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Catch up on A Warm Place!

A WARM PLACE – PRELUDE

A WARM PLACE

Table of Contents

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY ONE

TWENTY TWO

EPILOGUE

OTHER TITLES

ABOUT ME

ONE

As far as the end of human civilization as we knew it was going, I had to admit, I was having a pretty good time.

We’d been on the highway for almost two days, and so far it had been a thankfully uneventful pair of days. After everything that had gone down over the past week, from my car crash, to the assault on not one but two different groups of armed and dangerous assholes, to the handful of encounters I’d had with dangerous wildlife (my arm still hurt from that fucking wolf), uneventful was not just good, it was welcome.

Although I had started the trip with some uncertainty and anxiety brewing in my head and my gut over that last conversation I’d had with Tanner, I was able to pull myself into a better mood before too long. Between having two very attractive and friendly women that I had already been intimate with and would continue to do so around, and engaging in one of my favorite activities, (hitting the open road after a stay in one place), it was easy to prop myself back up with all those feel-good chemicals. And I’d managed to maintain it for all of yesterday and most of today.

Though like the setting sun, with nightfall scheduled for the very near future, I could feel bad vibes darkening my own emotional horizons.

I tried to tell myself to get over it, but that had a low chance of being successful.

Presently, as we walked down the highway, which was mostly clean and clear, topped with a layer of snow that crunched under our boots, I studied my traveling companions.

Delilah was the kind of girl who looked good regardless of what she was doing. I mean, personally, I thought they were both like that, but Delilah was what you would call ‘photogenic’. Dressed up in her faded bluejeans (that she’d since repaired), a gray, ragged hoodie, and a white beanie that she’d found in one of the many abandoned cars we stopped to search, she looked great. She looked like a model on her way to one of those fucking ‘ironic’ photoshoots, the kind intended to sell ‘pre-faded’ or ‘pre-ripped’ brand new jeans for two hundred fucking dollars to dipshits. Her vividly red hair peeked out here and there from beneath her cap, her vibrant blue eyes seemed to spark in the fading sunlight, and her pale, pale face was still smoothly beautiful despite the exposure to frigid weather. Some people are just born traditionally beautiful, and Delilah was one of them. I was very lucky that she was riding my dick twice a day.

Megan was the opposite of Delilah in several ways. Where Delilah was trim and petite, Megan was taller and more filled out, more built. She probably had a good five inches and twenty five pounds on the redhead. Decked out in some brown cargo pants, heavy hiking boots, and a thick gray jacket over a hoodie, she looked a lot more...aggressive. Everything about Megan was aggressive. The way she walked, the way she talked, her stance and expressions. We had more in common, I had to admit. I wouldn’t call Delilah timid, exactly, but she was definitely a lot more submissive. Megan was a lot more assertive.

Her tan skin sported more scars than Delilah’s, and her black hair, cut shorter than Delilah’s own red hair, was often worn in a rough, short ponytail. She also had on a black beanie, just like me. Her angry brown eyes were distant often when I glanced at her, and I wondered what she was thinking about. Probably nothing good.

Tragedy had befallen pretty much everyone since the snow began, but some of us had been hit a lot harder than others.

And some of us had always dealt with it.

Megan had had a hard life, from the bits and pieces I’d gathered from her so far. She was a hard woman, consequently.

Something that drew me intensely to her.

I was also extremely lucky that she had agreed to let me stick my dick in her.

There had been some tension between the two of them when they’d first met, pretty much exclusively coming from Megan, given she was jealous of Delilah’s natural charisma and uncomfortable, if not outright hostile towards the idea that Delilah had agreed to have sex with me in exchange for my protection and getting her somewhere safe. If we didn’t get along so well, I would have thought Megan might have a point, but thankfully it was turning out that Delilah liked me so much, it almost seemed like the ‘deal’ was an excuse to fuck me immediately. Not that she really needed one.

Delilah was a fucking supermodel to me.

But another problem that I thought would manifest had yet to. Although I think most reasonable people know that despite the fact that we think we can predict a lot of outcomes, the nature of individuality and, well, being a human, means that things can often go in a different direction, I was also a little interested to see if Delilah might not take at least a little offense that I...well, preferred Megan.

It wasn’t intentional, and it wasn’t like I was trying to snub Delilah. It was more just the way it had fallen. Megan happened to hit more of my buttons than Delilah. And it wasn’t even like I thought there should be conflict there.

Honestly, I was happier when everyone got along, and I hated anyone hurting or feeling left out.

Despite that, there was a part of me that assumed Delilah would be maybe a little offended that I preferred Megan to her, given that, by most accounts, Delilah was more ‘conventionally’ attractive, whereas Megan didn’t seem to give much of a shit if she was attractive or not. (Or, at least, she tried to hide it. I think it bothered her how much she gave a shit about being attractive she still gave. Honestly, I could sympathize.)

But Delilah seemed as happy as ever.

Which made me curious. It could be that she just hadn’t picked up on it. Or it could be that she just didn’t care.

Sometimes, though, if someone didn’t care about something, it was because something else that was more important to them had overridden it.

Maybe she just didn’t care because she was happy about another thing.

And that’s what I’d been teasing out all day long, in my head at least: what was she happy about? Finally, I had come to a conclusion.

She was happy we were going to that town she’d asked me to take her to.

It was the basis of our relationship, personal and business, and she seemed fairly particular about getting to, specifically, this one town.

Which made me wonder…

“Delilah.”

“Yeah?” she asked, glancing at me.

“I was curious...is there a specific reason we’re going to this town?” I asked.

A look of anxiety passed over her face that she tried to control, which was interesting.

“Yeah, where are we going? I just realized I’ve never actually, like, asked,” Megan said.

“It’s called Pine Lake, small place,” she replied, not quite looking at either of us.

I waited. Then, “Delilah...is there something you’re not telling me?”

Megan glanced over, suddenly intrigued.

Delilah hesitated, then sighed, her breath puffing on the air. “Kinda.”

“What, you got a boyfriend waiting for you up there? I bet that’d be awkward given what we’ve been doing with you,” Megan said, grinning.

“No! Not a boyfriend. My friend. She’s a girl. We always said...we’d meet there, if things got really bad. You know how like you think about the end of the world or the collapse of civilization and sometimes with your best friends you say ‘if it all goes to hell, we’ll meet up and stick together’? Well, we really had a plan. Like we actually talked about it. And it got more serious the worse the weather was getting. She moved away a year before everything went to hell. Her boyfriend at the time got some job in a town that was kinda close to Pine Lake. So...I’m hoping she’s waiting there for me.”

“It’s been two years,” Megan murmured.

Delilah sighed. “I know, I know...I was scared to go out for a long time. I kept thinking ‘maybe this’ll get better’ or ‘she probably is somewhere else’ but finally I just said ‘fuck it’ and started heading that way. I’ve made a lot of progress…”

“Why were you worried about this?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“I’m not...sure. I guess it’s really close to my heart, and I like you a lot, like a lot, but...I’m...I don’t intend to, like, stay with you, or anything. Once I final Lindsay, you know, I’m sticking with her. And I guess I was worried you might change your mind if you knew that.”

“You don’t have to worry about that, Delilah,” I replied. “A deal’s a deal. And you’ve more than held up your end. As long as you don’t actively fuck me over, I’ll get you there. And if your friend isn’t there, I’d probably be willing to help you track her down.”

“Really?” she asked, looking at me with a renewed enthusiasm.

“Yeah. Believe it or not, I like you a lot, too.”

“And here I thought all you two had was hate sex,” Megan murmured.

“No, that’s just you and me,” I replied, and she laughed.

A few seconds of silence went by. “So you’ll take care of me?” Delilah asked quietly.

“Yes,” I replied. “That’s what I told you. You don’t have to worry about that.”

She gave me a small smile. “You did come for us.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” I replied. I’d probably said that a dozen times now. Although that last conversation I’d had with that fucking asshole was messing with me in a more abstract way, the other thing was messing with me in a bigger, more obvious way: I hadn’t been there. I’d been off getting my dick sucked and they’d gotten-

“Chris,” Megan said, interrupting my thoughts. I glanced over. “We’ve been over this: you told us exactly where you were going, gave us a chance to ask you to say. We knew the risk. It turned out for the best. The assholes are dead. It’s fine. We’ve forgiven you for what happened. Don’t keep beating yourself up over it.”

“Yeah,” I managed. It was going to fuck with me for awhile, but she was right.

I could sense she wanted to ask me about what had gone down after she’d left. They must have heard some of it, or even if they hadn’t, she must have been wondering what had taken so long after she and Delilah had left the room. I hadn’t said anything yet, and I think at least Megan could tell that something had happened and it was bothering me. I wasn’t sure whether or not I was going to talk with either of them about it.

Fuck, I hadn’t even written about it in my journal. I’d written about pretty much everything else that had happened…

Just not that.

My journal. Heh. What all this had been about.

That still seemed kind of unreal to me. Intellectually, I was aware of how one change could lead to a vast array of changes. But actually experiencing it was still weird. If I hadn’t crashed, I wouldn’t have met these two women. Fuck, Delilah almost certainly would have just frozen to death right there on that cabin floor, and Megan...might have escaped. Or might have provoked one of those shitheads into killing her.

I guess it was more about the crash than the journal, but then my obsessive nature about getting the damned thing back had put me on the path to Tanner.

I still don’t know precisely what it was about that fucking conversation, but I know it had done something to me. Was it bad? Good? Or neither? I think some of it was that he was the first person I’d ever come across who had tried to basically use me to commit suicide...again, as far as I knew. A few people had just come at me, no words, no warning, just whackjobs in the woods that I figured were looking to kill and rob me.

No, I needed to stop poking at this, stop thinking about it.

Just focus on something else.

Well, on the plus side, I’d met Hazel, and damn if she wasn’t one of the best lays I’d had. I knew older women could fuck but wow had she been something else. I missed her, though thankfully in just a sexual way. Maybe that sounded really shallow or callous, but I think it was for the best I didn’t miss her emotionally, because we were almost certainly never going to see each other again. We’d just bumped into each other, so to speak, and now we had long since drifted apart. I was northbound on a highway, she was living happily in an isolated lake house. Though I felt bad for her that she didn’t have someone around to fuck her.

Maybe she’d find someone.

Thinking about that was, admittedly, turning my mind to more carnal desires. I was finding myself really wanting a threesome with Delilah and Megan. I actually hadn’t had too many in my life before meeting them. The few I’d had were one-off situations. But now I was traveling with not one but two attractive and very willing women. Delilah was just straight-up super sexual, and Megan, after some hesitation, was comfortable enough with the two of us that she didn’t mind responding fully to that sexuality.

And, well, obviously I was just fucking horny most the time.

That thought spurred another: we should really find a place to bunk down for the night. If at all possible, I always tried to sleep indoors. I no longer had a tent with me and even if I did, and even as much as I’d enjoy it...it would be a tight fit with three of us. Especially with my big six foot two, bulky-build ass.

“It’s starting to get late,” I said, pausing. We were in the middle of the highway. There was pretty much nothing but plains, lots of frozen plains off to the left, and it had been that way for awhile. To the right, though, were some signs of civilization. “We should find a place for the night.”

“It would be nice,” Megan said, and yawned, then popped her back. “Fuck, I’m tired.”

I nodded and walked off to the right guardrail. Walking all day was really tiring. Walking all day in the snow, even on a relatively flat surface like a highway, was really tiring. I’d tried not to push too hard, but I did want to make meaningful progress with the good days that we had. A blizzard could blow in and last three days pretty unexpectedly. Even some shitty snowy weather could ruin a whole day of progress, and it wasn’t like we were making a lot of progress. We’d probably made it fifteen miles so far, what with the stops to search cars, breaks to keep frostbite and hypothermia at bay, and to eat meals.

Plus, we’d slept in this morning, and I intended to tomorrow too. It wasn’t like we were on some tight timeline. Delilah seemed happy enough that we were just moving towards the settlement and so long as we didn’t take a month to do it, I imagined she’d be okay with it. I figured we’d be there inside of two weeks, provided we didn’t run into any problems. Though that was a big ‘if’ given the shitty nature of the world now.

So far, we hadn’t seen any other people on the road yet, and any wildlife we’d seen had been from a comfortable distance.

That could change quickly.

Getting up to the guardrail I was glad to see immediately that there was a house off a little ways that looked small but intact. Thankfully, in this area the highway was basically level with the road. Although unfortunately that was good and bad. The house was a pretty obvious target. But that was always a risk, and anyway, few people traveled at night and we weren’t going to be there for more than a night anyway.

“We’ll try there,” I said.

“What if someone’s there already?” Delilah murmured.

“Well, either we’ll barter with them for a place to sleep, they’ll try to kill us and I’ll have to kill them, or we’ll move on. There’s some cars down the way there,” I said, pointing maybe a mile on down the highway, “we’ll camp in one of them if we have to.”

“Fun, fun,” Megan muttered, and hopped the guardrail. “Let’s go, I’m starving and horny.”

“Same,” I said, jumping the guardrail as well and then turning to help Delilah over if she wanted. She did and I took her hand. She didn’t let go after stepping over and so we held hands as we started walking through the snow towards the house.

After a moment, Megan took my other hand.

I couldn’t help but smile.

Definitely, it’s the little things that can be great sometimes.

TWO

I think something that people have difficulty with, nowadays, is the notion that it’s going to stay cold. Practically no matter what.

The most we seem to be able to hope for now is approaching freezing, so, low thirties. I kept a thermometer with me for awhile in the beginning, but eventually got to the point where I could tell how bad or ‘good’ the cold was.

Sometimes, I still got that creeping sense of ‘fuck me is this ever going to end!?’, usually in the early mornings when I was in a sour mood and stepped outside for the first time. Mostly, though, I’d gotten used to it. Although, it was still miserable. At best, I didn’t mind it too much. On average, I just tolerated it. Keeping busy helped. There were a lot of little tricks to staying warm and preserving your body heat, mostly it was just layers, really.

As I was thinking it, a cold, cold wind blew across the plain as we headed in between the highway and the house. That made me think of something else: why? Why had this happened? No one knew. Or, well, probably someone who was still alive knew. One of the politicians or military brass or scientists behind the scenes who had figured out what the fuck was going on, or even had caused it, but the average person? Fuck no. We all had our theories though. Personally speaking, I kind of thought it was a botched attempt to counteract global warming.

I remember reading these articles during the first half of 2036, before it actually happened, about how America, China, Brazil, and Russia were launching coordinated satellites. I think that, more than anything, was what caught my eye. On the surface, it was some kind of telecommunications project, but something seemed off about it to some of the journalists. I honestly can’t remember the details now, and it wasn’t like I really understood them then, but it was something about the pattern of the satellites and the types of satellites not being for communications. They were apparently labeled ‘experimental’, which was usually enough to fool people.

Oh, it don’t look like the regular ones? That’s because it’s experimental.

The theory I had settled on was that the powers that be finally realized just how mightily fucked we were, as a species, after we’d trashed the climate for decades and decades, and had gone looking for a magic bullet to fix it all.

Only the magic bullet had misfired.

Somehow, they’d fucked up the weather or atmosphere or whatever, with their network of satellites, and this was the result.

But I was willing to admit I could be totally fucking wrong.

Could be fucking aliens for all I knew.

I focused up as we got closer to the house. I hadn’t seen any telltales of local activity, but it was a lot harder to tell for sure in isolated places like this. No movement in the windows, at least. I hated just walking up in plain view. If someone was in there with a rifle or even a pistol, if they were a decent shot, they could pick us off easy as hell. That was life nowadays, though. You gambled. I’d gotten good about reading the odds ahead of time, but it was still easy to be wrong. The best you could do was hope you got out alive if you were wrong.

The house was a simple, single-story thing, its windows intact, front door shut, made of wood with very faded pale green siding. It had no front porch, just two steps leading up to the front door, though I got an impression of some little garden areas off to the left and the right of the steps, and there was no doubt a driveway and maybe even a little path from it to the door underneath all this snow. We got to the front door.

“Back, to the right,” I said quietly, motioning to them.

Megan and Delilah did as I instructed. I already had my pistol out. It was the nine millimeter I’d recovered from my last fun excursions, a nice, sleek, black thing that held fifteen shots and was in pretty good condition. My forty-five was in my backpack for safekeeping, and our hunting rifle was hung over my shoulder.

Each of the women had a pistol and ammo, as well, and we all had a knife.

I knocked on the door. “Is anyone in there?” I asked. “My name is Chris and my friends and I are looking for lodging for the night.”

I kept my voice calm and clear. No sense trying to hide how many of us there were: if there were people in there, they’d have seen us from a long ways off by now.

Listening and waiting, I heard nothing at all. Just the wind.

