion. A moment later, they shot right over the top of Chrissie and Rhonda once again, catching just the quickest glimpse of them. "Goddammit," Brett said, pulling around in a tight turn to the right. "They're still not clear." "Will one more pass do it?" Jason asked, pulling his expended magazine clear. "I only got one more clip in here." "I guess it's going to have to," Brett said. "Get it ready." He finished his bank and then lined up for another run, navigating by landmarks only. He passed over the top of Chrissie again, silently telling her to hurry up. And then he was following the edge of the hill between the two groups, hoping that this run would be enough. The pursuers were a little faster with their guns this time. When they came around and lined up on them this time, the weapons were already flashing. As Jason opened up on them with the M-16, a burst of fire from one of their weapons found its mark. There was a bang from just below Brett's feet and a small spray of blood splashed in his face. Pain, severe and sharp, was suddenly shooting up his left leg, seeming to be centered in his knee. "Brett!" Jason yelled in horror, his hands coming off of the gun. "Jesus Christ! You're hit!" Brett continued his pass, not looking down to see how bad it was, not wanting to know until he got the helicopter clear of the target area. He pulled up a little, bringing their altitude up a hundred feet, and slacked off some of the speed. The pain in his leg continued to worsen, spreading up and down his entire body, throbbing with the beat of his heart. It felt like someone had installed a vice on his knee and was clamping it ruthlessly down, turn by turn. Finally, unable to delay it any longer, he looked down, seeing nothing but bad news. His left leg was a mess. It appeared that a bullet had entered just below his kneecap, moving at an upward angle. It had exited just above his kneecap, blasting a hole the size of a silver dollar in his lower thigh. Muscle and fat tissue along with bone fragments, a piece of tendon, and a considerable amount of blood were all protruding from the exit wound. "This is bad," Brett said, trying to move the leg a little. The moment his thigh shifted on the seat a large glut of blood gurgled out of the wound and the pain intensified to a level that actually made him sweat. "Owwww, Goddamn that hurts!" he yelled, his face grimacing. "Brett?" Jason asked, his face worried. "Can you move your leg?" "Not really," he said through gritted teeth. "How are you going to land then?" Jason asked. "You can't maneuver at slow speed if your feet can't work the pedals." "Let's worry about that," Brett answered, "after Chrissie is safe. Hang on, we're going back around." He banked to the right, adding a little more speed, trying to keep his worthless lower leg from flopping around. Blood continued to pour from it, soaking into the seat and pattering to the floor. "What are we going back around for?" Jason asked. "We're out of ammo!" "But they don't know that, do they?" Brett returned. "Just seeing us come at them will keep them in the mud for another minute or so. Hopefully that'll be enough. Now hang on." He dove back down, heading for the front side of the hill once again. This time he did not go directly at the attacking men, choosing instead to cross at high speed to the right of them. The mere passage of the helicopter in their vicinity would probably be enough to keep them down and off of Chrissie's tail and since Jason did not have to actually aim and shoot at them, there was no point in getting close enough to be shot at effectively. This worked just as he had hoped. They were close enough to see the men still in the same place they'd been during the first pass, close enough to see the flashes of six weapons shooting at them, but far enough away so that there were no more pops of bullets hitting the aircraft. "Chrissie," Brett said into the microphone as he banked off to the right, "are you still down there? What's your status?" "We're still moving," her weary, out of breath voice answered a moment later. "We're just passing the front of the hill now." "I see her!" Jason yelled, pointing out the window. "She's at our two o'clock." Brett looked and was able to see the tiny figures staggering onward. They were indeed past the front of the hill now, moving through a shallow gully between it and the next one. Though it was still technically possible for the men on the other side of the hill to catch up to them, it was unlikely unless they went into an all-out sprint. As long as Chrissie kept moving for another few minutes, she would more than likely be safe. "It looks like you're safe, babe," Brett told her, breathing a sigh of relief. "Keep moving at the pace you are for now, but I think we kept them at bay long enough." "Thanks Brett," she breathed back. "And how are you? Is anyone in there hit?" "I got a little... uh... scratch to my leg. I'll be all right though. Everyone else is fine too." "How little of a scratch?" she demanded. "Is it from a bullet?" "It's from a bullet," he said. "A little one. I'll live. Now get your ass over to your trench and be sure to hold these fucks off. I don't think they'll attack again, they don't have enough people left, but you never know. They've been pretty fucking stupid so far." "I copy," she said. "Is Paul on the way up to get Rhonda?" "I don't know," Brett said. "Paul, are you out there?" "I'm here," Paul said immediately, as if he had been awaiting a chance to break into the conversation. "I understand you're wounded, Brett. How bad is it?" "My left knee's been shot," he said. "I'm still bleeding but I think I'll be okay once I get back on the ground." "Will you be able to fly?" Paul wanted to know. "I've got three people that need immediate evac to El Dorado Hills. I don't know how bad Rhonda is, but it sounds like she might be a fourth." Brett frowned a little and tried moving his leg once again. The pain was even worse this time. Now it felt as if the operator of the vice was not only tightening it shut but also burning the skin with a blowtorch at the same time. My God, he thought helplessly, will I even be able to land? "Brett?" Paul asked. "Did you copy my question?" "I copy," Brett told him. "Don't worry. One way or another, I'll get those people to El Dorado Hills. I'm gonna take one more look at the battle area and then I'm gonna come in for a landing. Get the wounded over to the LZ as quick as you can." "As soon as I get Rhonda, I'll be on my way." "Then we should get there about the same time, shouldn't we? Brett out." With that he began to climb again, quickly bringing them back up to 6000 feet. He did not slow down and go into a hover, not just yet, since doing so would have required that he use the anti-torque pedals much more actively. Instead, he put the aircraft into a broad circle, circling widely around the town, the freeway, the canyon, and the no-man's land of the battlefield. He kept their speed at about 70 knots. "Jason," he said, gritting his teeth through the pain, "keep an eye on the gauges, particularly the fuel, engine heat, and oil pressure. I don't know for sure that one of those bullets didn't hit a fuel line or the tank or go into the engine compartment." "Right," Jason said, leaning forward and scanning the instrument panel. "Are you gonna be able to..." "I'm going to have to," he said. "Don't worry." Jason nodded, not saying anything further but obviously worrying. "Sherrie," Brett said next. "Are you still back there?" "Right here, Brett," she said. "Get the first aid kit out of the compartment back there, will you? And see if you can edge up here between us and get a bandage on my leg. I need to get the bleeding stopped." "Right away," she said, reaching behind her and digging out the large white box with the red cross on it. While she was assembling the bandaging materials, Brett took a look down at the battlefield, trying to get a sense of how things were going. In all of the excitement of getting Chrissie and Rhonda free and of getting shot, he had almost forgotten the big picture. Looking now he could see that things were fairly static down there. The shift of forces had been completed and the trenches that were the next line of defense were manned and ready. If the militia decided to push south again they would find yet another wall of guns to fight through. The militia themselves were still gathered in three separate places - a group apiece in each of the trench complexes they had just taken (or been given) and a smaller group at the original line. Brett could see that a few of the men from the original line were separating out and walking forward to join the others. It must be, he figured, the commander moving forward to examine the territory that had been captured. To the west, where the strafing runs had just taken place, the group that had been in pursuit of Chrissie was now making its way back, having given up the chase. There were only five of them out of the original ten - the rest were corpses lying in the mud at the scene of the attack. Brett tried to get a loose count of the surviving militia members that were facing them but the pain kept getting in the way. He had to settle for a broad estimation. It was quite apparent that there were now less than seventy of them however, possibly a lot less. He reported this to Matt and Michelle, fighting to keep his voice calm and level. "We copy, Brett," Matt said. "How are you doing up there? Are you just gonna keep circling?" "I'll come down in a minute," he said. "I just wanted to take a look at the area first and make sure there's no surprises waiting for us." "Brett," Michelle cut in, "how bad are you? You can land that thing, can't you?" "Yes," he said. "I'll be coming down in just a minute, as soon as Sherrie gets me bandaged up. Don't worry." "I am worried," she said. "And you didn't answer me. How bad is it? Can you move your leg? Are you bleeding to death? What? You're hiding something." He sighed, not having the energy to go on with the charade any longer. "It's pretty bad," he said. "I got shot through the left knee. I'm having trouble moving it and I'm in a lot of pain. It's gonna be kind of difficult to work the anti-torque pedals like this so there's going to be some trouble when my speed drops below twenty knots." There was an extended silence on the airwaves. "I copy," Michelle finally said. "So will you be able to get down, or won't you?" "I will," he said. "One way or another, I'll get us down and I'll get the wounded to El Dorado Hills. I'm a fighter." "Yes you are," she said. "We'll be waiting for you down here." "I know you will. Brett out." Sherrie had finally managed to assemble the bandaging supplies and she pushed her way between the two of them to dress his leg. She was forced to lean way over the front of him in order to do this, partially obstructing his vision with her body. He sat quietly as she did her work, his hands continuing to work the flight controls. Had the circumstances been a little different, he more than likely would have enjoyed the sensation of her body pushing against his, particularly the feel of her soft breasts against his shoulder. But the pain she was inflicting by lifting, pressing, and wrapping his wound was so intense, so powerful, that all he could think of was trying not to scream. When she was finished he had a fairly respectable pressure bandage pressed over both of the wounds and wrapped tightly with tape. Sherrie's hands were now dripping with his blood but she hardly seemed to notice. "Will that be okay?" she asked nervously, looking at her work. "It's perfect," he told her, taking his hand of the control long enough to wipe the sheen of sweat from his forehead. "It looks like you got the bleeding to stop." "Will you... will you be able to... you know... use that leg now?" she asked. He smiled at her. "I'm gonna have to try," he said. "Now go get yourself secured back there. I'm gonna see if I can hover while we're up here in the safe zone." "Right," she said, edging her way back to the rope coil. He looked over at Jason. "How are those gauges looking? Any holes in the bird?" "It doesn't look like it," he said. "Everything's holding steady, right on the line." "Good," he said, nodding. He took a deep breath. "All right, let's give it a shot. I'm going to try to pull a hover up here. You ready?" "I'm ready." "Then hang on. Things might get a little interesting." Brett took one more deep breath of the humid air and then straightened up the shallow bank he had been in, putting them back into straight and level flight. Slowly he reduced the airspeed, watching as the gauge dropped from 70 to 60 to 50. "How we doing?" Jason asked, watching nervously. "So far, so good," he answered, wincing as he tightened his leg on the pedal. "But the hard part hasn't happened yet." He slowed further. The gauge dropped to 40 and then slowly to 30. As it dipped below 30 knots the back end began to swing to the right as torque, which had been dampened by the speed, suddenly regained a grip on the machine. Brett braced himself for the pain and tried to push down on the left pedal, which would increase the amount of air being blown out of the NOTAR system and therefore stabilize the rear-end swing. Pain unlike anything he had ever felt before exploded in his knee like a bomb. He screamed it was so intense. "Brett!" Jason yelled, his hands grabbing for his seat as the swing became worse. Behind them, Sherrie screamed. "Ahhhhhhhh!" Brett cried, trying to ignore it and having no luck. Fresh sweat broke out, not just on his face but all over his entire body. He felt himself going faint as his body, in a reflexive reaction, slowed his heart rate down to a dangerously low level. The rear end continued to swing, now spinning them around so that they were facing the opposite direction. Outside the window the landscape rotated sickeningly. And still his leg would not push the pedal down. It couldn't. "Brett!" Jason yelled again, terrified now. The chopper was on the verge of spinning out of control. Brett let out his breath in a great gasp and, using his hands on the controls, brought their speed back up. The gauge climbed, passing back over 30 again and moving towards 40. Slowly the back end stopped spinning and straightened back out. A moment later they were straight and level again. Brett was panting, drops of sweat running down his face, the pain slowly fading back to a level approaching normal torture. The dizziness began to pass and his heart rate sped back up to normal. "Are you okay?" Jason asked hesitantly, looking at him in alarm. He looked over at him. "Yeah," he said. "I'm still here. But it seems that we have ourselves a little more of a problem than I originally thought. My leg won't move that pedal at all." ------- Chapter 20 "What are we going to do?" Sherrie asked, trying not to let panic overcome him. "Is there any way to land this thing without those pedal thingies?" "Well, there's an auto-rotational landing," Brett said, "but that's not really the ideal solution." "What's an auto-rotational landing?" Sherrie wanted to know, locking onto that in desperation. "If it'll get us down, let's do it." "That means he cuts the power and lets us fall to the ground," Jason said. "At the last moment, he pulls up and arrests the fall." Sherrie looked at the two of them as if they were mad. "Cut the power?" she said. "Fall? Are you insane?" "Not at all," Brett said, putting the aircraft back in the wide bank that it had been in a few moments before. "That's how you get down if you have an engine failure. The problem here is that it'll be kind of hard to bring us down in a specific place. We might end up in a tree, or on top of a building. And you come down rather hard too. I had to do it once in a Kiowa in Texas. It wasn't pretty. My observer fucked up his back pretty good and the helicopter never flew again. This chopper would almost certainly be permanently disabled if we did that and there's still a better than even chance that we'd all be killed anyway over this kind of terrain." "Great," Sherrie said, barking out a semi-hysterical laugh. "So we're talking a fifty-fifty chance?" "If we try that," Brett said, wiping the sweat off his face again. Christ his knee was hurting. "There might be another way though." "Like what?" Sherrie asked. "Like letting me fly," Jason said. "Letting you fly?" Sherrie said, her eyes wide. "You don't know how to fly this thing!" "I know how to fly it," Jason corrected. "I've just never done it before." "And this isn't the time to take over the controls," Brett said. "Sorry Jase, but I don't think it would be possible to maintain control if we tried to switch in mid-air, otherwise I might give it a shot." "Then what do we do?" Jason and Sherrie asked together. "You can't fly it," Brett told Jason. "But maybe you can be my left foot." "Push the pedal for you?" "You got it," Brett said. "Unbuckle and lean over here. If you put your foot on the pedal and push it when I tell you to and release it when I tell you to... maybe it just might be enough to keep us under control. I can still work the right pedal, the collective, and the cyclic. Sherrie?" "Yeah?" she said doubtfully. "We'll need your help too. I need you to come over here and hold onto my left leg to keep it from moving. When Jason pushes the pedal down, don't let my lower leg go down with it. Got it?" "I think so," she said, nodding, glad to have something to do. "All right," Brett said. "Let's give it a shot. We'll try to pull a hover up here again to get the feel for it. If we can do that, there's a good chance we'll be able to land." Sherrie and Jason both got into position. Jason released his harness and edged halfway out of his left side seat. He stretched his right foot out and over and slid it up against Brett's left boot. Brett winced a little at the contact. Sherrie resumed her position between the two seats. It took a little experimentation but finally, by kneeling down at an uncomfortable angle, she was able to get her hands around his upper calf, just below the wound, and hold it in place without obstructing either his vision, his hand on the collective, or Jason's leg on the pedal. The fit of the three of them however, was more than a little awkward. "Okay," Brett told Jason once they were ready, "the important thing to remember is not to push down hard on the thing. When I say to push it, just ease it down a little tiny bit at a time, very slowly. When I say let up, do the same. Got it?" "I got it," Jason said. "All right, let's give it a shot." He took a few deep breaths and leveled out their bank once again. "Slowing up." He eased up on the airspeed once again, making the indicator slowly wind down. He watched it carefully as it dipped closer and closer to the point where the torque became a force to be seriously reckoned with. As before, it was just under thirty knots when Brett felt the tail starting to turn. "Push down just a bit," he told Jason. Jason applied a very small amount of pressure to the pedal. It sank down a half an inch and than another half an inch. The swing of the tail smoothed out. Brett's foot remained just above the pedal, held there by Sherrie's bloody hands. "Good job," Brett said, starting to think that this just might work after all. Though having his leg suspended was increasing the pain considerably, it was nowhere near the white-hot agony of his first attempt at slowing. "Get ready to do it more. The more I adjust the collective, the worse the torque is going to be. It's a constant adjustment as we slow." "Right," Jason said, shifting a little in his seat. Brett continued to reduce airspeed and Jason continued to gently push down on the pedal to compensate for it. The needle dropped below twenty and then below ten. There were a couple of moments when they swung back and forth, when Brett had to push a little on the right and Jason had to ease up on the left, but these swings, although jerking, were almost gentle, nothing like the violent spinning of before. Brett barked out commands - up or down - as they were needed. Finally the needle dropped to zero knots of forward speed. The back end tried desperately to swing and actually was able to in small increments, but the up and down of the pedals with two different feet upon them were able to counter it. They hovered in space, 2000 feet above the ground. "We did it!" Jason yelled excitedly. "Goddamn, Brett, we did it! We're hovering!" "Thank God," Brett said, smiling in spite of the pain. "Does this mean that we're going to live?" Sherrie asked from her kneeling position. Her hands were cramping from the effort of holding Brett's leg. "It means our odds got a little better," Brett said. "Now lets bring it back up to forty knots or so and then we'll head on down. Get ready to push again, Jase." Slowly Brett built up airspeed once more until they were past the critical point. Jason kept the proper amount of pressure applied to the pedal. Once they were relatively stable Brett let everyone back away from him in order to stretch their fatigued muscles before the big event. Brett also had Jason contact Paul on the radio to tell him what they were doing and to have him clear the parking lot. "We're going to land on the far side of the lot," Jason explained, "but be sure everyone stays well clear until the skids hit the ground. There is a chance that we might... you know... have a loss of control and we wouldn't want anyone else to get hurt." "Copy," Paul said slowly. "We'll be standing by. Good luck to you." "Thanks," Jason said. "We'll need it." Brett banked the helicopter back around in a wide circle, bringing them around so that he could approach from the north, which would lessen the chances of them accidentally hitting the community center building if they lost control at the last second. This course put them out over the canyon, which was still about a third full of raging floodwaters rushing down from higher in the mountains. As he passed over the northern rim Brett began to descend and slowed his airspeed to thirty-five knots. "Okay," he said as the altimeter approached 5000 feet above sea level, "let's get back into position and we'll start slowing down." Jason and Sherrie both quickly resumed their respective places at Brett's side. Brett had to stifle a scream as Sherrie grabbed his leg a little too hard and then another as Jason's boot nudged his foot. "Are you all right?" they both asked, looking at him anxiously. "Yeah," he breathed, biting his lip a little. "Everyone ready?" They assured him that they were as ready as they were going to get. "Then let's land this thing," Brett said. He continued to descend, letting the helicopter take a gentle angle downward. They passed over the hills between the town and the canyon and then over the southern wall itself. The rooftops and winding streets of the subdivision grew bigger and bigger in their field of view. Ahead of them and slightly to the left, the park and the community center could be seen, including the large parking lot that was their landing zone. Brett eased up on the airspeed a little more, keeping them just above the point where Jason needed to actively intervene. He banked a little to the left and then back to the right, putting the landing zone directly in front of them. "Okay," he said once they were lined up. "We're on final approach now. I'm going to slow up some more. Get ready to do your stuff." "I'm ready," Jason said, chewing his lip a little. "Remember," Brett said as he pushed down a little more on the collective, "once we get into the ground effect, you're going to have to ease up. The blades won't be biting into the air as hard and the torque is going to suddenly lessen." "I'll remember," Jason said, his eyes watching out the windshield in front of them. They passed the outer edge of the park, still descending, and Brett dropped the airspeed past the critical point. "Down a bit, a bit more," he said, and Jason pushed down on the pedal. The back end, which had been trying to swing, stabilized for a moment until the speed dropped even more. "More," Brett said. "Just a bit more." They passed over the baseball diamond at a little over a hundred feet above the ground, still slowing, the tail swinging spastically back and forth about three feet in both directions. Brett continued to slow them up and Jason continued to apply pressure to his pedal. "Doing good, doing good," Brett said, feeling sweat dripping down his face, feeling his heart pounding in his chest. He slowed some more. "A little more, a little more." They passed over the southern edge of the parking lot, still slowly dropping, still moving at about twelve knots, the back end still swinging back and forth as Jason's control movements lagged just behind Brett's voice commands. "Coming up on the LZ," Brett warned, slowing them even further. "Here's where it really gets tricky." "Bring it on," Jason said, wiping his own face, watching with intense concentration as the white lines of the parking spots grew larger and larger. Brett dropped a little further, until they were about six feet above the ground. "We're going to hover now," he said, bleeding off the rest of the speed. The tail swung out a little wider as Jason struggled to keep up with the maneuver. For a moment it seemed they were going to spin wildly but it was only a moment. He pushed down a little more and arrested it and then overcompensated just a little, forcing Brett to counter his move. At last the airspeed stood at zero knots six feet above the ground. "Good job," Brett said with a little sigh of relief. "We're almost home free. I'm gonna drop us down now. Get ready for the ground effect. As soon as we start to swing, let up on the pedal slowly and I'll give a little push on mine." "Let's do it," Jason said. Brett let them drop down a little bit more and, at three feet, they were firmly in the ground effect, where the air from their own rotor was bouncing off the ground and pushing them back upward. The helicopter suddenly didn't need as much power to keep aloft and in order to get them the rest of the way down, Brett pulled back on the collective considerably more than he would have to make the same adjustment at altitude. As such the rear end tried to swing around since the force of torque was equally reduced. "Ease up, ease up!" Brett barked, feeling the swing. Jason eased up a little faster than he had been, countering the action. The rear end stabilized. "Out of sight," Brett said, dropping them the rest of the way down. There was a thump from beneath them as the skids touched semi-gently down on the asphalt. It was almost anti-climatic. "We did it!" Jason yelled, feeling the wonderful sensation of being back on mother earth. "We're down, Brett! We did it!" "We're down?" Sherrie asked. She too had felt the thump of landing but was having trouble believing that they were really safe. "We're down," Brett said, neutralizing the collective and turning the throttle back to idle. The whine of the turbine engine, which had been screaming a moment before as it held the helicopter at a hover, died down to a soft, almost gentle hum. The rotor blades began to slow down. "It wasn't the prettiest landing I've ever participated in, but Goddamn if it didn't feel the best once it was over." ------- Now that the immediate crisis was over and the adrenaline had a chance to slack off some, Brett's leg began to seriously scream at him for the abuse that had been inflicted upon it. The pain swelled up like a balloon, traveling up and down his body in sickening waves, commanding his attention. He had never imagined that a simple gunshot wound could be so freaking painful. Hadn't he been told once that they were almost painless? What moron had pulled that information out of his ass? Obviously someone who had never been shot in the knee before. "Are you all right, Brett?" asked Jason, still quite elated at the fact that he was actually alive and not a burned up, smashed up corpse. He didn't like the way that Brett was leaning back in his chair with his eyes squeezed shut. "I think..." he said, "that you... you better do the shut-down checklist for me. Do you mind?" "I'm on it," he said worriedly. He gave his mentor one last glance and then began the process of disengaging the rotor and shutting down the engine. Sherrie meanwhile, jumped out through the missing door on the side and fell to her knees on the wet asphalt. She leaned down and put her lips to the ground, kissing it several times. "Thank you, thank you, thank you," she said, over and over again, presumably to God or Jesus or whatever entity she believed in. Across the parking lot the door to the community center opened and Paul came out, followed by two of his medical team. They had a wheeled table with them - a makeshift gurney that had been constructed by Steve Kensington a few days before. They reached the helicopter before the blades were even able to stop turning. Paul ripped open the pilot's side door and looked in. "Hey, Paul," Brett groaned, trying a grin on for size and doing a miserable job at it. "What's the good word?" "That was some kind of fucked up looking landing," Paul said, his eyes dropping down to the bloody bandage on Brett's knee. He also took note of the blood, now congealing, that had dripped down to the floor. "Any landing that you walk away from," Brett quoted, "is a good landing. I learned that in flight school. I think they laid that one on us the first day. It's right up there with the old, bold pilots saying." "Well, it was a good landing then, I'll agree with that," Paul said, "but it don't look like you are going to be walking away from it. How bad is the injury? Give it to me straight." "It went in below my kneecap and went out just above it," Brett told him. "I saw bone fragments and tendons sticking out of the exit wound. I can't move my leg at all." "Do you mean you physically can't move it, or do you mean it hurts too much to move it?" "Both," Brett told him. "It's agony to even try, and it won't move even when I do." Paul nodded. He reached down and began unlacing Paul's left boot. "I'm going to check and make sure you're still getting blood flow down there," he said. "How's the pain?" "Horrible," Brett said honestly. "I had a kidney stone once and I thought that was bad." He shook his head. "That felt like a blowjob in comparison to this." Paul laughed a little, taking the laces all the way off. "You have a way with words, Brett," he said. "You oughtta be a writer. Are we gonna be able to get the wounded to El Dorado Hills?" "Yes," Brett said immediately. "We'll get them there." "Are you gonna fly there the same way you landed? With Jason pushing one of your pedals and Sherrie holding your leg up." "There's no other way," Brett said. "Just shoot me up with some of that morphine to take the edge off of this. We'll make it." Paul looked up at him. "Shoot you up with morphine before you fly a helicopter? Isn't that just a little unwise?" "It's the only way," Brett said. "Don't give me enough to put me out. Just give me enough to make it tolerable." Paul gave him a doubtful look and then began trying to pull Brett's boot off of his foot. The moment he moved the leg in order to accomplish this, Brett screamed as the pain flashed white-hot once again. "Brett," Paul said softly, "I can't give you enough morphine to make this tolerable. That much will put you out like a light." Brett panted for a few moments, wiping a fresh sheen of sweat from his face. "Give me what you can," he said. "There's no other way to do it. We have wounded that need to get there, don't we?" He nodded. "Yes, we do. Lucy and John are both dead - we did everything we could for them but... well, it just wasn't enough. Susan, Lori, and Sandy will need to get there at some point for treatment but they can wait for a while. Sarah, Rhonda, and Megan all have pretty serious wounds however, particularly Megan. They need to get to the doc right away, like within the next twenty minutes." "Then it's settled," Brett said. "I was the one that went against common sense and got myself shot up. I'm the one that'll just have to deal with the consequences. Give me as much dope as you think I can tolerate and then lets get those casualties loaded up." "And what if you pass out from the pain while you're in flight?" Paul asked. "Or what if you pass out from the dope? I'm not a doctor, Brett. I'm not an expert at medicating people. That shit could happen. What will you do then?" "Then we'll crash," Brett said, not mincing words. Paul looked at him sternly, shaking his head hopelessly. "What a clusterfuck," he said. "Is that really our only choice? What about Jason? Do we have the right to ask him to risk his ass on this screwed up mission? If you crash, you'll be taking him with you." Both of them looked over at Jason, who was still sitting in the observer's seat, following the conversation. "Well?" Brett asked him. "What do you think, Jase?" "I'll go no matter what," Jason said. "My place is in this chopper. But... maybe there's another answer." "Another answer?" Paul asked. "What do you mean?" "No," Brett said immediately before he could even say it. "I could fly this thing to El Dorado Hills," Jason said, ignoring him. "Absolutely not," Brett said. "This is not the time to learn to fly. Not with casualties on board." "Brett..." Jason started. "I said no," Brett said. "That's final." "I can do it," Jason said defiantly. "I've been watching you fly this thing for weeks now. You've taught me every system, every control, everything." "Jason, you can't just jump behind the controls of a helicopter and start flying," Brett told him. "It doesn't work that way, no matter how much you think you know about it." "Is that any riskier than flying the damn thing all shot up with morphine, with one foot on the controls and a woman holding the other foot? And there's not even room for Sherrie and the casualties anyway, even if we could talk Sherrie into climbing back in here." "No," Brett repeated. "I can do it," Jason said, staring at him. "Brett, I can. I know I can." "No!" "I'm not a kid, Goddammit!" Jason yelled, leaning closer to him. "You're sitting there thinking that I'm talking out of my ass because I'm fourteen fucking years old and I don't know any better. I'm not, Brett. I know exactly what I'm saying. It might be a little rough