Invitation.
I looked back into the mirror, which reflected her from the waist up and decided for the moment that her front was now my favorite view. Her breasts rose and fell with the brushing motion, her eyes focused on her hair, as if she were unaware of the impact her body in motion had upon me. Her eyes shifted slightly and met mine in the mirror and she blessed me with a smile.
When the brushing was finally finished, she opened her top right dresser drawer, pulled out a pipe and loaded it. Swiveling her butt and legs around her dressing bench, she turned to face me, slightly parting her legs. She brushed her left nipple with her fingertip and it responded. Then she put the pipe on her dresser and slowly stood, allowing me, finally, a look at the whole package. She turned slowly, a full circle, then, hands on hips, inquired, “Had enough?”
Full front, a cornucopia of curves and soft skin and hard muscles, hidden little crevices and wonderfully responsive tissues that would spring erect at the touch of my tongue or the caress of my fingers…Yes that was definitely the best of all the options…for the moment, anyway. “Just another hour or so,” I said.
She laughed and retrieved the pipe. “Now your turn,” she said, walking over to me and kissing me softly on the lips. This is goose/gander deal here.” She demurely slid under the comforter and lay on her back, only her head showing.
I stood up a gave a turn around, an awkward and ungraceful 360, but apparently it did the job. “Enough foreplay,” I said. “Let’s get it on.” I hopped onto the bed.
“Hush,” she replied, placing a finger on my lips. “Just a tiny bit more conversation.”
Waiting was not a problem for me. I knew whatever was on her mind was best exorcised. When our minds were free, we always communicated better sexually. I climbed back into bed and lit the pipe with a kitchen match, took a hit and passed it.
She took a toke, held it a bit, and asked, “You’re comfortable with the new living arrangements? You’re right about it being a bit sudden. Could I have made a mistake?”
I put my arm around her and pulled her closer. “There was no mistake,” I answered. “I trust your instinct. I had the same feeling when I was talking to him out in the cold. He’s good for us. We’ll be good for him. Besides, Duke seems to like him. What more could you ask?”
Turning onto her side under the covers, she put her arm around my waist and looked up at me. “Better now,” she said. “We can stop talking. Wanna fool around, big fella?”
She sat up, letting the covers slip to her waist and took another hit and passed the pipe. I inhaled deeply and put the pipe on my night stand, then leaned over and gently placed my lips around her left nipple. I heard her sudden intake of breath. I was forever amazed and how she could instantly surrender to the physical. I knew that above me, her eyes were unfocused and her mouth slightly open. A rush of visceral response centered in my chest and flowed outward North and South.
Sarah reached down. “Ahh. So nice,” she said dreamily. “Diamond cutter.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Two days later, the four of us—Weasel, Duke, Sarah and me—hiked five miles through the snow south and west of the compound to the site of Weasel’s home. Sarah and I kept increasing the pace, knowing we would soon be co-conspirators in Weasel’s secret world of technology.
There would be no shock had we found his home in a cave…or even a tree house. Whatever it turned out to be, we knew it would be isolated, unique and stamped with Weasel’s peculiar charm.
He didn’t disappoint.
A three-hour hike brought us to a small development of modest looking suburban homes, the kind that were grouped close together and two homes were joined by a shared wall. They were called townhouses, even though there wasn’t a town nearby.
“Whaddya see?” Weasel asked.
We were in the middle of a grouping of sixteen townhouses, eight each on either side of the road. We saw the homes, the indentation in the snow that demarcated the road that ran between the structures, a deer trail worn down deep enough to show brown grass and dirt, various other animal tracks and the signs of our own passing, Duke’s paw prints and our own boot impressions.
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” Sarah said.
“That’s good,” said Weasel. “Because I live right over there.” He pointed to the end house behind us and to our left. “To get there, we gotta start over here.” He pointed to the opposite end house of the grouping we faced. “Follow me.”