I always hated this part.

I tried again. “Look, if you want us to go away, all you have to do is say so. We’ll leave. But we’re willing to trade.”

Still nothing at all. Either no one was in there, or they were hiding. Either laying in wait, or too afraid to answer the door, hoping I’d just go away.

I tried one more time. “All right, I’m going to come inside in a moment, last chance to tell me to fuck off.”

Nothing.

I sighed, shifted back to the women, and looked at the windows. No tiny movements, no telltales of someone peeking at me through the closed curtains.

“Stay here,” I said, “I’m going to take a quick walk around. Get up against the house, not in sight of the windows or the door.”

They both told me they had it and got into position. I took a few moments to make a quick jaunt around the house. Couldn’t find any signs of anything having been there for awhile. No footprints, no handprints on the walls around the back door I found or the windows. No signs that anyone had been gathering firewood, although again, it could be hard to tell. Even on a regular day, the snow tended to erase a lot if there was even a bit of wind. But I made it back around to the front of the little house without any notion anyone was inside.

“All right, here we go,” I said.

I’d already tried the back door and found it locked. Now I tried the front and grunted unhappily when I found it was locked, too. We took a minute to hunt around for a spare key, but if it was here, it was buried in the snow, and it was definitely getting darker and colder. I wasn’t going to piss away anymore time looking for it.

Time was a very valuable asset nowadays, and it got away from you faster than you realized when the cold or the dark was on approach.

I kicked the door in.

It took three hits and my leg hurt after, but it got the job done and the door was still pretty much in its frame after I was done. I brought my pistol, half-expecting someone to be on the other side, but all that awaited me was a dim living room. I didn’t get a feeling anyone was there, but I did my due diligence, carefully making my way inside, checking the sides. A kitchen sat off to the right and a door ahead of me, across the living room, led into what looked like a little hallway area. I waved the women inside and motioned for them to stay put, then got to searching the house. For now, I just wanted to see if we were actually alone.

Ten minutes passed and I wound up back at the start, satisfied.

Nothing there but a pair of bedrooms, a bathroom, and a laundry room, as well as a few closets, all empty and mostly cleaned out, too. Which made me wonder why the place was locked up. Maybe whoever owned it, or at least whoever had a key, had been living here for awhile, and had only just recently decided to pick up and go, for whatever reason locking it behind them. But I didn’t sense any danger.

“All right,” I said, looking around the living room, my eyes zeroed in on the dark fireplace, “first thing is getting a fire going. Megan, you take care of that. Delilah, why don’t you start prepping for dinner? I’m going to take another walk outside while there’s still light, double-check that we’re really secure and see if I can’t find some firewood.”

They both said ‘okay’ and because the mood struck me, (it felt good to be inside after a long, hard day of walking), I grabbed Delilah and gave her a long kiss on the mouth. She responded with enthusiasm and tongue.

When I was done, she stepped back, grinning, and I began to head outside.

“Hey, what the fuck, where’s mine?” Megan asked, sounding genuinely annoyed.

I grabbed her and kissed her too, and she kissed me back hard.

I let her let go me, and when she did, she looked at me with a small but satisfied smirk, then went over to the fireplace, where she shrugged out of her pack and dropped into a crouch while swinging it smoothly around in front of her.

Heading outside, I thought of Megan.

I still wasn’t completely sure where I stood with her. I knew that she liked me, she was sexually attracted to me, and that she trusted me. You’d think that would mean I knew exactly where I stood with her, or at least had a decent idea, but Megan was…

A little difficult.

Not that I blamed her. She’d had a rough life, before and after Armageddon, and her paranoia was hard-earned. As well as her prickly demeanor. While I knew I could grab Delilah and kiss her without a problem, (at least unless she told me otherwise), I didn’t know if it might piss Megan off all of a sudden. I think some of our friction was coming from the fact that we were both used to being in charge of the relationship, so to speak.

I didn’t mind sharing control, but I think she did.

So I tried not to push any of her buttons...you know, for the most part. I had to admit, there was a certain satisfaction in fucking with her. Not like for real, but just some teasing, play fighting. The problem was it was a bit harder to tell where the line was, so even then I tried to tread carefully. I thought that with time, we’d get better at reading each other. I think it was still a foreign concept to her that I could be teasing her and not be actually trying to hurt her. She’d encountered too many shitheads and bullies in her life.

How long were we going to be together?

Shit, I had no idea. I didn’t want her gone, I actually loved her company, but with the way the world was going, I knew she might decide to pack up and leave tomorrow. Although I didn’t think that would happen.

I did my more careful survey of the exterior, still didn’t find any signs of people or wildlife, (though anything could be hiding in the collection of trees maybe a mile and a half distant that I could no longer see in the failing light), and snagged a few pieces of wood at the back out of a bin meant to hold firewood.

Back inside, Megan had gotten a fire going and they were both sorting through our food. I was carrying most of it, (actually, I was carrying probably three quarters of everything we owned between us, both because I had the biggest pack and I was the strongest thanks to my sheer size), and so I set my pack down by them and began to head deeper into the house.

“What do you want?” Megan asked.

“I think that rabbit meat’s on the way out. Fry it up with something, whatever you two want,” I replied. I wasn’t a picky eater and I thought it would make them happier to decide. Megan wasn’t a picky eater either, or at least professed not to be, but I knew Delilah had her tastes. So while they figured that out, I went around and checked all the windows, making damn sure they were not just closed but locked.

Then, after double-checking the back door, I shut the front as best I could and stuck a chair up under the knob.

Someone could get in, sure, but they’d have to make a lot of noise doing it.

Then I rejoined the ladies in my life and helped them make dinner.

It was a slow, pleasant experience. I helped cut up the meat and tossed it into the pot Megan was carrying in her pack while Delilah got two cans of beef stew opened up. It would make a good dinner. Once it was all in the pot and mixed up, (and I’d made sure the rabbit meat hadn’t gone over), we set it in front of the fireplace and then sat down and started going through our packs. This was a part of the routine now: inventory check.

It paid to get not only a mental reinforcement of our supplies, but a visual one as well.

When we’d left Hazel’s place, she’d given us a fair share of all the shit we’d recovered from Tanner’s house. I had been happy enough to leave the excess runoff with her. She was a good woman, and I didn’t just think so because she’d left me fuck her in any hole that I wanted. Consequently, I thought we had a decent spread in terms of supplies, but even a decent spread would only last so long for three people.

Especially considering I was the only one here with a large backpack. Megan’s was medium-sized and Delilah’s was small. This was to be our sixth meal on the road and I was sort of straddling the line between rationing and enjoying ourselves. You couldn’t just get by on the bare minimum all the time because eventually you started asking yourself: what the fuck am I even living for? It sounded dumb, but when you actually lived it for months on end, it became harder to answer that question sometimes.

I set two plastic bottles of water by the fire as well, not too close, but close enough that they’d warm, then I began sorting out the supplies. Right now, we had cans and we had plastic containers of wolf meat and that was it. Fourteen cans in total. Some tuna, some soup, some fruits, some vegetables. A decent blend of foods, but at present, if we found nothing else, I figured we had about four more days of food between us, if we rationed a little. If we rationed a lot, we could stretch this out to a week, maybe eight days.

But that was pushing it, and we had to keep our strength up.

While the food cooked, I checked over the rest of our supplies. It was a decent supply, but there was a certain reality to traveling in a winter wasteland. You could only bring so much with you, and you had to spend some of it every single day to stay alive. Ideally, you would find either more supplies out in the wastelands or you’d run into someone who was willing to trade, but that wasn’t always the case. You could have dry spells. Like what we’d been having the past two days. There was hardly anything in the vehicles we passed, and there were barely any buildings within walking distance of the highway.

“Delilah,” I said as I finished the check and stood, “help me search this place.”

“Yep,” she replied, getting up as well.

“I’ll make sure our stuff doesn’t burn,” Megan said.

“Thank you.”

We got to it, each of us starting at the same place but then heading in opposite directions. Both Delilah and myself had a good eye for hidden caches or out-of-the-way supplies, though she was better at it than I was. We’d settled on basically each of us doing a complete search simultaneously, but from opposite sides. Like starting at the bottom of a circle and working your way along one side while your friend worked their way along the other, eventually you’d pass over each other, keep going, and meet back where you started, and you’d get to cover half of the other person’s work. It wasn’t entirely perfect, but I think it was the most efficient use of time.

This search didn’t last long, as the house wasn’t very big. We used what light was remaining and, when we had to, our lighters to hunt around. I was still holding out hope for a flashlight at some point, or one of those electric lanterns.

As I suspected, the house was well-positioned to be visited by damn near anyone traveling along the highway. Although we hadn’t seen a single soul so far, it had been two years now, and the place was almost picked clean. Again, I wondered if someone had lived here through it all and finally up and left at some point, locking it behind them relatively recently, but it was just one of those things I was never going to actually know.

We managed to find some clothes that would be decent trading, a sewing kit to add to the one we already had, and a lonely can of shredded beef.

Delilah and I rejoined Megan by the fireplace and ate dinner.

“So, threesome tonight?” I asked. “The bed looked big and in good condition.”

“Yes,” Delilah replied immediately. She was always down for a threesome.

Megan laughed softly. “You two are always so fucking horny.”

“And you aren’t?” I replied.

“No, I am, I just am better about not giving into it all the fucking time.”

“You don’t really have to not give in now,” Delilah said. “I know what you mean, honestly. But we all trust each other, we’ve all fucked each other, it’s safe. Why not just fuck all the time?”

“No argument from me,” I said.

Megan rolled her eyes, but then shrugged. “Yeah, I mean, I don’t really have a good argument myself. I don’t even want to argue. It’s just...leftovers, I guess. Society’s bullshit about how bad you should feel if you sleep around or frequently.” She grinned suddenly and looked at me. “Would it be a problem if we got drunk?”

“No,” I replied, interested that she was bothering to ask. I think by now Megan had, to a certain degree, deferred to me as leader of the group. The question struck me more as one of practicality than of permission.

She wanted to know if I had a good reason for her not to get shitfaced.

I didn’t, honestly.

Plus, I’d learned she was a lot sluttier when she was drunk.

“Good,” she said, and began digging in her pack.

THREE

Dinner was good, and watching Megan and Delilah relax, actually relax, as they started drinking from the bottle of wine, was nice.

Not just because I’d noticed that women, especially these two women, tended to get wilder when drunk, but because it was good to see them happy.

There were way fewer reasons to be happy nowadays.

I didn’t drink myself. Didn’t like the taste and didn’t much care for the feeling of being drunk. But I did take to being stoned, and we had a pair hand-rolled blunts leftover from my last adventure. I was tempted to light one up and take a few puffs, but I didn’t. Right now, I didn’t have enough of a reason to, and I was certain that at some point in the future, I’d have more of a reason to, and it’d be better to have more then than less. Be it a bad mood, wicked nightmares, pain, or anxiety, I had learned to ration that shit.

I was lucky to even have the weed.

While we waited for our meal to digest, I washed the pot out and then packed it with snow gathered from outside the back door and set it to boil by the fireplace. Then I got behind Megan and began massaging her shoulders.

“Oh my fucking God,” she moaned as I worked my thumbs into her shoulders and back. “That’s just...ah...holy shit. Fuck, you have really strong hands.”

“I do,” I agreed.

“Why are you doing this?” she murmured, hanging her head, losing herself in it.

“I like you,” I replied.

She laughed softly. “That’s enough, huh?”

“It’s not like I’m trying to get into your pants. You already let me in.”

She laughed again. “Yeah.”

My relationship with Megan was...interesting. Delilah had been happy enough to offer up her body in exchange for protection. Not exactly an uncommon deal nowadays for me. And given that I had a sweet little implant in my cock that was basically perfect protection from pregnancy, and STDs for the most part, I all too happy to sleep with any woman who came my way. Honestly, so far, I don’t think I’d turned anyone down.

Even though, in one or two cases...I really should’ve.

But with Megan, it was different. She had been absolutely adamant that we were getting into bed as equals, not as part of a deal, and that she wasn’t submitting to me somehow. Which was fine, and I could even understand it. I wondered how many guys had tried to turn any relationship into a power play with her. Women with tough personalities tended to bring that out, often in the worst way, in a lot of dudes.

I was glad I wasn’t one of them.

But once we’d actually had sex, and our relationship dynamic, inasmuch as we had one, had been established, she was so much more comfortable around me. Although I think sometimes she was still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I didn’t intend to fuck her over at all, but for people with trust issues, there was honestly no way to meaningfully convey that.

I massaged Megan’s back for another five minutes, then switched over to Delilah, who made a lot of happy sounds as I worked her back as well. She was already completely topless, freeing her wonderfully big, pale tits and baring them to the fireplace. Her skin was soft and smooth against my hands as I massaged her, and I took a great satisfaction in the sounds and shudders I elicited from her as I worked.

Megan took another deep drink from the bottle and then held it up and squinted at it. It was about halfway gone now. Besides this, all we had for booze was a similarly sized bottle of vodka. “All right, good enough,” she said, passing it to Delilah and then standing. She shifted and staggered, reaching out and putting a hand on the mantle of the fireplace to steady herself. Giggling softly, she began taking her clothes off.

“Yeah,” Delilah agreed after a drink of her own, “good enough.”

She gave the bottle to me and I corked it while she stood and finished undressing too. I replaced the bottle and stripped of my own clothes. We’d ended up dragging the mattress off the queen size bed in the master bedroom out here into the living room where the fireplace was. It was better for a number of reasons, but honestly I really liked being able to see these two women as I fucked them and they fucked each other.

I studied them in the flickering firelight as their clothes came off. They were beautiful, wonderfully beautiful, and I was glad they had gotten more comfortable around me and each other. Delilah was more towards the petite side, a slim, pale beauty of a woman with a somewhat disproportionately sized rack. She was less than five and a half feet tall and I’d be surprised if she was more than a hundred and ten or fifteen pounds, but she was sporting some beautiful double-ds. She’d lucked out there. Megan had naturally tan skin and was taller, with more muscle on her frame, which was not just bigger but broader. Not by a lot, but enough to notice.

She wasn’t just tough in personality. Although I was a lot taller and heavier than her, I bet if she put her mind to it, she could fucking knock me silly.

As soon as I got my clothes off, I snagged one of the washrags and bars of soap. We were each lucky enough to have a set. Then I grabbed one of the bottles I’d set to warm by the fire, unscrewed it, and got to work washing up. Cleanliness was one of my guilty pleasures that I had allowed to follow me out of my old life. It wasn’t always possible, but I went to lengths farther than the average person, I thought, to obtain some way of cleaning myself every day.

Especially if I was going have sex with someone.

I was glad that Megan and Delilah were cool with doing the same. I mean, if I was going to eat pussy, it would be nice if they’d at least try to wash up. Although I had noticed that Megan was almost exclusively going to Delilah for oral recently. Not that I blamed her. She was quite good and enthusiastic with her mouth.

The atmosphere went from comfortable and content to excited and erotic and aroused as we all washed, and I saw both of them doing the same thing I was: sneaking glances as the others’ naked bodies. There was a really exciting thrill to seeing someone you were turned on by completely naked, especially knowing that sex was soon to follow.

Both of them had let me do pretty much whatever I wanted to them and I was so fucking glad that I got to creampie them.

Orgasming into a hot woman with absolute no protection between the two of you might have been the best pleasure life had to offer.

Or to offer me at least.

As soon as we were finished washing and then drying, I picked Delilah up and tossed her onto the mattress. She let out a delighted shriek as she flew through the air and then landed, and then I turned, embraced Megan, and began making out with her while also leading her to join Delilah. She kissed me back, tongue already creeping into my mouth as we moved, and when we hit the mattress she tripped and did an awkward sprawl onto it, pulling me down with her. And then she was pushing me onto my back, still kissing me, running her hands over my body as I did the same to her. Touching her was a study in pure arousal.

Delilah didn’t let us have each other for long, pushing herself up against me and reaching down between us, gripping my cock and beginning to massage it while also kissing the side of Megan’s neck. Megan stopped kissing me, turned, and began kissing Delilah full on the mouth. She’d been a little shy at first when the redhead had come onto her, but that was long gone. She was as into and comfortable around Delilah as I was, and fuck if they didn’t just make one of the hottest pair of ladies I’d ever had the pleasure of seeing.

They both made out right in front of me, tongue kissing and groping as Delilah continued massaging my cock with her soft, hot hand. I ran my own hand over Delilah’s breasts, practically addled with lust at this point. Groping her sent pulses of total, uncut desire racing through my whole body. She was so soft and smooth and hot. Having sex with Delilah was honestly like what I imagined fucking a porn star would be like.