at first, it might take me a few minutes to get the feel of the thing, but if you help me, I can fly this helicopter. I know what I'm saying and I know what the risks are. I wouldn't tell you this if it wasn't true." "Jason..." Brett started. "You need to trust me, Brett," Jason told him. "You've always been the one to treat me like I was a man, even when I wasn't acting like one. You treated me that way from the very start, back when I was crying over my mom and dad next to that camper and I really was just a kid. You stood up for me in front of Jessica, in front of the other women in town, in front of everyone. Don't start treating me like a baby now." He leaned even closer, his voice softening. "Let me fly this thing," he said. "If you help me, I can do it. We might crash, but I think we stand a better chance with me doing it than having both of us try to monkey the damn pedals together." Brett looked at him, at the serious expression on his face, in his eyes. Jason wasn't even old enough to shave yet. He hadn't even reached his full adult height yet. But was he a man? Was he old enough to give a subjective assessment of his own abilities independent of the desires of youth? Was he? "Brett, I can do it." Brett let out a breath, letting his head hang down for a minute. He looked back up. "Get this thing refueled and get Steve to put the doors back on," he said. "And then, while Paul is loading up the casualties, you can help me over to the other chair. We take off in fifteen minutes." Jason could not prevent the grin from spreading across his face. "You got it, Brett," he said, standing up. "We'll lift off in fifteen." He hopped out and began sprinting towards the fuel truck and Steve's shack. Paul and Brett both watched him go. "Do you really think that's a wise decision?" Paul asked carefully. "No," Brett said, shaking his head a little. "But he made a very good point. His way is about the safest option that we've got." ------- Stu was looking at the trench that his forces had just managed to capture. He couldn't help but be impressed by it. "This has got to be the work of our friend Brett," he told Stinson, who was tagging along just behind him. "No bitch would have thought of something like this. Only someone with military experience could have supervised the construction of this thing." "I suppose," Stinson said almost shortly. He had been through a little too much in the last hour to be concerned about who had built the trench. "They surely pounded the shit out of us from here though." "Yes," Stu said with a nod. "It all makes sense now. He put trenches at the first line of defense to keep the bitches that are shooting at us safe from fire. He probably hit on the only fucking way there was to keep them from bolting the first time we shot back. Even so, they fled like the wind once we started to close and take some of them out." "How many did we kill?" Stinson asked. "Three bodies in the trenches that we took so far," Stu said. "There's also one towards the front that Lima's people hit when they were in that stupid-ass shootout with the group that was running away." He shook his head in disgust. "I still can't believe that he stood there and shot at them when he could have just gone around the other side of the hill and hit them from close range. I'm going to demote his ass for that. Make him a Goddamn private again and put him on point." Stinson looked at him with unmasked contempt. "I wouldn't be too hard on him," he said. "Sometimes its kind of difficult to make rational decisions when people are shooting at you and killing your men. Especially as tired as we all are." Stu wasn't buying this. "That's what our job is," he said. "And I expect better decisions than that. First he loses his golden opportunity, and then he gets half of his fucking men shot by that Goddamn chopper. Jesus, what a moron." Stinson dismissed the subject of Lima, having passed the point where he really gave a shit. "What about the chopper?" he asked instead. "What do you think was up with that weird shit it was doing?" They had all seen the Garden Hill helicopter climb up to altitude and go into a very wide circle around the battle area and the town. After circling for several minutes, it had straightened out and then tried to hover, but had not been able to. For a moment it seemed that the thing was going to spin out of control and come crashing to the ground. But then it had sped back up and began to circle again. Finally, it had slowed up once more, going into a shaky looking hover for a few moments, and then had turned to the south and disappeared from sight. "I think that one of Lima's guys managed to hit it," Stu said. "Obviously the thing was having some sort of mechanical problem that they were trying to deal with. Maybe the tail got hit or maybe one of the controls is out. Either way, it looked like they were having a lot of trouble keeping the thing under control. They might not have even been able to land it. My guess is that that chopper is out of the fight whether it landed or not, and good fucking riddance. We'll have a much easier time taking that town if they don't have a means of seeing us when we advance or dropping that napalm on us." "Taking the town?" Stinson asked. "You still think we have a shot at that? I lost twenty-eight men charging this trench. How many did Lima lose?" Stu shook his head again. "That asshole lost thirty-eight, including the five that the chopper took out. That leaves him with eighteen. Obviously we'll have to combine forces into one large attack." Stinson did some mental addition - something that wasn't terribly easy considering his fatigue level. "That means we have forty-six men to make an assault," he said once he had the figure. "That's less than I had to take this one trench." "Don't forget the ten able bodies from my covering platoon," Stu reminded him. "That brings us back up to fifty-six again. That should be more than enough to take the town now that we've cleared the trenches out. The rest should be pretty much a cakewalk, especially considering the fact that they won't have the chopper any more to help direct them." "You don't think they have any more trenches?" Stinson asked doubtfully. Stu scoffed at the very notion. "It takes time to build a trench like this," he said. "Especially if your workers are a bunch of bitches. What do you think they did, spent the last month digging fucking trenches on every Goddamn hill around the town?" He shook his head condescendingly. "No, they only could've done this on the first line on the most likely approaches. We just made the mistake of advancing through the easiest area. That's the disadvantage to not having air assets - you can't recon shit like this." "So we're going forward again?" Stinson asked. "Of course we are," Stu said forcefully. "There's no other option. And now that that chopper is damaged, there's a good chance we might be able to capture it and our friend Brett intact. If we're lucky, the chopper will be repairable and we'll be able to use it for ourselves." "If we're lucky," Stinson echoed, sighing as he said it. "What about the men? They've been through an awful lot. I'm not sure they're... well... motivated to try this again." "They'll do what the fuck they're told or they'll be shot on the spot," Stu said roughly. "Now let's start shifting everyone over to here. We'll reorganize again and then we'll start to move in ninety minutes from now. And just to show everyone that the worst is over, I will personally lead this assault." ------- It took Steve about ten minutes to put the doors back on the helicopter - about five minutes faster than it usually took Brett and Jason working together to do it. While he was doing that Jason drove the fuel truck over and filled up the helicopter's tank with fresh jet fuel. Brett continued to sit in the pilot's seat while all of this was going on. His knee was still screaming at him quite loudly but he tried his best to ignore it as he talked on the radio to his field commanders. "The last look I got of them," he told them on the VHF band, "they were still scattered around pretty good. They were in possession of the two outside trench complexes but the original group near the rear was still back there. You guys mauled them pretty good, probably fifty percent casualties. It'll be at least an hour, maybe more, before they can regroup and try again." "I copy, Brett," Matt, the commander of the ground forces, replied. "We're all in position now and we're expecting our replacements out here soon. Confirming they're on their way?" "They just left five minutes ago," Brett assured him. "Chrissie's squad lost two of their weapons during the final pullback so I only sent out enough to cover every gun. I loaded them up with extra ammo though." "Good," Matt said. "We should be all right as long as they attack us on somewhat the same path as before. We're pretty well spread out here. It would be nice if we could get you back in the air for us before that happens though. It's not real fun down here not knowing what they're doing." "We're going to be leaving for a wounded run in just a few minutes," Brett assured him, leaving out the part about how Jason was going to be flying. "With any luck we'll be back within forty-five to an hour. That should get us overhead again before they can make their next attack. If not, you're just going to have to wing it. Do you think you're up for it?" "I guess I'll have to be," Matt said. "I'll talk to you when you get back." "Good luck to you," Brett said. "Not that you'll need it." Before he could sign off, Chrissie came on the air. "Brett," she said. "How are you doing? How's your leg?" "I'm hanging in here," he told her, putting a note of nonchalance into his tone. "Don't worry about me. Just worry about keeping those assholes back." "Is the bleeding stopped?" she asked, insisting upon worrying about him. "Will you be able to fly okay?" "Paul wrapped me up nice and tight," Brett answered. "And I can guarantee that the flight won't bother it any worse than it's being bothered now. Just put me out of your mind. I'll be back overhead soon." "Copy," she said slowly. It was obvious that she could sense something was not right but she mentioned it no further. "And no more heroics," he told her sternly. "No more heroics," she agreed. No sooner had Jason finished the fueling process than Paul and his helpers began to bring the wounded out. They were wheeled one by one across the parking lot on the homemade gurney. Rhonda was the first one. She was barely conscious, obviously well doped-up, and had a large bandage over her chest. Her breathing was very ragged and sounded very wet, her face was pale, almost ashen in color. An IV had been started on her and was running down into her arm. Since there was not room for three people to lie down in the back, she was forced into a sitting position against the back wall. Megan Flitcroff was next. She was even worse looking than Rhonda. Megan had been shot in the center of her chest during the first stages of the assault on Matt's position. Though it seemed her lungs had been spared, some vital organ or vessel had been severed somewhere in there. She was completely unconscious, her breathing fast and shallow. Two IVs had been installed in her arms and Paul had already run in three liters of fluid in a vain attempt to keep her blood pressure above 80/20. She was forced, by virtue of her lack of consciousness of any kind, to lie down on the floor. It was somewhat cramped and her feet ended up between the two front seats. The last gravely wounded person to be loaded up was Sarah, Steve's wife. She had taken one in the right side of her chest and, like Rhonda, was obviously suffering from a collapsing lung in addition to blood loss from internal damage. She was fully conscious but having considerable trouble with her breathing. Her pale skin was soaked in sweat and her chest heaved up and down with the effort of respiration. She had an IV as well and she also had a catheter in her chest to help relieve the pressure that was building up from the leaking air. Steve, who had been standing in the background until this point, rushed over and wept over her as she was loaded up. "I'll... be... okay..." she panted to him, kissing his face and offering him a hug. "A little... trip... to... the doctor... is all." "I'll see you later," he said, sniffing as he returned the hug. "Do you understand?" "I do," she said. "And I will. That's a promise." Sarah, like Rhonda, was forced up against the back of the chopper in a sitting position. Steve gave her one last kiss and then allowed the door to be closed upon them. "All right," Brett said, looking at Paul and Jason, who were standing outside in the rain. "I guess it's my turn." "I guess it is," Paul said. Paul, Jason, and Steve, all working together, carefully lifted him out of the right side seat and carried him around the nose of the aircraft to the front. He screamed a few times as his leg was jostled up and down during the trip and a few more as they maneuvered him into the observer's chair. Paul used a pillow to prop up his leg in the most comfortable position but even so the pain was tremendous. "War sucks," Brett said through gritted teeth as Jason climbed into the pilot's seat. "Give me your arm," Paul told him from just outside the door. "I'll give you a little something for the pain." "Now you're talking," Brett said, handing over his left arm. Paul wrapped a rubber tourniquet around his bicep and tied it off, causing the vein in his elbow to poke up invitingly. He pulled an alcohol swab package from his pocket and ripped it open, discarding the wrapper and using the pungent smelling swab to rub the vein. He then produced a capped syringe from a fanny pack on his waist. He pulled off the cap and dropped it to the ground. A small needle on the end of the syringe gleamed up at him. He poked the needle into Brett's arm, just over the top of the vein, and a moment later some of his blood could be seen swirling into the clear liquid inside of the syringe, clouding it. "Okay," Paul said, "I'm in the vein. You should be feeling better in just a moment." With that, he slowly pushed the plunger on the syringe and injected the contents. "This is eight milligrams of morphine," he told him. "As much as I dare give you. It won't make you completely comfortable but it'll take the edge off and let you still stay awake and alert enough to make decisions and give instructions." "Whatever helps," Brett told him. Already he could feel the medicine coursing through his body, making him a little dizzy, relaxing him. "Damn, that shit works fast." "Nothing like IV push," Paul told him. "All right. I've done what I can for you." "You're a good man," Brett said. "But we need to get going. Get everyone well clear of the area." "Right," Paul replied. "See you in a bit." "Damn right you will." By the time Paul had pulled everyone away from the helicopter and back inside the community center, the morphine was up to nearly full effect in Brett's body. As Paul had told him, it didn't take the pain away, didn't make him completely comfortable. Instead, he just didn't seem to care about the pain as much. The swimming sensation in his head made it seem like more of an annoyance than a living thing. "All right," Brett said, looking over at Jason. "You ready to fly?" "I'm ready," Jason assured him nervously. "Then let's do it. Go through the engine start procedure and get the rotor turning." Jason flipped the proper switches and then engaged the starter, going through the motions mechanically and with confidence. This part he had done many times before. The turbine engine, still quite warm from the earlier flight, flared immediately to life, making the vehicle vibrate almost comfortingly. Jason then disengaged the rotor clutch, allowing the blades to begin spinning above them. "So far, so good," Brett told him. "Now go through the abbreviated pre-flight check real quick and then we'll lift off." Jason nodded and then began going through the checklist one by one. He called out each item as he checked it and then confirmed it's operational status. This was also something that he had done many times in the past and it took him less than two minutes to accomplish. "We're ready," he said when he was done, now starting to feel real nervousness. Was this really a good idea? Brett didn't allow himself to have second thoughts. "Then let's go," he said. "Keep the cyclic and the collective neutralized and throttle up to one hundred percent." "Throttling up," Jason said, turning the knob on the collective all the way up. The whine of the engine increased greatly, as did the vibration of the cabin. The needle on the RPM dial swung upward and stopped just below the red zone. The rotor blades became a blur above them. "Now push the collective gently forward," Brett told him next. "And I mean gently. We'll lift up into the air once the blades bite into it. Remember, the moment that the skids leave the ground, you'll have major torque to deal with. Push down on the right pedal as soon as we go up, about two inches, slowly. That oughtta keep us under control at least. You'll have to monkey back and forth until you find the neutral position." "Okay," Jason said, stuttering a little, he was so nervous. "Here I go." Slowly, as he had been told, he pushed forward on the parking-brake like lever to the left of his seat. As he did so, the angle of the rotor blades was changed, creating lift. The vehicle began to shudder as the force of gravity was countered and then, after an agonizing five seconds, it lifted up, the skids breaking contact with the ground. Immediately and violently the back end tried to swing in opposition to the rotor. "Right pedal," Brett barked, feeling the swing. Jason pushed down about two inches, dampening but not entirely killing the torque. The rear end continued to spin around as the helicopter reached the top of the ground effect and stopped there, unable to lift any more. "Get this thing stable," Brett said, watching Jason's every move. "Hurry up. There isn't a margin for error here." Jason pushed the two pedals up and down for a moment as they hovered three feet above the ground. He overcompensated the first time, sending them spinning in the other direction. He then overcompensated for his overcompensation, sending them spinning back the other way. "Easy," Brett told him, feeling adrenaline shooting through him despite the relaxing effects of the morphine. "You're pushing the pedals down too hard. Remember what I told you. Gentle movements. It's almost like you just think about doing it and it's done." Jason, his face sweaty, his pupils dilated from his own adrenaline rush, stopped pushing down so hard. Gradually he was able to get control of the spinning motion and arrest it, leaving them in a three-foot hover facing the community center. The faces of Paul, Steve, and several others could be seen peering out through the windows in front. "Very good," Brett said, taking a few deep breaths. "Now try to get the feel of this thing for a minute. If we were having formal lessons, I'd have you do this for an hour or so, but since we aren't, we'll only spare a minute. Spin us back and forth by using the pedals. Turn us around in a circle, both ways, and stop us right where we are now." Jason did this, holding the three-foot hover and pushing the pedals back and forth, allowing the aircraft to spin slowly around in a circle and then back again. The motions were jerky at first, almost nauseatingly so, but very quickly - quicker even than Brett had the first time he'd taken a trainer helicopter up so many years before - the young man got the hang of it. Within a minute he was able to spin them around and stop them on a particular compass heading and then spin them back the other way and do it again. "Very good," Brett said, obviously impressed. "You have an uncanny way of getting a feel for it." "All those years of playing computer games and PlayStation," Jason said, giving them another spin to the right. "That, and the unnatural reaction times of the young," Brett said. "Anyway, this portion of the lesson is over. Let's get ourselves up in the air now, shall we?" "Let's do it." "Okay," Brett said. "It gets a little tricky here. I want you to push gently on the collective again, just a little bit more, okay? We'll go straight up slowly. Once you get out of the ground effect, you're going to be dealing with more torque, so get ready to compensate for it." "Right," Jason said, bracing himself. He slowly pushed the collective forward, causing the blades to bite harder into the air and produce more lift. They moved upward haltingly, the back end trying to spin again as more torque was created. Jason, ready for it, countered it smoothly by pushing on the pedals. They spun less than two degrees before he had them stable. They continued to rise slowly into the rainy sky, clearing the roof of the community center, the ground dropping away beneath them. The altimeter wound its way upward, the dial spinning clockwise. "Beautiful," Brett said, relaxing his grip on his seat a little. "You're doing very well. Take us up to 5000 feet and then we'll start playing with the cyclic. In the meantime, get us on the heading for Cameron Park." As they continued to rise into the air, Jason manipulated the pedals so that they spun around. He watched the compass as they turned, arresting the spin when it reached 234 degrees - the course to the Cameron Park Airport. He had to fine tune just a bit to achieve the exact heading and, so intent upon this was he, that he didn't notice his altitude passing over 5000 feet. "You're getting too high," Brett said. "Ease up on the collective a bit." He eased up too much, not just stopping their climb but actually dropping them back down a bit. He adjusted without being told, bringing them back up. He never did get them stabilized on the exact altitude before Brett started him on the next phase of the flight. "Don't worry about it," Brett said. "You're close enough. Let's put on some speed, shall we? Now remember what I told you, everything that you do with the controls has an effect on some other control that will require compensation. When you push the cyclic forward..." "Torque will change and lift will change," Jason finished for him, reciting one of the lessons he had been given time and time again. "Correct," Brett said. "So get ready to counter them. And remember: gentle movements. Handle those controls softer than you do Stacy and Tina's tits. You get it?" "I get it," Jason said with a nervous grin. "Here we go." He pushed forward on the cyclic, changing the angle of the rotor ever so slightly. The nose of the helicopter dipped down a little and they began to move forward through the air, slowly picking up speed. As Brett had told him it would, the torque eased up, trying to spin the back end around, and their altitude tried to drop as some of the lift was reduced. Jason pulled back on the collective and eased up on the anti-torque pedal. The forces stabilized and they remained more or less on course and at altitude. "You're flying, my man," Brett said, proud of his student despite the effects of the morphine and the pain beneath. "You're actually flying." "Goddamn if I'm not," Jason said, his grin as wide as it ever got. Brett had him slowly pick up speed until they were moving at nearly ninety knots. They shot over the canyon and over the rugged terrain south of it, heading towards the airport where the helicopter had once been housed. Jason had a little trouble at first keeping them at a steady altitude but, as he had with controlling the torque, he picked it up with uncanny quickness. It wasn't long before the airport and the devastated town surrounding it was looming before them. "Okay," Brett said, "there's Highway 50 up ahead. Now it's time you learned to bank." "Turn right to 270, right?" Jason asked. "That's right," Brett agreed. "Banking is different than turning with the anti-torque pedals. It's a lot easier to get out of control if you do it wrong. Just ease the cyclic to the right and the aircraft will start to bank. It will continue to increase the bank as long as you hold it away from the neutral position. If you keep it there too long and bank us too much, we'll lose all of our lift and go spinning to the ground, so don't do that." "Don't do that," Jason repeated. "Right." "And again, you'll have to compensate for the loss of lift during the bank with the collective and then decompensate once the turn is complete. So be ready to that. You shouldn't have to worry much about the pedals at this speed however." Jason performed the bank very well. If anything, he was a little too gentle with the controls, shooting them well beyond the landmark of Highway 50 and then having to bring them back. He countered the ups and downs of lift fairly well but had a little trouble getting them back on their course. This was all very well however since it allowed him some precious practice banking back and forth. At last they were at a steady altitude flying directly over the lanes of the four-lane highway (when it wasn't washed out by mudslides that is). In a matter of minutes they saw the hills guarding El Dorado Hills coming up before them. "Slow up your airspeed to about sixty knots," Brett told him. "And start a gentle descent down to 2000 feet. Again, remember to compensate for your forces." "Right," Jason said, pulling back on the cyclic and the collective. As they did their jerky descent towards their neighboring township, Brett dialed up the radio frequency that matched the one on the portable they had given the town. When he was sure that they had been spotted approaching by the guard positions, he began to hail. It took only a few seconds before he was answered. "This is Pat," said a male voice that both Brett and Jason recognized. "Is this Brett I'm talking to?" "Yes it is," Brett agreed. "We're approaching your town with three badly wounded women from the battle. Request permission to land in the usual spot." "Permission granted," Pat answered. "I'll get the medical team scrambling and we'll meet you at the LZ." "Uh... it might be a better idea," Brett told him, "if you kept everyone inside until after we touch down. You see, I've been wounded as well and Jason, my student, is flying the helicopter at the moment. He's never flown before, including never having landed." The pause was almost comically long. Brett could picture Pat down there in the school building mulling that one over, perhaps wondering if he had heard correctly. "I see," Pat finally answered, not asking any further. "We'll keep everyone indoors until you're down." "I think it would be for the best," Brett told them. "We should be down shortly." Shortly turned out to be almost ten minutes. Jason handled the descent and the slowing aspect of the landing very well, bringing them to less than six hundred feet above the LZ and less than thirty knots of airspeed, but the challenge of the tight turns and lining up with the landing zone proved to be frustratingly hard. He overshot three times and undershot twice before he was able to get them onto the correct angle of attack at the right point in the parking lot. Brett encouraged him gently during this process, never yelling at him, talking almost soothingly the entire time. Finally he got them down to three feet above the parking lot only thirty feet from where he had intended to touch down. He successfully pulled into a shaky hover and then let the skids thump down after a final twist of the tail from the torque. "We're down," Brett said, letting out an exhalation of air. "The eagle has landed Goddammit!" Jason was able to say nothing for a moment. He was too keyed up. Brett had to remind him to neutralize the controls and throttle down. "Keep us idling," Brett told him when he finally did this. "I want to head back to town as soon as they get our people unloaded." "You bet," Jason agreed, wiping his sweaty face. The moment the rotor slowed down to idle speed, Pat, Renee, and several of the other townspeople came rushing out, pushing their gurney before them. They reached the helicopter and opened up the side door, the others making way for Renee to stick her head in. She didn't even glance at Jason or Brett, didn't acknowledge them in any way. Instead, she began examining her patients, giving them a quick look to determine severity. "They all look pretty bad," she said, touching each of them with her hands. "Let me do a quick triage to see who we take out first." She homed right in on Megan, frowning as she shook her a little by the shoulder. When this elicited no response she picked up her arm and felt for a pulse. Another frown resulted and she then felt at the neck. "Is she dead?" Jason asked, watching all of this with alarm. "Not quite," Renee said. "She has a bradycardic pulse - only about thirty. Her breathing is almost completely absent." She paused for a moment, her face serious. "She won't make it. She's probably already suffered brain damage." She turned to her team. "We'll triage her as a black." They nodded solemnly while she began looking at Rhonda. "A black?" Jason asked. "What does that mean?" "It means there's nothing that can be done for her," she said. "But you said she's still alive!" he cried in protest. "For the moment," Renee said, her voice a little kinder now. "But if I waste time trying to treat someone who has virtually no chance of recovery, one of these other people, who probably will make it, could die." "But..." "Jason," Brett said, putting his arm on him. "It's okay. That's the way battlefield medicine works. Let her do her job." Jason most definitely didn't like it, but he kept the rest of his opinions to himself. Renee decided after examining the other two semi-conscious women that Sarah was the worst of the two. Once this decision was made, her team moved quickly into action, pulling her out of the cramped confines of the helicopter and onto their gurney. Sarah moaned as her body thumped down onto the small bed. "Did Paul put in the chest catheter?" Renee asked, examining it. "I'm not sure," Brett said. "I would assume so." "Tell him he saved her life," she said. "She would've been dead some time ago if not for that." She turned to her team. "Get her into the operating room and have the surgery team prep her. Tell them that I'll be in shortly. As soon as you drop her off, get back out here and get this one." "Rhonda," Rhonda croaked, her eyes creaking open. "My name is Rhonda." "Right," Renee said absently, not really wanting to know her patient's name. "Rhonda. She'll be next." Her team moved off, leaving her and Pat standing there beside the chopper. "And how about you?" Renee asked Brett, looking at the bandage on his knee. "How bad are you?" "My knee is pretty much shot - literally," he said. "But I'll be okay for a while. Paul shot me up with some morphine and got my leg nice and stabilized for me." "You want us to get you inside?" she asked. "It'll be some time before I get around to..." "No," Brett said. "The battle is at a pretty critical phase right now and Jason here is not quite ready to solo. I need to stay here." "Can't run the show without you huh?" Pat asked. "Maybe they can," he said, "but I would just assume they didn't. Besides, there are other wounded back home that are worse than I am." "How many?" "Five more," Brett said. "Mostly arm, leg, or shoulder wounds according to Paul. Nothing immediately critical." Renee nodded, seeming to feel a little overwhelmed for a moment but then catching herself. "How is the battle going?" Pat wanted to know. "Are you winning? Losing?" "We're winning," Brett said. "There have been two engagements so far, starting this morning. I've been directing from the air while our forces have been in the trenches they've dug. We've chewed them up pretty bad thanks to the ammo you folks gave us. I'd say we've killed or badly wounded at least a hundred of them, maybe more. They're down to around sixty men." "Sixty men out of four hundred?" Pat asked incredulously. "Most of that was on the march," Jason said. "That's right," Brett said. "They came at us this morning with considerably less than 200. We've shot them, napalmed them, strafed them, and machine gunned them every time they tried to advance." He explained a little bit more about the particulars of the battle, glossing over his own heroic though ill-advised dive upon the attacking troops, concentrating instead upon the bravery displayed by those in the trenches. "Simply amazing," Pat said, seemingly in awe. "Remind us never to start a war with you folks." "You don't have to worry about that," Brett said. "When this shit is over with I'm hoping we'll be able to retire from the war business." "But it's not over yet?" Renee asked. "Not yet," Brett said. "They don't have a chance in hell of taking us now but it looked to me like they were gathering for another try anyway when we left." "So there might be more wounded?" Brett sighed. "There might be," he agreed. "But maybe I'll be able to persuade them of the futility of their actions." "How would you do that?" Pat asked. "I'll try talking to them," Brett said. "What can it hurt?" ------- Rhonda was pulled out of the chopper a few minutes later and whisked inside the building by the medical team. Renee bid Jason and Brett good luck and farewell and then went off to begin the surgery on her patients. In the back of the helicopter Megan's heart had finally wound down to a stop, as had her breathing. She lay there lifeless, her IV's still installed in her arms. Pat gave her a sad look and then shook hands with both Jason and Brett, wishing them luck. "We'll see you later," he told them. "Go kick some ass." "Thanks, Pat," Brett said. He closed his door and then watched as Pat headed back for the school building. When he was gone he looked over at Jason. "Let's get back," he said. "Same drill as before, lift-off, stabilize in the ground effect, and then go up a thousand feet before you put on forward speed." Jason nodded, giving one last glance at the dead body behind him and then throttling up. His take-off and ascent was much smoother this time, not quite up to professional standards of course, but not bad either. He raised them up and spun them around to a 90 degree heading before putting on the