Weasel retrieved a pine bough half-buried in the snow and using it as an eraser for our footsteps in the snow, led us around the back of the townhouse. We entered a kitchen area through the unlocked back door. “Don’t have to worry much about prowlers out here,” Weasel said. “But I do have a few surprises in case anyone shows up. You two wait up here with Duke while I attend to a few matters. It’s safe to roam around up here, but don’t come downstairs until I get back.” He disappeared through a door that led to the basement.
Half an hour later he reappeared and escorted us into the basement, closing the door behind. We descended into the darkness, feeling our way along until we reached a carpeted floor. “Now,” said Weasel’s disembodied voice, “here’s something I bet you’ve never seen before.” In an instant the darkness was replaced with glaring light, causing us to turn our heads and shield our eyes.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “How in the hell did you do that?”
“Mac, that there is a demonstration of the wonders of electricity.” He reached for a light switch, an item I was quite familiar with, but which I had never known to serve any useful function. Weasel flicked it down and the room returned to darkness, then back again to its lighted state with another flick.
Sarah was quite enchanted with the process and played with the switch several times before she asked, “Where is the power coming from?”
“I’ll show you in a few minutes,” replied Weasel. “But first, observe.”
Two ceiling lights, the bulbs behind milky glass fixtures, provided the illumination. The room was furnished and obviously was meant to be a place for entertainment and relaxation. Couches and chairs faced a large television and there were stereo speakers in the corners. One wall was lined with cabinets, the others paneled in gray weathered looking format. Family photos and prints of art work were displayed on the walls. Nothing we hadn’t seen before. At least there were no skeletons.
Weasel walked over to one of the cabinets and opened its door. He went down on hands and knees and pulled on something I could not see and then moved away, revealing an opening small enough for us to crawl through, connecting us to the neighboring home’s basement. This new room was lit by one bulb. He turned out the lights in the room we had come from and closed the cabinet door behind him and then the hidden door in the new room’s wall.
“Now, remember how I been stressin’ the importance of safety and bein’ suspicious all the time?” He pointed to a hand grenade that was held to the wall by the door we had just come through by two metal bands. A length of fishing line was in his hand. One end was attached to the ring in the grenade. “This line leads to an eye hook inside the door. I removed it before I opened the door when I first came down. If I hadn’t done that, I’d look like the inside of a raccoon. That’s what took me so long. Had to disarm several booby traps. What you do, is always live in a place that you feel is gonna be safe. Then you set traps all over the place, figurin’ you’ll never be safe. Works out pretty well that way.”
“How many times have they been set off?” asked Sarah.
“None up here. Four times in about 18 years down south. Makes a pretty big mess when it happens. Plus I gotta move when someone comes across my place. Got five fellas once. I can guarantee you they weren’t makin’ no social call.”
Except for in books, it was the first grenade I seen. I had read somewhere that in the early 21st there were approximately three hundred million privately held guns in the United States. But grenades weren’t available to the general population i
n the 20th and 21st. They were a limited resource after the collapse. Within two decades, the clans had used them all up.
“How many of these things you got?” I asked.
“I got hundreds. Pineapples, frags, flash, concussion, smoke—You name it, I got it. Ain’t a better scavenger in the world than me, Mac. Got some claymores, too. They make an awful mess. Armories and police stations. Just gotta know where to look.”
He directed us to another hidden door and another basement. I quickly figured out that we were moving down the line of townhouses which were across the street from where his was located. We were on the wrong side of the road. I didn’t bother to ask. Each door had been booby trapped similarly to the first. When we got to the last basement, there was a door in the wall left of us instead of straight ahead.
This opened to yet another tunnel, a passageway which obviously snaked under the street to the other group of townhouses. Two single bulbs strung along the ceiling provided light for our claustrophobic hands-and-knees sixty-foot journey. Every ten feet a vertical 4x4’s led to lengths of 2x8’s above our heads, bracing the ceiling.
“How in the hell did you build this?” I asked.
“Ain’t as hard as you think when you got the right equipment.”