The women came apart and then Delilah spent a little while kissing me. Megan watched, sitting up on top of me, smiling a drunk little smile. While Delilah kissed me I resumed groping Megan, first her wonderful, firm breasts, then down her sides and around to her well-formed, tanned ass. We kept that up for a little bit until I wanted something more.

“Why don’t you two put your mouths to good use?” I asked.

“Yes, sir,” Delilah replied immediately. That girl was always eager to please.

Megan, on the other hand, crossed her arms, pursed her lips, and stared at me. I stared back at her. The only reason I pushed her like this was because I was pretty sure by now that she liked to be pushed...just a little. Not too much, but some.

“You’re lucky I like you as much as I do,” she said finally, and got off me, joining Delilah in laying down closer to my cock.

“Yes, I am,” I agreed with a grin.

She sighed as Delilah reached out and gripped my dick, encircling my rigid shaft with her slim, hot fingers. “Don’t get cocky.”

“Was that a joke?” I asked.

She paused. “Honestly no, but...whatever. Just shut up and enjoy yourself.”

And then both of them had their tongues out and were licking my cock like an ice cream cone. I groaned loudly and let my head fall back on the pillow, momentarily paralyzed by the overwhelming wave of hot bliss that hit me from having two women go to town on my most sensitive area with their wonderful mouths.

They licked and licked, dragging their tongues over my head, occasionally pulling them up the shaft or focusing on that spot just below the bottom of the head that was super fucking sensitive. And then Delilah put her lips right on that spot and started moving them around, using her tongue, and I let out another loud groan.

“Aw fuck, that’s it ladies…” I groaned, raising my head again and watching them work. That, honestly, was half the fun. The intense thrill of watching two women, completely naked, dragging their tongues all over my dick.

Then Delilah took it into her mouth and started sucking me off, moving her head smoothly up and down.

“I want my turn after this,” Megan murmured.

“Mmm-hmm,” Delilah replied. I honestly thought that woman got off on doing oral. Which, you know, was fucking awesome for us.

White hot, rapturous ecstasy really began to consume me as she sucked my dick, putting those lips to amazing use. She bobbed her head smoothly, encircling the base of my shaft now with a thumb and two fingers to hold it smoothly in place. She looked marvelously sexy and erotic as she worked, and when she gave my cock up to Megan, who started sucking me off too, Delilah leaned down and began licking my balls.

“Holy fucking shit, this is good,” I panted.

They kept going, passing it back and forth between them, until Megan grew too restless.

“Okay, my turn,” she said, gripping Delilah’s hair by the roots and pulling her head up. Damn, I wonder what they’ve been getting up to when I wasn’t around.

“Yes, mistress,” Delilah replied, almost gasping the words.

“Up,” Megan said to me.

I laughed softly and got up. Fair enough. She took my place and spread her wonderful legs, and Delilah got down in between them and dove right into eating her pussy. Megan let out a loud, long, wonderful moan of bliss as our little redheaded fucktoy got back to work. I looked at the two women and they really seemed like something out of a porn. My eyes fell onto Delilah’s ass. It had a nice bit of padding that I always appreciated, accentuated by her trim frame, and I quickly shifted into position over her.

She was lying flat, which was fine by me, because I slipped my cock in between those smooth thighs of her, right into her wet, pink pussy.

Delilah let out a muffled shriek of pleasure as I penetrated her, and I groaned loudly, joining Megan in unleashing the building pleasure verbally. I pushed deeper and deeper into Delilah, finding her fantastically tight and oh so fucking hot and wet. She was such a wet girl and I fell back in love with her pussy each and every time I got back inside of it. Probably the thing I really liked about her was she could take a fucking pounding, which I took a sort of primal satisfaction in doing. I started stroking into her and she yelled and moaned.

“That’s it you little bitch,” I growled at her, holding myself up and looking down in between us at her sweet ass while watching my cock disappear into her over and over again. “You fucking take it, you dumb fucking slut.”

She moaned loudly and I knew she was rushing headlong towards an orgasm. Another thing I loved about her: how fucking easy it was to make her come.

“That’s right you little redheaded whore,” Megan growled, grabbing her head and forcing her face deeper into her crotch, “eat me, you little bitch. Make me come. Make me come you stupid fucking whore!” she yelled and slapped the back of her head.

I started groaning as I felt Delilah’s pussy begin going crazy. She let out a wild shriek and her whole body bucked as she started to orgasm. The pleasure of pounding the fuck out of her squirting pussy was even better and it was hard not to bust.

Actually, it was too fucking hard and I fucked up and started coming.

“Ah fuck, Delilah!” I yelled as my own climax burst into existence and I started shooting my load into her.

Holy shit was I glad I had that birth control implant, because I would fucking suck at pulling out. Mainly because it felt so much better and more satisfying not to pull out at all and just fill a woman up with a huge load.

I became totally lost as I shoved myself deeper into her, my hips jerking forward with each pulse of ecstasy that exploded out of me and into me. I pumped that sweet vagina full of my seed as she squirted all over my dick and it was hedonistic heaven.

When I was done, I pulled out of her and let her finish up with Megan, who started her own orgasm almost as soon as we were done with ours. I watched her twist and squirm and scream as she came, both hands on Delilah’s head, her legs spread out wide. And I found that I wasn’t winding down from my orgasm as I watched her come, using Delilah to get off, I was winding back up. I was still fucking hard and ready to go.

Thank fucking God, because I wanted into Megan’s pussy so bad right then.

As soon as she let go and went slack, I smacked Delilah’s pale ass. “Move it.”

“Yes, sir,” she murmured tiredly, and shifted out of the way.

I immediately climbed on top of Megan and looped my arms under her legs, lifting them up. “Oh fuck,” she said, opening her eyes back up.

“Put it in,” I said, staring down at her.

She stared up at me and a renewed intensity came back into her eyes, onto her face, and she gripped my cock and put it into herself.

We both groaned as I brought her legs up and pushed my way into her.

“Oh yeah!” she cried as I began humping her, slipping into her again and again. “Oh fuck, Chris! Oh yes! FUCK THAT PUSSY!” she screamed wildly.

I held her legs up and fucked her brains out, absolutely losing myself in the rhythmic motions of our raw, furious fucking. She started screaming at me, demanding that I go harder, faster, and I did, pounding her into the fucking mattress. I yelled back at her, for a few moments actually lost in a delirious haze of sex and something a little like rage, like we were competing with each other, she was seeing how much she I could give and I was seeing how much she could take and I heard things getting knocked off the table nearby and the bookshelf knocking up against the wall and then, suddenly, we were coming again.

The orgasm seemed to last longer this time, and hit harder.

And when I was done, I pulled out of her and rolled off of her, laying next to her, both of us slicked with sweat and getting our breaths back. I floated in an ocean of post-orgasmic bliss for several moments.

“You’re so lucky,” Megan muttered after a moment.

“Yeah?” I replied.

“Yeah. You don’t got to clean a huge fucking load of cum out of you. And I let you do it.” She sat up and looked down at herself. “How the fuck did you have so much left!? You did come in Delilah, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Fuck!”

“I don’t know, it just happens,” I replied, then yawned. “I need to sleep.”

“We all do,” she murmured.

“Drink some water, both of you, before you go to sleep. And if you wake up, keep drinking it,” I said as both of them went back over to the fireplace and began to wash up again.

“Yeah, yeah,” Megan muttered.

“I’m just trying to watch out for you. It’ll help with potential hangovers.”

She paused, then glanced back at me with tired eyes, looking a little guilty. It was harder for her to hide her emotions when she was drunk. “I know...I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” I said.

She paused again. “Thanks...for watching out for me. For us. It’s nice...not enough people are willing to do it.”

“Thanks for watching out for me, too,” I replied, surprised by the display. Normally it was like pulling teeth to get something like this out of her. She must be more drunk than I thought. Or maybe just more tired.

She finally nodded and went back to cleaning up.

I made myself get up and pulled on my boxers, then took one more walk around the house, checking out all the windows just to try and see if I could see anything. But there was no moon or stars out tonight, and it was pretty much pitch black out there. It felt a little like how I imagine it must feel to be in a submarine, staring out into the deep ocean, or in space maybe, minus the stars. With that done, I went back and took the time to pour the water that had boiled and then cooled into the bottles we’d partially drained to wash ourselves, and the leftover now purified water into our thermoses. It wasn’t enough to totally refill them, but that was fine, I’d make more tomorrow. I then arranged the washrags to dry after cleaning them a bit, threw a few more logs onto the fire and spent a moment rearranging it, then crawled into bed.

I got in between the two ladies, and Megan tugged at me tiredly, so I spooned her tonight, putting an arm over her nude body beneath the blankets.

She settled into my grasp and I was asleep within minutes.

FOUR

I woke up freezing.

Something was wrong.

I tried to sit up but I couldn’t move. Fear pulsed through me and I looked around. Where the fuck was I? It was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. I was on a bed, some shitty narrow bed in a room of boarded-over windows and peeling wallpaper.

I was tied down.

Suddenly, I heard heavy boots hitting a wooden floor. Coming closer. The fear grew. I could see my breath on the air and I was fucking freezing. It was so bad I was shivering violently. I looked down the length of my own body, finding myself in nothing but boxers, and saw an open door. Abruptly, I realized where I was.

The room I’d killed Tanner in.

How the fuck could I be here? What the fuck was going on?

Where was my shit? Where were Megan and Delilah?

Suddenly, the man himself walked in. He was smoking a cigarette, and as he turned to face me, I jerked in surprise and terror as I saw a bullet hole in his forehead. It was an ugly, hideous wound and blood had leaked all down his face. He looked like something out of a horror movie or one of those old-school wrestlers who’d gotten their foreheads busted open during a match. The blood, though, was dried and old.

“You did me a favor, man,” he said, his voice just as dry, hardly a whisper. “So I’m gonna do you the same favor.”

His other hand came up holding a pistol and he walked slowly over to me.

I tried to say something but my throat was locked up. I couldn’t fucking move, even though I could feel myself shaking violently from the cold.

“Don’t worry man, being dead isn’t so bad.” He put the frozen barrel against my forehead. I felt it. Felt the frigid circlet of metal. “Trust me.”

He pulled the trigger.

~

“Fuck!”

I jerked awake and heard two shouts of surprise.

“What?!” Megan demanded from somewhere nearby.

I was fucking freezing and I could still hear the echo of the gunshot, shit, I could still feel the pistol against my forehead, as I slowly forced myself up into a sitting position.

“Chris...what the fuck? Are you okay?” Megan asked.

“What the hell?” I groaned, looking around.

Somehow I’d ended up not only out from beneath the blankets, but I’d gotten myself off the fucking bed and onto the cold wooden floor. I felt stiff and frozen to the bone.

“Oh shit, what happened?” Delilah groaned.

“Are you okay?” Megan repeated.

I looked around slowly. My brain was having trouble catching up. I saw the chair in front of the door, still in place. Saw orange-tinted sunlight, dim, coming in through the windows. I saw the fire, down to embers but not yet totally out.

I saw Megan and Delilah sitting up in the bed to my left, looking at me with concern.

“Yeah,” I managed and shivered.

“Chris, get over here, now,” Megan said, getting up. “Delilah, help him.” She began moving over to the fireplace and restarting the fire.

“Come here, Chris,” Delilah said, getting closer to me.

I gritted my teeth, making myself crawl back onto the bed. Shit, how long had I been laying on the floor? Probably not that long, I thought, or hoped. I experimentally moved my toes, my fingers as I got under the blankets. They moved, so that was good.

“Oh my God, you’re freezing!” Delilah gasped as she touched me.

“Sorry,” I managed, shivering.

“It’s okay. Here, closer to the fire, come on,” she replied.

I ended up laying in front of the fire that Megan got restarted, with three blankets on top of me. I felt like shit.

“I was having a nightmare,” I said after a bit.

“What about?” Megan murmured.

I hesitated, probably long enough for them to realize it was a lie. “I can’t remember.”

Neither said anything, though Megan paused in her activities long enough that I knew she was considering pressing me for the truth. But she kept going. I watched her work, the heat slowly, painfully bringing my body back online. I sat there and felt like a dumbass. Falling out of bed, for fuck’s sake.

How had I even managed that?

I guess it happened every now and then, although I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had some kind of major shift during sleep. I let it go after a bit, realizing I was focusing on the wrong thing. That nightmare had been bad. I’d had some bad ones since this apocalypse started, but I think everyone did unless they were a sociopath or enormously well-adjusted. And those dreams had been bad, especially in the beginning, but they’d mostly settled down. But this one…

Fuck, I don’t know. It wasn’t even so much what had been happening as…

I don’t know.

Just something about it, the emotions I was feeling.

After what felt like too long, I finally got warmed back up, and when I had, Delilah had me lay down on my back.

“What for? We should get going,” I said.

“I’m going to administer a dose of painkillers,” she said with a smile that told me she was about to make me come.

Well, that would definitely help with the pain, physical and emotional.

I honestly thought I wouldn’t be able to get it up with my mood, but Delilah got it up. She climbed on top of me and rode me nice and easy, and I laid there and enjoyed every second of it. When I came, it hit hard and rolled like a hot, rejuvenating wave through me, pushing away the cold and the pain and the unease.

Delilah smiled down at me as I grabbed her hips and shot my load into her, becoming totally enraptured in the bath of bliss that was washing over me.

When I was finished, she stayed on top of me for a few moments as I went slack, waiting for my breath and pulse to calm back down.

“Better?” she asked.

“Better,” I murmured.

She lost her smile. “I’m sorry you had a nightmare. It must’ve been bad.”

“Yeah,” I replied. I could sense she was trying to draw me out a little, but I still wasn’t willing to give. Not yet. I still didn’t know what to make of all this.

She waited a little longer, then gently patted my chest and got up off of me. I laid there for a bit longer, since I knew we had some time. Megan had set snow to melt and then boil, and that took a little while. Even with the orgasm and the warmth, everything still felt sore and stiff and for about fifteen minutes I laid there and really, honestly considered just staying here for the day. I could do it and I doubted either of them would argue with me. Hell, they might actually be wanting to do that themselves. Moving around in the world was a bitch and a half now, even under ideal conditions. But I guess that was what got me going.

If we had good weather, I didn’t want to waste it, and I did want to help Delilah find her friend. It must be good to have a friend, a real friend, waiting for you somewhere.

Megan headed out, saying she’d check the area.

I took a moment to pull back the bandage over my forearm. Although it had been over a week since the wolf attack, hell, almost two weeks now, it still hadn’t fully healed. They had been deep bites, but I was glad to see that they were almost healed, and the scarring probably wouldn’t be too bad. Shit, I had several scars by now. I didn’t really care most of the time, but it was getting a little ridiculous. I was fucking twenty five and I had like a dozen prominent scars. And I knew it was only going to get worse as life went on.

“Does it still hurt?” Delilah asked.

I looked up. She was washing now, but was staring at the wounds on my arm. “They’re fine,” I replied, taking the opportunity to put a new bandage on after washing the wounds. It had been a couple of days since the last bandage change and honestly it was more paranoia and caution than anything else. I could get by without one now, but that was one of the rules for this new world.

Be cautious.

An infection could fucking kill you, and brutally, too.

I took a moment to do some stretching to help with my sore, stiff body, then washed, and by the time I was dried off and began dressing, Megan came back inside. “I don’t see anyone or anything out there,” she reported.

“Good,” I replied as I finished lacing up my boots nice and tight. I stood and popped a few joints. All in all, I felt better, and I’d feel better than that once I got breakfast in me. “Let’s eat.”

Breakfast was our remaining supply of canned tuna. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to get us going. I still wasn’t too comfortable with the amount of food we had left. We needed to find something, and soon. Maybe five days had been an overestimation on my part…

I realized, abruptly, that the only reason I was casting the shadow of doubt over my previous assessment was because I’d had that bad nightmare and woken up in pain and in a shit mood. I felt a small urge to write in my journal, but I couldn’t come up with a reasonable enough reason to go lock myself in the bathroom or somewhere else private for enough time. I think they’d respect my privacy, probably, but I didn’t want to give them more questions than they already had. For whatever reason, I didn’t want anyone, not even Megan and Delilah, to know about my journal. So I pushed the urge down and promised myself I’d do it later.

While the other two finished packing up and preparing themselves for another long day of walking, I took the opportunity to step outside. The cold hit me but I was used to it by now. I took a look around. It was pretty out, the sun rising now, the skies holding a slightly orange tint with the early dawn. Hard to believe it was September. I mean, I thought it was. I was guessing, but I tried to keep track of the days even now. Months had largely lost their meaning. I guess the only division between the seasons now was the length of daylight.