speed. Soon they were at 5000 feet once again and heading at 110 knots back to Cameron Park. His bank over the airport, bringing them to the return heading of 54 degrees, was also a vast improvement over the first time. He only overshot his compass heading once before putting it right on the dial. "You keep this up," Brett said, still feeling the morphine working on him, "and you're gonna put me out of a job." "Oh, I think I'll need you around for a few more days at least," Jason said in all seriousness. Brett had him ascend even higher as they headed towards the canyon, instructing him to level off at or about 6000 feet. As soon as they were in radio range of the town, Brett keyed up the radio. "Brett to Garden Hill, is anyone out there?" he asked. An ecstatic sounding Paul answered up first. "You made it!" he said happily. "You actually made it there and back!" "We did," Brett agreed, smiling at Jason. "Did you ever have any doubts?" "Of course not," Paul replied. "Fuckin liar," Jason said good-naturedly. "How was the mission?" Paul asked him. "Any problems in El Dorado?" "Well," Brett said, "we lost Megan on the way. Rhonda and Sarah are still hanging in there and are with the doctor now. How are things going here?" Matt came up on the frequency and handled that one. "No contact yet," he told Brett. "We're all in position and just waiting. We don't have a visual on them and we're not really sure what, if anything, they're doing." "Copy," Brett said. "We're gonna head out over the battle area before we land to have a look at what's happening. ETA is about four minutes or so. We'll update you then." "We're standing by," Matt said. They passed over the canyon still moving at 110 knots. Thirty seconds later the town flashed below them. Brett had Jason slow up as they came up on the battle area. He leaned forward and peered out at the hills, trying to spot the friendlies and the non-friendlies. As he looked, he pulled out the map and unfolded it on his lap. "Ten knots," Jason said, struggling a little with the controls but keeping them generally at the assigned altitude and heading. "Good lad," Brett said. "Try to pull a hover if you can. Keep your eyes on the instruments while you do it. You have no reason to look outside." "Right," Jason said, making the adjustments and bleeding off the rest of his speed. Brett spotted the friendly forces right away, finding them exactly where he had left them, spread throughout the trenches just south of the first battle area. It took him a few more seconds to find the enemy but at last he spotted the telltale figures of men among the brown and green landscape. They were a quarter mile to the south of the main concentration of Garden Hill forces, gathered loosely behind a row of hills. It appeared they were massing for an attack. Brett compared their current location with the features on his map. He traced routes back and forth for a moment and then came to a decision. He keyed up his radio. "Matt, they're massing for an attack in grid foxtrot 6. It looks like the entire group is there - all that can walk anyway. It appears that they're doing weapons loading right now. A bunch of them are sitting in circles. We need to shift forces to counter them." "I copy," Matt said. "Just give the word." "You're platoon is fine where they are," he said. "You'll catch the right flank of their advance from your position. Chrissie, you need to move your people over to trenches 41 and 43. That'll put you on their left flank. You can concentrate heavily over there since we're dealing with a one pronged advance." "I copy trenches 41 and 43," Chrissie said a moment later. "We're moving now. And it's good to hear your voice again." "Thanks," Brett said absently. "Michelle, you there?" "Right here," she answered up. "Shift your people over to trenches 38 and 39. That'll put you dead center of their advance if they go the way I'm thinking they will. Once you've all shifted, we're going to land and pick up another egg." "I copy 38 and 39," she told him. "And I'm glad to hear you back again too." Brett watched for a moment as his orders were carried out. As before it looked like ants leaving their nest and moving to another. And also, as before, they moved off to the south first in order to keep their shift a secret from the enemy. "Paul," Brett said into the radio. "Are you still with me?" "I'm still with you," he answered up. "Get Steve to get an egg ready for me, will you? We'll be coming down in another minute or two. And also, will you dig up Sherrie and ask her if she's ready to have a little more fun? I'll understand if she doesn't, but we really could use her up here." "Copy that," Paul said. "We'll see you on the ground. How are you doing? Do you need another shot?" "I'm cool for now. Just get everything ready." He unkeyed the microphone and looked over at Jason. "Well," he said. "Shall we try another landing lesson?" ------- Two weeks of firing back at hit and run attacks and night runs by the helicopter, combined with the desertions of many of their supply carriers and finally, two bloody attacks on the Garden Hill positions, had left the remaining militia nearly out of ammunition. The supplies on hand for the automatic and semi-automatics had been the most critical, leaving less than a single full magazine per bearer when it was all divided up. This amount, as well as the also critically low rifle ammunition supply, had been boosted a little by the stripping of the dead and wounded from the first two engagements. That had yielded nearly a thousand additional rounds total, which sounded like a lot but really wasn't when it was distributed among fifty-six people. "If we don't do this quick," Stinson told Stu, "we're going to be hitting them with our guns instead of shooting them with them." "Don't worry," Stu had assured him, trying (and not succeeding very well) to project confidence. "We'll take them quick. They'll scatter like rabbits now that they don't have the safety of their trenches to hide in. And remember, they're probably almost out of ammunition as well. Remember how much that bitch of yours told us they had? She was one of their leaders so she should have known. At the rate they've been firing at us I don't see how they can have much left." "No," Stinson was forced to agree, "I don't imagine that they do. Unless they found another supply somewhere." "Where the hell would they find more ammo?" Stu scoffed. "It's not like they can drive down to the fuckin gun shop and pick some up now, is it?" "I guess not," Stinson said. And now, just as they were finishing up the loading of their weapons and magazines and about to form up into their new squads (their fourth reorganization of the day), another prediction of Stu's was proven wrong. The helicopter, which Stu had been counting as a casualty, had reappeared in the sky above them. True it had seemed to be flying just a little strangely, as if it was somehow more difficult to control, but there it was, hovering two thousand feet up once again. "Don't worry about it," Stu barked at the men when they started grumbling about it. "It doesn't matter anymore, you pussies! Don't you get it? They've lost! We've chased them out of their trenches and now all that fucking chopper is going to be able to do is direct those bitches into our gun sights. It'll be doing us a fucking favor!" And though his speech did very little to alleviate fear or to instill confidence, it shifted the balance just enough to stave off an open rebellion for the moment. When Stu barked the order to form up a minute later, the men, Stinson included, obeyed him. It was as they were establishing the new chain of command and assigning radio sets to the various leaders that the helicopter suddenly turned on its heels and began a shaky descent to the ground, finally disappearing over the hills a few minutes later. Everyone watched it go. No one, Stu included, commented on it. All had a pretty good idea what it was going to pick up. ------- Jason only had to come around again twice before he was able to set the aircraft down in the community center parking lot. And the landing zone he ended up in was only twenty feet away from where he'd intended to land. "You're getting better," Brett told him, clapping him on the shoulder as he idled back the engine. "Pretty soon you'll be flying circles around me." "Every landing is a good landing, right?" Jason asked, still trembling from the adrenaline rush that setting them down had caused. "That's the gospel," Brett assured him. "I'm gonna go take a leak," Jason said, unstrapping his harness. "Maybe I'll throw up a little while I'm in there. Be right back." "Bring me an empty bottle when you come back," Brett told him as he opened the door. "A big one." "An empty bottle?" Jason asked. "What for?" "Pretty soon I'm going to have to take a leak too," he answered. "I see," Jason said, flushing a little. He closed the door and headed off towards the community center at a jog. Brett opened his own door to let in some of the fresh air while Steve Kensington and his crew came over with their handcart, a fresh tank full of napalm resting on it. While the crew worked on installing the tank itself, Steve attacked the side doors with his wrench, removing them once again. He hardly looked at what he was doing as his hands loosened the bolts and pulled them free. He asked Brett about Sarah, his wife, and how she had fared on the flight over. Brett assured him that she had been doing well when they'd left, that she had been the first one taken into surgery. As they talked and as Steve worked, he kept glancing at the dead body of Megan, which was still lying in the cargo area, rapidly stiffening. Neither of them commented on it. Paul came out a minute later, leading Sherrie with her. They too took in the sight of Megan lying in the back. Paul looked sad while Sherrie, who was pale and drawn, made the sign of the cross. "You decided to go back up with us?" Brett asked her. "I almost didn't," she said, looking at him meaningfully. "But in the end... I knew that I had to. I'm the only one besides Paul that knows how to do this. And we can't very well spare Paul down here, can we?" "No," Brett said. "We can't. And don't worry too much. Jason flies pretty good for a rookie, and I promise we won't be doing any more dives down on the militia. Hell, if everything goes all right, we won't have to use this egg at all." "You have a plan?" Paul asked. "I wouldn't exactly call it a plan," Brett said. "Maybe a little psychological warfare will help though. I don't know their exact state of mind over there, but it can't be good. We've killed too many of them for it to be good. Maybe a few plain facts will push them over that edge." "You're going to talk to them?" "I'm going to talk to them," he said. "We know what frequency they're using. It's a simple matter of tuning our radio over to it and pushing the button. I'll give it a shot once we're back in the air." "It would be nice to think this thing will be over soon," Paul said. "It's been one long-ass day. It'll be even nicer to end it without anyone else ending up like poor Megan here." "Amen to that," Brett said. Jason came back out a minute later carrying an empty apple juice bottle he'd scrounged from their supply room (Garden Hill never threw containers away). He handed it over to Brett and then he, Paul, Sherrie, and Steve went about the distasteful task of removing the corpse from the helicopter. Without the time for a proper interment, and lacking any pomp and ceremony, they simply dragged her over to the storage room and put her inside. A puddle of blood, now congealed, marked the spot in which she had lain. Sherrie and Jason quickly wiped it up. The rope coil was brought back from the storage room once again and installed in the same manner it had been before. Steve was able to move a little faster this time and had the entire set-up ready for action within ten minutes. "You're ready to rock," he said, slapping the side of the helicopter. "Let's get back up there then," Brett told his crew. "Time's a wasting." Sherrie climbed back into her spot, giving a little shudder as she passed through the doorway that she had sworn a little more than an hour ago that she would never pass through again as long as she lived. She took her accustomed spot and grabbed tightly onto the bungee cords that held the rope coil in place. She made the sign of the cross once more and then put on her headset. Jason climbed back in the pilot's seat, strapping himself into place and putting on his own headset. He seemed a little more confident in himself as he made a check outside to make sure everyone had cleared the area. He turned to Brett who gave him a nod and a moment later he throttled up and took off. He found the handling of the machine to be noticeably different now that the doors had been removed and with the extra weight and drag of the napalm tank, but he was able to adjust to it very quickly. Following Brett's previous examples, he turned towards the canyon and climbed up to altitude over there, rising up to 6000 feet once again. He then turned back to the north, towards the battle area. Brett leaned forward as far as he could as they approached at 50 knots and finally slowed up to a hover. He saw that the militia was now formed up behind their hills and apparently ready to make their advance at any time. He turned the knob on the radio set in front of him to the citizen's band frequency and tuned in channel 24, which was the command frequency of the militia. ------- Stu was giving some last minute instructions on the coming attack to his squad leaders when the radio on his belt suddenly began to squawk with an unfamiliar voice. The squad leaders, who all had their radios set to the same frequency, heard it as well. Stu and everyone else listened in disbelief as they processed just what was being said. "This is the commander of the Garden Hill forces," said a male voice, "calling the commander of the Placer County Militia. Do you copy me? Please reply on this channel." Stu took his radio from his belt and looked at it for a moment, making no move to reply. Around him his men became silent, watching and listening to this new development, wondering just what it meant. The message came again, in the exact same words, and then once more. "Are you going to answer them?" Stinson asked, looking at Stu. "It's got to be some sort of trick," Stu said, feeling fearful for no good reason. "Hello down there," the voice said from the radio. "Anybody home? I know you can hear me. We've been monitoring your channel ever since the second day of your march. Why don't we talk? Maybe we can come to some arrangement that will prevent needless deaths. It's worth a shot, isn't it?" The voice sounded very calm, very reasonable, but unmistakably sure of itself. Stu did not want to answer it. "Maybe they want to surrender," someone suggested. He wasn't taken very seriously. "Come on," the voice chided now, as Stu continued to stand there, not doing anything. "You're all down there gathering up to attack us again. Obviously you're not cowards. Surely you're not afraid to talk to me, are you?" It was this ancient, schoolyard challenge that forced Stu's hand. Nobody called him a coward. He keyed up his radio. "This is the commander of the Placer County Militia forces," he said into it. "Who am I talking to? Is this the one they call Brett?" Stu figured that using the man's name would instill an advantage. He shortly found out that the name-dropping worked in both directions. "I'm glad you decided to talk," the voice said. "Yes, this is Brett Adams, commander of the Garden Hill forces. It would seem that you've been talking to Jessica Blakely. We heard that she made it to your town. And who am I addressing? Is this Bracken? I was told that Bracken was in charge of the group that would be making the march." Stu started a little at these words. How the hell had Adams known about Bracken? He fought to keep his voice calm and keyed the microphone again. "This is Lieutenant Covington," he said, "acting commander. Captain Bracken was killed during one of your night runs on us during the march. Who have you been talking to?" "We have our sources," Adams said mysteriously. "Covington huh? Would your first name be Stu? I've heard a few tales about you myself, particularly the group that you were part of prior to being absorbed into the militia." "Bracken's bitches," Stinson said upon hearing this. "Jean and Anna must've made it here. That's how they knew we were coming!" "Don't be fucking stupid," Stu barked. "There's no way those two bitches made it all the way here. They must have a spy or something in the town. Maybe that Jessica bitch has a radio transmitter or something." Stinson looked at him as if he were an idiot, not bothering to shield the expression. A radio transmitter? Did he really believe that? Was it that hard for him to accept the obvious, that Jean and Anna had successfully escaped the town and made it here intact? Stu, somewhat shaken by the exchange, decided to change the subject, to try to regain the advantage in the conversation. He keyed up the microphone again. "I believe," he said, "that you made the acquaintance of some of my men back in the woods a few days after the comet. That you killed them and took their weapons." "I prevented them from raping a young girl and killing her brother," Adams replied. "But that's neither here nor there. The past is the past and the future is now. Why don't we talk about your future, Mr. Covington?" "Why don't we?" Stu agreed. "As you can see, we're preparing to launch another attack. Are you offering to surrender? If so, it will have to be unconditional before we accept it." Adams was laughing as he came back on the air - actually laughing. "You are very amusing, Mr. Covington," he said, still chuckling a little. "It's been a while since I've had a good laugh. I thank you for that. Now, let's get serious, shall we? What I am offering you is the chance to back out of this attack and return to your town with your lives intact. Here are the terms we are offering. You drop your rifles and head back to the interstate. You may take your pistols for self-protection on the march back home. If you do this right now and start heading back to Auburn, we will not harass you in any way on your return. We will even leave a supply of canned food along the highway to sustain you if you are short of that staple. If you persist in this attack, you will fail miserably and, when you finally give up, we will hound the survivors as you try to make your way home. We will do this night and day, from the ground and from the air until every last one of you is dead. That's the offer. Give up now and leave in peace, or try to push forward and be slaughtered." The men all tittered nervously as they heard this. More than one of them expressed the idea that it sounded quite reasonable to them. Stu barked at them to shut the fuck up. They did so only reluctantly. Once he had quiet again, he keyed up. "Nice try, Adams," he said. "I understand that you're a military man and a former pig. You've probably bluffed a thousand dumb thugs with your little speeches in the past. I, however, do not bluff so easily. Your trenches were a very effective defense of your town and I must commend you. They were well constructed and they almost did the job that they were meant to do. Almost. But, as you can see, we have pushed your bitches out of them. I know and you know that there is nothing stopping us from marching to your wall and inside your town now. You might be able to put your bitches in front of us to snipe at us from time to time, but they will not be able to stand up in the face of my highly trained troops." The men, despite their cynicism, their fatigue, and their defeatist attitude, actually responded to this speech. There were several cheers at Stu's words, several hands raised in clenched fists. Apparently there was a little pride left in there somewhere. "I hate to tell you this, Covington," Adams' voice replied, "but you are wrong. I won't tell you that I don't bluff, because I do, but in this circumstance, I am not. I'm going to break a little rule of military logic now in the interests of wrapping up this war between us up. Ordinarily, you never let your enemy know what your defenses are like, but in this case, I'm going to make an exception. As you may have guessed by now, two of your women made their way from Auburn to our town. Jean and Anna are their names." "Goddammit, I told you!" Stinson said angrily. "Those fucking bitches made it here!" "He's bluffing," Stu said, although not as self-assuredly as before. "Bluffing?" Stinson asked, taking a step forward. "How the fuck could he be bluffing? He knows their names!" "We probably said them on the radio at some point," Stu replied. "They've been monitoring us." "Oh for Christ's sake," Stinson said, shaking his head in disgust. "These two women," Adams' voice continued, "have told us very much about your town. You were dumb enough to discuss your attack plans in front of them and they provided us with considerable intelligence. We knew you were planning to come at us with four hundred men divided into three companies of one hundred twenty apiece and a reserve platoon of forty. We knew this long before you even left the town. The moment we found out that an attack of that size was imminent, we began to prepare for it. Since that day we have had work crews out in the hills around town digging trenches and fortifying them with sandbags. We have over a hundred of them total, on all sides of the town, layered all the way from the first line you encountered to the wall. Inside of the wall we have more trenches as well as mine fields surrounding our community center. You see Stu, we were prepared to fight off all four hundred of you, perhaps minus a few from our hit and run attacks. You have what? Maybe sixty men there that are capable of fighting? Your army is now a sad joke. We have air superiority, napalm, and the ability to shift our forces into prepared positions in your path no matter what path you decide to take. You cannot defeat us. Further advances will only lead to more death, mostly on your side." The men began to titter again as they listened to him. Could it be true? Could what this man was saying possibly be the truth? Did they really have more trenches in front of them, enough so that no matter where they decided to attack from, they would have to fight through prepared positions? "He's bluffing!" Stu yelled, hearing the doubtful mutters, seeing the doubtful faces. "Don't you see what he's doing? He's trying to psych you out! He knows they don't have a chance against us so he's trying to get us to give up." "What if he's not bluffing?" someone asked. Choruses of agreement met this question. "There is no way in hell that they have more than one set of trenches!" Stu assured them. "It's impossible! There's no way those bitches could have dug that many! No fucking way!" "Are you still there, Stu?" Adams asked. "Do the smart thing and put down your arms. There's no reason for anyone else to die. If you head back today and follow the highway, you can be back home in a little more than a week. You can sleep tonight knowing that no one is going to attack you. Wouldn't that feel nice? To get a full night's sleep?" "Thanks, but no thanks," Stu said toughly into the radio. "But I'll counter your offer with my original one. If you unconditionally surrender, we won't kill anyone else. Take it or leave it." "I guess we'll have to leave it then," Adams told him, a tinge of regret in his tone. "Apparently you are not able to see reality. For those of you in the militia that are listening in to this conversation, please keep in mind that you have a choice as well. If you choose to follow the man you're following and go forth with this attack, you will die. Once you move forward from that line, the offer is off the table. We will throw you back and then pursue you until you are all dead. We've already killed more than three hundred of you. Don't think for a moment that we will hesitate to kill the rest. After all, you came here with the intent of doing harm to us, of stealing from us. It's not too late to live. If you move forward, it will be." Adams said no more. The men, having heard his final message, forgot all about the brief flash of patriotism that they'd shown. It was clear that most of them believed what they had heard. Stu knew that he was edging into a very precarious position. "Listen, you guys," he said to them, projecting his voice so that everyone could hear him. "He's bluffing us. How many times do I have to tell you that? Think about what he's saying for a minute. If he really had the trenches and the firepower that he's boasting about, why would he have told us about them? Why? Why wouldn't he just let us come on and then slaughter us? That is what makes the most sense militarily. If he's telling the truth, he has absolutely nothing to gain by letting us off the hook. Nothing! The only thing that makes sense is that he's trying to convince us to surrender at the last moment to avoid the capture that he knows is otherwise imminent!" The men looked at each other, turning these words over in their heads. They did not want to be convinced to go forward, that was obvious. But at the same time, the logic that Stu was laying down was very compelling. When they thought about it, it was hard to come up with a logical reason for Adams to reveal their true defenses to them. It really didn't make sense on any level that they could see. The thought that Adams might be trying to save a few of his own troops lives simply didn't cross their minds. Stu sensed a turning of opinion and pushed his meager advantage to the hilt. "He's trying to get us to turn away at the last minute," he told his troops. "He's trying to trick us into giving up our victory now that it's finally in our grasp! We've been through hell, all of us, getting to this point! We've lost friends every step of the way, including our leaders. Are we really going to give up now? If we push forward, we'll have that town in our possession in less than an hour! Less than an hour! Think about that. We could be drinking their booze and fucking those bitches in less than an hour. Instead of marching back in defeat, we could be sinking into some warm pussy! We could be eating warm food! Most important of all, we could be slicing the dicks off of the men who did this to us and sticking them up their asses!" It was this last, the promise of rape and murder, that finally convinced them. Though opinion was far from unanimous, favor turned just enough in favor of Stu's plan to hold the cohesion of the group together for a little while longer. When Stu yelled for them to form up a minute later, they obeyed him. ------- Brett saw them forming up into attack groups below. He shook his head slowly at their stupidity. He had really thought that his plan was going to work. "What now?" Jason asked, sparing a glance down below. He was really starting to get comfortable behind the controls. "I guess we fight again," Brett sighed. He keyed up the CB channel one more time. "You're making a big mistake, Stu," he warned. Stu's reply was arrogant. "I'll be seeing you soon, Adams," he told him. "You'll have to land some time." Brett changed the frequency back to the VHF channel and called up Matt and the others. "It didn't work," he told them. "They'll be moving in any minute now. Get ready." First Matt, then Michelle, and finally Chrissie advised that they were more than ready. ------- "All right, everyone," Stu said over the command frequency. "Let's move out. Keep yourselves spread and we'll advance to contact. You know the drill." They knew the drill all right. One by one the men moved forward, hands gripping rifles, boots slogging through mud, eyes peering outward, alert for the first sign of gunfire. Stu and Stinson lingered near the rear, waiting for all of the men to form a wall between themselves and the enemy positions. Then they too moved out. Stinson gripped his rifle nervously, his finger playing around the trigger guard. He didn't like this. He didn't like this one bit. ------- "They're moving in," Brett's voice said over the VHF channel. "Same formation as before. They're in a line stretching out about 150 yards laterally. They plan to advance to contact and then probably try another flanking maneuver with the shoot and cover tactic." Matt was looking over the sight of his own weapon, peering outward into the landscape in search of the enemy. As of yet, he saw nothing. He took his hand off the rifle long enough to key up his radio. "I copy, Brett," he said. "How's their orientation?" "The center of the group is heading right for Michelle's position," Brett answered. "Matt, your group and Chrissie's will be close enough to give them a hell of a crossfire once they're in range. Michelle, did you copy you'll have first contact." "I copy," she said. She was near the center of her troops, looking through the opening in the sandbags. She couldn't see them yet either. "We'll open up at three hundred yards, just like before." "How about we change that order just a little bit," Brett said. "Don't open up at three hundred this time. Let them come in to two hundred first." Michelle wasn't sure if she had heard him right. "What did you say?" she asked. "Confirming you want us to let them close to two hundred yards before we fire?" "You got it," he said. "That way, you'll be able to hit them with all of your guns at once. They'll also be in range of Matt and Chrissie that way. The effect upon them should be quite overwhelming." "Brett," Matt cut in, not liking the sound of that at all, "are you sure that's a good idea? Two hundred yards is awfully close." "I know," Brett said. "But don't worry. They have no reserve left to send in in front of them. Trust me on this. You'll be safe." ------- It was another five minutes before Michelle's group spotted the first of them moving in. Within a minute, they had all of them. Within another minute, all three platoons in their trenches had the enemy in sight. The initial range was close to 400 yards. They were moving a little slower than they had on their previous attacks, seeming to step carefully now instead of jogging. The command to hold fire was passed up and down the ranks one more time for clarity. Michelle chewed a large wad of gum nervously as she sighted in on the closer of the men. She breathed deeply and slowly, feeling the familiar sensation of calm that overtook her whenever combat was imminent. Around her, many of her troops were doing the same. The group of militia passed over the 300-yard mark and kept coming. No one fired but everyone tensed up. They came closer and closer, passing 250 yards, and still they held their fire. "Steady," Michelle told everyone, her finger caressing her trigger, her mind marking the spot where the 200-yard mark was. She picked a small group of trees that she figured was about that distance, commanding herself not to be conservative. Though letting them get that close went against every instinct that she had, she knew she had to trust Brett's instincts more than her own. Finally the first of the men stepped past her invisible line. She waited until a few more passed over as well. And then, unable to stand it anymore, she gave the order to fire. ------- Stinson was getting edgier and edgier with each step that they took forward. They had already gone well beyond the point where he had figured contact would be made with the enemy. Why weren't they firing? He could not bring himself to believe that they were really going to march in without any opposition. "Something's not right," he said to Stu, who was about ten feet to his left and slightly behind. "They should have shot at us by now." "They're probably..." Stu started, but he never finished. From the hills directly in front of them, barely two hundred yards away, a multitude of flashes suddenly erupted, including the repeating flashes of automatics. The range was much too short for there to be a meaningful reaction time and before anyone could dive down, a wall of lead came rolling in, cutting into their ranks like a lawnmower. Screams filled the air as more than fifteen men went down at once, blood flying from their bodies. "Get down!" Stinson and Stu and several squad leaders yelled simultaneously. They yelled even as they were doing this themselves. It was an unnecessary order in any case since everyone left at this point in the battle was well versed in the concept of getting their asses in the mud when the shooting started. Unfortunately, in this circumstance, hitting the dirt did precious little good. The range from which the gunfire was coming was simply too close, the gunfire itself far too accurate. Before anyone could scramble to cover, another volley of fire slammed into them, riddling those on the ground with bullets. More screams pierced the air as another six or seven were shot to pieces where they lie. Stinson himself had a burst of fire stitch through the mud less than two feet in front of him, spraying dirt and water into his face and temporarily blinding him. "Return fire!" Stu screamed, unleashing a burst with his automatic. "Get some fucking fire up on those hills, you assholes!" Stinson, like everyone else, ignored him in favor of finding some sort of cover to stop the deadly rain of bullets. He found a large rock that had once been under ground but that the constant rain had exposed due to erosion. No sooner had he pulled his body behind it then more bullets came flying in, this time from the flanks. He looked up just in time to see the flashes from the hills to the left and right of the position from which the original fire had come. "Jesus Christ," he said, terrified. Three more men fell to it in less than five seconds. "Stu," he cried at the leader, who was crouching behind a fallen log twelve feet to the right. "They've got us in a crossfire! We need to pull back!" "We're not pulling back!" Stu yelled. He fired one more burst and then looked over at Stinson. "We need to get around on the flank," he said. "We'll leapfrog again, just like before. You lead first and second squad over there, I'll lead the rest. Get ready to go!" "We can't flank them," Stinson protested