As we entered the long tunnel, I heard a muffled sound unlike anything I had ever heard. Sarah and Duke picked it up too. As we moved down the shaft, I began to feel the sound as well as hear it. There was a faint vibration in the ground beneath my hands and knees. The sound was a deep drone, like a giant mosquito. Discernible within the drone was a rhythmic pulsing, but very fast, almost too rapid to pick up, but definitely there. Weasel crawled in front of me. I asked his butt what the noise was. His head laughed and told me I’d know soon.
After a few more feet, an unfamiliar smell began to accompany the sound. It was the odor of something burning. Similar to a kerosene lamp or burning fat, but somehow dirtier. We finally reached the tunnel’s end and entered Weasel’s domain, the noise becoming very loud. A smoky haze filled the new room—another basement.
The source of the noise and smoke and stench was vibrating in the middle of the room. It was a black tubular frame about three feet long and two feet high. In its middle, above the ground, the frame supported a black box which was making a huge racket and spewing forth blue-gray smoke. A thin, flexible pipe led from the box to the wall and, I guessed, out of the basement.
Weasel had to yell to be heard. “That contraption is a gasoline powered electric generator,” he yelled. “Ain’t never known another person to have one.”
“How in the hell does it run?” screamed Sarah. “There isn’t any gasoline anymore.”
Weasel motioned us to follow him, and we exited into another basement and then a third before we could get away from the smell and noise. “It ain’t the noise that’ll kill you, it’s the fumes. Full of carbon monoxide. Could drop you in a few minutes if you didn’t get any fresh air. Believe it or not, most of the fumes were going out of the building through that exhaust pipe. That’s what cars and trucks used to put out in their exhausts.”
“How did people stand the smell? And my eyes. They’re really burning,” Sarah said.
“I know. Some cities were so bad, that they used to have ‘alerts’ for people with breathing problems. Crazy stuff. Saw it on some vids. That’s why I’m looking into new generators. Real state of the art for the 21st. Propane and natural gas. Quiet and less junk in the air. I found some, but gotta figure out how to get ‘em here and set ‘em up.”
Ten more minutes of crawling brought us into a different building, two basements away from the generator, and the fumes and noise had been left behind. The room was strikingly similar to the one we had first entered—quiet, comfortable, and peaceful.
“This is my relaxation room,” explained Weasel. “Most of my supplies are in the rest of the rooms you haven’t seen yet. We’re safe here. The upstairs doors are sealed. The booby traps are all reset. Plus I’ve got a few escape tunnels you ain’t seen yet. Sit yourselves down. Relax.”
Duke explored every corner of the new territory, found a soft throw rug, curled up, and slept. I flopped down on a leather couch, glad to be finally out of tunnels and off of my hands and knees. Sarah stood in the center of the room, hands on hips, looking down at Weasel, who had taken root in a rocking chair, smiling contentedly. Proud.
I could see why. Across one wall, like a blank canvas, was a gigantic TV screen. At least three or four feet across. Beneath it was a shelving unit with a smoky glass door. Each of the six shelves held an impressive piece of electronic equipment. Weasel noticed where I was looking and walked over to the system, opening the door to the electronics.
“C’mon over here you two,” he invited. Pointing to the whole system, he said, “You’ve seen these in stores or magazine pictures. Home entertainment system, finest the 21st could provide. TV is a Sony 40 inch 6K res. 3-D adaptable. These little fellas,” pointing now to the shelves in the cabinet, “are a Bose wireless digital surround amp with subwoofer over there in the corner. Got eight speakers all over the place. You watch a blue ray on this little puppy, and you’ll think you been transported to another time and place.”
“Weasel,” Sarah said in mock exasperation, “you can’t drag us through forty miles of tunnels and show us the most amazing thing we’ve ever seen in our lives and then give us the specs on some stupid television.” She grasped him by the shoulders and shook him. “Tell me about the electricity. How did you get gasoline for that generator? How does it work? My God, does this mean we can have a refrigerator and freezer and read at night without those smoky candles?”