I sighed softly as I looked around, taking the whole environment in while the others finished. It was beautiful out, in its own way. For most of my life, I had actually been one of those people who ‘stopped and smelled the roses’, figuratively speaking. Usually once a month, maybe twice, I’d just drive down to a park and sit and look at nature and animals. Squirrels and birds and whatever else was scurrying around. There was something about nature that always struck me in some true and powerful way. I suspect it had something to do with the fact that we, humans, had spent far, far more time living among nature than among dwellings.

I mean, even the oldest city, as we really understood them, was maybe ten thousand years old, if that? Whereas humans had been around for hundreds of thousands of years. I glanced at the sky. Shit, maybe. I mean, I’ll be honest, I didn’t know much about history. I could be wrong. But I had the impression that we lived as wandering nomads for way longer than we’d lived in cities, even small ones. So it tracked that we were far more accustomed to nature. Or fuck, maybe it’s just me and a handful of other people who think nature looks awesome.

But even now, even with everyone frozen and dead, it still looked nice in its own way.

Sometimes, anyway.

Sometimes I just fucking hated it. But today everything was oddly beautiful. The way the sun reflected off the snow-capped trees and orange-tinted skies and the way the ice clung to everything, making it look almost ethereal.

The effect was even more powerful at night.

Sometimes I regretted how tired I was by nightfall, that I crashed into a long, hard sleep more often than not, simply because I missed out on seeing the same landscape in the strange starlight. But during mornings like this, it was…

Almost magical.

The door opened behind me and Megan and Delilah emerged.

“We good?” Megan asked.

“Yeah, we’re good,” I replied. I hadn’t seen or sensed anyone or anything lurking around.

“Okay,” she said. She stepped up beside me, hesitated for a second, then kissed me on the cheek. It was an oddly kind thing to do, not that Megan lacked for kindness, but generally she seemed either guarded or, at best, neutral. Maybe preoccupied by her own thoughts.

“What was that for?” I asked, grinning despite myself.

“I like you,” she replied. It sounded like a cover answer, and I thought it was more maybe because she thought things were bothering me, wanted to help, but didn’t quite know how to. Honestly, I appreciated the gesture.

I kissed her back. “I like you, too.” I kissed Delilah, because I didn’t want either of them feeling left out, even a little. “And you.”

She grinned. “I really like both of you.”

Feeling a bit better, I started walking back towards the highway. They followed a few paces behind me. I’d traveled in groups before, and while I’m not one to talk myself up, more often than not it did seem like I was looked to as a de facto leader. I’d like to think it was because I kept a level head and could make half-decent decisions under pressure, but it was more just because I was big and looked scary, and unfortunately for a lot of humans that subconsciously signaled ‘authority’. Which is fucking dumb, but I wasn’t going to turn down the opportunity.

Especially if it made women more likely to fuck me.

Of course it also made men more likely to fight me.

But for pussy, eh...it was worth it, to be honest. Plus, I was actually half-decent at being a leader, so I liked to think I’d led a lot of people to safety who otherwise might not have gotten there. Like what I was doing now.

We got back onto the highway and it looked clear as clear could be. Back in the day, it seemed like people were coming and going a lot through my town. Eventually, that tapered off, but even when I got onto the road after over a year, it seemed like I’d run into people a lot more often. Now, not so much. I wasn’t sure why that was. Fewer people in general? That made sense, I guess. It wasn’t like we’d had time to repopulate. Maybe most people were just settled. Or maybe I was just in a really unpopulated part of the country now.

I glanced sidelong at Megan, then at Delilah.

Traveling with someone you were having sex with, but you weren’t actually like...together, was a weird experience. Or it could be, anyway. I don’t know if anyone but true sociopaths could truly separate sex from emotion. I didn’t do it, not completely. I didn’t want to, honestly. I liked emotions. I liked the feeling of being connected, of intimacy. Sex felt great, but sex with someone you connected with on an emotional level was a lot better.

Some people did it casually. Like Delilah. I think she was just a lovey type person. She connected with people quickly, or allowed herself to, anyway. Actually, that might be putting a bit more agency to her than she quite had. I think she just felt good about someone and attached to them. She was twenty two, after all. Not that I minded, but I could see how it would be easy to take advantage of her. Or shit, maybe I’m wrong, and I’m the dumbass and she’s just playing me. If so, still worked out for me. It wasn’t like I was falling in love with her.

With her pussy? Yes. But if we parted ways today, it would suck, to be sure, but I’d get over it. No disrespect to her, she was great, but you had to teach yourself how to move on, and quickly, if possible, nowadays. With murderers, freezing temperatures, and dangerous wildlife all over the place, it was hard enough staying alive, let alone mourning yet another lost lover.

Then there was Megan. She was the more curious of the two. Hardheaded, stubborn, angry. And yet, for whatever reason, she trusted me. I honestly didn’t know if it was going to go anywhere, she was unpredictable at best. For now, I figured I was an ally of convenience to her. She felt like she could trust me, I could help keep her alive, and I was a safe bet for a good lay. No risk of STDs, no risk of pregnancy, no risk I’d hurt her or try to make her do things she didn’t want to. Or, at the very least, in her eyes, an acceptably low risk.

I realized my mind was wandering a bit much and I should just be happy that I was in the situation I was in, and focus on staying that way.

Looking ahead, I saw nothing but clear highway, and the occasional car to investigate.

Here was hoping things were looking up.

FIVE

The next two days passed with relative ease, but things didn’t quite look up.

For me, at least.

I had nightmares both the following nights, and it was getting harder to keep up appearances of being in a good mood, or even neutral. And that was saying something, considering I had two really big reasons to be not just neutral, but in fucking ecstasy, in Megan and Delilah. We had good times both nights, but the nightmares still found me.

I got close to breaking out the weed, but hadn’t yet.

We spent the first night in an abandoned camper. Not ideal, but someone had already created a makeshift wood-burning stove with proper ventilation, so we made it work. The second night we found a little log cabin and put up there. Nothing noteworthy happened beyond the sex and the nightmares. We hadn’t found anymore food anywhere. Not in the cabin, not the camper, nor any of the cars we searched, nor the two houses we stopped to check along the way. I was honestly beginning to get worried about the situation.

By now, we’d eaten the rest of our wolf meat, as well as all the food that both Megan and Delilah were carrying. At this point, as we headed out today and got underway, I was currently holding the last of our food: six cans. Three of black beans, three of mixed vegetables. I had to admit that I thought the wolf meat would last longer, and I had also been banking on us finding fucking something so far. But that had been stupid of me.

We walked mostly in silence for the first part of that day, but when we came to the first real sign of civilization, I stopped.

“What is it?” Megan asked.

“I want to look around,” I replied, walking over to the left, up to the guard rail. There was another little section of land, not all that dissimilar from the one I’d met Delilah and Megan at. The sort of little place just off the highway. We were a little ways up and I could see about a half dozen buildings, all along a rough stretch of road that terminated in a rise of forested hill and what looked to be a cabin not far from a radio tower.

“What are you thinking?” Megan asked, coming to stand beside me.

“We need more food,” I replied, trying to discern what the buildings were.

The nearest one was clearly a gas station. There were three more stretched out down a little road beside it. One of them was definitely some kind of fast food place, but the other two could be anything. Snow had covered or faded their signage. The only other building that lay farther on down the main road, maybe halfway between here and the radio tower, was a house. It wasn’t a great prospect, I’m sure this had once been a well-traveled area, and these buildings were all within extremely easy reach of anyone walking down the highway.

But a lesson I had learned time and again was: you won’t know until you actually do it.

Kind of the same principle of asking someone out. You look at them and think ‘they’re fucking way outta my league’, but for all you know, they could be wishing you’d ask them out, or at least receptive to a date.

It was a slim chance, usually, but better than no chance.

And in this case, it made more sense to do it. Plus, there were woods in the area, which meant two possible things: game or some super food. Some of those genetically enhanced seeds they’d dumped via drones all over the place when it became obvious the snow wasn’t going away. I’d come across a lot of weird plants out in the middle of nowhere and some had saved me from starvation, but this area seemed annoyingly bare.

But, again, you never knew.

“We should stop here, search those buildings,” I said.

“I agreed,” Megan said. Then she hesitated and reached out, put her hand on my forearm. “Chris...I wanted to talk to you about something.” It was weird to see her so hesitant, but I was pretty sure I knew what this was about.

I waited, looking at her.

She steeled herself, straightening up a bit, and it was interesting seeing her face fight between being kind and worried, but also hardening in anticipation of something going wrong.

“Something’s wrong,” she said, “I know something’s bothering you. Something that happened back there and it’s really fucking with you and...I want to help. We want to help.”

I looked at Delilah, who was staring at me as well, nothing but empathy on her face, and I felt bad.

“Is it...are you still upset about us getting captured?” Megan asked.

I sighed and shook my head, looking back at her. “No, it’s not...that. I mean, yeah, I’m upset. I feel stupid and guilty about it, but that’s just...a natural reaction, I think. No, that’s not what’s bothering me. It’s…” I hesitated, thinking about it.

How could I explain it?

“I don’t know,” I said finally, a little exasperated. “Tanner and I, we...talked, in that room. Before I...killed him.”

“You were totally in the right-” Megan began, but I cut her off.

“No, no. It’s not-it isn’t that simple. It isn’t that I killed him. I mean, yeah, that fucks with me too, but I’ve had to kill people before.”

“What did he say to you?” Delilah murmured.

I was silent for a long time, trying to find the right words, and then heaved a sigh because I realized I still hadn’t even been able to articulate it to myself, let alone someone else. I shook my head again. “I don’t know. I’m not ready to talk about it. I haven’t...I haven’t figured it out yet. It’s fucking with me and I need to think some more.”

Megan nodded and gave me a hug suddenly. I hugged her back tightly, and then enjoyed another from Delilah.

“You told me earlier that sometimes, when you need a pick-me-up, you choose a location in the distance and go there,” Megan said, surprising me. “Why don’t we, after our search, go to that cabin by that radio tower on the hill?” she suggested.

“You remembered that?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she replied, half-defensive. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but it seemed rare people full-on remembered inconsequential stuff I’d told them, even from a few days ago. I’d mentioned it to her while we were recovering at Hazel’s after dealing with Tanner.

“Okay,” I said, because honestly, I just wanted to feel better, and I thought she was onto something. Plus, we might as well go there anyway. Getting there might not be difficult, exactly, but it looked like it might be enough of a pain in the ass that it’d keep at least some appreciable percentage of people away from it.

Meaning there might actually be stuff there.

We set off down the off-ramp and started making for the nearest building: the gas station. I figured, between Delilah and myself, if there was anything to find in these buildings, we’d find it. And there had better be food there.

I admittedly did feel better as we walked down that off-ramp. I imagined a lot of that had to do with the fact that Megan and Delilah had pushed. Being alone and relying on nobody but yourself certain had its appeals, but traveling with people had massive upsides, too. Knowing that people cared about you, and actually experiencing that care, was…

It was powerful.

I guess that was the old human brain at work, given we’d evolved to work together. I think that’s why civilization is even a thing. I did okay in civilization, I guess, but I think I did better on my own, usually with a few people. Maybe just one. I’d spent a lot of time traveling alone, but I’d also spent a lot of time traveling with just one woman.

Although I had to admit, traveling with two was better.

Or maybe it was just traveling with these two.

“Hey Chris, I was curious…” Delilah said.

“Yeah?” I asked.

“Has your dick every gotten you in trouble?”

“Yeah, I want to hear about that if it has,” Megan said with a smirk.

I sighed. “I mean yeah, it has.” They both waited and stared at me. I sighed. “Just a couple of times. First time, I was maybe a month into living on the road. I stop at this little town in Georgia, find work as a woodcutter, live in a motel room. Next door is this couple. They’re always fighting, I can hear them arguing through the walls. But every time I run into the woman, she’s maybe thirty five, thirty six, and hot, too, she’s always hitting on me.”

“So you fucked her?” Megan asked.

“What’d she look like?” Delilah asked.

“She was like five five, pale, although most people were at that point, dirty blonde, brown eyes, kinda curvy. Excellent hips. That’s what I really remember about her is those fucking hips of hers. But, I mean, she was married. I could see the ring on her fucking finger. But she always kept hitting on me over the course of like two weeks and finally she shows up suddenly right after I get home from my job, and she tells me her and her husband had split, and she wanted some celebration sex, and she was super into me.”

“She was bullshitting, wasn’t she?” Megan asked.

I sighed. “Yeah. And I knew it. I could just tell she was lying. But I was thinking about leaving town anyway soon so...I fucked her.”

“You bad, bad boy,” Delilah murmured.

I felt myself reddening and I sighed again. “I mean, what can I say? Dude was an asshole. Always treating her like shit. They’d been together for like fifteen years or something. So, I mean, I said yeah.”

“And you fucking nailed her so hard, didn’t you?” Megan asked.

“I fucked the shit out of her,” I replied, then chuckled awkwardly.

“Details,” Delilah almost demanded.

“She pretty much jumped on me as soon as we got into my room and locked the door. She was fucking desperate, or pressed for time. We stripped fast and just fucking screwed. Did it missionary first and I pounded her so fucking hard I put a crack in the wall.”

“Seriously!?” Megan asked.

“Yeah, the headboard was heavy and kept banging into the wall and it was a shit wall anyway. It wasn’t a huge crack or anything, but God was she fucking horny. She must’ve come like three times during that first session. She let me go raw and I came so fucking much inside of her. It was amazing. Then we washed up and we fucked again, doggystyle, and I was pulling her hair and smacking her fat ass and grabbing those huge hips of hers...we came again and then we laid there for awhile. We were gonna go again and then we heard her husband coming back home to the next door room. She freaked out. And had reason to, because apparently he knew what was up. He kicked my fucking door in and there we are naked.”

“Holy shit,” Megan said, grinning broadly.

“Yeah, I’m glad you think this is fucking hilarious.”

“You were being a bad boy,” Delilah replied with a shrug, “you knew what you were doing.”

“To be fair, I thought there was a chance they had split. Anyway, he was fucking drunk. That’s what he’d been doing: drinking. She thought he’d be gone for longer, but he probably had suspected something like this and the paranoia might’ve finally gotten to him. I tried to tell him she’d told me they had broken up, but he wasn’t having any of it. I was so fucking lucky he hadn’t thought to grab a gun or a knife. Came at me with his fists.”

“What’d you do?”

“Cold-cocked him. Guy had a glass jaw. Which was good, because he was a pretty big dude. Knocked him out fucking cold, pulled on my clothes, grabbed my shit, and just left.”

“What about the dirty blonde?” Megan asked.

“I actually offered to take her with me. She almost went. Almost. But she stayed. She said she still loved him, and this had been fucking stupid, and she was almost sure he’d take her back. That it wasn’t the first time something like this had happened...for either of them. So I just, you know, walked away from that mess.”

“You are a fucking whore, you know that?” Megan asked.

“You fucking asked!” I replied, exasperated. “It’s not like I’m proud of it.”

“I get it,” Delilah said. “I mean fuck, you fucking wreck us like every fucking night and then again in the morning. You’ve got a wild fucking sexdrive. I imagine it makes it...hard to keep in control. Am I right?”

I heaved another sigh. “Yeah,” I admitted. “I’m better about it now. But after spending years of thinking I wasn’t very good with women to suddenly having a lot of women be into me...yeah, I wanted all the pussy that was offered.”

“Don’t know why you were having problems,” Megan muttered. “You’re tall, you’re big, you’re strong, you’re hot.”

“I am not hot,” I replied.

“Yes, you are,” she said, dismissing me.

“What, was that your first thought when you saw me? ‘Wow, he’s so hot!’”

“No! My first thought was ‘if this guy tries to make me blow him, I’m biting his fucking cock off, I don’t care if he kills me’,” she snapped.

“Fair enough.”

“But yes, even during our initial encounter where things were a lot more...unstable, I was frustrated with how attracted I was to you.”

“You are pretty hot,” Delilah murmured.

“Only now apparently,” I replied. “Would’ve been nice in high school.”

“High school is bullshit anyway,” Megan said, waving one hand. She snickered as we approached the gas station. “You home-wrecker.”

“You’ve never wrecked any homes?” I fired back.

“No,” she replied with an air of easy confidence. “I have not.”

“You sure about that? Or have you just never been made aware of the fact? I’m sure you’ve hooked up quick and easy before,” I replied. “It’s easy to hide that in some situations.”

“He’s right,” Delilah murmured.

Now Megan got to be annoyed. “Okay, fine. As far as I know, I’m not a home-wrecker. Happy?” she growled.

“Happy enough,” I replied with a shrug.

She punched my shoulder playfully and then regarded the gas station. “Do you think anyone’s in there?” she asked.

“Probably not, but let’s be careful,” I replied, pulling out my pistol.