angrily. "Goddammit you idiot, they're on both sides of us and up the fucking middle. They're killing us! We need to pull back!" "We'll give you covering fire, just like before!" Stu yelled. "Now get going before they kill all of us!" "They're in trenches, Stu!" Stinson yelled back, making no move to get ready to charge. "Don't you see that? Adams was telling the truth! They're firing at us from trenches and our covering fire won't do any fucking good!" Stu simply glared back at him, seemingly not hearing this last piece of information. "I gave you an order!" he said. "Get your fucking squad moving right now or I'll shoot you where you are! Do you understand me?" Stinson stared back, ignoring another burst of fire that slammed into his rock. He knew that even if he tried to go forward, there was no way in hell that the men would follow him. They had reached the end of their rope. The unit cohesion - while it might have been enough to get them to advance under light resistance - would never hold under an advance against this murderous fire. There was simply no way. Even now, as the first and second in command stared at each other, three more men were shot to death, victims of the crossfire from the right and left. "Did you fucking hear me?" Stu yelled at Stinson. "Get your ass moving!" Stinson didn't pause to debate what he did next, which is probably why he was able to do it. "I hear you," he said softly. He raised his M-16 up and pointed it at Stu. He squeezed the trigger, holding it down tightly. The weapon was still set on full automatic fire and Stu had time for one quick look of shock and surprise before his face, neck, and body were riddled with an entire clip of ammunition. He flopped, rolled, and bounced, blood flying into the air around him. Even after the action locked open on the empty chamber, Stinson continued to hold the trigger down. Around him the men, who had somehow known that that burst of fire was something different than return fire, were staring at him in shock as the bullets continued to fly in. "I'm taking command of this group," Stinson yelled out calmly. "Does anyone have an issue with that?" No one answered him, either in the positive or the negative. "Good," Stinson said. "My first order is to cease fire. Do not return fire at them. We're pulling back!" The looks of relief were unmistakable. ------- Brett watched out the window of the chopper at the slaughter taking place below. Already he could tell that the militia would not be able to hold on for more than another minute or so before they went fleeing in terror back the way they had come. And when they did that the troops in the trenches would keep up the volume of fire on them, perhaps dropping half of the survivors as they retreated. And then, when the ones who survived that gathered in the rear to lick their wounds, he would direct Jason and Sherrie to drop the napalm canister on them. It was not something he was looking forward to, but it was something that would have to be done. "It's almost too easy," Jason said, obviously less than happy about the slaughter as well. "They don't have a chance." "They were given a choice," Brett said. "I didn't make it for them." "I know." Brett noticed now that there was no longer any return fire coming from the militia positions. What was up with that? Surely they hadn't killed everyone down there. And surely they weren't out of ammunition yet. The answer came a moment later when the CB band, which they were routinely monitoring, came to life. "Garden Hill command," said an unfamiliar voice. "This is militia command. Do you copy? Request immediate communication!" "What the hell?" Jason said. "Who was that?" Sherrie, who had heard everything through her headset, asked. "That wasn't our friend Stu," Brett said. "That's for sure." "Are you going to answer him?" asked Jason. Brett nodded and reached forward to turn the transmit frequency back to the militia channel. He keyed up. "This is Brett Adams," he said. "Go ahead militia commander. And please identify yourself." "This is Sergeant Stinson, new commander of the militia," said the voice. "I'm requesting an immediate cease fire." Brett and Jason shared a look with each other. Brett keyed up again. "Why should we do that?" he asked. "And where is Covington? Has he been killed?" "I killed Covington," said Stinson. "I did what should have been done a long time ago. I realize that we have crossed over the line that you drew in the mud down here, but I would like to accept the offer that you made earlier. We will surrender, drop our weapons, and go home right now if you cease fire." Brett didn't hesitate a bit. "We accept your terms," he said. "Hold in place and I'll contact my commanders. I'm warning you though, if you fire so much as a single shot towards us, if you so much as take one step in any direction but back to the highway, you will all be under a death sentence." "Believe me, Adams," Stinson returned, "the last thing in the world that anyone of us left down here want is to be shot at any more. We'll put down our guns as soon as the firing stops." "Stand by," Brett said. "I'll be right back to you. Don't move until I tell you to." Sherrie seemed a little concerned. "Could they be trying to trick us?" she asked. "They could be," Brett said. "But I don't see what good it would do them. They're beaten. I think they're probably on the up and up." He reached forward and turned the frequency knob on the radio again, bringing him back to the VHF frequency. "Matt, Chrissie, Michelle," he said. "The militia is surrendering. Cease fire immediately. I repeat: cease fire immediately. It's over. Please acknowledge." ------- It was perhaps the longest minute of his entire life. After Adams told Stinson he would be right back with him, the bullets had continued to fly in. Two more men were killed and one injured as shots hit them. They all itched to pick up their rifles and shoot back at their tormentors, but none of them did, everyone knowing the consequences. All they could do was lie there behind their rocks and their trees and hope that they could live long enough for the communication channels of Garden Hill to work. Finally, after an eternity, the last groups of bullets came rolling in, hitting trees, plunking in mud, and whizzing through the air. The sound of the gunshots that had sent them lasted another few seconds as they trailed behind the projectiles. The last crack of a rifle echoed away into the distance and then, at long last, there was quiet, broken only by the sound of the rain and the groans of the wounded. The war was over. "Stinson, are you there?" came Adams' voice on the radio. "I'm here," he answered, rolling onto his back and sighing in relief. No matter what else happened, he was at least alive. "The cease fire is now in effect," Adams told him. "Our troops are watching you very carefully of course, and they still have their weapons trained upon you, but they will not fire upon you unless you fire at them or you start forward." "Thank you," Stinson said. "Thank you very much." "Don't thank me," Adams said. "Thank yourselves. And remember this moment the next time talk in Auburn turns to conquest of Garden Hill. We don't go quietly." "No," Stinson agreed. "You certainly don't. For what its worth, most of us didn't want to come here in the first place." "But still you did," he answered. "We have free will as human beings. You folks came here and you caused the deaths of not only many of your people, but many of ours as well. And for what? For nothing. Had you taken our town you would have captured a few men, a few women, a few children and some food supplies. Was what you suffered really worth all of that? Don't bother answering me, I'm not up here to converse with you, just to get you out of here so we can go back to existing. I expect you to start your pullback to the highway immediately, without your rifles. We have two more hours of fuel in this helicopter and by the time we have to land to fill up the tank, I want you and your people back on the freeway and past the border sign that you encountered on the way in. On your return, you will follow the freeway lanes wherever possible. We will be watching you." Stinson looked around at the men that had been shot. Many of them were dead but more than a few were merely wounded. And then there was the group of wounded back at the original jump-off point. "What about our wounded?" he asked Adams. "What should we do with them?" "Those that can walk, take with you," Adams replied. "Those that cannot, you can either carry them on litters or leave them where they are." "Will you treat them if we leave them?" Stinson asked. "They will be killed where they are," Adams told him coldly. "We don't have the resources to care for enemy wounded; we have enough problems caring for our own. Sorry. Again, this goes back to the choices you made when you started marching this way." Stinson sighed. "I understand," he said. "We'll take as many as we can." "And make sure that the ones you leave behind," Adams added, "do not have any weapons available to them. Remove their rifles and place them apart from them. Take away their sidearms. If any of my people are shot at while we are clearing our terrain, if even a single bullet flies from one of your wounded that you leave behind, then this armistice that we have agreed upon will be null and void and we will hunt you down on your return march." "I understand," Stinson said again. "It will be done." "Good," Adams said. "I suggest you start doing it then." Stinson sighed again and put the radio away. He looked over at the men, all of whom were still lying in the mud, still unable to believe that it was really over. "Everybody who is not wounded," he said. "Form up on me. We got some work to do." ------- Chapter 21 It was approaching 4:00 PM on the afternoon following the battle and Brett was in a room in the El Dorado Hills elementary school that had been converted to a hospital room. It had once been one of the smaller classrooms just off of the former administration area. The desks had been removed and replaced with a four portable beds of varying type. The one that Brett was lying on had once been someone's hide-a-bed. His closest neighbor, Susan, who was only four feet away, was lying in a cot. She still had a bloody bandage covering her shoulder wound. She, like Brett, had yet to be operated on. Both of them had IV locks installed in their arms through which they were given injections of Dilaudid and Torridol every two hours to help with the pain and inflammation. Across the room from them were Rhonda and Sarah, both of whom had already been through their surgical procedures by the weary, overworked general practitioner and were now sleeping the sleep of the very heavily drugged. On the chalkboard at the front of the room the four occupant's names were chalked in and separated into columns by vertical lines. In these columns were vital signs, which were taken and charted every fifteen minutes, and the last drug dosages. Near the front of the room was Jennifer Harris, a middle-aged woman who had once been a teacher at the school and who was now one of the newly christened nurses. She was sitting down in a chair reading through a physician's desk reference manual. Brett had been here for a little more than three hours now, one of the last group to come over after the battle. It had been hard leaving the cockpit of the helicopter and allowing Jason to solo for the first time, harder than he had ever imagined it would be despite the uncanny speed with which the young man had picked up the basics of flight and landing. But leave it he had too. His wounded leg had been screaming for relief by the time they finished circling and observing the retreating militia members as they went back to the highway and flying the other wounded to El Dorado Hills. Brett was much more relaxed now, thanks mostly to the intoxicating quality of the narcotics he had been given. He was in fact, having a deep, philosophical conversation with Susan, who was flying about as high. "I think Charmander is definitely the best," Brett said. "I mean, he can start a fire, can burn shit up with his tail. Squirtle is totally useless in a fight. What's the point of squirting water at people? You can't win a battle with water for God's sake." "Not true," Susan said seriously, her words thick and slurred. "I saw him knock Team Rocket right the fuck down one time while they were battling Ash and Misty. Right on their asses! Tell me that's not a serious-ass stream of water. And Squirtle is cuter too." "But you can't kill someone with a stream of water," Brett protested. "Ask those assholes we napalmed. Fire is the way to go." "Nobody dies in Pokemon," Susan reminded him. "It doesn't matter if they get burned or squirted. They just get knocked out." "That's true," Brett allowed. "And they always wear the same clothes too. Don't they ever wash them?" He smiled a little, thinking about it. "I've always wondered what Misty looks like naked. Or maybe Officer Jenny. Yeah." This gave Susan the giggles, which in turn gave Brett the giggles. Both of them laughed so hard that they caused pain from their various injuries by the jostling of their bodies this produced. They were still chuckling a little when Pat entered the room. He was wearing his traditional jeans and flannel shirt. Matt and Michelle were behind him, both obviously having bathed and changed clothes since the battle. "Matt, Michelle," Brett hailed, seeing them. "What are you doing here? Is there trouble?" "No, no trouble," Matt said. "We just got done dropping the food supplies for the militia and we thought we'd swing out here real quick to check on everyone so we can give a report at the community meeting tonight." "So you had Jason fly you all the way out here for that?" "We also thought you'd like a report on things back in town," Michelle told him, leaning down and taking his hand in hers. "And I wanted to see you too. I haven't had a chance to lay my eyes on you since we assembled this morning. I was worried about you." "I should yell at you guys for wasting jet fuel to fly out here," he said, squeezing Michelle's hand back. "But to tell you the truth, I'm really glad to see you too." They discussed the health and well being of all of the wounded for a few moments, starting with Brett himself and working their way to the most severely injured. Brett and Pat both assured them that they were all doing fine - or at least as well as could be expected under the circumstances. "Renee tells us that the most dangerous thing to worry about now is infection or emboli in those with bone injuries," Brett explained. "She's putting us all on antibiotics and anticoagulants." "What about your leg?" Michelle asked. "I heard it was pretty torn up. Will you walk again?" He frowned a little. "Renee only had a chance to take a quick look at it between other patients," he said. "She doesn't know yet. She thinks she might be able to put it back together but the bone is pretty shattered and some of the tendons are torn." He shrugged. "We'll just have to wait and see." Michelle leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead. "You'll be all right," she said stoically. "I just know you will." "So anyway," Brett said, changing the subject in order to keep his mind off of his leg, "how're things back in town? I assume you finished clearing the battle area?" "Yes," Matt said, nodding and grimacing a little. "That was actually worse than the battle I think. It really bothered a lot of the troops." "Not so much the bodies," Michelle put in. "Although that was pretty bad, but the... you know... the wounded." "How many were there?" Brett asked. "Well, you saw that they hauled five of them out when they withdrew, right?" Matt asked. "Right," Brett said. They had taken two from the battle area itself and three from the staging area behind the lines, carrying them out on crude litters made out of sleeping bags and limbs from trees. That was in addition to the five or so that seemed able to propel themselves. In all, thirty-eight men made their way back to the highway to start their long trip home - thirty-eight out of four hundred that had started the journey. That was more than ninety percent casualties or desertions. "There were about thirty of them that were still alive in some way out there," Matt said. "A lot of them were unconscious and pretty much beyond salvation anyway, but a few... a few could've been saved maybe. We shot all of them in the head with pistols." "It was the only way," Brett said. "There's no way we could afford to waste the fuel to transport them here or the resources of the doctor here treating the enemy. No way." "I know," Matt said. "I explained that to everyone and they all understood it. But still, it's not easy shooting an unarmed, wounded man in the head. Especially when they're begging for help or crying for their mothers. I shot several of them myself. I know." "There's going to be quite a few people who are going to have trouble sleeping tonight," Michelle said, her eyes saying that she was going to be one of them. "I wish I could tell everyone that it was the right thing to do," Brett said. "I really do. But I can't. It was wrong to shoot wounded prisoners. It goes against everything that we've been taught and raised with. But unfortunately, that morality is something else we can't afford anymore. Did anyone refuse to do it?" "No," Matt said. "Not everyone did it of course, but no one who was faced with it actually refused." "I hope we never have to do anything like that again," Michelle said. "There's always hope," Brett said. "Never promises though. How about weapons? Did we recover all of them?" "More than a hundred and fifty rifles," Matt confirmed. "That includes twelve fully automatic M-16s and AK-47s and nearly sixty semi-autos of various type and caliber. We hauled them all back to the community center and we'll get a crew together to clean them up when we have the time. We also got nearly seventy pistols from the dead bodies. Rifle ammo wasn't as good as we'd hoped though." "No?" "No," he confirmed. "They probably smuggled most of what they had left out with them. All that we found was what was in the weapons themselves and even that wasn't too terribly much. Maybe three hundred rounds total for the assault weapons and about the same for the rifles." "Not nearly enough to replace what we shot up at them," Brett said, although that was pretty much what he had expected. "No, but I don't think we'll have to worry about that bunch anymore for a while. Hopefully there are no other Placer County Militia type groups on their way to us. If there is, we might have problems. We'll need to keep a real close eye on the surrounding area from now on. We got lucky by having advanced warning of this attack. The next time we might not." "That's true," Brett said. "And remember, there's only so much life left in that helicopter. We need to find another one as quick as we can and from there we need to find spare parts, more fuel, and more ammo. All stuff to work on when I get out of here. How far did the militia make it out of town anyway?" "They made it just past the border sign the last time we checked on them," said Michelle, who had been adopted as the new observer for the time being. "We dropped them three hundred cans of chicken noodle about a mile to the west, just before the first mudfall on our side. They should reach it just about sunset if they keep moving." "Tell Jason to make at least one flight before sunset, just to make sure they're still where they're supposed to be." "We will," Michelle promised. "And what about our bodies?" Brett asked next. Another sad look passed between the two of them. "All recovered," Michelle said. "That wasn't a lot of fun either." "No, I don't imagine it was." "They're all in the storage room for now, in sleeping bags," Matt told him. "We're going to get some people out digging graves tomorrow in the park near where Dale and the others are buried. Steve's already working on making some crosses with their names and dates on them. Paul suggested having a ceremony of some sort after we bury them, just to honor them you know. Of course we don't have a priest or anything to give a proper funeral, but all the same, I think they deserve something other than just being tossed in the holes and covered up." "I think that's a very good idea too," Brett said. "I want to be there when you do it. I want to say a few words." "How long are you going to have to stay in here?" Matt asked. "I'm coming home the day after she fixes my leg," he said. "Whether she likes it or not." ------- At 10:30 the next morning, in Auburn, Jessica finally stirred and raised her head from her pillow in the bedroom of the high school administration building. This was her typical awakening time these days, particularly when she had been drinking heavily the night before, as she had been the previous night - as she did almost every night. Her eyes were bleary and bloodshot and her head pounded sickeningly. Worst of all was her stomach, which was rumbling like a volcano about to erupt. Experience told her that it soon would. "Oh God," she mumbled, refusing to open her eyes completely. She fumbled her hand across the nightstand next to the bed until she encountered the walkie-talkie that she carried with her at all hours. She picked it up and put it next to her mouth. "Alice?" she groaned into the mouthpiece after keying up. "Are you there?" The reply was almost instant. "I'm here, Ma'am," she said. "Good morning." "Right," Jessica said sourly. "Bring me up a bloody Mary and some Tylenol, will you? I'm feeling a little under the weather." "Right away," Alice replied. "Would you like breakfast brought in to you?" "Not for another hour or so," she said, the thought of food making her stomach turn over a few more times. "And make that bloody Mary a pale one, if you know what I mean." "I know what you mean. I'll have it in to you in five minutes." Jessica put the radio back down, not bothering to thank her assistant. She covered her eyes with her hand, trying to lie as still as possible to fight off the nausea and the headache. It was a losing battle at best. Christ, how many drinks had she had last night? Ten? Twelve maybe? She wasn't entirely clear on exactly what had happened after 11:00 PM or so. She and ten of her closest acquaintances had been having themselves a little party - as they did every Wednesday and Saturday evening. There had been food, music, booze of course, and one of the men that had been captured with the town had been brought in for entertainment. They had been... well... what had they done with him? She remembered having him lick everyone's ass - that had been rather early in the festivities. And then there had been the inevitable reaming of his ass with the huge dildo that was such a favorite at parties. There had been a lot of drinks consumed during this portion of the party and things were a little hazy after that. She had the sense that things had gone a little bit too far - it had happened before - but she was not at all sure just how. While she was still sifting through the opaque haze of memories her stomach insisted that it was not going to hold its contents down any longer. With another groan, she rolled out of bed, landing on her hands and knees on the floor. Moving quickly she crawled to the private bathroom and put her head in the toilet, arriving just in time to disgorge a small amount of stomach acid and watery liquid that smelled strongly of vodka and orange juice. She retched a few more times, mostly dry heaves, and then finally her stomach settled the tiniest bit, allowing her to pull her head out of the bowl and stagger to her feet. She panted weakly for a few moments, trying to get her equilibrium. She was still dressed in the pantsuit and blouse that she'd worn the night before (she would never wear anything as common as blue jeans and a flannel shirt now that she was in charge) although there were several nasty looking stains on them now. When she felt she could do it without falling, she turned herself around, lowered the toilet seat, and then unbuttoned her pants, pushing them down to her ankles along with her silk panties. She sat herself down on the toilet and began to urinate, relieving her drink-swollen bladder of its burden. As she peed she looked down at the crotch of her panties, hoping to see the telltale stain of menses there, instead seeing nothing but a few urine stains. "Damn," she cursed, shaking her head a little in frustration. When she finished peeing she pulled some toilet paper from the roll and wiped carefully, pushing the wad well inside of her vagina. She looked at it. A little moisture but no blood. Not a single drop. Her period still hadn't started. What was wrong? It was almost four weeks late now, a little bit longer than could be blamed on simple stress. Surely she was too young for menopause. Her mother hadn't gone through the change of life until she was 54 years old. So logically, shouldn't she be about the same? She had never even heard of anyone going through it at 34. She stood up and pulled her pants back up, staggering a little as she did so. As she fumbled through the snapping and zipping process she wondered if maybe that asshole Stinson or some of his cronies had... well... done something to her when they had raped her all of those times. Could they have done some damage to her reproductive system that would have broken her cycle in some way? Was that possible? Even as that thought came into her mind another thought, this one much darker, tried to push its way forward. The thought was of Linda, one of the other "wives" that had shared the hell of living with Stinson with her. She was now nearly five months pregnant with Stinson's baby, just now starting to show. Was it possible that she, Jessica, could be... ? She groaned as if in pain, pushing that thought away and burying it before it could be fully formed. She did not want to even think about the possibility of that being a possibility. She was having a physical problem, or maybe a stress problem - leadership was challenging, wasn't it? That was what was wrong, not... well anything else. Certainly not! She heard the door to the main room open a moment later, just as she was finishing up with the flushing process. She walked out of the bathroom and beheld Alice, who was dressed in blue jeans and a sweater and had a pistol strapped to her waist. Alice's eyes were bright and alert, her expression non-committal as she took in her boss. She had seen Jessica under much worse conditions than this. She had a large glass that contained maybe five ounces of vodka and six of tomato juice. It was so pale that it was almost pink in color. "Give it to me," Jessica said, walking quickly across the room and nearly snatching it out of her hand. She downed almost half of it at a single gulp, feeling the burning of the booze as it poured down her throat and into her abused stomach. It almost made her retch again for a moment but this was an effect she was familiar with. After a few moments the opposite occurred and her stomach settled as the booze took hold. "Here's your Tylenol," Alice said, handing her four of the red and white pills. Jessica popped them into her mouth and then washed them down with about half of the remaining drink. That would take care of the headache in about twenty minutes. In an hour, after two more bloody Marys and a little breakfast, she would feel almost normal again. She wondered if maybe she was drinking a little too much lately and then dismissed that thought as quickly as she'd dismissed her earlier one. "Is there anything else?" Alice asked her, still standing there obediently. "Another bloody Mary in about five minutes," she said, taking one more sip of her drink and then setting the glass down on the nightstand. She began unbuttoning her blouse. "And get someone in here to clean this place up. The bathroom needs a real going over." "Right away," Alice replied. "Will you be taking your bath soon?" "Yes," she said. "As soon as I get changed into my robe. Have them start running it now and then you can have breakfast up in the office for me when I get back." ------- An hour later Madeline entered the main admin building, walking past the two guards out front with hardly a word. She was one of less than ten women in town who had unlimited access to the main building with its heat and power, who could get in to see Jessica without an appointment. She was the only one who could do this that didn't consider herself to be a friend of Jessica, who didn't regularly attend the barbarous gatherings that she referred to as parties. In fact, the relationship between the two of them was becoming increasingly antagonistic as Jessica's reign as Auburn leader rolled onward. So far they had avoided any really nasty confrontations with each other but Madeline knew that that was about to come to an end. Jessica was getting too strange, too unstable lately. She was prone to irrational outbursts that bordered on outright paranoia at times. And after what had happened last night, the time had finally come for some plain talk. "Hi, Alice," Madeline said with a sigh as she entered the outer reception for Jessica's office. "Is Jessica in?" "She's in," Alice said with a sigh. "She's just finishing up her breakfast." "Is she sober?" she asked next. She was really hoping to catch her before she too many morning drinks - something that was an exercise in timing. Alice seesawed her hand back and forth in the air. "She's working on the fourth bloody Mary right now," she said. "The last two haven't been as strong though. It's about another hour before she starts on the screwdrivers." "Well," Madeline said, "I guess that's about as good as it's going to get. Will you tell her that I need to have a word with her?" "Sure," she said, picking up the walkie-talkie. She keyed it up. "Ma'am?" she said into it. "Madeline is out here to see you. She says she needs to talk to you." "Tell her to come back later," Jessica's voice replied a little testily. "I'm busy right now." Alice looked up at her apologetically but Madeline was not going to be dissuaded that easily. She reached over and plucked the radio from Alice's hand. "Jess," she said into it. "This is really important. I need to talk to you now." Jessica refused to answer Madeline directly but this seemed to do the trick. "Alice," she said, "go ahead and send her in." "Thanks, Alice," Madeline told her, dropping the radio back onto the desk. She walked to the door and opened it. Jessica was sitting behind her large desk, a half eaten tray of food pushed off to the side. She was sipping out of a glass and going over some sort of paperwork - God knew what it was. Jessica enjoyed keeping lists and ledgers and notations on every little thing that occurred in the town. "What is it?" she said shortly, not even looking up at her security chief. Madeline closed the door behind her and walked over to the desk. She sat down in a chair across from it without being asked. "Well?" Jessica said, finally looking up, showing bloodshot eyes. "You were so anxious to get in here. What's the problem?" "Greg Rollins is the problem," Madeline told her. "Greg Rollins?" she said blankly, the name obviously meaning very little to her. "The man that you and your friends utilized for your little party last night," she reminded her. "Oh... of course," she said with a disinterested shrug. "What about him? Why would he be a problem?" "He's dead," Madeline said plainly. "He died about four this morning." She paused a little. "From internal bleeding." Jessica showed no particular emotion at this news. "What happened to him?" "What happened to him?" Madeline said, leaning forward. "Do you really not remember what you and your friends did to him last night? Did it slip your mind? Or were you just so drunk that you can't recall it?" Jessica face flushed with instant anger. "How dare you come in here and speak to me in that tone!" she said. "You are forgetting your place, little missy! I am the leader of this community. What makes you think that you can come marching in here..." "You don't remember the crowbar, do you?" Madeline asked softly. "You really don't." This startled Jessica a little, bringing back a blurb of a memory, which she quickly buried again. "Crowbar?" she said. "Jesus," Madeline said, somehow more bothered by the fact that Jessica didn't remember than by the act in the first place. "Let me refresh your memory a little for you, shall I? Apparently during your little gathering last night, after you finished raping him with that dildo you use, you decided that the dildo wasn't humiliating or painful enough and you ordered Alice to go find you a crowbar." "I wouldn't have been serious about that," Jessica said. "You were," Madeline said. "Alice brought you one and you and your friends took turns putting it up inside of him and twisting it. You ripped him open rather badly and it would seem that you managed to push the thing all the way up into his stomach cavity." "That's impossible!" "I was the one with the honor of getting rid of the crowbar after the party," she told her. "It had pieces of what I'm pretty sure were intestine stuck to it. Greg was brought to the medical office writhing in pain and vomiting blood. He suffered in agony for several hours before he finally died." Jessica paled during the story but finally recovered herself. She shook off the image and then turned on Madeline for providing it to her. "So what if we did do that?" she asked. "What the hell is the difference? He's one of the men that used to rape us. Why should anyone care what happens to those scum? Do they deserve any better?" "Yes," Madeline said, "they do. For God's sake, Jessica, what you did was barbaric. It was beyond an atrocity. And it's not the first time either. We've had a total of three deaths now because of the abuses that you and your friends do during your little parties." "You listen to me, little missy," Jessica said, glaring at her. "How dare you come in here and talk to me like this. I am the leader of this community and I will do whatever I see fit. If a few scum-sucking pieces of shit that call themselves men are hurt being punished for the way that they treated us, what the hell business is