Weasel laughed and steered Sarah to an easy chair, gently pushing her down. “Now you just get comfortable, little Miss Curiousity. I got a few surprises in store for both of you. But good things take time and the tellin’ of a story and givin’ of gifts is half the fun. All this stuff I got here and in the other rooms is wondrous indeed, but finally having someone to share them with makes ‘em a thousand times more valuable.”
He crossed the room and opened one side of a double door refrigerator and—wonder of wonders—there was a shining light bulb inside it. He pulled out a big glass pitcher with a brown liquid in it and retrieved three crystal glasses and a crystal bowl from the cabinet, filling each glass with ice cubes that came from behind the other refrigerator door. Weasel presented Sarah and me with the crystal glasses and Duke was the recipient of the bowl, which he promptly began lapping up, making big splashing noises.
“This here,” said Weasel, holding up his glass, “is what’s called instant iced tea. It’s already got the sugar and lemon flavoring in it. Comes in brick form in big jars or can. You just chip off a little chunk, put it in water and stir it up. Not bad, huh? Would either of you care for some more ice?” Sometimes he could be a real show-off.
“No thanks, Mr. Technology,” I said.
Weasel produced a pipe and a small tin fllled with fat marijuana buds, each as big as my thumb and laced with little red and purple hairs. “Got this stuff from a guy in Peoria. Traded him a big can of some powdered Kool-Aid for an ounce. Called it Kansas City Dead Dog. Said he found a huge plant growin’ out of the carcass of a dead dog. Watered it a lot and waited a couple of months till it started budding ‘fore he harvested it. Best pot I ever had.” He fired it up and passed it to Sarah.
“It’s time now for some explanations,” she said, passing the pipe to me. “How’d you get the generators running?”
“Well,” he replied, “you two know as well as me that there just ain’t any gasoline out there anymore. And if there was it wouldn’t be worth a shit. It loses its octane with age. Oil ain’t a major problem. It gums up and separates a bit, but if its sealed well, it’s generally usable. I just make sure I change it a lot when I’m runnin’ the generator. Kerosene’s available too. But you can’t run no engines with it. Good for lamps though.”
“Get to the point, Weasel,” Sarah said. “How did yo
u get the generator to run?”
“Keep your britches on, Sarah. You know I like to tell a good story. What happened was I was livin’ in southern and central Illinois for a few years, and I kept comin’ across references to ethanol. Found some writin’ on it and figured out it was fuel that farmers made out of corn and soybeans when they used to have real big crops. Mostly they mixed it with gasoline. But if you wanted, you could run a car or tractor on straight ethanol by makin’ some changes in the spark plugs, carburetor and timing belt. All I had to do was figure out how to make the stuff and then mess around with some engines tryin’ to find the right combinations.”
“What about going with solar?” Sarah asked.
“Good thinking,” Weasel said. “Looked into it. First problem is age. Solar panels don’t last forever. Most of them we can see on buildings are wore out now. Also, they got inverters. Change the current. Inverters last shorter time than the panels. Third thing is you gotta put ‘em up. People can see that. I don’t want to be seen.”
I was on my third toke and decided it might be fun to go check out the refrigerator light. “So how’d you make fuel?” I asked on my way over to the fridge. I opened and closed the door a few times, trying to figure out whether it stayed on all the time or just when someone opened the door.
“Mac,” asked Weasel, “just what in the fuck are you doin’?”
“Never mind,” I replied. “I already figured it out. This little white knobby thing here on the side is actually a switch that turns off the light when the door hits it. No problem.”
“The man could do brain surgery,” said Sarah. “Just ignore him, Weasel. One time he spent an hour and a half reading one page of a novel when he was stoned. Just go on with your story.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but when you really got into it, there was about ten different levels of meaning to each line. It was very complex. Fascinating stuff. Got any books, Weasel?”
Blood of the Dogs_Book I_Annihilation Page 5