We set to work. The gas station had big, obvious windows, most of which had been broken out, that gave a view on a stark interior. Already, I could see barren shelves and empty stands. Nonetheless, I made sure to do it the right way, nice and slow. I checked the exterior first...and hesitated. Couldn’t be sure, but I thought someone might’ve been around. With the way the snow blows, footprints can disappear quick even on a relatively clear day, but I thought I caught very faint imprints of boots in the snow around the back.

“Be careful,” I said as I came back around to the front and walked in through the front door. I had my pistol out but lowered, partially obscured. The lobby wasn’t too big, but it had two big shelves parallel to each other, creating a little aisle between them, facing towards me. There were places to hide, namely behind the counter and whatever else was back there.

“If anyone’s in here, I’m not looking for trouble!” I called, and waited, listening.

Nothing. I was reminded of the time I’d run into a beautiful woman named Mary in a gas station much like this. That time I’d been a lot more sure someone was inside, now I couldn’t tell one way or the other. I took a few steps in and then whispered Megan’s name while motioning gently with my free hand behind my back.

She joined me.

Without taking my eyes off the front counter, I nodded to the left, where the bathrooms were. “Check them. Carefully. I’ll check out the rest.”

“Yep,” she whispered, and headed off, her own pistol out.

Delilah, thankfully, took her cue and remained where she was, standing just inside of the store now, her little twenty-two in hand. I headed back, peering into the freezer area to the right to see if I could catch any movement through the frosted glass doors. Nothing. No food, either, from what I could see. Carefully, I moved up to the counter and then back around behind it. The little flat surface that would fold down or up, admitting or denying access, was folded up. Not conclusive, exactly, but certainly indicative.

I heard a loud creak and tried not to jump, turning back and looking. Megan was wincing, her hand on one of the bathroom doors. She peered in, gun first, scoping it out. Couldn’t be helped. Some shit just made noise.

But I sensed no shift, no change elsewhere in the gas station.

However, as I got a good look behind the counter, I saw something in the sunlight from one of the broken windows.

A puddle of melted snow in the shape a boot.

SIX

“Someone was here,” I said.

Behind me, I sensed Megan freezing up. They waited as I looked around. There were three doors back behind the counter. One clearly led to the freezer area, not sure about the others, but all three of them were opened, and the place looked disturbed. Like someone had been through recently, doing exactly what we were doing right now.

“I don’t think they’re here now,” I added finally. “Just wait there.”

I moved carefully to the first door, the one immediately to the right, that led to the area behind the freezers. Cautiously poking my head inside, I looked around, but could quickly tell no one was here. Though I saw more melting snow on the floor. With that out of the way, I moved over to the next door and waited there for a moment, listening for any telltales of someone hiding away. But I heard nothing. No subtle shifts or movements, no breathing, nothing. I looked inside, gun ready. What I found was a little office where the owner or whoever happened to be manning the station would take breaks in. Just a desk, a swivel chair, some filing cabinets, some shelves, some boxes knocked over and obviously rifled through.

No place to hide.

I moved on to the final door and looked inside. Here was a storage area that had also obviously been cleared out, and I relaxed.

“We’re clear,” I said, putting my gun away.

“So what do we do?” Delilah asked uncertainly.

I moved over to the window behind the counter, on the west side of the store, and looked through it at the way yet gone. I saw the road continuing off to the west, away from the highway, and the hill with the radio tower. The next building was close, a bit farther up north along another road, one I hadn’t been able to determine what it was. I tried to put myself in the shoes of whoever had been here, but it was hard, given I knew so little about them.

They’d searched the place and then moved on. We hadn’t seen anyone on the highway, and we would’ve for sure. It was a clear day out and a straight patch of road. So they were probably still somewhere in the area. Where could they have gone? I guess it depended on where they’d initially come from. After a moment, I decided the only thing that made sense was to assume they were in one of the other buildings in the area, and to be careful.

I said as much to the others.

“You think they’re hostile?” Megan asked, her voice low.

I sighed and shrugged. “Impossible to tell. They’re alone, I’m pretty sure about that. Or, well, they were alone here. Best guess? It’s a traveler or salvager or trader who saw some buildings to investigate and has investigated them, or is still. Just keep an eye out and don’t do anything stupid. I don’t want to get into a shootout if I can avoid it.”

They both nodded. We were in agreement there.

“Megan, you got lookout. Delilah and I will search this place, although I don’t think we’re going to find much. The place has been tossed to hell and back.”

“I’m on it,” Megan replied, taking up position at the front door.

The back door had been in the manager’s office and it was shut, but I made a mental note of it. In fact, I went back and checked that it was locked. Once I was sure, I set to work with Delilah in searching the place.

I tried not to rush, but now that I knew someone was (potentially) in the area, I wanted to get to the part where we ran into them. Either it was going to be violent or it wasn’t.

Or, hey, maybe I’d get lucky and it was a hot chick down to fuck.

That was always nice.

I poked around, looking in all the likely places. Getting out my lighter, I crouched down and began probing the depths of the shelf space under the front counter. I found a lot of dust, some trash, some mouse droppings. Wonderful. After a long five minutes, I sighed softly and finished my search with a grand total of nothing. From there, I moved on to the back office, which showed the most promise. Delilah was in the bathrooms, hunting as I was. I pulled open the drawers and then took them out, looking for anything at all, but they were dead empty. This lent credence to the theory that this place was bone dry.

My mind wandered as I searched, thinking of stuff I would do with Megan and Delilah the next chance I got. The way they looked naked. The way they looked eating pussy. How they sounded when they were coming. But also how comfortable they were around me. Delilah didn’t surprise me. Almost from the beginning I could tell she was a sexual woman, though I had the notion that I was the first person in awhile she’d felt full-on comfortable being outright sexual with. But with Megan...well, I had learned that with some people it was a throw of the dice how exactly they would react after you’d fucked.

Sometimes they freaked out for one reason or another. I’d woken up to find women just gone. I always freaked when that happened, because I was worried they’d robbed me, but so far that had yet to actually be the case. No, they’d just panicked, maybe. Or maybe they thought I’d be weird or controlling or an asshole or something and they’d just wanted sex but nothing else, so they left. It often sucked, waking up alone. Sometimes, though, they stuck around and things got weird, and not in a good way. They’d start picking fights with me or suddenly acting like we were a super close couple after a one-night stand. Sometimes they’d tried to use me to beat up exes or to rob people or some other fucked up shit.

It was hard to trust people, it’s why I liked to keep things simple.

I was glad things had turned out the way they had with Megan. So far, anyway. I had to keep reminding myself that shit could turn sour quickly, even if I didn’t think it would. People were more likely to throw in their lot with yours pretty fast nowadays, but inversely, they were just as likely to abruptly decide you weren’t working out anymore. And it wasn’t even necessarily their fault. Maybe they had been feeling fine up until suddenly they didn’t.

Unfortunately, I was right again: the gas station was a bust.

Not a goddamn thing. Literally nothing but trash and dust left.

“You see anything?” I asked as Delilah and I rejoined Megan.

“Nothing,” Megan replied.

“Let’s move on then.”

We stepped back out into the brisk cold. I kept my eye out as we made the short walk across the snowbound parking lot to the next closest building that, the closer we got, the more convinced I was it had been abandoned. Sure enough, as we got around to the front and peered in through one of the plate glass windows, I saw a whole lot of nothing.

“Wonder what it was,” Delilah murmured, looking up at the blank spot where a sign had once hung over the main entrance.

“Probably a store of some kind that just couldn’t keep it up,” I replied, shading my eyes and leaning forward.

“Not at all like you,” Megan murmured in a surprisingly sexy voice.

I glanced at her. She was smiling at me and I felt a sharp tug of lust. She didn’t do it often, but when she wanted to, she was good at turning on the flirt.

“Stop distracting me,” I muttered as I walked over to the door and opened it up. I saw signs that our mystery guest had been here, too.

“It’s fun, though,” she replied demurely, following me closely.

I sighed. “I know. But we have to focus. Later.”

She stepped next to me and reached out, brushing a hand across my crotch. “If you say so,” she replied, then turned and moved back to the door, past Delilah as she walked in, to keep watch.

I looked at her for a moment, wondering if I had time to bend her over and fuck her slutty little brains out here in this abandoned shop, and shook my head. Delilah was smirking. No, we had to focus. Get the place searched, see if we were really alone or not, and then I could fuck the absolute shit out of both of them.

Especially Megan.

We pissed away about twenty minutes looking that place over, and at the end of it yet again had nothing to show for it, although I hadn’t really gotten my hopes up. I think it had been some kind of shop before it died, maybe a sex shop or adult video store. There were so many of those along highways. Honestly, I was surprised we hadn’t encountered one yet. I wanted some lube. Hazel hadn’t been willing to part with hers and I really wanted to fuck Megan and Delilah in the ass. Especially Megan, she had such a hot ass.

All that there really was in the store were the remains of a campsite. Someone had dragged in a big metal drum barrel from somewhere and used it to start a fire in one of the back rooms. There was a bit of wooden debris and ashes left scattered around the room, as well as some wrappers and other bits of trash strewn about.

That was it though.

We emerged back out into the sunlight and began marching across the street towards the place I’d pegged as a restaurant from the highway.

Judging from the sign, which I could see a bit more clearly now, it was a burger joint.

There were two vehicles in the lot in front of the restaurant, both with open doors and popped trunks. We kept the ball rolling, checking over the vehicles and finding they’d been picked as clean as dead bodies in a desert. The situation wasn’t much improved in the burger joint either. I found more evidence of our mysterious wanderer we were apparently following in the footsteps of. Almost all of the tables and chairs in the burger joint had been reduced to kindling since the end of the world, and I found an unpleasant surprise waiting for me in the back bathroom.

“Shit,” I muttered as I pushed open one of the two stall doors.

“Something wrong?” Megan asked.

“No. Just found a corpse. Old,” I replied.

“Oh.”

Well, probably old. Hard to tell with frozen bodies. I went about the ugly job of searching for supplies, though I could tell someone had done that already. He was middle-aged, maybe into his fifties when he’d died. He looked...tired. Not angry or scared or despairing. Just tired. I knew how he felt. Some days, I was nothing but tired, and it was willpower alone that forced me on. I wondered what his story had been.

Was he a local? The owner of the shop? Or just some guy who’d come wandering across the land? There were no obvious wounds on his body, so he’d probably just frozen to death. People didn’t realize how easy that was to do. I mean, a lot more of them did now probably. Nothing in any of his pockets, unfortunately.

I let him be and closed the door. I was eager to get a move on, but I kept hoping to find something among these buildings. Even if they’d been picked over for months and months at this point, there were often people coming and going. Sometimes people left stashes of stuff behind for one reason or another and, well, to be perfectly honest, I took them. Unless it was very obvious that whoever it was was still around and would come back for it soon. Because usually, it was next to impossible to tell if you were stealing or not.

I mean, I guess it was all stealing in some regard, but there was a world of difference between taking someone’s stash from next door or while they were out for the day, and taking the stash of someone who’d left it there and then died six months ago and hadn’t told anyone where it was. And I was a survivor.

I wasn’t into robbing people, but I wasn’t into just leaving stuff I could use.

“Maybe we should just head for the house,” Megan said uncertainly as we wrapped up our excursion to the burger joint and stepped back outside.

“No,” I replied almost immediately, “we need to be thorough.”

She sighed. “Yeah, I guess you’d know. Hope there’s something in this next one.”

I nodded in agreement and we walked down the rest of the way to the last building on this little side street: a general store. It made me think back to the one that hadn’t been too far from the little cabin I’d set up in when first meeting Delilah and Megan. Out of everything, I thought it had the most potential. Something in my gut said that if there was anything to find among these buildings, it would be in this one.

As we approached, I saw a few signs of the apocalypse that had come. There were usually signs wherever there were pockets of civilization that had obviously been abandoned for awhile. Someone had taped up a hand-printed sign in bold, black lettering that read NO MORE FOOD to the front window beside the main entrance. I’d seen a lot of places like this, gas stations with no gas, grocery stories with no groceries, gun shops with no ammo. And there’d been a lot of places looted, doors kicked in, windows smashed.

Shit, a lot of places had burned down because people were too crazy.

Like I’d say, those early days of the apocalypse were nuts.

We made our way inside, and again found some signs of melted snow and bootprints. Although now I had something of an idea of this person’s path: this was where they had started. The shape of the bootprint was almost totally lost in this building, the snow little more than a puddle. There was a good chance this was where they had started. Meaning they must have come out of the woods a little farther off to the north.

Again, we would’ve seen them on the highway, even from several miles off, given we’d had a clear, straight view up there.

Still wasn’t much to go off of, but given they were moving in a reverse course of the way we were, I still thought there was a decent chance they were waiting somewhere nearby. Which meant either that one house or the lone cabin up on the hill. Could be they’d moved on, but I figured there was a good chance they’d seen us by now. We were kind of hard to miss if you were looking. And no one had taken a potshot at us, so that was a good sign.

The general store was yet another sad sight: dusty, barren shelves and trash-strewn floors.

By now, we all knew the drill. Megan stood guard and Delilah began looking behind the counter while I walked deeper in and hunted around for anyone or anything that might be hiding. I checked a back bathroom, a manager’s office, and a storeroom, and found nothing worth mentioning. From there, I stayed in the back and began my search for supplies, intending to work my way forward. For a moment, I just stood there in the manager’s office and forced myself to do nothing at all. I just closed my eyes and relaxed.

I was going to rush this, I knew I was, because I was getting impatient and a little frustrated, and I was already kind of pissed and upset as it was.

But if I rushed it, I’d miss something. I could’ve missed something already. Less likely, now that Delilah was performing second sweeps, but still possible.

After taking several deep breaths and just waiting, just doing nothing, I opened my eyes again. I felt better. Calmer.

I was ready to work.

The office was a sad thing, like a lot of the places I’d come across in my travels. I don’t know what it was about places like this, but so many of them seemed rundown and miserable, even when they’d been functional. No wonder so many people had hated their fucking jobs back then. I started with the obvious places, putting those thoughts aside and narrowing my focus. I checked the desk drawers, pulling them open one by one, checking for false bottoms, then removing them and setting them aside after clearing each.

Nothing in the desk.

I looked up under the chair. Sometimes people taped shit to the bottoms of chairs. Checked up under the desk, too, at that. Still nothing. I’d once found a baggie of cocaine that way, and had made quite the good trade later on.

There was a filing cabinet, two of the drawers already open. I pulled them all open all the way, one after the other, checking, and then pulling them out as well. No joy there. There were wooden shelves, but they were barren. I moved them aside and crouched down. I laughed as I found something. A penny. A fucking penny.

With a soft sigh, I pocketed it. You never knew when something like a penny might come in useful. Impromptu screwdriver, tiebreaker implement, or hell, some people still just liked coins. There was a potted plant, long since dead, that I moved, hoping to find something hidden beneath the big pot. Nope, nothing there, either.

For a moment, I was stymied. I thought for sure there’d be something. Don’t know why. I looked around slowly, first down, then mid-level, then up.

Up.

I pursed my lips. One of the ceiling tiles was slightly misaligned. It was too high up to get to safely, even standing on the desk, but I’d seen something in the storeroom. Hurrying over to it, I snagged the small ladder and brought it back, set it in place, then climbed up it. I pushed up the tile and poked my head up, bringing the lighter with me. Not ideal, given I wasn’t sure how flammable whatever was up there in the roof might be, but I still didn’t have a flashlight. Taking a look around, I grinned.

“There you are, fucker,” I growled.

There was a little backpack up there, in the nearest corner, hidden among shadows. I reached out carefully, snagged it, and then made my way back down the ladder. Once I was safely down, I pocketed the lighter and unzipped the backpack. It was a simple model, something I might’ve worn to middle school, a faded green thing that had seen a lot of use. It was ripped in a few places, sewn up in others. I checked the outer pockets and found nothing, then began pulling out what was inside. It quickly became evident that it was someone’s emergency survival kit, and also that it had been stashed here for awhile.

There was a film of dust on the pack.

I pulled out a small box of matches, a box of purification tablets, a compass, a small first-aid kit with just the basics of bandages, a little roll of gauze, painkillers, antibiotics, burn cream, and a few other odds and ends, a twenty ounce bottle of water that was still sealed, a pocket knife, a change of thermal clothes and, last but not least, a hand-crank flashlight!

Shit, I’d been looking for one of these for forever now. I’d had one awhile ago, but I’d been forced to leave it behind when some assholes had driven me out of town. I packed it all back up and then stuffed the much smaller backpack into my own, since there was room at this point. No food, but it was a good find, at least.

I left the back office and continued along my search.