it of yours? You're just the head security guard! And didn't you kill the man that was raping you when this all started? As I recall, you cut his throat open while he was sleeping, didn't you?" "And that was a tactical act of warfare," Madeline told her. "Granted, I enjoyed it a great deal, but I did not torture him, nor did I do it as party entertainment. Do you really not see a difference?" "There is no difference," Jessica hissed. "I'm sorry that my parties offend your little sensibilities. I didn't realize you cared so much for those animals." "Those animals are human beings," she said, "despite their crimes. And animals are not even treated the way you're treating them. They didn't treat us the way you're treating them, not even Stu's men." "I've had about enough out of you for today," Jessica said dismissively, not wanting to discuss this any further. "You may leave now." "I have some other things that I need to talk about as well," Madeline told her. "What other things?" "The guards," she told her. "You've been encouraging my guards to go over my head directly to you for reassignment to day and night shift. And then you've been granting the changes without consulting me." "It is my prerogative as leader," Jessica said. "If you treat them unfairly, I have the right and the obligation to make things right." "Unfair?" Madeline said, her eyes widening. "You call assigning people that just happen to be your cronies to night shift unfair? That's bullshit, Jess, absolute bullshit. I treat every one of my people the same. Everyone works the day shift for a week and then everyone works the night shift for a week. But just because certain people have your ear and they've been to your parties, they're going to you and asking to be taken off their night shift obligations and you're granting it. And then nobody is telling me this until someone shows up for a shift I'm not expecting them on and telling the woman who is not one of your cronies that she is now working the night shift again. Or, I have to force people to work double shifts because someone wanted the night off to go to one of your parties, or they're too hung over to work their day shift. I can't maintain discipline this way. Our guard force is becoming a joke." "I do not engage in favoritism," she said. "I simply reassign where you have been displaying it for your friends. Don't try to twist this around on me. And remember who is in charge of this town." Madeline trembled a little in frustration, grappling with control. How she wanted to slap this idiotic woman and try to drive some sense into her. How she just wanted to slap her for the sheer pleasure of it. But she didn't. That was not the answer, would not accomplish anything. Instead, she tried reasoning. "Jess," she said, "the militia will be back soon, any day now. That means that four hundred men with guns are going to be showing up expecting to come back into town and resume their lives." "I know what it means," Jessica said. "So shouldn't you be out there preparing for them and watching for them instead of being in here bothering me?" "If we don't have discipline in the ranks," Madeline said, "then we're going to lose. You have got to stop interfering with my scheduling and my training. You have got to stop showing favoritism for certain women." "I don't have to do anything," Jessica said. "That is what being in charge is all about. It is me who makes the decisions here and it is me who decides what kind of discipline is needed or expected. You are nothing but a scheduling person and you're not even very good about that. Now I suggest you leave this office right now before you end up on the kitchen detail or the laundry detail instead. It is well within my power to put you there you know." "Jess," Madeline tried again. "Go now," she said. "Not another word or you'll be in the laundry room so fast it'll make your head swim." "You need to listen to me, Goddammit!" Madeline yelled, finally reaching the breaking point. "For the love of God, what are you doing? You're risking our entire revolution, our entire town because you just have to have your little fingers in everything. Is your little power trip that important to you? So important that you'll risk it all before you admit you're being a fucking idiot?" Jessica's hands clenched into fists and her face turned beet red. "You're relieved of your duties," she hissed. "As of this moment, you're on laundry detail." "You can't remove me from the security detail," Madeline shot back at her. "I'm the only one in this town with the training and experience to lead a battle against the men!" "I have relieved you," she yelled, slamming her fist down hard enough to knock over her drink. Tomato juice and vodka spilled over the surface and onto the floor. "I want you down there washing laundry right now." She picked up her walkie-talkie. "Alice, get in here." "Jessica," Madeline said again, calming herself. "You..." "Shut up," Jessica barked at her. The outside door opened and Alice put her head in. She looked at her. "Have the guards escort Madeline down to the laundry room," she told her. "As of this moment she is relieved of her former duties." Alice looked very doubtful. "Ma'am?" she said. "Are you sure that's a good..." "Don't you question me!" Jessica screamed at her. "You are little more than a secretary and I did not ask you for your opinion! I gave you an order and I expect you to carry it out!" "Yes, Ma'am," Alice said, withdrawing from the room and leaving the door open. She looked very frightened as she went. "Leave your gun here," Jessica said, looking at Madeline again. "You won't be needing it in the laundry room." Madeline unsnapped the .45 she carried from its holster and removed it. She tossed it down onto Jessica's desk where it landed with a clunk. "You're making a big mistake," she said. "Oh, I don't think so," Jessica replied icily. "I don't think so at all." ------- The pain was certainly there, a deep, constant throb that pulsed up and down his leg rhythmically, as regular as a ticking clock or a beating heart. But it was not nearly as deep, as gripping as it had been in the helicopter or in the bed the previous night. It would seem that Renee, the former family practitioner who was now a general surgeon, had done something right in there. Of course he had no way of knowing if that was true or not. He could not move his left leg, not even the tiniest inch. The entire thing, from just below the pelvis to the bottom of his ankle, was strapped into a very improvised brace made from metal poles that looked like they'd been taken from a child's swing set. These poles were held together with flexible aluminum straps of the sort that held an automatic garage door opener on its mounting. If Brett tried to move his lower leg at all, it didn't budge. He could lift it slightly upward by lifting with his upper thigh muscles but the entire leg came up with it when he did this. Renee and her assistants had basically immobilized the leg into a straight position. It was about an hour since he'd awakened from the anesthesia he'd been given for the surgical procedure. He was back in the same room that he'd spent the previous day in with the same roommates, although Sarah was looking a little livelier on this day. His throat was dry and scratchy and hurt like fire when he tried to swallow - a result of the breathing tube that Renee had placed in his trachea while he'd been out. His mind had been very cloudy at first - indeed it took him more than fifteen minutes to remember where he was and what had happened to him - but now his thinking, such as it was, was pretty much back to normal. Jennifer, the nurse, had given him a shot of morphine a little while after he'd awakened and had told him that the surgery had gone well, but other than that he had talked to no one yet. "How are you doing?" a female voice, approaching from behind, enquired of him. He recognized it as Renee. He looked up at her, seeing the bags under her eyes that came from being almost constantly awake for the last 30 hours. He could smell cigarette smoke on her, as if she'd just stepped out for one. "I don't know," he said pleasantly. "How am I doing?" She grabbed a rolling chair from next to Susan's bed and brought it over, plopping herself down into it. She looked at him. "You're kneecap is not quite in the same position it used to be in," she told him. "The underlying bone structure was pretty much mangled and I had to fit it in there the best I could. It kind of leans to the right a little and is tilted upward on the left." "I see," Brett said, although he really couldn't. "So you're saying that my leg will be kind of funny looking?" "That's right," she said. "It'll be kind of funny looking and it will be perhaps an inch shorter than the right leg. That bullet smashed through the lower part of your femur and the upper part of your tibia and fibula. It also cut through some of the tendons that hold your knee together." "So will I be able to walk?" he asked her. She gave him a half-smile. "I think so," she said. "It'll take you a little getting used to and you'll almost certainly have a pronounced limp for the rest of your life, but I think that you'll be able to recover most of the functions of that leg." He gave her a full smile. "That's really good to hear, doc," he told her. "Thank you." She shrugged. "I did what I could," she said. "Back in the old days, before the comet, I could've sent you to an orthopedic surgeon who could've fixed you up so that you were better than you had been before. But we seem to be all out of orthopedic surgeons these days." "I'm sure you did the best you could," Brett told her. "Really, I'm just grateful that there was doctor to work on me and the others at all. You saved most of us, doc. Sarah sure as hell wouldn't have made it without you and I probably wouldn't have either. At the very least I would've been bedridden forever." "Well, I'm not saying for sure that you won't be yet," she said. "Keep in mind that I did an orthopedic rotation once when I was back in medical school. That was the extent of my training for you and for Susan over there. I put your leg back together with some pretty strange things - things that were never meant to be put into a human body. I put screws from the hardware store into your femur and tibia. I cut the damaged bone away with a pair of bolt cutters from Frank Edwards' garage. I used a Makita reversible drill to screw in the screws. I'm telling you, I felt like I was in woodshop back in high school instead of operating on a human being." "But it worked didn't it?" Brett asked, actually finding it somewhat amusing that she'd put ordinary wood screws into his leg with a Makita. "I'm pretty sure it did," she agreed. "And I sterilized them of course, if you were wondering about that." "Actually, I wasn't. But thanks for letting me know anyway. So how long will I be in this get-up?" "Six weeks minimum," she told him. "Probably more. I don't have an X-ray machine to check on the progress of the mend so we'll have to play it safe. After it looks like its healing up, you'll be able to try walking on it and getting it back up to strength. You're going to lose muscle tone while you're convalescing. And of course you're going to have to take Coumadin for at least a month." "Do you have that much Coumadin?" he asked her. "We used up our entire town's supply treating Sherrie's leg." "Well, we had a pharmacy available to us so we have a fairly good supply of it," Renee told him. "But we'll probably exhaust a good portion of that treating all of the bone injuries that resulted from the war." Brett wondered if she was hinting at something. She seemed to have something that she wanted to discuss but it didn't seem to be a trading issue - at least not exactly. "What can we do about that?" he asked carefully. "We need to get more medical supplies," Renee said simply. "Look," Brett said, "I'm sorry that we've burdened you with our wounded, really I am. But..." "No," Renee said, shaking her head. "You misunderstand me. I'm not trying to point out a debt that you owe to us. Not at all." "No?" "No," she said. "While it's true we have treated your wounded here in our town, using our supplies, I am not trying to hint to you that you now owe us something in return. On the contrary, I believe - and Pat shares this attitude I'm sure - that it is you that did us a favor. You fought the war. You sacrificed the people to beat those fascists in Auburn. Now we won't have to deal with them in the future. If you would've lost I'm sure they eventually would have worked their way down to us at some point." "I suppose you're right," Brett said. "So you see," she said, "treating your wounded and using our supplies to do it with was the least we could do. In truth, I'm somewhat ashamed that we didn't send troops down your way to help you out. We had volunteers you know." "No," he said, a little surprised. "I didn't know." "More than fifty of us, men and women alike, volunteered to take up arms for your cause. It was only the logistics of getting them there that prevented us from making an official offer. In a way I feel like we were the United States during the early part of World War II and you folks over in Garden Hill were the Russians or the English. We supplied the ammunition and the guns for you and you did the killing of the enemy and the sacrificing of your own people." "It's over now," Brett said, wondering where all of this was leading. "We've beat them back and they shouldn't be a threat to anyone again for a long time. Don't let your actions or lack of actions keep you awake at night." "Yes," Renee said, "this battle is over. But what if there are more? Don't tell me you haven't considered that possibility." He sighed a little, shifting his position carefully on the bed. "I try not to think about that," he said. "But, since it is my job, I do anyway. Yes, of course its possible that there are other Auburn-type groups out there. I like to think that most groups of survivors will form up much like we have or like you have, but I know enough about human nature to know that there will always be Auburns." "And one of those Auburns might turn their forces loose upon us if they know of our existence," Renee said. "They might," he said. "So what we - that is both of our towns - need to do, is make sure that we're as prepared for that eventuality as we can be. That means we need more ammunition, more guns, better guns, upgraded defenses, the whole nine yards." "Yes," Brett said. "That's only prudent." "And then there are the medical supplies," she went on. "We need more antibiotics, more surgical instruments, more pain killers and anesthetic supplies. In short, we need to find a hospital or a medical supply warehouse and raid it for as much as we can get. Hell, if I were just able to get my hands on a damn ultrasound machine I would be able to do so much with it." "So what are you saying, exactly?" Brett wanted to know. "I'm saying that our community has something that you need - a doctor, medical knowledge. Your community has something that we need - a pilot and an aircraft and military knowledge. We worked together during this crisis and utilized both of our resources to the advantage of both. I think that extending that relationship now that there is no crisis would be even more beneficial. I believe that making some sort of cooperation and trading pact is in order." "Hmmm," Brett said thoughtfully. He liked the sound of it. "I'm not a town leader, Renee," he told her. "And I don't have any sort of authority to make deals or even propose them." "But you have Paul's ear, don't you?" "That I do," he said. "And for what its worth, I think you're right. I think cooperation is in both of our best interests." "Cooperation," she said, "and maybe even a merger eventually." "A merger? You mean, we join together under one system, in one place?" "That's exactly what I mean," she said. "There's strength in numbers, is there not? And it's much easier to defend four hundred people if they're in one place instead of two. My thought is that we think about moving all of your people down to here. You'd give up your bridge position and your nicer homes, but you'd also have the advantage of being located next to the water access for fishing and on lower ground for when the weather gets colder - because it will get colder soon. My guess is that Garden Hill is sitting on the location of a future glacier." "My guess is that you're right," Brett answered. "Maggie - she's a friend of Chrissie and Michelle's - has a meteorology degree. She says the same thing. That the warmer weather we've been experiencing is a result of heat released by the comet and trapped by the cloud cover. She also says that its gradually cooling and that more than likely we're in the beginning stages of a new ice age. The glacier will probably reach here eventually as well." "About twenty or thirty years after it swallows up Garden Hill," Renee countered. "Again, true," he conceded. "I'm not really sure how the townspeople will take the idea of moving out of their homes though. That would be something that would take a lot of discussion at a lot of community meetings. And then there's the logistics of doing it. How would we get all of our people from there to here? It would be quite a walk - especially with supplies." "You'd need a bigger aircraft," she said. She looked at him pointedly. "Do you know how to fly airplanes as well as helicopters?" He smiled. "Why yes I do," he confirmed. "And I just happen to know where there's a nice twin-engine Cessna as well. If I could get that thing running and figure out some way to land it both here and there, it could haul ten people over at once, or it could carry five or six thousand pounds of cargo." "So you see?" she said brightly. "Two heads are better than one. Already we've come up with a plan." "Again," he reminded her, "I'm just a grunt. I have no actual authority to agree or disagree." "It just something to think about," Renee said. "And something to talk to Paul about. Promise me that you will?" "I promise," he assured her. ------- Early the next morning Jason landed the helicopter once again in the parking lot of the El Dorado Hills elementary school. He was getting quite good at the mechanics of flying now that he'd accumulated almost five solo hours and the touchdown was smooth and right on the mark. Shortly after his landing Brett and Susan were loaded into the back along with a large supply of antibiotics, painkillers, and anti-coagulant drugs. Hector, who had finally been deemed well enough to leave (actually he should have stayed a little longer but he didn't want to miss the burial ceremony) was given the honor of sitting in the front. Jason lifted off into the rainy sky and headed for Garden Hill. His control adjustments and altitude changes were no longer jerky or hesitant. Nevertheless Brett did not like sitting in the back of the chopper, unable to see what was going on. Like most pilots he did not enjoy not being in control of an aircraft in flight. Thankfully he at least had the headset for the back. "Did you check on the militia today?" he asked Jason as they climbed up to cruising altitude. "On the way over here," Jason said. "Of course I didn't have Matt with me since I was making a pick up, but I was able to get a good visual on them. They've reached the first mudfall now and are moving south along it. It looks like one of the wounded they were carrying on the litter died somewhere along the way." "Uh huh," Brett said, trying to squirm into something approaching a comfortable position. "And what about the maintenance regime? Have you..." "I have it scheduled for today," Jason told him. "Right after the ceremony." "Good," he told him. "How's your altitude? Are you steady?" "Steady on five thousand feet," Jason assured him. "Right on the line." "And your airspeed? Have you..." "Brett," interrupted Hector, who was wearing the front seat headset and listening in. "Give the man a break, will you? He's doing just fine." Brett gave him a break and soon they were safely on the ground once again in the parking lot of the community center. A large crowd was present to greet them and the atmosphere was almost festive. Paul personally shook hands with each of the returning wounded and many of the women hugged and kissed everyone. Maria was there to greet Hector, which she did most affectionately and with large tears in her eyes. Chrissie and Michelle were there as well. Both of them made a point to hug and kiss him for an extra long time. Hector and Susan were able to walk into the community center - although Hector was a little slow - but Brett had to be placed on the rolling table that was Garden Hill's gurney. No sooner were they safely inside then Jason spun up the helicopter once more to head back to El Dorado for another load. In all everyone but the most gravely of wounded were brought home, in each case with medical supplies and careful care instructions. At 1:30 that afternoon, after everyone had finished lunch, the burial ceremony for the dead was held in the park next to the playground. Of course the bodies - wrapped in sleeping bags instead of coffins - had already been placed in the graves the day before by the same team of workers that had dug them. In all there were seven graves and eight grave markers standing in a stark line beside the six graves from the first attack on the town months before. Each marker was a wooden cross made from scavenged two by fours and treated with creosol to keep it weatherproof. The horizontal beams of the crosses bore the names of the dead as well as their dates of birth, dates of death, and the conflict that they had fallen in: The Second Battle of Garden Hill. The funeral services themselves were short but emotional. Paul led the ceremony, speaking to the assembled townspeople from a small podium that had been set up. He thanked those that had fallen for their sacrifice and vowed that they would never be forgotten. Brett, who was crammed into a homemade wheelchair that had to be carried over the muddy ground, then took the podium and spoke for a longer period. He gave a eulogy for each individual person, talking of their strengths and giving anecdotes about them. He addressed the small children of those that had them, telling them that their mommies were gone but that everyone else was still here because of that. He then expressed a very sincere wish that Garden Hill would never have to endure such a ceremony again. After the speeches the townspeople took turns shoveling the muddy soil back into place, covering the sleeping bags one by one. Within an hour, the work was done. Everyone went back to their jobs for the day or, if they happened to be off, back to the community center. The mood would remain somber for quite some time after. ------- Madeline looked at the pile of towels in the gymnasium of the elementary school gloomily. They were the bath towels from the previous day and she was responsible for getting them all washed and hung up to dry by the end of the workday. The pile was more than eight feet high and more than ten feet across - nearly a third of all the towels available in town. As the Garden Hill women had before them, the Auburn women certainly liked their baths. Currently there were eight tubs set up and running and each woman was entitled to three baths per week. That was unless you were one of Jessica's inner circle, in which case you had access to Jessica's private bath whenever you wished. Madeline sighed, biting back another burst of anger at what had become of and got to work. She picked up an armload of towels and carried them over to the large inflatable swimming pool that was filling with water from the fire engine outside (the fire engine idea had come from Jessica - she claimed to have thought of it back in Garden Hill). Half of a box of laundry detergent had been dumped into the pool and a foamy, gritty lather was now forming. She tossed the towels into the pool and then went back for another load. Four loads later the pool was close to overflowing and the pile of towels was not noticeably smaller at all. She shut down the hose and then went outside to shut down the engine of the pumper truck. It was as she was turning off the switches on the truck's panel that Darlene Annadale - one of her former guard supervisors - came over to her from the area of the kitchen. Darlene had been removed from guard detail the day before after protesting the removal of Madeline herself to Jessica. Nor was Darlene the only one. Two other supervisor rank guards and five of the guards themselves had been removed in a similar matter for similar reasons. All had been placed in menial, labor-intensive jobs as a replacement. Darlene had been put on dishwashing detail, her job to clean the thousands of dishes that were dirtied with each meal period. "You all done with that hose?" Darlene asked her, her expression sour. "We need it inside to rinse the dishes off." "Sure," Madeline said, reversing the motions that she had been making to the panel and reactivating it. "It's all yours. I'll need it again in about another half hour or so." "We should be done by then," she said. "We just have to do a final rinse on everything." She shook her head angrily. "We need another ten people on this detail at least. I can't believe that cuntasaurus has half the town doing nothing while we're in there scrubbing our asses off." "My detail is pretty much the same," Madeline agreed. "I could use at least six people to help wash all the towels but all I have is myself. Be thankful that she didn't put you with me." Darlene looked at her meaningfully. "Why are we putting up with this shit, Maddie?" she asked her. "Christ, we might as well leave the town. I heard she kicked another two people off the guard detail this morning - and that they didn't even complain to her about what she did to you. I heard that Jessica did it just because she thought they might be on your side instead of hers." "Yeah," said Madeline, who had a quiet though effective way of keeping her ear to the ground. "That's what I heard too." "She's taking all of the women you trained out of the guard posts and replacing them with a bunch of yes women who do anything she says. What's going to happen when the men come back? They're going to walk right over those incompetent fucks and then we'll be right back where we were before the revolution." "I know," Madeline said. "Something has to be done about Jessica. That's pretty obvious." "But what?" she demanded. "We don't have much time and that bitch has got her little circle jerk that she invites to her rape and kill parties supporting her." "What have the other women been saying?" Madeline asked, although she knew. "What have they been saying?" she asked. "They've been saying that she's a damn nutcase and that we made a mistake making her the leader. What the hell do you think they've been saying? But no one is doing anything about what's going on." "No," Madeline said. "No one is doing anything about it. Most of the people here - hell, everywhere - are followers. They won't take any initiative to make change." "So nothing will happen then," Darlene said. "Especially when they see what protesting against her gets them. Look at us." "Yes, but followers can be made to follow something else - that is their nature." "What the hell does that mean?" "Just keep doing your job," Madeline advised her. "Things are coming to a head here. Pretty soon Jessica will make that final push over the line." ------- Regular guards shifts in the normal positions had been resumed now that the war with the militia was at an end. On this night Michelle had just come off of a six hour rotation in position 3 while Chrissie had spent the day performing her supervisory duties - mostly from their house so that she could keep an eye on Brett, who had been installed in the main bedroom. He spent most of that day laying in the bed and reading from a collection of paperback novels from the supply room. He could get up and use the bathroom on his own when he needed to but it was a major operation involving an extended extrication off of the mattress and a twenty-foot walk with a pair of improvised crutches. Each trip left him exhausted and sore, his knee and arms throbbing from the effort. Now, with night having fallen and the room lit up with candles and gasoline fired lamps, his two women were both home and preparing to give him a sponge bath. Chrissie had filled up a large bucket with warm water from the fireplace and Michelle had gathered soap, towels, and several washcloths. They pulled off all of his clothing leaving him stark naked on the bed. Then they each grabbed a cloth and went to work, dipping it into the soapy water and running it over his chest, his arms, his legs. "Ahhhhh, that feels soooo good," he sighed, basking in the sensation of feminine hands scrubbing him clean. "I don't deserve you two, you know that?" "We know," Chrissie said, running her wet cloth over his uninjured thigh. So noticed that a particular part of his anatomy certainly seemed to enjoy the attention that the rest was receiving. "It looks like someone is thinking about more than a bath." She pointed at the rapidly swelling organ. "Why yes it does," Michelle said with mock sternness. "You pervert. We're in here to get you clean, not to be dirty." "Yeah," Chrissie agreed. "You oughtta be ashamed of yourself." "I'm ashamed," Brett told them, reaching out with his hands to stroke their blue jean clad legs from each side. "I'm deeply ashamed." As he said this his manhood continued to stiffen, rising inch by inch into the air until it was sticking straight up in all of its glory. "Look at this thing," Michelle said as she lathered his lower stomach up, the soft cloth making circles around his skin. "You'd think it hadn't seen any action in a while." "It hasn't," Brett reminded. And in fact this was true. Between fighting the war, grabbing a few hours of sleep every now and then, and being injured, he hadn't had an intimate encounter with either one of his wives in nearly two weeks now. He hadn't even paused in all of that to whip off. And now that the prospect of intimacy was presenting itself, his little soldier was standing at rapt attention, very much interested in the goings on. "And whose fault is that?" Michelle teased him, letting some of the water dripping from her cloth fall onto the head of his penis. "Chrissie and I managed to keep ourselves amused when we really needed it." "That's right," Chrissie put in, dabbing softly at the flesh of his inner thighs. "Why if it wasn't for Shellie keeping me happy, I would've divorced you for sexual neglect." "We were starting to think you weren't interested," Michelle told him. "As you can see," Brett told them, raising his hips upward a little, trying to get one of them to touch him, "I'm interested now." Neither one made any move to put their hands upon his penis. Instead, they simply kept scrubbing him, going through a rinse cycle now. "There is something that we probably should tell you though," Chrissie said, her voice a little more serious. "What's that?" he asked. "Well..." she said, looking over at Michelle for support. Michelle nodded to her encouragingly. "Well... the fact is... that I... "We," Michelle corrected. "We," Chrissie agreed. "We haven't been entirely... well... faithful to you during this dry spell." Brett looked at her, wondering if she was being serious or not. She certainly looked as if she was. But she couldn't really be trying to tell him that she... that she and Michelle, had cheated on him, could she? "What do you mean?" he asked carefully. "I uh... well... I seduced Maggie," she finally blurted. "You... seduced Maggie?" he asked, the vision of Chrissie and Maggie making love together rising into his head. It was not an unpleasant image in the least. She nodded, her face a little shamed. "After the first hit and run attacks we made," she told him. "I couldn't help it, Brett. I was horny and you weren't around and Shellie was asleep and Maggie and I were naked together getting cleaned up and... well... I did it." "You did it?" he asked, wanting more details than that. "I started touching her," she said. "And then... and then I ate her out." "Wow," he said, staring at Chrissie, finding himself quite aroused by what she was telling him. As Michelle had suspected, he was not the least bit upset by this admission. "And then what happened? You said Michelle was involved?" And so they told him the entire, sordid story, taking turns narrating it and turning him on greatly in the process. He particularly enjoyed the tale of their last encounter in the storage room. "And so you sat on her face?" he asked, fighting to keep his hand away from his turgid penis. By now, Chrissie was starting to see the effect that their admission was having upon him. Her nervousness at confessing her actions was being quickly replaced by sexual stimulation. "Yeah," she said, her eyes shining. "I sat on her face and she stuck her tongue all the way up inside of me. It felt so good, Brett." "Did she make you come?" "Oh yeah," she said, rubbing her legs together now as she felt moisture seeping out of her. "Her face was drenched by the time I was done." "And you ate Maggie out while she was doing this?" he asked Michelle, who was also showing unmistakable signs of arousal now. "I made her scream," she confirmed. Unable to help herself any longer, she reached over and took him into her hand, slowly stroking up and down. "Ahhhh," he groaned at the touch. "Well, needless to say, I forgive you both. In fact... Ohh that's the way..." "Let me help," Chrissie said, reaching over and putting her hand on him below Michelle's. She began to stroke as well. "You were saying, Brett?" Michelle prompted as they developed a pleasing rhythm. "Oh," he said, finding it suddenly hard to concentrate. "I was just saying that if you ever want to... you know... have some fun with Maggie again... well, I'm not about to complain about it. It sounds like the poor girl needs a little release now and then." The two women exchanged a smile with each other. "Well, as a matter of fact," Michelle said, "that's kind of what we wanted to talk to you about - Maggie needing release." "Yeah?" "Yeah," Chrissie confirmed, reverting back to