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From: Al Steiner <steiner_al@hotmail.com>
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Subject: {ASSM} NEW: Aftermath 1 by Al Steiner (Mf) 3/4
Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2000 10:10:04 -0400
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AFTERMATH 1 3/4
Send all comments to steiner_al@hotmail.com
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 on the other side of the national forest boundary. 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 that 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 that 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?" Jason, speaking for the first time
since dinner, asked. "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
that 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 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 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
that 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 that 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 that 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 Home
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 Jason 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 Christ 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 that 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 that 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 will kidnap me and rape me like that last one 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. "For everything that 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 surgery. 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 that 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 that 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 that 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 that
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 for bed. 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 that 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.
+++++
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