As I did, I heard the wind picking up, and by the time I’d finished up my search and reunited with Megan in the front, (passing Delilah on her way back to double-check my work), I realized that something was different.

Looking outside, it hit me.

It was darker.

A storm was coming.

SEVEN

“Found something,” I said as I came to stand next to Megan, who was frowning out through the plate glass at the front.

“Oh yeah?” she replied.

“Yeah. Some survival gear. No food, but a flashlight, some meds, a compass, good trading stuff if we run across anyone.”

“Good.” She was clearly distracted, and with good reason. A cloud cover had blown in, and it was gray and ominous. Even as we stood staring, light flakes of snow began falling from those skies, blowing in the harsh winds that gave me chills just hearing it. “Maybe we should think about getting to that house soon,” she said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Let’s finish our search here, then get a move on.”

“Okay.” She paused, frowning. “Hurry.”

I nodded and hopped to it, pulling out the flashlight and cranking it, then turning it on. The bright light that came out gave me a morale boost at least. But I understood her anxiety. No one wanted to be caught in a storm, and the house was probably our best bet as a place to bunk down for the duration if we had to.

We moved fast, and I didn’t manage to find anything in the ten minutes I gave myself to check over the front half of the general store, but by then, the winds and the snow were worse. I called for Delilah as I looked out the window and saw the snowfall was getting a lot heavier.

“Yeah, we should go!” Megan called.

Delilah emerged from the back rooms and joined me as we hurried up to the front door. Rejoining Megan, I looked unhappily outside. Visibility was cutting down. Shit. I should’ve headed out sooner. I quickly pulled my hat and gloves on, made sure everything was adjusted, and then threw the door open. “Come on, let’s move it!”

We set out.

Immediately, the roaring of the wind overcame everything else. I kept the layout of the immediate area firmly in my mind as we started moving down the side road, back towards the gas station. Theoretically, we should be there in ten minutes or less. I could still see the indentation of the street in the snow, so that was a good indicator. I glanced back to make sure Megan and Delilah were still following me.

This is why a rope would be handy, although this wasn’t yet a full-on blizzard. Visibility was still half-decent. I could just barely make out the gas station at the end of the street, so ideally, once we got there, we should be able to see the house itself. Even if we couldn’t, it was a simple procedure to get there. I thought back to all the miserable times I’d had to do this before. At least this time I had company.

There were a lot of times where I’d be outside and a blizzard would just kick up without much warning. The weather was all fucked to hell and back now, and that could happen with disturbing ease. And then you could die with disturbing ease.

I pushed on, putting one boot in front of the other, feeling my body heat rapidly diminishing. That was another problem with storms and blizzards. And yet another problem was that we were risking the hope that the house was actually a good place to stay. It might not be. There might be nothing to burn and a lot of broken windows. The look I’d gotten at it had given me an impression of it being intact, but I could be wrong, and I hadn’t seen the whole thing. But right now, it was our best option, so we were taking it.

The seconds seemed to drag on and the next however long it was passed like a fucking kidney stone as I marched on, glanced back every fifteen seconds to make sure no one had wandered off course, and just kept putting one fucking boot in front of the other. Certainly I’d been through worse than this, but something I’d noticed was that the shit happening to you right now tends to seem pretty bad in comparison to everything else.

Finally, we reached the end of the road.

Unfortunately, by then, the visibility had lessened, with snow coming down in sheets, blowing across the whole area.

“Fuck!” Megan shouted. “Where’s the fucking house?!”

“Just stay with me!” I shouted at both of them, making sure they were focused.

They each nodded and we pressed on. I’d gotten good with figuring distance in my head, making mental maps of the area and keeping myself oriented in them, and figuring out about how far I was traveling based on the lengths of my strides. So I aimed myself for the house, walking roughly diagonally across the street that broke west from the highway, and hoped for the best. The winds kicked harder as I walked, and it became more of a pain to keep on track. The snow covered everything and by now I was shivering violently.

We needed heat and shelter.

Now.

Again, pushing. Pushing harder. Keep going. Ignore the cold and the wind and the howling and the goddamn freezing. I found myself pissed that I’d waited for so long. If I’d just left right then, as soon as it started to snow, we could have been there by now. Goddamnit. And it wasn’t like I had anything to even show for that extra ten minutes.

Fuck, where was the other sidewalk?

Was there a sidewalk on this half of the street?

Where was the house?

I began to actually feel the icy tendrils of panic in my gut when, suddenly, the house seemed to appear to me out of the snow. I looked back again, suddenly terrified that I’d have lost Megan or Delilah, but they were still there, struggling along. I had to get them inside. I had to get myself inside, but I was responsible for their safety. Well, for Delilah’s, and I guess for Megan’s, even if she didn’t want to admit it.

The house wasn’t all that big, but it was a house, and the windows were intact I saw as I walked up to the front door. I pulled out my pistol as I approached it, knowing that my aim was going to be shit if I needed to shoot. With my other hand, I gripped the knob and twisted. It was locked. Fuck. I backed up and threw my shoulder against it. The door cracked inward, giving some, but not enough. I hit it again, harder, and that did it.

I stumbled inside, barely managing to catch myself, raising the pistol and-

“Don’t fucking move.”

My eyes and the pistol zeroed in on the voice instantly, despite the cold. I found myself standing in a sparse living room staring at a tall, pale woman wearing a white beanie, white coat, and dirty gray work pants.

She was holding a shotgun and it was leveled right at me.

“Wait,” I managed, though I didn’t lower my pistol.

“Why?” she replied.

“I don’t w-want trouble,” I said, forcing the words out. Fuck I was cold.

Her eyes cut briefly behind me, where she no doubt saw either Megan, Delilah, or both. Something seemed to soften in her hard green eyes and her stance relaxed.

“Fine,” she said, “lower your gun and I’ll do the same.”

I lowered my gun slowly and put it back in the holster. She must have figured she wouldn’t be able to kill all three of us fast enough with a shotgun, which meant she was almost certainly alone. Alone or with a non-combatant.

Or maybe she realized I was much less likely to be a threat since I had two women traveling with me and they didn’t look beaten or enslaved at a glance.

“Get in here and close the fucking door,” she said.

I stepped in and the others crowded in behind me. I closed the door as best I could, shoving it back in place and finally grabbing a nearby chair and pushing it up under the knob.

“Sorry about the door,” I said.

She sighed and shrugged. “I guess I’d’ve done the same in your position.”

“You alone?” I asked as I finished with the door. It wasn’t perfect, but it was roughly back in place and, like before, if someone wanted in they’d have to make a lot of noise doing it.

“Yes,” she replied after just a second-long pause. I could see how that was a potentially dangerous question.

“Mind if I confirm that?” I asked.

“Be my guest,” she replied, a little too quickly. “I only just got here myself.”

I realized she wanted some time alone with Megan and Delilah. It was possible she wanted to kill and rob us all, and figured two-on-one was easier, but I didn’t think so. I wasn’t getting ‘killer’ vibes from her, more ‘paranoid’ vibes. Which was totally understandable. And given I trusted Megan and Delilah to say good things about me out of earshot, I made sure to take my time checking out the rest of the house.

In truth, there wasn’t much to check out. Two bedrooms, one of them pretty small. A bathroom. A kitchen. That was it. I didn’t find anyone, and the place was decently secure. But like I said, I took my time, hearing only low muttering coming from the living room. I’ll admit to some apprehension, because I thought it might also be possible that this new woman was trying to turn Megan and Delilah against me.

I trusted them more than I’d trusted most of the people I had come across, but one of the problems with trust is that you can never truly know.

You can’t see inside a person’s head.

But I told myself I trusted my instincts, which meant I trusted Megan and Delilah, and so I eventually came back to the living room, thinking that it would seem off if I gave them too much time. “We’re clear,” I said.

The woman, who was blonde, I saw, as she had taken off her beanie, had visibly relaxed and had slung her shotgun over her shoulder.

“I’m Dana,” she said, walking up to me, stopping an arm’s length away, and offering her hand.

I shook it. “Chris.”

“Your girlfriends like you a lot,” she said with a small smirk.

I chuckled. “Well, I like them a lot, too. Though I’m not quite sure they’re my girlfriends.”

“Afraid of commitment?” she asked.

“Not really. I’m just not sure they’d be comfortable calling themselves that.”

Delilah shrugged. “Girlfriend. Fuck friend. Friend with benefits. Sex slave. Call me what you want,” she replied easily.

“I think that last one will get him shot,” Dana murmured. “It’s much too literal nowadays.”

“So I take it we’re cool?” I asked.

“Yes. On average, one man and one woman traveling together tend to be less dangerous. One man with two women even less dangerous. And one man who I can get away to ask the two women if they’re being held against their will or abused, and they give me convincingly honest answers in the negative mostly negates my suspicions. However, don’t let that give you the impression that my guard is down. I’ve killed before and I’ll do it again if I have to.”

“Understood,” I replied.

She stared at me for a moment, then smiled broadly and let out a little laugh. “Impressive. A lot of guys get all ‘I’m not going to be talked to like that, especially not by some blonde bitch’, when I say something like that. You must be the real deal.”

I shrugged. “That’s what I’ve been told.” I paused, studied her for a moment. Dana was a very striking woman. I’m not sure if the average guy would necessarily call her attractive, although she definitely was to me, but there was something pretty obvious about her. She was tall, actually just a bit taller than Megan, so I’d guess maybe five ten. Hard to tell from under her coat, but she looked a little filled out, and not from lots of food but from lots of exercise and a good frame to support it. I think it was her face that stood out the most.

It was a bit sharp and angular, with pronounced cheekbones. She was very pale, as was her blonde hair, which was cut short. She had a few scars on her face, one on her cheek, another on her forehead, another on her chin. And I realized her nose had been broken and reset at least once. Yeah, Dana struck me as an interesting, intense person.

“So, the question now is: where do we go from here?” I said finally.

“Well, obviously not out of this house,” Dana replied, glancing out the nearest window. “I doubt it’s going to let up for the next several hours. I’m a trader and I’ve got some good stuff, so if you three would be willing to play nice, I’m down to share this house and trade a few things until the storm passes.”

“Fine by me,” I replied, glancing at the others and raising my eyebrows in question.

“Yeah, that’s fine,” Megan said.

“Yeah...any chance we could get some pleasure with our business?” Delilah asked. Megan shot a look of open surprise at her, and I felt about the same way.

“Wow, so you’re pretty bold,” Dana replied, sounding amused as she regarded Delilah. “Hmm.” She considered it. “So, the thing is, you two are gorgeous, actually, but I’m not into fucking girls. Looking at them naked or having sex? Yeah, definitely. Kissing and groping? Sometimes, when the mood strikes me. But nothing more. However…” She looked back at me, and I felt an erection immediately begin to stir as my lower belly boiled with dark excitement. She looked dead into my eyes as she continued speaking. “Your man, on the other hand, I am very into. He’s quite attractive, and, for obvious reasons, I’ve got a thing for kinda weird-looking guys.”

“He’s not weird-looking,” Megan said.

“I didn’t mean it as an insult. Common is overrated. I love it,” Dana replied.

“She’s right, I am kind of weird-looking. Mean-looking, not to put too fine a point on it,” I said, to which Megan just sighed a little.

“If you’re willing to share, I’d love to have sex with him, and I’d really love it if you watched. And I’d also very much love to watch the two of you taking turns fucking him,” Dana said. She never looked away from my eyes as she talked.

It was weird, and maybe rude that she was talking about me to other people while looking directly at me, but there was nothing but lust in me right now.

“I’m so down for that,” Delilah replied immediately.

Megan was silent for a few moments, then shrugged. “Yeah, okay. I gotta admit, I want to see you naked, and I can tell already Chris has fallen in lust with you.”

“Can you blame me?” I replied.

“No, not really,” Megan said.

I took a moment to clear my head. I always tried to. Sex made me stupid. I now had Megan, and (sorta) Delilah to help cover me if I was being stupid, but still, it was good to make the effort. “Okay, can we trade after we have sex? Because I’m not going to be able to focus, and I don’t want you taking advantage of the fact that I’d just want to get through the trading for sex.”

She laughed loudly. “You’re a bit smarter than I thought. Okay, fair enough. But…” She frowned, crossing her arms. “I’m out of condoms. I don’t suppose you have any?”

“I don’t,” I replied. “We don’t use them.”

“No surprise there, I guess.”

“Would it help put your mind at ease if I proved that I have a birth control implant in my cock?” I asked.

“Yes, actually,” she replied. “Honestly, I’d be willing to roll the dice just a little if that was the case. You look like you can really fuck.”

“Good God, can he ever,” Delilah said.

“Like I said, they really like you.” Dana walked forward and took my hand. Her skin was warm and soft. “Come along then, Chris. Let’s treat each other to some pleasure before our business.” She began leading me deeper into the house.

I looked at the others. Delilah was nothing but excited. Megan looked slightly apprehensive, but also aroused, so that was good.

Dana took me back to the master bedroom, which had a decent queen-size in it. We took a moment to get it ready while Megan and Delilah found some chairs and got settled. I set my pack off to one side of the room while Dana set hers off to the other, in clear view. I’d had encounters like this before and they were almost universally pleasant. Especially so if the woman was clearly competent and knew what she was doing, and not just in bed, either. Dana was obviously a survivor, well-versed in what it took to stay alive and navigate this awful new world. Maybe not even just navigate it, but thrive in it.

Not to be too cocky, but I saw a lot of myself in Dana.

I got out two bottles of water and my own bar of soap and washrag, and saw her doing the same. She thanked me for providing the water, then proceeded to strip down along with me. There was a quickness to our movements, and I was glad to see she was as excited about this whole thing as I was. I watched her clothes come off her body. Her boots were kicked off, her coat unzipped and tossed aside, then the tight sweater beneath that, and the t-shirt underneath that. Her pants came off, then the thermal underwear.

Stripped down to her bare essentials, I saw I was right about her body. She had a good build, and some nice muscle definition. She looked like she might have a real shot at taking me on in one-on-one combat, so I was interested to see how that translated to sex. I stripped down similarly, and then felt a fresh wave of longing and desire roll over me as her sports bra came off. Oh wow those were some awesome tits.

Really beautiful, firm, c-cups topped by wonderfully pink nipples.

“Oh my God, you are so hot naked,” Delilah murmured.

“Thank you, I’m sure you are, too,” Dana replied as her panties came off, revealing a pussy with a small, surprisingly well-maintained bush of blonde public hair.

Her socks stayed on, as did mine.

My boxers came off, and she smirked. “Okay, yeah. Nice,” she said.

I gripped my cock, which was rock-solid by now, and angled it up. “See the gold?”

“Yeah, I do. Okay, you got that gold mesh whatever. Yeah, I’ve heard of those. All right, we’re good,” she said.

“Awesome,” I replied, and quickly began to wash up.

“You’re eager, huh?” she asked. “Not getting enough from these two?”

“He’s getting plenty from us,” Megan replied with irritation that might have been real or mock, I honestly couldn’t tell.

“He’s just a whore,” Delilah added.

Dana laughed and I shrugged. “Guilty as charged.”

“Most of us are whores,” Dana said. “Sex feels good. Not too much feels good nowadays. If you can fuck, why not do it?”

“My point exactly,” I said as I washed up.

EIGHT

Within a few minutes we were on the bed, totally naked (save for our socks), and embracing.

There it was: that thrill of hooking up with a brand new woman. And I had to admit, it was, in a certain way, more powerful because we had just met. I had to remember to thank Delilah for so successfully managing to turn this sexual. I had intended to at least broach the topic, because Dana just had that vibe about her, but Delilah was something else.

I explored Dana’s very pale body with enthusiasm, first cupping one of her breasts for a moment as our lips met and our tongues began to dance together and I tasted her taste for the first time. She had a dark flavor that was just a little sweet. She moaned in obvious satisfaction and enjoyment as we touched, and I knew how she felt.

There was something they called ‘skin hunger’, which sounded like something out of a fucking horror movie, but it was basically just the need to be physically close to another human being. Not even sexual, just a hug, an embrace, being touched. It was practically a biological need. I’d gone without for long stretches of time, and the hit of pure satisfaction and pleasure that came from even just touching naked was almost an overdose at times.

I wondered how long it had been for Dana.

My hands slipped over her body, down her arm, appreciating the feel of her decently-developed bicep and tricep there, then lower, to the curve of her firm hip, back around to the smooth, nicely-padded perfection that was her ass.

This woman had a fit ass.

I thought she was about my age, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find her a decade or more older. Definitely not younger. She pushed herself against me as she started touching my dick, making out with me harder, more intensely. So, she wanted more.

Okay, I could take a hint.

I slipped my hand between her firm, fit thighs and found her clit. She let out a loud, almost startled moan as I began to rub it.