nervousness a little - although this did not prevent her from continuing to stroke up and down. "You see, Maggie is... well... lonely. She hasn't had a man of her own since the comet you know. And she and I... and Shellie... we've been talking a lot lately. And she thinks you're really nice... and... and..." She trailed off, unsure how to continue. "Are you saying that you want me to fuck Maggie?" Brett asked carefully, thinking that he must be wrong. A man's wives wouldn't ask him to fuck someone else, would they? "Well," Michelle said, taking over for the moment, "we probably wouldn't have termed it that way. We would've said 'make love to Maggie', but yes, that is what Chrissie was suggesting in that cute, shy little way that she has." "I'm not shy," Chrissie said, half-playful, half-offended. "I've just never asked anyone anything like this before. It's so weird." "Like I have?" Michelle said with a grin. "Wait a minute here," Brett said, letting his hands drop from their legs. "Let me just get this straight here. You two, my wives, are telling me that you want me to have sexual relations with another woman. Is that what you're saying?" "Not just sex," Michelle told him. "We want you to... you know... let Maggie in on our relationship." "Let her in on it?" he asked, even more surprised now. "At least on a trial basis," Chrissie said. "We both like her a lot and she needs a man. She wants to be part of a family... our family." "And Chrissie and I think she would make a good addition," Michelle said. "Wow," Brett said, a little overwhelmed. "If it doesn't work out then it doesn't work out," Chrissie said. "But we'd like to at least give it a try. I think it'll work. Maggie's really sweet. She's not at all like she used to be when Jessica was here. She's changed a lot." "She knows what's important now," Michelle added. She smiled a little. "And, she's got really nice fake titties. You could tit-fuck her without even having to hold them together." This cracked Brett up. He spewed laughter at the serious way in which Michelle had thrown that in. It also served to break a little bit of the tension. He shook his head in amusement when his laughter died down. "Like I told you before," he said to them. "I'm a man. There's no way in hell that I'm going to turn down the addition of another woman into the equation. To do so would be... well... unmanly." Michelle and Chrissie both smiled at him gratefully. "I thought you would feel that way," Michelle told him. "In fact, I anticipated it." She turned to the door. "Come on in, Mags," she yelled. "You're all set up." Brett looked at them in surprise. "You mean Maggie is here? Right now? She's been here this entire time?" Michelle nodded. "A little liberty on our part," she told him. "We knew you would agree to this, so we worked to avoid all possible delays in the initiation." "It helps keep people from changing their minds," Chrissie put in. "You two are conniving," Brett said, not disrespectfully. Maggie appeared in the doorway, dressed in jeans and a tight shirt that accented her unnatural breasts nicely. She had a nervous, shy smile upon her face, as if she wasn't completely sure what she was doing here. She hesitated just inside the room, looking from face to face uncertainly. She seemed to be trying to avoid looking at the erect pole that was being stroked by the two women although her eyes kept flitting to it. "Come on in, Mags," Chrissie said, waving her into the room. "Brett has agreed to bring you in on a trial basis. How does that sound?" "Umm..." she said, stammering, her face flushing with embarrassment. "It sounds... uh... you know?" "We know," Maggie told her. "Now come on in and get a piece of this. You know you want it." She stepped further into the room, her steps that of a child learning to walk. Her eyes took a longer look at Brett's erection, not flitting away this time. "Welcome to the family," Brett, who was a little nervous himself, told her. "You come highly recommended." ------- The next day dawned with the Auburn guard force minus three more of its members. None of the three had committed any act that could be construed as criminal or negligent - all had in fact been among the best of those that Madeline had trained after the revolution. Their crime had been their friendship and support of Madeline and their criticism - spoken to friends but overheard by Jessica's cronies - of the earlier removals, particularly Madeline herself. The reason for their removal that had been given by Jessica was "questionable loyalties" and "possible seditious acts being contemplated". They were replaced by members of Jessica's clique, none of whom had been through the training course and two of whom had never even handled a firearm before. By 10:30 that morning the first death attributed to Jessica's takeover of the guard detail was logged. Peggy Linscott, one of the untrained women, accidentally shot Regina Navas with her M-16 rifle while trying to get the feel of it. She had been examining the various levers and switches of the gun as it lay on her lap with her finger inside the trigger guard. When she pulled the barrel of the weapon up to get a closer look at the safety switch, the weapon went off, sending a 5.56 millimeter bullet five feet across the bunker where it struck Regina - another one of the new guards - in the side of the head. She never knew what hit her. Peggy was not punished for her accident. She was not even removed from the detail. Despite the fact that she was now a nervous wreck, racked with guilt over what had happened, she was told to stand the rest of the watch and be more careful. Regina was buried just outside of town in an unmarked grave that was dug by former members of the guard detail. Word of these events was brought to Madeline in the high school building by other exiles from the guard force that had contact with townspeople outside of Jessica's circle. Jessica had been foolishly of the opinion that the incident could be kept quiet. Madeline did nothing for the moment. Though saddened by the useless death, she knew that it would most likely not be in vain. She kept washing her towels and hanging them on the overburdened lines in the gymnasium until nearly 2:00 PM when the moment she had been waiting for finally occurred. "Madeline?" a voice said from the doorway. "Can I have a word with you for a minute?" Madeline pulled her hands from the soapy water and looked up to see Kathy Kingsley standing in the doorway. Kathy had once been a nurse in Sutter Auburn Hospital (before the entire side of town it had been in was buried under billions of tons of mud). She had been off work on the day of the comet and had been traded back and forth between husbands no less than six times during the reign of the men. Kathy was in charge of their medical supplies and had trained up several other women to help her take care of any sickness or injury that occurred. She was neither a friend of Jessica's nor of Madeline's. She was in fact very apolitical as were most of the town's women. She had no wish to get involved in any of the movings or shakings that made the town run, preferring instead to simply do her job and live her life. "Hi, Kathy," Madeline said, looking at her, keeping her expression carefully bland. "What brings you down here to the slave galley?" Kathy cracked no smile at her joke. "I need to talk to you," she said, walking closer but taking a quick look behind her first to see if she were being observed by anyone. "It's very important." "Well come on in," Madeline said. "I'm about due for my break anyway." She came closer, obviously very nervous about being seen, and stopped just before the pool of soapy water containing the previous day's towels. "I'm here," she said, "at the request of some of the other women in town." "Oh?" She nodded. "I'm not a leader or a radical or anything like that," she said. "Usually my policy is to keep well out of things. Do you understand?" "I do," Madeline told her. "But things are different now, aren't they?" "They are," she agreed, taking another glance towards the doorway. "Look," she said. "Some of the women asked me if I would come talk to you about... well... Jessica." "I see," she said, continuing to keep her expression normal. "And what did they want you to talk to me about?" "She's crazy," Kathy said. "She's drunk half of the time and she's popping pills the other half of the time. We all know that she is the one that brought in the revolution and all and we're really grateful to her for that... but... she's not handling being a leader very well." "Oh really?" Madeline said sarcastically, letting her expression slip just a bit. "Everyone supported her at first," Kathy said. "She organized us and helped us get rid of the men. But now she's taking all of the girls who know what they're doing off of the guard detail. She replaced you and a lot of your people just because you spoke out against her. She's torturing the men that are left. Granted, a lot of those assholes deserved to be mistreated after what they put us through - hell, I should know that better than anyone - but she's gone over the edge about it. I was in charge of trying to treat that poor slob that they killed with the crowbar. I also treated all of the others. No one deserves to have that done to them. And anyone who condones that sort of activity is not someone we want leading us." "I agree," Madeline said. "And I tried to talk to her about it. That's what got me here." "She's not fit to lead this town," Kathy said. "Something needs to be done about her. And quickly. Pretty soon the men will be back in town and we'll have to fight them. It will be a tough fight even with everyone trained highly and ably led. It will be a pushover with those incompetent boobs we have now. And with each day that passes, the men get closer and closer to town and the guard detail gets less and less efficient. Hell, Linda Swenson told me that guard position four was kept unmanned all night last night because all of Jessica's guards were at her little party." "I heard that one as well," Madeline said. "But why are you telling me this? What is it that you want me to do about it? I'm in the Goddamn laundry detail." "We want you to do something," Kathy said. "And we want you to do it fast. And the reason that I'm here is to tell you that whatever it is that you do, you'll have the support of the ones like me." "The ones like you?" "The ones that don't ordinarily give a damn what happens. The ones that aren't in her little club. We make up most of the town you know and in this case, we do give a damn." She looked at Madeline firmly. "Get rid of her. You'll have our support. I haven't talked to all of them but I've talked to most of the leaders of the various little cliques we have among ourselves. We want to stay free and in control of our own destinies. We don't want things to go back to the way they were. With Jessica in charge and doing whatever she pleases, that's going to happen, either through the men or through her as she gets her hooks a little further into us. When push comes to shove, you'll have our vote for whatever action you see fit to take. Whatever action, do you understand?" Madeline smiled a little. "Yes," she said. "I believe I understand." ------- Madeline wasted no time. She left the laundry room shortly after Kathy's departure, abandoning her tubful of towels and her lines. She made her way through the bowels of the high school building and quickly rounded up Darlene, who was working her way through the mound of breakfast dishes with the aid of several other women. "Darlene," she said, waving her over. "I need a word with you." Darlene excused herself and trotted over. Words were exchanged for nearly five minutes, during which Darlene's expression went from misery to shock to barely controlled restraint. "Are you in?" Madeline asked her when she was done. "I'm in," she said fearfully. "But are you sure this will work?" "It'll work," she assured her. "Will any of your dish detail help us?" "All of them will help us," she answered. "No doubt about it. All of them are here because they crossed Jessica in some way." "Bring them over here." Darlene brought them over. Ten minutes later they were all involved. A few minutes later Darlene, Madeline, and their new recruits slipped out through an unguarded side door and began fanning out into the town. They visited the firewood detail, the garbage detail, the hot water detail, and several other job sites that were full of women that had been assigned there because of their problems with Jessica. Many of the women they talked to were the former guards that had been removed from their positions and had no problems agreeing to what Madeline was proposing. All of them knew that it was time. Thirty minutes later, just as the guards inside of the administration building were discovering that a great many workers had wandered off, a group of thirty women led by Madeline herself came walking up the street through the rain. They approached in a loose formation, moving slowly, not a single one carrying any weapons of any kind. They came up the walkway and towards the main steps of the building. It is perhaps a testament to the ineffectiveness of the guard force that they were not noticed until they were less than fifty feet from the building. When they were noticed however, the two guards out front rushed out to meet them, calling for reinforcements on their portable radios. Within seconds two more teams of guards - one from inside the building, one from the outside back of the building - came running over, their automatic weapons clanking, their faces fearful. The two groups met at the bottom of the concrete steps, the guards all pointing weapons at the crowd, the crowd only standing impassively. "What is the meaning of this?" demanded Brandy Olsen, the twenty-eight year old leader of the perimeter guards. She was one of the original guards trained by Madeline after the revolution and one of Jessica's inner circle. She had used Jessica's influence several times in the past to keep from being assigned to night shift posts and to get days off for the parties. She had in fact been one of the women to drive a crowbar into Greg Rollins a few nights before. Her M-16 was pointed directly at Madeline's face, the barrel trembling a little with motion transmitted from her shaky hands. Her finger was curled tightly around the trigger, perhaps exerting about half of the pull necessary to make the weapon fire. Madeline didn't even look at the finger, didn't acknowledge the gun in any way. "This," she said strongly and firmly, "is a military takeover of the town." Brandy looked at her incredulously. Behind her, the other guards all tittered a little. "You have got to be kidding," she said. "I don't kid," Madeline told her. "We've come to take Jessica into custody. Stand aside and let us enter the building." "You are out of your damn mind," Brandy said. "How dare you leave your work station in the middle of the day. How dare you lead these other women up here and spout crap like that. This group will disband immediately and return to work or all of you will be locked up until Jessica deals with you." Everyone held firm, continuing to stare back at the guards. "Did you hear me?" Brandy demanded. "Disperse immediately. You're all already in a lot of trouble. Don't make it worse on yourself." "What are you going to do if we don't disperse?" Madeline asked her calmly. "Are you going to shoot us down like dogs? We're unarmed, Brandy." "If that's what it takes, I'll do it," she said. "Don't bring us to that point. Now disperse!" "There will be no dispersal," Madeline said. "We've come for Jessica and we will have her." "We will shoot you," Brandy warned. "Don't think that we won't!" "Oh, but that's exactly what I think," Madeline said. "I don't think that you will shoot anyone, Brandy and I know that most of those women behind you won't shoot either." She turned her gaze on the rest of the guards, looking each one in the eye in turn. "None of you have become so dehumanized that you're willing to gun down unarmed women, have you?" "Don't try us," Brandy said. "I'm warning you." "No," Madeline said, "I'm warning you. Put your weapons down and stand aside. You all know as well as I do that Jessica is not fit to rule this town. Even you, Brandy, even you who goes to her little parties and helps her torture the men, even you know that we're in a world of trouble with her at the controls. She's a madwoman and she needs to be removed. You can shoot me if you want, you can kill all of us if you want, but that won't change the fact and it certainly won't keep Jessica from being removed from power. My companions and I are liberators and we have the opinion of the entire town on our side - the entire town minus Jessica and her small circle of cronies that is. If any of you shoot any of us, I can guarantee that you will stand trial for murder once Jessica is gone. And as you know, we have but one penalty for murder here - hanging." "Jessica is not going anywhere," Brandy said. "She is the leader of this town and she will continue to be the leader of this town. And I will shoot anyone who tries to enter that building without her permission and so will the other guards!" "No," said a voice from behind her. It belonged to Caroline Matthews, one of the few women still friendly with Madeline that was left on the guard force. "We will not shoot." She lowered her weapon, allowing the barrel to point at the ground. "Maddie is right. Jessica needs to be removed. We all know it and I will not help stop them." Brandy took her eyes off of Madeline long enough to glare at Caroline. "I might've expected this out of you," she spat at her. "Unload your weapon and take it inside immediately. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment." "I won't shoot either," said another voice, this one belonging to Linda Weatherly, who was a recent replacement for one of Madeline's people. "Things have gone too far around here." "You fucking coward!" Brandy accused hotly. "You're relieved as well!" "Coward?" she returned, lowering her own weapon. "You call me a coward? I cut the throat of that raping asshole that lived in my house in the middle of the night. I cut his throat and then I helped take down the guards in front of the community center without a gun! Don't you call me a coward just because I won't shoot women who are only doing what needs to be done!" "Damn right," said another woman from behind her - yet another replacement for Madeline's people. She lowered her weapon as well. "Let Maddie in there. It needs to be done." This left two women besides Brandy herself who were still pointing guns. These final two were like Brandy, Madeline-trained but Jessica loyal, frequent recipients of her favors. They wavered uneasily as all eyes turned to them. "Well girls?" Maddie asked them. "It's time to make a choice now, isn't it? Who are you going to follow?" "Stand by me," Brandy told them in a threatening, nervous tone. "Remember who your leader is. Stand by me and we'll nip this little uprising right in the bud." At that point things might very well have held at an impasse if not for the appearance of the townspeople. Gathered and told to assemble by other members of Madeline's conspiracy, they came from every direction, walking in groups of ten and twenty, women of all shapes and sizes, many with small children in tow. They formed up just behind the two opposing groups, standing there silently, their eyes trained on the spectacle before them. In all more than four hundred of them showed up. "All of you!" Brandy yelled as she saw them. "Return to your homes immediately! This does not concern you!" "It does concern us!" A voice yelled out. It was the voice of Kathy, who was standing near the front of the crowd. "It concerns every last one of us. These women are acting in our name and they have our support for their actions. Let them pass!" "They are attempting to unseat the lawful leader of this town!" Brandy yelled back at them. "It will not be allowed." Madeline ignored the crowd behind her. Instead, she continued to stare at the two guards next to Brandy. "What's it going to be, girls?" she asked them almost quietly. "You can see what's happening here. Which side are you going to be on?" One by one they lowered their weapons down, seeming almost relieved to be doing it. A murmur of approval erupted in the crowd at their actions. "I'm on the right side," said one. "As am I," said the other. Brandy was actually trembling now as she found herself standing alone. She gave a murderous glare to Madeline. "This isn't over," she said. "You still have to get by me." "It is over," said Caroline. There was a clank as her weapon came back up to position. Only this time it was pointing at Brandy. "Lower that rifle, right now." "This is treason!" Brandy yelled. "Call it what you want," Linda Weatherly said, bringing her weapon to bear on her former supervisor as well. The three other guards quickly followed suit. "But put down the rifle. It's over, Brandy." Brandy looked at the rifle barrels pointing at her. There were five of them, three aimed at her head, two at her body. She knew that if she pulled the trigger on her own weapon that she would be dead before Madeline's body even hit the ground. But would it be worth it? Would it be fitting for her to die defending her leader? She thought not. Her finger came off the trigger and the barrel slowly lowered so it was pointing at the ground. Another sigh of relief came through the crowd. "Cassie, Lynn," said Madeline. "Take her into custody. Hold her out here until we're done inside." "Right," agreed two of the women with her. They moved up and stripped Brandy of all of her weapons and her radio. She didn't protest. Madeline helped herself to Brandy's sidearm - a 9mm Glock. She checked to make sure a round was in the chamber and then held it in her right hand. "The rest of you," she said to her group, "follow me. We're going inside." As the crowd watched in anticipation, Madeline marched up the steps, her followers in tow. They entered the school building and moved across the lower office area, their feet squeaking over the tiled surface. Several workers - both of the Madeline and the Jessica clique (the former clique mopping and cleaning, the latter doing meaningless office tasks) stared at them fearfully as they went by, all cognizant that a historical event was taking place. They moved up the staircase to the luxury offices of the principal and vice-principal, where Barnes had once made his quarters, where Jessica now did. Alice sat at her desk in the outer office. She looked as if she was expecting them. She hardly even glanced at the gun in Madeline's hand. "Is she in the office or the bedroom?" Madeline asked Alice. "In the office," Alice told her without hesitation. "She's alone." "I see," Madeline said. "And whose side are you on, Alice? You've been her assistant since the revolution." "You know whose side I'm on," she told her. Madeline nodded, smiling a little. Yes, she did know whose side Alice was on. It had been Alice who had been providing her with information about Jessica's drinking and partying habits the entire time. It had been Alice who had described, in horrified disgust, the events involving Greg Rollins the other night. "I do," she said to her now. "I just wanted everyone else to hear it. Is the office locked?" "It's open," Alice said. "She's pretty drunk. She drank bloody Marys all morning. She just switched to screwdrivers about a half hour ago." "Thanks, Alice," Madeline said. She walked forward, heading for the office door. Her group tagged behind her, staying about five feet back. Keeping the gun down alongside her right hip, she put her left hand on the door and slowly opened it. The office was neat but smelled strongly of stale sweat and alcohol fumes. Jessica sat behind her desk, a pile of paperwork scattered before her. A bottle of Popov vodka sat on the corner of the desk next to a bucket of ice and a half-gallon pitcher of orange juice. On the opposite corner sat a clear cocktail glass. The mixture inside of it was very pale, almost transparent. Jessica looked up at the intrusion, her bloodshot eyes taking in her visitor. Alarm showed on her face and she began to reach for the walkie-talkie. "It won't do you any good," Madeline told her, stepping into the room. She kept the gun pointed downward, alongside her leg, in a non-threatening though clearly visible position. "The guards outside are mostly in favor of my presence here. Those that aren't have been removed or will be shortly." "Alice!" Jessica yelled, the alarm in her face growing deeper. "Alice is with us as well," Madeline said, stepping closer. Behind her, the other women entered the room, filing in one by one and forming up near the back wall. "What do you think you're doing?" Jessica said, the alarm changing to fury. Her words however, were quite slurred as she spoke. "We are removing you from power," Madeline said. "You will be taken into custody pending a community-wide assembly in which your fate will be discussed." "You can't do that," she said. "How dare you come in here and..." "I am doing this," Madeline said. "In the interests of town safety, I am removing you from office and resuming my duties as security chief. I will assume command of the town until such time as we can elect a more suitable leader than yourself." "Guards!" Jessica screamed. "Get in here! Get these bitches out of my office!" "You can scream all you want, Jess," Madeline said. "But you will stand up right now and accompany me downstairs. We will meet tonight and discuss your fate and your future place in this town." "Get out of my office," she hissed, venom in her eyes. "I am the leader of this town and you can not just come in here and tell me you're taking over. I was elected to lead these people and I will lead them as I see fit!" "Consider this a recall vote then," Madeline said, taking a step closer. "Now stand up." "You can't do this!" she screamed. "You'll hang for this! Even worse, you'll burn for this! I'll do to you what we did to that asshole Barnes, do you understand me? Guards! Get in here!" Madeline said nothing, she just continued to stare. The women behind her did the same. No guards entered the room. "Guards!" Jessica screamed again. "Stand up, Jess," Madeline said. "It's time to go." "I won't go!" she yelled. "Do you hear me, you little bitch? This is my town! Mine! Nobody is going to take me away from it! NO ONE!" Madeline raised her gun up and pointed it at her. "Stand up," she repeated. Jessica actually trembled in place for a moment as she stared at the weapon being pointed at her. "This isn't over," she said. "I'll talk to them tonight. I'll convince them. I'll see you burn for this, you little cunt!" "You'll be given a chance to speak," Madeline assured her. "Now stand up. Don't make this go any harder than it has to." At last, Jessica stood up. Holstered to her right hip was a .40 caliber pistol. She made no move towards it. Madeline stood aside, continuing to point the gun at her. "Disarm her, search her, and take her downstairs," she said to the other women. "Keep her under guard until tonight." Jessica offered no physical resistance as she was disarmed and searched (a .25 caliber pistol was found in a small holster on her ankle). What she did do was threaten every single woman in the room by name, telling each of them that they would burn or hang or be exiled or be cast into a room alone and naked with the remaining men. The women exhibited remarkable restraint in the face of these threats. Not a single one struck her or handled her roughly or even spoke back to her. Finally, still ranting and raving (and stumbling - the vodka had made her unsteady on her feet), she was led away, down the staircase, past the other workers in the building, and into a locked storage room. Two armed guards from outside took up position outside the door. "What now?" asked Kathy, who had found her way inside at some point. "Now," said Madeline, who was still holding the Glock in her right hand, "I have to get control of the guard force." "The guard force?" she asked. "The guard force," she confirmed. "Remember that most of them are Jessica loyalists now. They may not be competent, but they have control of a good number of our automatic weapons. If they decide to fight for her, we could have problems." "Oh..." Kathy said slowly. She hadn't thought about that. "How are you going to do it?" "Quickly," she said. "Very quickly. Before the rumors have a chance to work their way out there." ------- Madeline rapidly found all of the former guard members that had been removed from their positions by Jessica. Since most of them were part of the crowd that had gathered, it was not too daunting of a task. She led them to the armory and distributed weapons to them, giving each a pistol and an automatic rifle. She divided them into teams and gave each team leader a radio. As they loaded and checked their weapons she explained to them how they were going to do it. There were no questions. "Let's get it done then," she said, shouldering her own M-16. They fanned out in groups of two and three, each group heading for one of the guard posts. Madeline went to the nearest post - that of the bridge approach - driving there with her two teammates in a panel truck that was normally used for wood gathering. Jessica's replacement leader - who was in custody at the moment - was not in the habit of keeping accurate rosters of who was on duty at any given moment. As a result, Madeline had no idea who she was going to find out there or even how many. When she was in charge she had staffed the bridge approach with three women but it was entirely possible that someone had a hangover or was planning on attending a party tonight and had therefore no-showed. Madeline hung back until she was sure that all of her other teams were in position. She then told Annie Groton, the driver, to move across the bridge. It took them less than two minutes before they were parked below the hill that guarded this part of town. "Remember the plan," Maddie told her people as they exited the panel truck and began climbing up the hill towards the overlook. They were challenged before they could make it more than a hundred feet. A group of people packing automatic weapons tended to alarm those on guard duty, competent or not. Madeline, listening in on the guard frequency with a portable radio, heard Lorene Morgan - one of Jessica's appointees - trying to call in for assistance. "Base, are you there?" she cried, her voice scared. "There are a group of women led by Maddie coming up the hill right now. They have guns! Did you send them out here? What's going on?" "Base, position three here," said another voice on the frequency. "I have a group of four women with guns approaching my position. What's going on?" Two other positions quickly radioed in as well, in both cases the voices belonging to Jessica loyalists. "This is Maddie," Madeline said into the radio as she and her team continued to walk upward. "I'm addressing all guard positions, all guards, so listen up. Jessica Blakely has been forcibly removed as leader of this community. The charges are gross incompetence, dereliction of duty, and abuse of power. There will be a community meeting tonight in the high school football stadium, at which point her fate will be decided by a popular vote of all town women. She will be given the opportunity to defend herself before you all. "In the meantime, I'm assuming command of the guard force. Now you can debate my actions tonight at the community meeting and I will follow whatever the popular opinion is. For the time being however, I'm in charge of you all and I expect you to follow my orders. And here they are: All guards currently on duty who have not - I repeat not been through the training course that I gave after the revolution - put down your firearms right now and go back to town. You will be replaced by other guards that were removed from the detail by Jessica for reasons other than incompetence of duty. If you do as I say without resistance, you will not be persecuted or punished in any way for your actions. If you do not do as I say, then I will order your removal by force if necessary. "As for the rest of you, those that have gone through my training course - I will ask you to make a choice at this time. If you are willing to follow my orders until such time as I am officially removed from the position of guard leader, than you may stay at your posts. If you feel that you are unwilling to work under my rules - and all of you have experienced my rules before - then I ask you to do as the untrained guards and surrender your weapons right now. As with them, if you do this, you will not be punished or persecuted. "Now, I imagine many of you out there that are friends of Jessica are asking yourselves why you should do as I command. Jessica removed me from my position a few days ago and I have no authority under her rule to command any of you. What I will say in response to this is that while I am not acting with Jessica's consent, I am acting with the consent of the majority of the town. I'm talking about the common women, those that never had a chance to talk to Jessica, that sat in the background while she reigned, that were not within her circle of friends as many of you are. I will say that this group I represent makes up the majority of this town and that they applaud my actions. Resistance to them would not be a good way of remaining in their graces. Coming up to your positions right now are armed women that are loyal to me. They will take over the duties and take possession of the weapons of those of you that no longer wish to remain on the detail. They will assume these positions by force if necessary. Let's try not to make it necessary." Madeline took a deep breath, keeping the radio keyed up. "Ladies, whether you were close to Jessica or not, you have to know that she is not fit to lead this town. You also have to know that the guard force, in it's current condition, does not have a hope in hell of defeating the men when they return. And those men will be here any time now - they could be marching towards the last hill right now. Let's not fight among ourselves and lose this