by Jessy Cruise
Skip, 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 Missy, 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. Skip 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. Skip, 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 Skip'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 Skip's training, couldn't Jessica make a similar transformation? Was she completely beyond redemption? Skip 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, Jack 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. Paula and Mick 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," Mick 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," Paula said jokingly. "If I can get two broken hours a night, I consider myself lucky."
Skip, 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 Jack 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 Skip 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 Skip 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, Jack 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 Christine and Maureen, Mick'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," Mick 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," Skip 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?" Paula asked with a groan.
"Sorry," Skip 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 Skip, Jack, and Christine had been out before, there were now dead human bodies littered throughout their path. These bodies w
ere 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 Skip, shudder.
And then, two days later, while traversing a rise, Mick, 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," Mick 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," Paula 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," Skip said. "And hopefully our group will come out on top of the chain."
"I would kill myself before I would eat another person," Paula 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," Mick said. "What about the Donner Party or those rugby players that crashed in the Andes?"
"I would still rather die," Paula 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," Mick 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," Skip 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. Mick and Jack shared one lean-to and Paula and Skip shared the other. Everyone stripped down to their underwear and climbed into their sleeping bags. In the case of Paula and Skip, they both climbed into one large sleeping bag that had been formed by zipping two together.
"Keep me warm," Paula said with a shiver, pulling her body against his, sharing her warmth with him. As had been the case before with Christine, neither one of them smelled particularly good after eight days out, and Paula'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," Skip 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 Christine 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?"
Skip 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 Christine," he replied, "I didn't know that others could hear us. Now, thanks to some straight talk by Jack, 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."
"Paula," 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, Skip. 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 Skip 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 Paula 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 Skip learned of Paula'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 Christine loved to straddle his head, her wet and dripping pussy on his face where she could rub it back and forth over his tongue. Christine was also quite fond of being taken from behind, in the doggie-style position, while Skip 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, Skip 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 Jack and Stacy however, the subject of the trip to Cameron Park had created the most turmoil in the relationship to date. Christine 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 Paula. Strangely enough, that very argument was the exact reason that he wanted to take Paula and leave Christine behind. Christine had already done her time outside the wall and he wanted Paula to gain the experience that moving a long distance as part of a squad offered. Christine had pouted about this for a few days but had eventually seen the wisdom of his decision. The blow was eased further when Skip 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," Paula 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.