“Aw yeah! Right there! That is the fucking spot!” she moaned, laying on her back suddenly and opening her legs. “Oh wow, I’ve been...whew! Been a little bit!” she panted as I pleasured her. “I think I, um, I think...oh shit!” she screamed and jerked violently as an orgasm popped into existence. Okay, so it had been awhile.

Goddamn.

She came hard as I kissed her again and continued fingering her, rubbing her clit vigorously as she screamed into my mouth, grabbing me, holding me, kissing me. It was a heavenly experience, and as soon as she was done coming, I slipped my finger into her fantastically wet opening and started fucking her with it.

Something I’d learned: when a woman was coming, or on her way to coming, don’t change what you were doing unless she specifically told you to.

Wait until after.

“Oh fuck yeah!” she cried as I hit that oh so sensitive spot that I seemed pretty good at finding, and I kept on hitting it, kissing her furiously as she writhed and twisted. After another minute or so, she stopped me suddenly. “Do you eat pussy?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“Oh fuck, please eat me. Eat me until I come and I’ll let you fucking bust inside of me as deep and as hard as you want,” she said.

“Deal,” I replied immediately.

I pulled my finger out of her and got down between her athletic thighs, then set right to work. I wanted to drain my nuts directly into this beautiful blonde.

I spread the taut lips of her pussy and dove right in, massaging her clit with the tip of it and getting her right back to moaning loudly and writhing around on the bed. Dana was certainly an enthusiastic lover. There were some women who were awkward and tried to be quiet or to keep from moving around too much and I always had to encourage them to let loose a little. I mean sometimes, yeah, it was polite to keep quiet, but not when we were in the middle of nowhere. It was nice to be able to just fucking cut loose.

Dana had no problem doing that, obviously.

I kept tonguing her clit, hoping that Megan and Delilah were enjoying the show. Well, I knew Delilah was.

Still wasn’t sure if this was making Megan jealous or angry.

I hoped not.

But my focus was too on Dana right now. I kept going, licking and licking, lavishing her in bliss, trying hard to get her off. I wanted inside of her bad, but I also wanted to give her another orgasm for its own sake.

Making women come was its own reward.

I got my wish maybe a minute later after stroking her clit with my tongue solidly, alternating between fast and slow.

She sucked in a deep breath and the scream that followed was crazy as she started coming hard. She orgasmed intensely, her thigh muscles tensing up, her whole body going rigid and then convulsing. She made a strange almost gagging sound as she came, somewhere deep in her throat, and a hot gush of clear sex juices came out of her as I sat back and watched the spectacle. Dana was the kind of girl that I knew I was really lucky to have met and convinced to fuck me. I mean, I felt that way about basically all of them, but I could tell she was something special.

Not to throw shade at Delilah or Megan.

Once she was done coming, panting, she looked up at me and said, “Get the fuck inside me right now, dammit.”

That was an order I could comply with immediately.

I got up in between those fit thighs and slipped my cock right into her. Holy shit, she was wet. And tight! Damn! I slid slowly into that pussy, settling my hands on her firm hips as I looked down and watched myself disappear into her.

The pleasure and the intensity of it was unreal.

“Oh yeah that’s so good…” she moaned as I penetrated her.

I looked up her smooth body, her stomach, her excellent rack, her seductive, almost dangerous-looking face, loving the way she opened her mouth and squeezed her eyes shut while grasping at the blankets to either side of her. Like she couldn’t contain the pleasure roaring through her. For the first minutes, she laid there and let me screw her, her legs opened wide, enjoying it as much as I was. Watching her tits bounce in sync with my thrusting was almost hypnotic. And then, after several minutes, she seemed to come more alive again.

“Come on,” she said, her eyes snapping open suddenly, “harder. More.”

“You asked for it,” I replied. I grabbed one of her legs and brought it up, folding her, and then started hammering away at her pussy harder and faster with the new angle this afforded me. She let out a loud yell of pleasure.

“Yeah! Right there! Fuck!” she shouted.

I pounded her brains out, feeling that hot, wet sheath of absolute pleasure enveloping my cock each time I thrust down into her. I could hear the bed squeaking and groaning as we fucked, feel us moving it with our actions. I was totally enraptured by her, by everything about her. She reached up and gripped my arms for a moment as we screwed furiously, and suddenly she squeezed. “Doggystyle!” she said at once.

Not wanting to pull out, I pushed her leg over and down until she was lying on her side. Immediately, she could tell what I was doing and worked with me. We got her rolled onto her stomach, my cock still inside of her, and then up we went so that she was on all fours and I was on my knees behind her, and as soon as I was in place I immediately started hitting it again. She let out a loud, shouting moan of pure ecstasy as I dicked her brains out, shoving my whole steel-hard cock into her tight, raw vagina.

“YES! YES! FUCK! YES! GODDAMNIT! RIGHT THERE! DON’T YOU FUCKING STOP!” she screamed at me at the top of her lungs.

I didn’t. I stepped it up, grabbing her firm hips and putting one foot up so that I had better leverage. Grabbing her tightly, I resumed hammering the absolute fuck out of her and she let out a loud shriek of bliss.

I’m not sure which one of us came first, but I think it was her.

Either way, it was a near thing.

She had another gusher of an orgasm, squirting all over my dick and balls and lower belly and inner thighs as I started shooting my load into her. I was transported to another realm, a place of total, clean, raw ecstasy. It was a place I didn’t get to visit too often, (though far more often over the past two years). It was the realm of absolute pleasure that was generated when I was shooting my load into the unprotected pussy of a woman I had never made love with before.

It was heaven, plain and simple.

I came hard into her, my whole body going rigid as I dug my fingertips into her hips, feeling her smooth, firm body. My seed pumped out of me and into her in hard contractions, my cock jerking and kicking and spasming, each twitch sending a shockwave of blinding pleasure rupturing through me. I groaned loudly, the whole world fading away as I hunched over her, losing myself utterly in the orgasm, in the way it felt to shoot my load directly into unprotected pussy. Certainly it was a trick, my body believing that its basic function of reproduction was being satisfied, but goddamn what a fucking trick it was.

Sometime later, I was finished, and came back to myself.

We were both panting and sweaty, and I looked down at my cock still inside of her, at the swell of her fit ass, the curve of her hips up to her narrowing waistline.

God but was she a beautiful fucking woman.

“Oh fuck,” she whispered, the first to break the silence. “Oh yeah, that was worth it.”

“Worth what?” I groaned as I pulled out of her.

She immediately got onto her back while grabbing a washcloth she’d set aside and began cleaning herself up. “Waiting. I’ve passed up the last three fucking morons who came my way. Two of them were actually hot, but they were so fucking stupid and full of themselves, so cocky with so much swagger, God it’s such a fucking turn-off.”

“Not to most women, apparently,” I replied.

“Fine, to women with a fucking brain,” she said, rolling her eyes. She looked down. “Are you fucking kidding me? How much did you fucking come?!” she asked.

Delilah laughed loudly. “A lot,” she said.

“Fuck me, that’s a lot,” Dana muttered as she kept cleaning up. “Well, whatever, still worth it.”

“My turn,” Delilah said as she got up and took off her shirt. As her bra came off, Dana looked over and let out a low whistle.

“Good God do you have nice tits,” she said.

“Thank you,” Delilah replied with a demure smile.

I started getting ready for another threesome, hoping I had the stamina.

~

Megan, Delilah, and I fucked.

Dana watched, and ended up masturbating to it, and that was fucking hot.

And then, after we were done with that, I got up and started a fire in the wood-burning stove in the kitchen, because apparently none of us had remembered to start a fire. Normally I’m not so careless, but, well…

Sex makes you stupid.

Once the fire was going and we were all cleaned up, the four of us sat around and spent some time negotiating.

“Consider yourselves lucky,” Dana said as she walked back into the bedroom and set down a suitcase. “I wasn’t going to show off my good stock, but that was some good sex and honestly, I’m getting nice vibes from you.”

“Thank you, we appreciate it,” I replied.

I noticed that she had a pistol on her hip now and I imagined she was a quick draw. But that was just the way things went and I didn’t begrudge it.

“What are you after?” she asked as she set down her suitcase, unzipped it, and opened it up.

“Food, mostly,” I replied. “We need food.”

“Well, lucky you. I found a stash of food at the gas station.”

“Fuck, I knew there was something there,” Delilah muttered.

“Bring me your packs,” I replied as I got my own and started digging.

I spent the next several minutes sorting through all of our gear. We didn’t exactly have a lot that I was willing to part with. Ultimately I decided there was nothing we should part with from the girls’ backpacks and just drew from my own.

I set down the water purification tablets I’d found, a random assortment of spare clothes that didn’t fit any of us quite well, the pocket knife I’d found earlier, a box of ten matches, a bottle containing five painkillers and five antibiotics, and, after some consideration, one of the hand-rolled blunts.

“Hmm…” Dana said after looking it over. She sighed, and it wasn’t a good one. “I’m not trying to be a bitch or anything, but this isn’t going to get a significant amount of food. Even with the sex. However...I did notice a few big bottles in your pack, Chris. What are they?”

I hesitated, glancing at Delilah, then Megan. Delilah shrugged, Megan stared at me for a moment, then sighed and nodded.

I pulled the bottles out. One was the little under halfway gone bottle of wine, the other was the unopened bottle of vodka.

“Okay, give me this stuff, with that vodka, and I can negotiate a fair amount,” she said, eyeing the bottle immediately.

“Ugh, fuck,” Megan muttered.

“We need the food,” I said apologetically.

“I know, I know. Probably better off without it, to be honest. And you’re giving up some of your weed and we’ll still have the wine, it’s fine, go ahead,” she replied.

“Delilah?” I asked.

“Yeah, it’s fine,” she replied.

I set the unopened bottle of vodka down with the other stuff and then we spent another ten minutes figuring out exactly how much that was going to get us.

In the end, I thought it was a fair amount. The problem with trading was that different things had different values to different people. This could be awesome, or lame. Some people were smart, and recognized this, so they’d trade for something even if they themselves had no personal use for it, but not everyone was like this.

We managed to get five days’ of food, and this time I was actually more sure it was five days of food. Mostly it was in the form of surplus cans of meat, veggies, and soups, with a few other random things thrown in.

I distributed the weight among our three packs, and Dana seemed happy that now she could fit what was left from the suitcase and the stuff she’d gotten from us into her own backpack.

“You want a suitcase, ‘cause frankly I’m sick of hauling it around,” she said.

“I don’t think we want to haul it around either,” I replied. “That’s the irritating thing about traveling everywhere.”

We finished packing our stuff up.

The winds still shrieked outside.

I sighed and got comfortable. “Where you from?” I asked.

“Nevada,” she replied.

“What’d you do there?”

She looked at me for a moment, as if trying to judge something, then a look of ‘eh, fuck it’ seemed to come across her face.

“A few things,” she replied. “Waitress for awhile, mostly in Vegas. Then I was a prostitute. High class one, too.”

“I believe it,” I said. “You are so hot.” Maybe I’d been wrong that most men wouldn’t find her conventionally attractive. It was really hard to tell. Then again, I did think that there was a lot more to attitude and how you carried yourself than most people thought. Plus, it was absolutely amazing what people had been able to do with makeup and clothes back before the collapse. I wondered if she’d looked vastly different while on the job.

That’d be a shame.

“Thanks,” she replied easily. “After that I got into designing websites. Then I was a trophy wife for three years.”

“Holy shit, really?” Megan asked.

Dana laughed. “Yep. Some high roller comes in while I was gambling, sees me, falls bang in love. He’s some CEO, bigshot millionaire. Starts asking after me, I decided ‘hey, he’s kinda hot, not too old, actually doesn’t seem like a total douchebag for a rich guy’, and I figured, worst case scenario, I get some really expensive dinners out of it. Turns out, we got along. A month later, he proposes, tells me he’ll take care of me. I actually really liked him, and I was kind of tired of hustling. It was getting harder to pay the bills, so I said yes. We had a Vegas wedding.”

“So what happened?” Delilah asked.

“Two and a half years in, he wants a kid. I’m less than sure about having kids but I figure I’d at least entertain the notion. Being big money, we had access to doctors and tests and that was when I found out that I had wasted fucking years on birth control.”

“You...can’t conceive?” Megan asked.

“Nope. Infertile,” she replied.

“Shit...I’m sorry,” I said.

She shrugged. “Don’t be. I know it’s a really big deal for some women, and my heart absolutely goes out to them, but honestly, I don’t want a kid. I can say that for sure now. I mean, obviously right now yeah, but even then, when I got the news, I wasn’t upset. He was, though. It was kind of a deal-breaker. So we got divorced. I went back to Vegas and became a card shark.”

“How’d you get out here?” I asked.

She sighed. “Kinda just a lot of shit. I’m honestly not big on talking about my past. That’s more than most anyone has ever gotten out of me since this whole thing went down. For now, I like traveling, I like trading, and I’m good at staying alive.” She shrugged.

“Fair enough,” I replied.

“What about you three?” she asked.

The storm raged on, and Megan, Delilah, and I took turns telling her about ourselves while we waited for it to die off.

NINE

The storm lasted about another two hours in full effect, and then it took another half-hour to finally die off completely.

As far as being stormed in went, it was a pretty good experience.

And it wasn’t just because of the sex.

I mean yeah, that was fucking great. Absolutely stellar. But meeting someone new was often its own reward, and only became more rewarding the more I liked them. And I liked Dana a lot. She was sharp, smart, articulate, and honestly just really confident. Some people just were, like they were born with it. I could never fully tell if they were faking it or not, but I think it was more that they lacked some genetic factor for worry or anxiety.

Confidence ultimately derives from a question: how well can I handle this situation? Whatever the situation is. Even people who learned how to be confident, or grew more confident in their abilities, or faked it, still had that worry in the back of their head probably for a long time. Maybe forever. I know I did.

But I think in cases like Dana, and this could be wild speculation: she just didn’t get that emotional kick of worry.

Some people were lucky, in that they were free of more irritating aspects of the human condition. I’d met one or two people who weren’t afraid to die. Genuinely. They weren’t suicidal, they weren’t depressed, and they’d be glad to go on living for decades. It was just that the fear of dying actually did not bother them, even when it was bearing down on them. I think it was a quirk of either genetics or maybe the way they grew up, or a combination of the two. It wasn’t that they had decided to choose not to be afraid of death, it was more that the fear just didn’t arrive.

It must be nice.

“Any chance you’d consider traveling with us?” I asked as the storm finally died off and we were left with an almost eerie silence that always followed.

Dana smiled. “There’s a part of me that would really enjoy traveling with the three of you and getting fucked every day by you specifically...but I’m afraid I’m going to have to decline. I’m a loner.” She offered her hand as we stood by the front door of the house. I’d pulled the chair away. “This is where we part ways. It’s been an actually quite nice experience.”

“Same,” I said, shaking it.

“You look really good fucking,” Delilah said.

“So do you,” Dana replied, smirking a little.

“Good luck out there,” Megan said.

“To you as well.” Dana pulled on her hat, then stepped outside, looked around, and began walking away, towards the highway.

I watched her go out the window for several minutes, just in case anything was waiting out there, but she disappeared from sight without incident.

“She was nice,” Delilah said.

“Yeah,” Megan replied. “Now what?”

I glanced at her. “I just wanted to ask once...are you really okay with all that?”

Delilah looked at her, too. Megan looked at Delilah, then at me, and crossed her arms. She sighed. “Okay, I’ll admit to some jealously. Dana was...intimidating. And you obviously were super into her. And you asked her to join us without asking us if we wanted that first.”

Oh shit. I had done that.

“Fuck,” I said, “I’m sorry. I...wasn’t thinking.”

Megan stared at me for a moment, her expression hard, and I knew right away she was deciding whether or not I was telling the truth or just covering my own ass. She must have decided I was telling the truth, because she relaxed, and even a small smile came onto her face. “Yeah, fair enough. If I knew sex with her was on the table, I’d be a little stupid, too.”

I laughed, relieved. “That tends to happen to me.” I paused. “I’m sorry it made you jealous. I wasn’t trying to.”

She sighed and shook her head, staring at the ceiling in irritation for a moment. “I know. I didn’t think you were. That’s the problem with jealousy, it’s fucking dumb and doesn’t listen to logic. But whatever, it’s not a big deal. I’ll be fine. And it was fun.”

I relaxed, relieved. “It was. Now, let’s search this place and see if she missed anything, then we can finish this little journey.”

~

Either Dana had gotten to the house in time to search it top-to-bottom, or there just hadn’t been much left from a few years of wandering hands, because Delilah and I picked over the small place and found nothing worthwhile.

I wasn’t too dejected, though.