town to them. Those of you who do not belong on the detail, do us a favor and drop your weapons peacefully. Those of you who were Jessica's patrons, either do the same or remain at your posts. Let the town decide what to do with me and what to do with Jessica. "That's all I have to say. My people are heading to your posts. If you shoot at them or try to stop them, they will shoot back." With that, Madeline put the radio back on her belt. No transmission came over it, either in support of her or against her. She and her team continued walking up the hill to the guard bunker. They could have been picked off at any time, but they weren't. When they got up there they found Lorene Morgan standing next to Hope Chadwick. Their hands were empty and their rifles were resting at the bottom of the trench. "I'm glad you chose the right path," Madeline told them, holding out her hand for their sidearms. They both handed them over while the two real guards picked up their rifles. "I don't like this, Maddie," Lorene said. "I don't like this at all. I'm going to vote for the harshest penalty for you tonight." "Me too," Hope said. "I only dropped my gun because I didn't want to get in a gunfight." "Vote any way you like," Madeline told them. "That's what democracy is all about, isn't it? But why don't you ask yourselves a question before you cast that vote? Why don't you ask yourself if you're mad about me removing Jessica because you think she's a great leader or because you know that you're going to lose your special privileges and be treated just like everyone else?" "Fuck you," Hope said, turning away. She started down the hill. "I'm voting to hang you," Lorene told her. She started after her companion. Madeline watched them go, not even pretending to have hurt feelings from their words, not even pretending to worry. "It's a bummer when your friend in high places goes to jail, isn't it?" she said. She turned to her guards. "You two have the watch until you're relieved. Thank you for standing with me." "There was never any question," she was told. ------- Of the Jessica loyalists that had been trained by Madeline, six of them chose to remain at post under Madeline's rules and three elected to drop their weapons and leave the security detail. None of them tried to fight her forces, perhaps more out of the realization that they would eventually be tried and convicted of treason then out of fear of losing the battle. Of the untrained replacements, twelve of them surrendered their weapons peacefully but the remaining two, both at the same guard position - position five, which overlooked the main approach to the town and was staffed by six people - vowed that they would fight. A struggle ensued with the other four guards on duty there long before Madeline's people came up the hill. One of them - Kelly Cordova, a closet lesbian who was secretly in love with Jessica - was shot and killed. The other - Diana Scott, Kelly's best friend - was wrestled to the ground and taken into custody. An hour after Jessica was seized in the high school building, Madeline was firmly in control of the town and all of its automatic weapons. By two hours after, the entire town had been informed that a mass meeting would take place that night at the high school stadium. As Madeline had known it would be, the official vote removing Jessica from power was so overwhelming that it did not even require a count, not even with the two-thirds majority rule in effect. Jessica herself was given the opportunity to speak on her own behalf but, if anything, she only worsened her own position with her rants and accusations, with her frequent tirades about Auburn being her town. Having removed her from power, the town was left with the decision of what to do with her next. Should they exile her? Should they imprison her? Should they execute her? Should they reassign her to some unpleasant job and keep a close eye on her? And what of her close companions? Those that had stood beside her even after Madeline took steps to rectify the situation? What of them? It was Kathy, the unofficial leader of the town's silent majority, who was able to convince most of the women where their best interests lie. She nervously took the podium after the debate had raged without agreement for more than an hour. "A lot of you out there," she told the women, "seem to be hung up on the fact that Jessica was the driving force behind the revolution that freed us from the slavery we had under the men. This is true. She did do that and for that we will be eternally grateful to her. She was able to organize us and empower us to strike out when the odds favored us the most. It is entirely possible that, without her influence upon us, we would, at this moment, still be living as we were: playthings, slaves, human beings without rights. "However, Jessica's actions prior to the revolution should not be considered now as we judge her actions after the revolution. Nor should we base our decision wholly on the crimes she has committed to date. What we must do is consider whether this person is dangerous to this community and may be dangerous to us again in the future if allowed to walk among us. "Jessica is a very charming, very persuasive person - her speech earlier tonight not withstanding. She has a gift for pulling others to her side, for enlisting the aid of the weaker among us, for riling up sensitivities. This gift was a blessing in our darkest hour. It is a loaded weapon now that that hour has passed. "If she were allowed to stay here, I have no doubt that she would eventually amass another following. I have no doubt that she would constantly strive to place herself back in power. I do have doubts about this community's ability to indefinitely resist her poisonous charms. For this reason she is a danger to us and will always be a danger to us. You have seen what happens when someone such as her is able to empower themselves. "What I suggest, I do not suggest lightly. But it is my belief that the best course of action for this town is to exile Jessica Blakely permanently from our borders and to send those that stood beside her to the last with her. I would suggest that we give them ample food, medicine, even weapons with which to protect themselves. My wish is not to send them out unprotected and unfed to die. But they must go and they must go immediately; tomorrow morning at the break of day. It is the only way we will be safe from the tyranny that she represents." And so it was decided. The vote was made and the next morning, twenty minutes after sunrise, Jessica and four of her followers were led out through the maze of sandbags on the east side of town. They were given one pistol apiece and two hundred rounds of ammunition between them. They were given backpacks full of canned food - enough to last them nearly three weeks. And they were told to leave and never come back. "God help you if I live through this," Jessica told Madeline as they parted ways. "I'll take my chances," Madeline, holding her M-16 in her hands, replied. "Now go. The guards have orders to shoot you if you step inside of our borders again." "That's nothing I haven't heard before," she replied with an arrogant smirk. She turned on her heels and began to walk down the interstate, heading east. Her four companions, all of them looking dejected and scared, trailed after her. They disappeared over the rise and out of the view of the perimeter guards a few minutes later. The recon positions that Madeline had set up to watch for the return of the men picked them up a few minutes after that. They reported that the five of them had left the interstate at the highway 49 junction and headed north. ------- It was two days later that those same recon positions - which were located on the top of a small rise two miles down the interstate, hidden in thick vegetation - spotted movement on the freeway lanes a half a mile to the east of them. At first they could hardly credit what they were seeing, could not believe that this could possibly be the opposing force that they had been waiting and training so long to counter. "Those aren't the men from this town," said Annette Miller, one of Madeline's recently reinstated guards. "Look at them." And indeed the group they were watching did look rather disheveled. To the last man they were limping along, not in any sort of military formation, all of them filthy and heavily bearded. Several of them were being helped along by their companions. Two others were being carried on litters. "No, that is them," said Caroline Matthews, her partner for the shift. She was looking through a pair of high-powered binoculars and the features of the front man were clear enough to her despite the beard. "That's Stinson. I know that face. It's him. And there's Perkins, and Lamkins." She moved to other faces, calling out names as she recognized them. "That's them," she declared. Annette took a look through her own binoculars, seeing that Caroline was correct. These were the town men. "Where are the rest of them?" She asked, puzzled. "Is this just the lead elements? Are the rest hanging back?" "I don't know," Caroline said nervously. "Do you think maybe they know what happened? About the revolution? Maybe this is some sort of diversion." "Something really strange is going on here," Annette said. She picked up the radio. "Let's report in." The radio was connected by wire to an external antenna that was hidden in the trees above them. It was tuned to channel 38 on the citizens band - a channel that Madeline did not think that the militia would be routinely monitoring. "Recon 1 to base, recon 1 to base," she said into it. "Signal zero. I repeat: signal zero." Signal zero was the code word that the men had been spotted. By speaking it, Annette had set into motion a pre-planned and pre-practiced deployment of every woman in town that was capable of carrying a gun and for which a gun was available. She knew that within ten minutes of her saying the words, the bunkers and positions all along the east side of town and especially along the entrance maze, would be staffed and ready to fight. "This is base," Madeline's voice said, speaking calmly. "Confirming signal zero?" "Affirm," Annette said. "Maddie, I know we're supposed to speak in code only, but there isn't a code for what I'm seeing out here. I think we'd better talk in the clear for a moment." "Negative, recon 1," Madeline replied. "There's a chance they're monitoring. Do the best you can with the code words and report immediately." "Maddie," Annette insisted. "I don't think they're listening. There are only..." she looked over at Caroline, who had been counting them. "Thirty-three," Caroline said. "Not including the two on litters." "There are only thirty-three of them," she finished. "And they look like... like they've been through some shit." "Confirming thirty-three of them?" Madeline asked. "Three three?" "That's affirmative," she said. "We have only thirty-three of them in view at this time and two in litters. They have no rifles on them." There was a long pause as she considered this information. "Keep a watch on them," she finally said. "Initiate no contact or communication with them. The rest have to be out there somewhere. Let me know the instant you see any sign of them." "I copy," Annette told her. "Continuing to watch." ------- Madeline was confused. As all of her squad and platoon commanders checked in, reporting that their positions were manned and ready, she tried to sort through the facts in her head and come to some sort of conclusion. Why were only thirty-three men and a few wounded approaching the town? What had happened to the rest of them? Surely the Garden Hill forces hadn't defeated the Auburn militia, had they? And if they had, there was no way they could have killed 365 people, was there? Was there? "Maybe the rest of them are lagging back with the prisoners," suggested Kathy, who had taken to hanging out with Madeline. "They've never done that before," Madeline said. "Usually they just march in as a group. And why don't they have any rifles?" "I don't know," Kathy said. "It doesn't make a lot of sense to me." Madeline picked up her radio again. "Base to recon 1. Anything new out there?" "Nothing," Annette replied. "They've all passed by us and are approaching the last group of hills. The main positions should pick them up in about ten minutes. No sign of anything or anyone behind them." "I copy," she said slowly. "And Maddie," Annette added. "There's one other thing." "What's that?" "We got a good look at them as they passed in front of us," she said. "They don't look like they've been eating real well. They're all really skinny and their clothes are hanging off of them. A lot of them don't even have packs anymore, just sleeping bags." Madeline and Kathy shared a look of confusion. "I copy that, Annette," she said. "Keep holding." "They certainly sound like a group that hasn't done well in their war, don't they?" asked Kathy. "Yes," Madeline agreed. "They do." "So what now?" "Let's get out to the main positions," she said. "They should be calling in for clearance to enter in about twenty minutes. I guess we'll hear what they have to say." ------- It had taken ten long days of marching along the freeway and through the thick mud around the slides and washouts, but now, at long last, the end of this horrible mission was finally in sight. Stinson and the others were but ghosts of their former selves, bordering on malnutrition and scurvy despite the food supplies they had been given by their victorious enemies. Two of the wounded had died on the march back and two more were showing the first signs of lethal infection from their wounds. All group cohesion had vanished more than a week before. Now they were simply a bunch of men that all happened to be heading for the same destination. Conversation was almost non-existent from day to day. "There are the hills," Stinson said gratefully as he spotted the twin peaks that guarded the entrance maze. "Thank God." His boots were falling apart on his feet, so rotted from mud and water were they, and he was dealing with a very nasty case of trench foot from the constant exposure to moisture. At times he hadn't even been sure where they were. There was just the pain in his legs and feet and the slapping of his tattered boots on the ground. He rarely even bothered worrying how Barnes was going to react when they finally entered the town. The other men grunted a little at his observation but none of them said anything. They kept moving onward, their eyes locked onto the maze, which was just now becoming discernable in the distance. As they came closer and closer it occurred to Stinson that he should probably contact the guards out front on the radio. He no longer remembered the code word that had been assigned so long ago but he didn't think that really mattered anymore. He fished in his backpack for the portable radio, finally locating it beneath some cans of chicken noodle. The radio hadn't been used since his surrender to the Garden Hill forces. He wondered if it even still worked. Well, there was only one way to find out. He clicked it on and tuned the selector to the guard frequency. He took one last look at the men but none of them seemed particularly interested in what he was doing. Were any of them worried about Barnes' reaction? It certainly didn't appear so. He keyed up the radio. "This is Sergeant Stinson," he said into it. "Acting commander of what's left of the task force. We're approaching the town and request entry." He waited, knowing that the demands would start very soon. What had happened? Where was everyone else? And then there would be an extended debriefing. Would Barnes make him a scapegoat? Would he execute him or exile him for surrendering? He found that he didn't really care one way or the other. He was too numb to care. His level of interest in his surroundings came up a little however, when he heard the reply on the radio. "Mr. Stinson," a female voice said. "This is Madeline Rook, acting leader of the town of Auburn. Welcome back to town. You will find things have undergone a fundamental change while you've been away." Everyone stopped in their tracks as they heard this. Even the wounded in the litters raised their heads to stare. "That was a bitch!" someone said in disbelief. "Did she say acting leader of Auburn?" asked another. Stinson chewed his lip thoughtfully for a moment before keying the radio again. "Please clarify exactly what you mean by a fundamental change," he said. "Where is Colonel Barnes and the rest of the men?" "Barnes is dead," Madeline answered. "So are most of the other men in town. We cut their throats while they slept and assumed power for ourselves. Barnes himself had his genitals removed from him and then was burned alive. Only a few of the men that had been on guard duty at the time survived. We are in charge of all of the town's weapons that have been left behind - which, as I'm sure you're aware - includes the majority of the automatic weapons. In addition, those of us that have prior military training have taught the other women how to use them. At this moment you have a whole lot of guns pointed at you and a whole lot of fingers just itching to blow your raping asses away. If you do not wish that to happen, you will disarm yourselves immediately and approach the maze. You will be given further instructions at that time." Now the men were fully awake and aware. They began to talk back and forth, asking each other if what they were being told could possible be true. The bitches had taken over town? They had killed Barnes and the other men? They were pointing weapons at them right now? "If what you say is true," Stinson said into the microphone, "then what are your intentions towards us?" "That depends upon what your intentions towards us are," Madeline answered back. "We are prepared to fight off all four hundred of you if need be. That is what we have been training for and I believe that we are quite capable of doing it." "As you can see," Stinson said sourly, "there are considerably less than four hundred of us at the moment. Nor do we have any weapons except for our pistols. Do you intend to slaughter us?" "We do not," Madeline said. "It is our wish that you surrender to us peacefully. If you do so, I will guarantee that you will not be harmed. However you must understand that you will not be allowed to leave. If you attempt to flee we will pursue you." Stinson looked at the other men for a moment, seeking their input. His answer was no more than a bunch of weary shrugs. He keyed up the radio. "We have nowhere to go," he told Madeline. "And we have very little food with which to get there on. I guess we don't really have a lot of choice in the matter, do we? Will you take care of our wounded?" "As best we can," Madeline answered. "Now if you will all remove your weapons and drop them to the roadway, we can go about bringing you into the town." Another shrug was passed among the men and everyone unstrapped or unbuckled their pistols. No one bothered trying to keep one hidden. There was really no point in it. Once they were disarmed, Madeline directed them to approach the maze. "Stinson," she said over the radio, "I want you to come through first and alone. Pass the radio to the next man and he will be given instructions shortly. I would like to have a few words with you before the rest come in." "I copy," Stinson said. He handed the radio over to Jack Thomas, who just happened to be standing next to him. "See you on the other side," he told him. "Is this really a good idea?" Jack asked him, starting to have doubts about being at the mercy of the women they had once dominated. "I don't know," he said. "But it's the only idea in town right now." With that he began walking through the maze. It took him a few minutes to navigate through its turns and he was cognizant of the weapons that were undoubtedly tracking him the entire way. What would be his fate on the other side? Would they shoot him in the head? Would they imprison him? Or would they cut off his genitals and burn him at the stake? Madeline herself was waiting for him on the other side. The former junior wife of the second-in-command of the militia, he recognized her immediately. She was very beautiful and had been lusted after by many of the other men. Offers to trade two women just for her had once been common. She was, if anything, even more beautiful now. She no longer had that hollow, cowered look that had been the signature of Auburn women. She had a pistol strapped to her waist and an M-16 slung over her shoulder. Standing to the sides of her and slightly back were several other heavily armed women. "I trust you're not dumb enough to try something stupid," she said to him as he emerged onto the roadway. "No," he said. "I seem to be a little short on aggression these days. I trust that you'll keep your word and not shoot us down like dogs?" "As long as you behave yourself," she told him, taking a step closer. "What happened to the rest of the men?" "Dead," he said. "Or deserted. Mostly dead though." "The Garden Hill forces killed more than three hundred of you?" She seemed to be having a little bit of trouble with this concept. It was understandable. "It wasn't even that hard for them to do," Stinson said. "They landed troops in our path with their helicopter and chipped away at us the entire march. The hit us from the air at night. Some of our people ran off and took our food and ammo with them. By the time we got into position to fight we were already beaten. Bracken and the other leaders were dead by then and Stu was leading us. The hundred or so of us that were left went up against prepared defenses. They murdered us with each attack that we made. They dropped homemade napalm on us from the air. Finally I killed Stu myself and surrendered to them." Madeline searched his face for signs of deceit and found none. She knew that Stinson was telling her the truth. "It would seem," she said slowly, "that they knew you were coming?" "They did," he agreed with a sigh. "Jean and Anna told them." "Jean and Anna?" she said, pleased. "They made it there safely?" "That's what we were told," he said. He explained the conversation between Stu and Brett that had taken place just before the final battle. "So that's how they knew to look out for us. That's how they were able to start hitting us on our second day of the march." "All those people dead," Madeline said, shaking her head a little. She was still trying to come to grips with the idea that the men outside the maze were all that she would have to deal with. Her war was over before it could even begin. "And a few more on the way back," Stinson told her. "And it was all for nothing." "It depends on whose point of view you're looking at it from," Madeline told him. "Because Barnes was so hot to take that town and because Bracken was so hot to send so many men after it, we were able to do what we did. And guess what, Stinson. The little bitch you used to call your wife is the one that organized everyone. What do you think about that?" "Jessica?" he said, not even considering that it might've been one of the other two. "That's right," she said. "Yet another gift to us from Garden Hill. You managed to piss her off just enough to rally everyone behind her." "And where is she now?" he asked. "Are we going to be turned over to our former wives and dealt with that way?" "Jessica has been exiled," Madeline told him. "She turned out to be somewhat of a mixed blessing. She rallied us up to take over when the time was right, but she proved to be an even worse leader than Barnes was. She was last seen heading in the direction of Grass Valley and Nevada City. And as for your other question - no, we're not going to turn you over to your former wives. To tell you the truth, I'm not really sure just what we're going to do with you now. We've been so busy concentrating on keeping you from taking the town back that we haven't gotten that far in the equation yet." "I see," he said, staring at her. "So you may decide to burn us all alive after all?" "I don't think so," she told him. "I think we've all had enough death and enough cruelty to last us for a while. Calmer heads are in control now. Besides, men do have a certain use in a biological sense, don't they?" "I suppose we do," he agreed. "You'll be locked up with the other men for the time being," she told him. "You'll work during the day and you'll be fed at night. Other than that, you'll be segregated from us until we decide what your place in this society will be. Maybe we'll be as controlling and oppressive as you were - but I like to think that we won't." "I guess time will tell then, won't it?" Stinson asked. "I guess it will," she agreed. "Now let's get you searched and get the rest of them inside, shall we?" ------- That evening, in Garden Hill, Stacy was lying in bed, wearing nothing but a flimsy maternity nightgown, trying to get herself to sleep. Her body was curled up against Jason's bare back, her enormous stomach pushing up against him. He was snoring lightly, his arms wrapped around Tina, who was sleeping quite soundly on the other side of him. Stacy was uncomfortable, which was a very relative term since she had been quite uncomfortable for most of the entire third trimester of her pregnancy. The last seven days had been the worst of all. The baby had dropped down and engaged in her pelvis, releasing the pressure on her diaphragm, which made it a little easier for her to breathe, but putting tremendous pressure on her bladder, which now felt as if it was constantly full. It was feeling like that now even though she had emptied it less than twenty minutes ago. Also she was having strange aches in her back, cramping pains that felt as if someone were sticking hot wires into her kidneys. "And we have Eve to thank for all this shit," she muttered, rolling out of bed and standing on her feet. She grabbed a candle and a disposable lighter from the nightstand by feel and then walked across the bedroom to the adjoining bathroom. Once inside she lit the candle, illuminating the small cubicle in soft, yellow light. She set it on the sink and then lifted the hem of her nightgown up. Sitting down was an exercise in gravity control and she did it very carefully, finally coming to a soft, safe landing on the cold toilet seat. She pushed a little with her bladder muscles, expecting nothing more than the pathetic trickle that usually came out, but this time she got considerable more. Warm fluid gushed out of her, splattering the toilet and spraying to the floor near her feet. She felt it running down her calves and dripping onto her feet. She knew at once that it wasn't urine and that it hadn't come from her urethra. "Oh no," she said, trying to peer over her bare stomach to see how bad the damage was. She knew to look for excessive blood or dark meconium in the amniotic fluid, signs of impending trouble with the baby. Before she could get a good look however, the first contraction hit her. She had had false contractions for the past two weeks with increasing frequency. Now, as the pain rippled through her from back to front, seizing her like a vise, taking her breath right out of her lungs, she wondered how she could have ever mistaken the false contractions for the real thing. She groaned painfully, not quite screaming as the pain increased in intensity, seemed to level off for a moment, and then finally began to fade. By the time it was over she was panting. Shakily she stood up and made a half-hearted attempt to wipe some of the amniotic fluid off of her. She was gratified to see that it was as clear as water. She picked up the candle and then walked back to the bedroom, already nervously anticipating the next contraction. "Jason, Tina," she said as she approached the bed. She had to say it again before they stirred awake and looked up at her. "I'm in labor," she told them. "Labor?" Jason asked, his eyes widening. "Are you sure?" "I'm sure," she said. "My water broke and it just felt like someone was wrenching my guts out. We'd better get Paul over here." "Let me get dressed," Tina said, pulling herself out of bed. "I'll go get him." It had already been decided that in the cases of normal labor and delivery in Garden Hill, there was little point in flying the woman to El Dorado Hills to be with the doctor. Especially not at night when flying and landing were much more dangerous (particularly with Jason being the only available pilot at the moment). As such, Paul, who had already had three deliveries of babies under his belt before the comet, had been appointed the official town midwife. In addition to the training he already possessed, Renee had run him through an advanced course to make sure he knew how to deal with the un-routine as well as the routine and to recognize problems early in the process. She had also donated a considerable amount of obstetric supplies. He now was equipped to deal with everything from breach delivery to meconium aspiration to prolapsed umbilical cords. He could even - as a very last resort - perform a C-section if necessary, although that would only occur in the event of helicopter failure and impending death of the mother. Tina threw on a pair of jeans and a sweater, put some shoes on her feet, and then went racing out the door into the darkness, a flashlight in her hand and her rain slicker thrown carelessly over her clothing. In the ten minutes that she was gone, Stacy had two more contractions - a mild one that felt only a little worse than menstrual cramping, and a hideous, painful one that brought her to her knees and made her moan in pain. "Are you okay, Stace?" asked Jason, who was prepping the bed with towels and absorbent disposable linen as he had been previously briefed to do by Paul. He was playing the part of the nervous husband admirably well. The fact the baby was not his (although Tina was currently six weeks along with one that was) did not even enter into his equation. "Fuck you, Eve!" she cried as the pain started to fade away. "Fuck you and that Goddamn apple!" Jason, who had been raised with communistic atheism as his primary religion, only had a slight idea what the blasphemes she was shouting out meant. Instead of questioning her however, he helped her to the bed, lying her on the nest he had constructed. Paul arrived a minute later, having been dragged across town at top speed by Tina. He was panting and out of breath as he entered the bedroom and began ordering more lighting and unzipping his supply case. He pulled on a pair of gloves and told her to open wide. "Don't be modest," he assured her. "I'm a professional." He inserted his entire hand into her vagina and probed forward until he felt her cervix. The mucous plug was long since gone and he was able to push two of his fingers into the hard ring that led to her uterus. On the other side he could feel the spongy tissue of the baby's head. "Well, you're on your way," he announced, carefully working his hand free and stripping off the glove. "You're dilated to four centimeters. Only six to go." "Almost halfway there," she said, trying to relax between contractions. "How much longer?" "With a first baby," he said. "I'd say maybe six hours or so. I'm not an expert or anything though." "Six hours?" she cried. "Oh my God." It actually turned out to be closer to eight. Her contractions continued to build both in intensity and length throughout the earlier morning hours until she was screaming with each one. She cussed Adam, Eve, and the asshole that had knocked her up. She vowed several times that she was never going to do this shit again. At last the contractions became so close together that they never seemed to die away completely before the next one hit. They were now accompanied by an overwhelming urge to push. Paul, who had been checking her cervix every hour or so announced that she was now dilated to ten centimeters and that the baby's head was starting to move downward. She was placed into the delivery position with Paul positioned in the catcher's box and Jason and Tina to each side, holding her legs apart and back, spreading her open almost obscenely. Fluid tinged with blood gushed out of her with each contraction, soaking into the pads and towels. Soon the top of the baby's head became visible between the stretched vaginal lips. "Look, you can see the head now," said Paul, who was much more nervous than he was letting on. "It has red hair like you, Stacy." "Goddamn motherfuckin son of a bitch!" she screamed as the next contraction ripped into her. And finally, at 6:33 AM, the head forced its way out into the world. Jason and Tina, neither of whom had ever seen a baby delivered before, gasped as they saw how impossibly big the head looked sticking out of her body. Had it really just come through there? "Push," Paul said as he picked up a bulb syringe and suctioned out the mouth and nose. "Push. It's almost over." "Ahhhhh," Stacy cried, bearing down one more time. The rest of the baby came out with absurd ease into Paul's gloved hands - a wet, slippery, perfectly healthy baby. The first of Garden Hill's post comet period. Paul suctioned it one more time, clearing its lungs out and it hitched a little, seemingly in surprise, and then uttered a weak cry, drawing the first breath of what would hopefully be billions. "Oh my God," Stacy cried, craning forward and looking at the little alien that had been growing in her for the first time. "Oh... a baby. I did it. I had a baby!" "What is it?" Tina asked, finding tears in her eyes as she witnessed the miracle of birth. It was Paul, who was wiping the moisture off of the tiny body with a towel that spotted the identifying features. Nestled between the squalling infant's legs were a tiny penis and testicles. "It's a boy," he said, trying to choke back his own tears. "It looks like we gained another member of the club." Paul clamped and cut the umbilical cord and then handed the baby to its mother. While waiting for the placenta to deliver, Stacy brought the newborn infant to her breast allowing him to suckle. The baby boy stopped crying and sucked contentedly, unaware of the world he had just been brought into, unknowing of the challenges that would lie ahead for him and others of his generation. ------- Epilogue October 17, Impact +370 days El Dorado Hills, California "Are you okay Brett?" asked Doreen Rowley, the twenty-year-old wife of Pat. She was sitting on the left side of the helicopter as it idled on the ground, and had been most of the way through the pre-flight checklist when she noticed her instructor rubbing his knee and grimacing. "A little bit of an ache," he said dismissively, taking his hand away and shrugging her question off. "Nothing I can't handle. Now how about you finish up the pre-flight so we can get up in the air?" "Right," she said, her face a little concerned. She dutifully went back to work however and soon the checklist was complete. Doreen was the fourth of his student pilots since the official merger of the Garden Hill and El Dorado Hills communities three months before. She had just finished ground school and this was to be her first trip up in the air where she would get some stick time. In truth, his left knee, the one injured in the Second Battle of Garden Hill (as Matt, their official historian called it), was throbbing painfully and had been all morning. It was the barometric pressure. Renee had told him and the others with bone injuries that many times. The weather was going through some changes as the cloud cover above was running out of precipitation to drop on them. Windstorms and rainstorms swept in and out now, sometimes with terrifying power, and the barometer rose and fell with the advance and decline of these systems, making everyone edgy and compressing nerve fibers in those that were vulnerable to such things. Currently the barometer was on the rise though the sky was just as cloudy as it had been since the impact. It was in fact one of the most rapid rises yet recorded and it was creating an ache unlike any he'd felt since the first post-operative weeks after the surgery. He tried his best to ignore it, for the most part successfully. "So," he asked Doreen, giving one more rub of the area. "I'm all set to take off then?" "Yes," she told him. "Everything checks out." "Are you sure?" he asked, deliberately injecting a note of skepticism into his tone. The old instructor's trick worked on her for only a second. She looked down at the checklist in her hand, trying frantically to spot something that she might have forgotten to check on it. Seeing it however, she knew that she had covered everything. Her face took on a more confident expression. "I'm sure," she told him. "You're ready to fly." He smiled. "Almost got you with that one, didn't I?" While she laughed he throttled up the engine and then lifted off, rising into the air. Doreen was actually one of his better students and he thought she would have no trouble at all picking up the mechanics of flying. As his experiences with Jason had taught him, the younger members of society, those that had grown up with Nintendo and PlayStation, tended to be much easier taught. The two students that he had been forced to wash out so far had both been in their thirties. Brett brought them up to an altitude of 3000 feet, taking them well out over the Great Central Valley. Though the cloud cover was still with them and though monster storms sometimes rolled in and dumped inches of rain in little more than an hour, the constant fall of raindrops was now a thing of the past. The weather itself had grown steadily colder over the past few months - they were lucky if they reached 45 degrees during mid-afternoon these days - but the average day brought them nothing more than a light mist of drops. Sometimes they didn't even get that and it would be possible to go outside without rain gear on. The cessation of the rainfall - aside from creating problems gathering dishwashing water, laundry water, and bathing water - had had a dramatic effect on the view of the valley below them. Where once there had been a virtual sea of water more than a hundred feet deep, there was now endless swampland and wide, surging rivers running through mudflats and the mounds and mounds of debris left over from the initial flooding. Thankfully the millions of bodies had all decomposed by now, leaving nothing more than bones scattered among the remains of cars, the uprooted trees, and the piles of smashed concrete. The residents of Auburn had taken to picking through this debris in order to survive, at least that was what recon flights of the area had shown. What they were finding to eat in all of that was the subject of often intense speculation in the executive council meetings. "Let's head a little to the south," Brett told Doreen, "and then we'll have you take over and try some turns. Sound good?" "Uh... sure," she said a little nervously. "Relax," he told her. "You'll do fine." The aircraft they were in was not the MD-500 that had helped them win the war against the Auburnites. With its rotor blades failing, several major engine components well past their useful service life, and no replacement parts on the horizon, the machine had been honorably retired and relegated to museum status behind the El Dorado Hills elementary school buildings. In its place the merged communities now possessed a Bell JetRanger - the civilian model of the helicopter that Brett had flown for the Sheriff's Department - and an old Vietnam era Huey that had been refurbished and returned to service as a firefighting helicopter shortly before the comet impact. Both helicopters had been discovered by recon flights from the MD-500 - the Bell from a small municipal airport outside of Reno and the Huey from a National Forest station outside Angel's Camp. Both had been stored with a fairly good inventory of spare parts and components, enough to hopefully keep them in the air for as long as there was a fuel supply for them. Currently Brett was flying the Bell, which had dual controls for the ease and safety of teaching. It was the Bell that also was used for short-range recon missions and small lifting. The Huey, a large, maintenance intensive, dual engine job, was used only for heavy lifting or - if they were to go to war again - for transporting large numbers of troops. So far, the former job was all that had been required of it. Brett, as fond as he had become of the MD-500 during the Garden Hill days, loved the Bell almost physically. It was the aircraft that he was most familiar with, that he had accumulated the most hours in over the years. He liked the responsiveness of its controls and even the clattering racket caused by its tail rotor. The quiet that the MD-500 had produced with its NOTAR system had always seemed unnatural to him. "Okay, let's have you take the controls and take over straight and level flight for me," Brett said as they moved south over the flooded and smashed city of Sacramento. "All right," she said, putting her hands on the collective and cyclic and her feet on the pedals. He talked her through the switchover and a moment later the aircraft was hers. Nothing dramatic happened. As long as she didn't move anything, the aircraft would continue on its course. As soon as it soaked into her mind that she was in command, he talked her through her first turn. As most of his students did the first time, her hands were a little too light on the controls, so afraid was she of being too heavy on them. It took her a minute before she actually got the machine to change direction. Once she began to practice though, she caught the hang of it real quickly. Inside of ten minutes she was turning and banking with ease, able to level them within five degrees of a particular heading and able to maintain her altitude within a hundred feet or so. By the time twenty minutes had passed, she was able to maintain altitude perfectly and put them within a degree or so of the requested heading. "Very good," Brett told her, absently rubbing his knee again, trying to massage away the ache. "Very good indeed for your first time up. Why don't you spin us back around to 10 degrees and we'll head on back. It's your aircraft until we get ready to descend." "My aircraft," she said, savoring the words. Ten minutes later she handed control of the helicopter back to him, allowing him to descend towards town. They passed over the defensive bunkers on the outer perimeter, bunkers which had been built by work crews shortly after the community merger and which were staffed by an elite cadre of trained guards supervised by Chrissie. The guards in those bunkers were all equipped with fully automatic rifles and had plenty of ammunition to burn if needed. The extra weapons had come from pillaging partially flooded police buildings in Reno, Sparks, and several smaller towns both in California and Nevada. The ammunition had come from a storage warehouse much further away. A routine radio check-in occurred when they were spotted and the three guards below waved up at them in a friendly manner as they flew over the top of them at 1500 feet. They were given clearance to land the aircraft and Brett circled around the elementary school once to get the feel of the wind and to get a read on the altitude. The constant barometric changes of late meant that the altimeters of all of the aircraft - which operated by measuring barometric pressure - were off by an unknown amount at any given time. Since it was only a small amount it didn't matter terribly much in flight but it did make landing a tad tricky at times. Still, Brett was a veteran of such post-comet idiosyncrasies and he touched down neatly, right in the accustomed spot, between the Huey and the twin engine Cessna that had been scavenged from the Cameron Park airport. It was the Cessna that provided the long-range recon of the area. With a range of more than 1000 miles, Brett, Jason, and Pat had flown as far as Boise to the northeast, Salt Lake City to the east, Las Vegas to the southeast, and San Diego to the southwest. What they had found in all of these places was starkly depressing. The constant rainfall of the first six months post impact had drowned the desert and flatlands. All of the cities and towns in this area were flooded out and choked with mud, the only residents left, small groups of disorganized survivors, probably living off of the meager pickings left over from the collapse of civilization. Circling such places showed evidence of crude defensive walls built around enclaves, signs that the groups were constantly fighting among themselves. This was the view they had in all of the major desert cities: Reno, Salt Lake, Boise, Las Vegas. Los Angeles and San Diego were simply not there anymore, the very landscape that they had once stood upon washed clean of the towering high-rises, the endless subdivisions, and the millions of people that had once lived there. It was only in the mountain areas, high above the floods, outside of the mudslide areas, that any sign of organization existed. Here, near the communities of Nevada City, Alturas, Murphy's - tiny towns that had managed to roll through the earthquake intact - were places similar to El Dorado Hills or Auburn found. Circling such areas showed unmistakable defenses and inhabited buildings. In several cases the people themselves had been spotted. Review of videotapes made on the overflights had shown buildings where food was being stored, pens where animals were being kept, even greenhouse type facilities in Alturas. In contrast to the depressing views of the cities, the few thriving mountain communities brought hope; hope that there might be a future to the human race after all. "Okay," Brett told Doreen once the rotor was in the neutral position and the engine was throttled back down to idle. "Go through the shut-down procedure." She did so, performing each action on the short checklist without problem. The rotor spun down to a halt and the engine died with a last whine, leaving only silence behind. They both unstrapped from their seats and stepped out. Brett's leg gave a strong protest when he placed weight upon it. Christ, he thought, it was really hurting today. Sherrie, Paul's second wife, came walking out from the small maintenance shack where the aircraft supplies were kept. Her job in town was to keep the various planes and helicopters of the El Dorado Hills Air Force fueled and ready to take off at a moment's notice. She also oversaw the maintenance on each one, although others did the actual tasks. It was a job that she was very well suited for. She had had a baby less than four weeks ago and was still slightly pudgy with postpartum fat. She was also limping quite badly on the leg that had been shot in the First Battle of Garden Hill, much worse than normal. "Hey, Sherrie," Brett said as he limped over towards her. He gave her a smile that one gives to others that are sharing their exclusive misery. "You too huh?" "Yes," she groaned good-naturedly. "It's killing me today. I don't think its ever been this bad before." "The barometer is surely going crazy on us, that ain't no shit," he replied. "I guess because it dropped so low during that last storm." "Go get a couple of Naprasyn from Renee," she suggested. "I did and it took the edge off a little." "Maybe I will," he replied, intending to do just that. Sherrie turned her attention to Renee, who was standing shyly next to her instructor. "So how'd you do?" she asked her. "You didn't crash my chopper, I can see that." "It was really cool," she beamed. "The bomb!" "And we're going to do a lot more of it tomorrow," Brett reminded her. "So why don't you go get your notebooks and head on home. I want a three page essay on the physics of ascent and descent before we lift off." "Awww," she groaned. "Not more homework." "More homework," he confirmed. "And no bitching about it or I'll give you even more." "All right," she said, exaggerating her annoyance. She headed off to the main bank of classrooms, whistling as she went. Brett looked over at the empty parking spot on the other side of the twin-engine plane. It was for their smaller recon plane, the former Highway Patrol Cessna 182 that had been next to the MD-500 in the Cameron Park hanger. "Jason still out on patrol huh?" he asked. "I'd of thought he'd be back by now." "He said they were going to shoot some film of the Tuolumne forest area. Our maps are a little vague on that part of the foothills." "Oh," Brett said, nodding. "I guess that will take a while then. I'm telling you, you give that kid an assignment and he certainly takes it seriously. How much longer until the 182 goes down for a thorough?" "Another twenty hours or so," she told him, knowing the answer without having to look at her books. "Good enough," he said. "Hopefully Jason will have the map done by then and we can start concentrating on recovering that jet fuel from Winnemucca. I know it isn't going anywhere, but I just don't like leaving those tanker cars sitting there." He was referring to another group of tankers and boxcars that had been found sitting on a cut through some hills outside of the small, demolished Nevada town. Three of the tankers were full of jet fuel bound for a military base in Nebraska. The logistics of getting it back to El Dorado Hills were something that was still being worked out. "Well," Sherrie told him, "I'd better get the Bell gassed up and ready to roll. Any problems with it?" He assured her that there were not and they said their goodbyes to each other for the moment. While Sherrie limped off towards the fuel truck, Brett limped off towards the elementary school. He found Renee, their resident doctor, inside one of the classrooms. The room was decked out with anatomical posters that had come from her former office and the blackboard was filled with drawings of the human circulatory system. At the desks, watching her lecture on anatomy and physiology were three men and six women from town, the first class of the El Dorado Hills School of Medicine. It had been decided even before the merger of the towns that the perpetuation of specialized knowledge such as medicine, piloting, and mechanics, would be the most important goal. In the world that was forming in the wake of the comet, knowledge and skills would be power. As such, Brett was teaching people to fly and the basics of military tactics, Steve Kensington was teaching engine repair and basic engineering skills, and Renee was teaching medicine. Stacy, Jason's first wife, was sitting in the front row, staring intently, her stomach already starting to swell with her second pregnancy. She was the star pupil so far, having been liberated from the kitchen on the basis of her extremely high test scores on the general knowledge exams that had been given. Renee, seeing him standing in the doorway, paused in her lecture and offered him a smile followed up by a questioning look. He asked if he could have a word with her for a moment and she excused herself. "Knee bothering you?" she whispered when she reached him. "You must be psychic," he said. "I must be," she confirmed. "Is it bad?" "As bad as it's ever been. How about kicking down some of that Naprosyn you gave Sherrie?" She pulled a prescription pad from her pocket and wrote "Naprosyn - 2 tabs" on it. The reason for the pad was that a few people in town had been helping themselves to some of the drug supplies - particularly the painkillers and the Valium derivatives. This had prompted the ruling committee to place all pharmaceuticals - over the counter and otherwise - under lock and key, releasable by the supply staff only on written order from the doctor. This did not include the alcohol and marijuana supply, which was releasable by a mere order from the ruling committee. "Are you flying any more today?" she asked him. "No," he told her. "We've wrapped it up until tomorrow. Unless of course, someone attacks us in the meantime." She laughed a little. "I guess we'll just have to take that chance." She scribbled a little more on the pad. "I'm adding a couple of Vicodin for you too. I couldn't give Sherrie any of that because she's nursing, but you're not lactating currently, are you?" "I don't seem to be," he said with a grin. "It must be nice to be a man," she said, rubbing her own swelling stomach a little. She tore the prescription off and handed it to him. "See you at dinner tonight." "Right," he told her, taking it. "Thanks." It took him the better part of ten minutes to get the supply clerk to get his pills from the locked room. Once they were handed over he washed them down with boiled water from the dispenser in the hallway. He then made his way upstairs - wincing at each step on the risers - to the main office where the ruling committee met. The office was not terribly opulent by any means. It had once belonged to the principal of the school and it retained much of its original furnishings. Pat, Bonnie, and Paul, the committee members, were sitting around the desk having an informal discussion about initiating contact with Auburn. It was an old argument and one that they never seemed to make much headway on. Of course the change in government there had long been noted. It was not hard to notice that the women were the ones with the guns now and the men were the ones scavenging in the mudflats of the valley for whatever it is that they looked for there. Auburn was watched very closely by El Dorado Hills. Recon flights during the day were contacted three times each week - always by approaching from the east, as if they'd come from Garden Hill - and night flights were conducted weekly. So far it did not appear as if the women were planning any kind of military operation soon, but you never could tell. Bonnie was of the opinion that contact should be made, just in the interests of being the neighborly thing to do and perhaps to see if any sort of trade could be worked out. Pat and Paul however, were both opposed to the contact on the grounds that they didn't want to have dealings with a community that treated one sex as slaves. Sometimes they argued viciously about this for hours at a time. Currently the discussion was much lower key. They were sipping out of glasses of boiled water with lemonade powder in it and behaving almost calmly. They looked up at him as he entered and he told them that unless they had something else for him to do today, he was going to go home and lay down. "The leg bothering you?" Bonnie asked, noting how he was carefully keeping his weight on the right one. "You could say that," he agreed. "Renee cut me loose some pills for it. I want to see if I can sleep it off." "Sure," she said after receiving no dissent from the other members. "Take the rest of the day off. You're not the first one being bothered by the barometer today." "It really is spiking, isn't it?" said Paul, whose job it was to keep an eye on such things. "It really is," he agreed. "I'll catch you later. If you see Jason when he comes back, will you have him stop by my house on his way home? We need to go over the lifting procedures for the Huey some more so we can get that fuel lift figured out." "I'll tell him," Paul said, "but that might be kind of late. He stays here until almost 9:00 some nights working on those maps." "Well, I'll probably be up," Brett said. "The baby, you know." "Oh, we know," they all echoed. All of them were living in houses with infants. He bade them farewell and headed back downstairs, exiting the school by the side door and limping his way out to the street in front. Fortunately, the house he shared with his three wives was relatively close by, less than three blocks in fact. The streets were damp as he made his way home but the precipitation was non-existent, not even a mist was falling. The wind was icy and moving at a fairly good clip from the west. It seemed almost dry outside, though very cold. Brett pulled his coat a little tighter and soon he was home. The house that he and his family had been assigned was a two-story, four bedroom that had probably been pretty expensive before the comet. He entered through the unlocked door and stepped into the formal living room, where the previous day's laundry was hanging amid dry linen placed there to absorb the excess moisture. He wound his way through all of this and into the family room, which was modestly, though tastefully decorated with its original, pre-comet furnishings. Chrissie was sitting in the recliner, a paperback book folded open in front of her. Her walkie-talkie sat next to her on the end table. In her arms was three-month-old Laura - named for her maternal grandmother who had been shot to death a year ago. It had become somewhat traditional in town to name children after parents that had died in the impact. The boys were generally named after the father's father and the girls after the mother's mother. Chrissie had her shirt unbuttoned and her bra pulled up. Laura was suckling contentedly at her right nipple, drawing the life-giving milk from her mother's body into her own. "Hey, babe," Brett hailed, walking over and kissing her lightly on the mouth. He then leaned over and kissed the infant's head as well. Laura stopped sucking long enough to give him a toothless smile and then she went right back to work on the engorged nipple. "What're you doing home? Just feeding or are you here for the day?" "Just feeding Laura," she said. "I still have tomorrow's roster to do and a training rotation to schedule for." She gave a crooked grin. "It'll be nice when Shellie pops out her little package and gets her milk. Then I won't have to keep coming home every four hours to feed the machine here." "I heard that," said Michelle, emerging from the bathroom. Like roughly three-quarters of the childbearing age women in town, she was well knocked up. Nearly six months along now, her stomach had gotten huge. "And if you think I'm gonna stick a baby on each of my tits, you're out of your freakin mind. They'll suck me dry." "I love it when you talk like that," Brett said, kissing her. Michelle was currently pulling a shift as the mother of the family. Since Chrissie's position was much more important than Michelle's - who was a mere guard supervisor - Michelle was allowed to stay home each day and take care of Laura. She offset these duties with Maggie, who was one of the guards and who was three months pregnant herself, on a rotating basis. It was somewhat of an unconventional arrangement but it was a somewhat unconventional world these days. Michelle plopped herself down on the sofa next to Brett and immediately snuggled up to him. After the routine questions about why he was home so early and how his day had gone, she began nibbling on his neck, giving soft sucks and kisses that soon had him to a full erection. "You guys," Chrissie said, feigning exasperation. "Don't do that in front of the baby. Go in the bedroom for Christ's sake." "I think she's got a good idea," Michelle said, nibbling a little on his clavicle. "Care to join me, Brett?" "We already did it this morning," he reminded her, playing hard to get. "And we'll probably do it tonight too," she said, giving his erection a squeeze through his pants. "Now I know why Chrissie was such an animal while she was pregnant. Now let's do it." "If I must," he said, faking a sigh. They retired to the bedroom and did it. It was up to its usual standards of excellence. After, as he lay curled up next to Michelle's swollen body, feeling the perspiration drying on his skin, he was just starting to drift off to sleep, the combination of Vicodin and sex putting him under. Just as the last plugs of consciousness were being pulled free, just as his breathing took on the slow, regular patterns of slumber, a commotion from outside jerked him back upward. "What the hell?" asked Michelle, who had heard it as well. It was the sound of voices raised in excitement. Many of them. They were loud enough to be heard even through the double-paned glass of the house's windows. This particular part of town was densely populated, with no unoccupied houses on the street at all. It sounded like all of their neighbors were standing outside and babbling. Individual words could not be made out due to the glass and the sheer number of speakers, but something had obviously riled up everyone. "I'd better see what's up," Brett said, pulling himself free of the covers and rolling out of bed. His knee was only throbbing distantly now, thanks to the pain medicine, but his mind was a little groggy. He picked up his jeans and sat down to put them on. As he was doing this, a loud knock came on their front door. "Who is it?" he heard Chrissie call from the living room. A voice muttered something excitedly in return. This was followed by the sound of the door opening and a faint, female voice telling Chrissie that she had to come outside. She had to see, and quickly. "Oh my God!" he heard Chrissie exclaim. "I have to get Brett and Shellie! They have to see this!" Brett and Michelle shared a look, wondering if there was some kind of trouble. Obviously something strange was going on out there. But what? They both continued to dress. Brett made sure that his gun was strapped on to his waist. The door to the bedroom was ripped open a moment later and Chrissie stood there, her face flushed and excited, Laura dozing in her arms. "You have to come see this," she said. "Hurry, come outside." "What is it?" Brett asked. "Just come on!" she said. "You have to see it for yourself. Hurry, before it goes away!" With that she rushed out of the room once again, heading for the front door. Brett and Michelle exchanged one more look and then threw on the rest of their clothing. They hurried through the house and out the front door. The first thing they saw were the neighbors. They were gathered in the street outside, everyone from every house up and down the block, nearly sixty people in all. They were looking skyward and pointing. The next thing they noticed was that the light was brighter than normal. It was almost as if... "Look at it," Chrissie said, laughing delightfully. "Isn't it beautiful? Isn't it the most wonderful thing you've ever seen?" Brett and Michelle looked skyward, off to the southwest. There, about midway in the sky, a break in the clouds had magically opened, a brief rip caused by the intersection of two weather patterns perhaps. Visible in that small break, which encompassed less than a single degree of the sky, was the sun. The big, bright, orange ball that gave life to the planet hung there in the hole, shining in all of its glory; a sight no one had seen now in more than a year. "The sun," Brett whispered, staring at it in awe. It really was a beautiful thing. He could feel its warmth upon his face, could feel the way his eyes tried to avert from its brightness. Surrounding it was the brilliant blue of the sky. "It really is still there," Michelle said beside him. "It really is." "And maybe things really will be all right," Brett replied, still staring. The break in the clouds would last for less than ten minutes before the curtains of cloud cover closed it back up again. But later that day there would be another opening, and the next day there would be yet another. ------- Author's Note And so this very long, very detailed story of the aftermath comes to a close. When I started this story way back in October, I had only the vaguest idea of where I would be taking it and I had no idea how long it would eventually end up being. And, while my early hopes of pumping out a chapter a week as I did during "Doing It All Over" turned out to be naïve, I do like to think I maintained a fairly consistent pace throughout. I would like to take this oppurtunity to thank, once again, the literally thousands of people that have emailed me with encouragement, ideas, criticisms, even hostility during the construction of this story. It is for you that I have carried on with this story and once again you have instilled me with the confidence I require to keep writing. Many have said that the emails are the only payment the Usenet author gets. While that is certainly true in this case, these emails represent much more to me than just words on a screen. With them I am told over and over again that I can write and that I do have a future with the written word. As to what that future will be, time will tell, but I now can be certain that there is a future there and that I have made my mark on the literary world in at least a minor way. Many of you, in these emails, have expressed the hope that I continue with this plotline forever, or at least for many more chapters. In fact, I have left the narrative open enough so that the thread can be picked up again at a later date if I so choose to do that (and more than likely, I probably will). But for the time being, I have told the story I set out to tell and it is time for me to step out of the Aftermath world for a while and step into some other worlds. For those of you out there who write, you'll understand how I feel perhaps. A writer's mind feels trapped if confined to one storyline, one plot, one set of characters forever. I honestly don't know how Tom Clancy and other such writers, who always use the same story with the same people, can do it. Just one more note on technical things and I'll leave you for now. I have been reading the discussions that go on in the alt.sex.stories forum and have noted that several people have questioned whether or not the impact of such a comet would cause the sort of destruction described in the story. Others have speculated much about whether or not civilization would survive on the east coast of the United States, or in Europe, or in other places (the Midwest was mentioned quite a bit). Just for clarity, I researched comet and asteroid impacts extensively before writing the first chapter. This research was done in various scientific journals and publications, not on the Discovery Channel and The Learning Channel between commercials for Miss Cleo the psychic friend. Everything that I read assured me that the effects I described from a comet of that size and composition moving at that velocity and impacting in the ocean would be a near extinction level event for most species on the planet, including homo sapiens. The tidal waves (not wave) rushing out from such an impact would be hundreds of feet in height while in the open ocean and would move at near the speed of sound until such time as they hit something. They would sweep through every ship afloat, be they in the open sea or near the shore, and would rise to nearly a mile in height when they encountered a continental mass, at which point they would wash nearly a hundred miles inland and then rebound back the other way. These waves, though they would start at the point of impact, would eventually wash through every ocean on earth as they bounced back and forth and would probably continue to batter the coastlines of every landmass for the better part of a week. The rain itself is another effect described in nearly every publication that I read. It was noted time and time again that a land impact, while devastating locally, would probably not cause a collapse of civilization, but that an ocean impact would be hundreds of times more devastating because of the global rainfall that would result from the heat of entry boiling away seawater into the atmosphere. This rain, I was assured, would last for months, possibly even a year or so, and that a new ice age would probably result from this. This means that every low-lying area on Earth would be flooded and washed out. The vast majority of the cities on this planet are near the ocean or rivers (as I mentioned in Chapter 1). All of them would be flooded or completely destroyed. Without the cities we have lost most of our planetary population. We have also lost our governments, our abilities to communicate and trade, and our abilities to produce food and goods. Military bases are rarely located on high ground so they would mostly be flooded out, their weapons, aircraft, etc, buried. My point to all this is that I stand by the details I described in the beginning of the story and that I would like to assure the readers that I did not just pull them out of my ass - there is scientific basis to them. The other point is to reiterate that everything is destroyed, not just the west coast of the United States. So that is my tale and I'm glad you have all enjoyed it. Until we meet again, Love to all (and good sex), Al Steiner May 31, 2001 Placer County, California, USA ------- The End ------- Posted: 2000-10-12 Last Modified: 2005-09-07 / 12:40:51 am Version: 1.10 ------- http://storiesonline.net/ -------