We had our food. Not exactly a long-term solution, but there was no such thing while living on the road. You just had to keep finding more food. One of the reasons people didn’t like doing it. Could be scary, but it could also be quite the thrill.

After the search, we headed outside, confirmed we were yet still alone, then got to it.

The walk took longer than I thought it might.

It was a pleasant walk, though I was cold by the time we had finally scaled the rise in the land and arrived at the cabin beside the radio tower. The tower itself was a large, imposing monolith of frozen, gleaming steel, rising blindly into the sky a good forty or fifty feet. Staring up at it, I wondered if it had any use any longer, or, barring that, when was the last time it had provided its basic function for someone.

The cabin was in decent enough condition, and it looked like no one had been up here for awhile. The three of us began our preparations for bedding down, because I could use a rest, and for some reason, it felt right to stay here for the night.

After securing the area, Delilah and I searched it top-to-bottom while Megan got first a fire, then dinner, going. There was no one around, including wildlife, and although the place had obviously been visited more than once, we found a few goodies tucked away in the forgotten spaces. There was a slim paperback that was mostly intact, a lighter that I gave to Delilah, since she didn’t have her own yet and it was still half full with juice that still burned, a few empty cans, and some clothes that could come in useful in a few ways.

After that, I spent an hour moving around in the nearest wooded area, gathering up firewood for the rest of the day and the night. When I’d secured a decent haul, I went back to the cabin, sat down with the ladies, and we all started going over our gear. I wanted to make sure everything was where it was supposed to be, and to perform maintenance on whatever we could. Mostly, that was guns and clothes.

We didn’t talk much throughout the whole ordeal, which suited me, because while I was doing all of this almost meditative stuff, my mind was working. I was turning over that conversation with Tanner in my head, but also considering other things. My own thoughts, notions, and perhaps even philosophies.

Inasmuch as I could be said to have those.

I was good at survival, but I didn’t think I was brainy enough to be philosophical. At least not meaningfully.

What I found myself coming back to was an almost startling realization that I’d had a few months back, before I had met Megan and Delilah.

While walking a highway, a different one, I had met a beautiful woman at a gas station. Her name was Mary, and she’d made a similar deal with me that Delilah had now: get her to civilization and she’ll fuck me real good.

And she had. And it had been just fantastic.

That was where I’d found my car, actually, at that gas station. It was during this little excursion, while I was scouring the land, looking for parts to repair the car, that something that had bugged me didn’t quite bug me anymore. Suddenly, for no obvious reason, and I’d ultimately just set it aside, I had kind of solved the question of: does my life have meaning? Or, I guess, sometimes I asked myself if life was ultimately meaningless, and up until that point, I always came with some variation of: I don’t know, I don’t want to think about this.

But I knew I set and achieved goals for myself and, more importantly, sometimes I helped people.

And the last time I asked myself if that was enough, the question was no longer uncertain.

It was just: yes, this is enough.

In some way that I spent hours teasing out, these two incidents were connected. I think I finally finished putting the pieces together when I locked myself in the cabin’s small bathroom for an hour and a half and first read my entire journal from start to finish, (surprisingly, sixteen months’ worth of writing from me didn’t take all that long to get through), and then I wrote and updated since last time. I scribbled in my blocky handwriting for half an hour straight and then just sat there for awhile, letting it all sink in.

Finally, I emerged from the bathroom after tucking my journal deep back into my coat pocket. I was glad that this time I’d had an excuse to hide away. Megan and Delilah seemed to understand that I needed some space.

They both looked at me inquiringly as I came out. There were two single-wide beds that we’d pulled the mattresses from, pushed together, and made into one large bed. They were sitting on it. Delilah was nude save for a pair of panties, laying on the side closest to the fireplace, reading the thin paperback novel we’d found. Megan was still in her clothes, sitting at the table, sorting through our supplies again.

“You okay?” Megan asked as I emerged.

“Yeah...I think so. I need to step outside for a minute,” I replied.

They both seemed to take the implied alone attached to that and just nodded, going back to what they were doing. I crossed the cabin and slipped out the door. Good, I’d made it out before the sun had gone down. In fact, it was sunset, and it was beautiful. It was perfect. I walked a little ways out from the cabin, not far, my boots crunching in the snow. There was no wind, there were no clouds in the skies, and nothing was moving for as far as I could see. Which was quite a ways. The cabin was built onto a little flat patch of land maybe fifty feet up, and so I had a clear view for miles and miles. I could see the highway, the fields, the little patch of civilization, the trees.

The world might have been an oil painting in that moment.

I stood there with my hands in my pockets, breathing slowly in and out, watching the sun gradually disappear beyond the horizon.

It just about disappeared before the cold really started to get to me, so I turned my back on the twilight and walked back inside.

“Okay,” I said as I came in, locking the door behind me, then hanging up my jacket and getting out of my boots, “I’m ready to talk. I think I’ve got it figured out.”

Delilah set her book aside and got up. She pulled on a sweater and a pair of thermal underwear and joined me as I sat at the table with Megan.

They both watched me attentively.

“So...I’ll put this as best I can. For awhile now, even before the apocalypse, I was asking the same question almost everyone asks: what’s the point of living? I’ve been wrestling with it for awhile. After the snow fell, I think I was in a mild state of shock for awhile, and honestly just surviving allowed me to put it off. Eventually though, it started coming back. I was living in this little town in Florida, doing okay for myself honestly, but I asked ‘is this it? Is this the rest of my life?’ And it just freaked me out. I think I developed my wanderlust as a direct response, or at least it was sent into overdrive. I’d been getting the urge to leave for a bit.

“Hitting the road helped alleviate it. The question didn’t bug me for months. I walked a lot. Survived a lot. Explored a lot. Met a lot of new people.” I paused, chuckled. “And fucked a lot of new people. But it didn’t last. It started bugging me again. Mostly I avoided it, but sometimes I ruminated on it, when I was completely alone. But about a month, month and a half ago, the question cropped up again and this time, it didn’t bug me. I kind of asked myself ‘is this it? Is this my life?’ And it was like, ‘Yeah, it is’. So naturally I thought, ‘is it enough?’ For some reason, I thought ‘yeah’. I just wasn’t afraid anymore. At least not of that particular line of reasoning. But I didn’t pursue it any further. Which I guess was a mistake.”

I waited, gauging their reaction. I didn’t think I was talking about any high-reaching stuff here, intellectually, but it was tough to tell what some people got or didn’t get. But Megan and Delilah were just watching me, listening, waiting.

I went on. “When I confronted Tanner, I saw…” I stopped, feeling that same shock of fear that I’d been feeling every day a nightmare had woken me. I swallowed and pushed on. “I saw something that just scared the fucking shit out of me. I saw myself in a decade if I didn’t, you know, stick to my morals, or find a greater purpose in life. I...he…” I hesitated, getting to the harder part, looking down at the table for a moment.

“He told me about himself. Used to have a wife, a baby. He worked at a grocery store after having a long, fucked up life. Things were still mostly okay, even after the snowfall. But then his baby was killed during a riot, and he went crazy and shot some people. They locked him up for months. His wife got sick and died while he was in lockup. Friend of his finally just let him go. He’d been wandering ever since. He couldn’t...kill himself.” I looked back up at them finally. “I don’t think I can. I mean, I’ll never know for sure until I’m actually standing there, gun in hand, with intent to do it, but I don’t think I can. I just think my survival instinct is too strong or fuck, maybe I’m just too afraid of dying to do it.”

I stopped again, then shook my head, plunged on. “He did fucked up shit, because he couldn’t kill himself. And he couldn’t assign any real meaning to his life. Couldn’t find any. Things have been going okay for me since the end of the world, but that existential question has been creeping up on me again and again, and I think facing Tanner, when he forced me to kill him even though I didn’t really want to...I don’t know. I guess it’s kind of forced me to confront that particular problem. Helping people is enough, but I guess what bugs me is I’m not sure if it will remain enough.” I waited, wondering if I’d gotten it all out.

“So…” Megan replied after a moment, “I think I get the gist of what you’re saying, but I’m not sure I entirely get it. What, specifically, is the problem?”

I thought about it, closing my eyes for a second. I was kind of all over the place there. After a moment, I had it. I opened my eyes back up. “I’m scared that I’ll turn into Tanner if I don’t find a larger meaning for my life. Not today, or tomorrow, or even three years from now, but eventually, if I don’t take steps now, and work to maintain some semblance of order and meaning to my life, I’ll end up there. And I don’t want to turn into a monster.”

“You don’t think this is enough?” Delilah asked. “I mean, you saved our lives. Twice. You’re helping me find my best friend. It sounds like you’ve helped lots of people.”

“It’s enough right now,” I replied. “Don’t get me wrong, I think this is important. Honestly, the two of you mean a lot to me. I’m just wondering if I might need to do more in order to continue feeling satisfied about my…” I sighed, searching for the words. “My place in the universe.”

“Lots of people don’t feel satisfied about their place in the universe,” Megan said.

“And I don’t want to be one of them.”

“You don’t think it’s possible that instead of turning into a monster you’ll just settle down somewhere with a girl or three? Or is that the same amount of awful to you?”

I laughed unexpectedly. “No. Honestly, if I somehow found a way past this feeling, this drive to do more...I’d be grateful. I don’t think it’s impossible that I’ll find a place I want to settle, but right now it feels unlikely.”

Megan frowned and seemed to gather her own thoughts. “You want my advice?” she asked after a moment. I nodded. “Just go with the flow. I know it sounds so trite, but I think part of growing up is realizing that...you keep growing. You change. And not necessarily because you want to. Maybe in five or ten or fifteen years you’ll decide ‘you know what? Fuck it. I’m putting down roots’. And you’ll be fine with that because you changed. I understand your existential crisis. Almost everyone has them. But I think you’ll find that if you stay the course, maybe start going out of your way to help people more than you already do, you’ll get along just fine.”

I was silent for a long moment, considering that.

Her words felt like they stripped away a lot, or quieted a lot of noise.

They rang of truth. I liked that. “Stay the course. Help people,” I muttered. Then I nodded. “I can do that...thank you. For that and for listening.”

They both smiled.

“I’ll always listen,” Delilah said. “I will also always open my legs for you.”

“Always?” I asked.

“Well...hmm. I guess not if I hurt down there. But otherwise, yeah.”

“And if you have a boyfriend or girlfriend that wants exclusivity?” Megan asked.

“Personally, I don’t think it could work between me and someone else if they aren’t into polyamory.”

“Well...cool,” I replied.

“I will stop opening my legs for you if you turn into an asshole, but I just don’t see that happening.”

“Well, you know how I feel about you,” Megan said.

I looked at her. “How do you feel about me?”

She sighed and crossed her arms. “I like you. I trust you. Sex with you is awesome. I respect you. Let’s leave it at that, okay?”

“Fair enough,” I replied. I stretched and popped my neck, then my back. It felt as if an enormous weight had been lifted from my shoulders. “What’s say I bring out that last blunt, and you girls polish off the rest of the wine, and we have a nice big threesome or three, and then have a nice, long, luxurious sleep before hitting the road again tomorrow?”

“That sounds excellent,” Delilah replied immediately.

“I’m down for it. Though I’d appreciate it if you’d find me more booze,” Megan replied.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

We got up and got to it.

TEN

The next three days were actually really pleasant.

Part of that was due to the fact that they were uneventful, but I thought a lot of it had to do with the fact that I’d not only gotten a lot off my chest, but also actually figured some shit out. I didn’t think I had it all figured out, there was still some stuff rattling around in my head, and I didn’t know if I’d ever get it all nailed down into place.

Shit, I didn’t even know if it was all supposed to be nailed down into place. As Megan had pointed out, people were supposed to change as they grew older and experienced more life, especially if they were on the younger side, like me.

But I felt good, and I didn’t know if they had their own things going on or a good mood was just infectious, because the girls were in pretty high spirits too.

We made good progress those three days, hitting ten miles each day. Eleven on the second, actually.

By the time we ran into our next genuine problem, I thought we had covered about half the distance to our intended destination. Not bad, but I knew it couldn’t keep up. We were tired, even with the nights of sleep and the clear weather we’d been enjoying, and we were going to need at least one day of rest soon.

“Well...fuck,” I said as we stood at the edge of our problem.

The highway terminated very abruptly a few feet ahead of us. A section of it that was meant to span a river some thirty feet straight down had collapsed. I peered carefully over the edge. Judging by the amount of cars down there, embedded in the band of ice that had once been a small river, I’m guessing that weight plus time equaled collapse. And I doubted it was too well-maintained even before the end of the world.

“Now what?” Delilah muttered, for the first time in days sounding unhappy.

“Don’t worry,” I replied. “Just a detour.”

I walked first to the right, peering over the guardrail, and saw a lone house maybe a hundred yards back the way we’d come. Should be easy enough to get to, and it looked fairly intact. Plus, there were woods behind it.

Perfect hunting ground, if it came to that.

I walked over to the other side. Much more to work with here, as I’d noted earlier when we were first approaching the bridge. There were five buildings down along a simple road that came off the highway, most of them looked like places of commerce, and another quartet of narrow structures strung out along the river.

Probably rental fishing cabins.

Then I turned around and looked back the way we’d come. The first thing I wanted to do, before anything else, was check the semi-truck that was sitting there. The huge boxy cargo container it was hauling might hold some goodies, as it was the kind of thing someone might have turned into a little basecamp at one point or another.

“Let’s check that out first,” I said. “Then we’ll head down to the house. We’ll turn in for the night.”

It was going to be dark soon, maybe even heading towards twilight by the time we actually got down to the house, depending on how long the truck took to search. The two back doors were slightly ajar. I pulled out my pistol, just in case, and motioned for the women to get to the side, out of view. Once they were safely out of sight, I grabbed the bottom of one of the doors and pulled it open while walking backwards with it.

Sometimes, if someone was trigger-happy enough, they’d just open fire the second the door opened up, even if no one was standing there, thus giving themselves away and me the advantage. No bullets came out, but that was no promise of safety. Carefully, I peered around the open door and looked in through the opening.

Someone had definitely converted it into a little outpost, but I thought that whoever it was had long since moved on. The stuff I could see had that ‘long dark and dead’ look that a lot of abandoned places did. Everything was oriented along the left side of the trailer, leaving an alcove of space to walk down along the right. Closest to me was a shelf that had been cleaned out, beyond that was a little table with a single chair, some boxes were stacked up beyond that, and at the back someone had rigged up a curtain that crossed the width of the trailer. I figured that this was probably where the sleeping area had been set up.

The curtain was closed.

I hauled myself up into the trailer and then froze as I spied something: snow with a bootprint in it. Several actually, walking back towards the curtain.

“Okay, I know someone’s in here,” I said, keeping my voice calm. “I’m not looking for trouble, I’m not looking for a fight. If you want me to leave, I’ll leave. If you’re looking to trade, I can trade. If you’re in trouble, I’ll help you.”

I waited. I thought I could hear heavy breathing over the winds outside, but it was hard to tell. Someone was almost certainly in here.

I took another step in. “Come on, seriously. Just say the word, I’m not looking to cause problems for anyone.”

Okay, definitely breathing. I took another two steps deeper in. Whoever it was, they were back there behind the curtain.

While considering what to do, the curtain suddenly pulled aside. I raised my pistol, faced with that sudden crucial moment of whether to act or not.

I didn’t pull the trigger, and thank fucking God.

“Pl-please don’t hurt me.”

A woman stood back there, her hands up now. She was pale, about average height and weight, shivering violently.

“It’s okay,” I said, putting my gun away, “I won’t hurt you.”

Slowly, she lowered her hands, looking at me in obvious fear. Fuck, I hadn’t checked the fucking cab of the truck. Could be someone laying in wait, she could be the bait. But Megan would definitely catch it if someone came out of the cabin, and something about this woman seemed really genuine. Then, as she put her arms down, she rested her hands protectively over her stomach, and in the thin light coming in behind me, I suddenly noticed it.

“Oh, fuck,” I whispered.

She was pregnant. Noticeably pregnant.

“Please don’t hurt me,” she repeated.

“I won’t, I promise,” I replied. “Delilah, get up here,” I said over my shoulder. “Are you hurt?” I asked as Delilah moved to join me.

“No,” she said.

“Are you alone?”

She hesitated. “Not-not exactly.”

“What’s going on?” Delilah asked.

“What does that mean?” I replied.

“Oh my God, she’s pregnant,” Delilah whispered.

“I-people are chasing me,” she said, trembling now.

Fuck. Fuck. Shit. Well, this was quite the situation I’d stepped into.

“We have to get you warm,” I said. “There’s a house nearby, off the highway. Will you come with us? We can get you warm.”

She hesitated for a long moment, looking between me and Delilah, then nodded. She looked terrified and tired and freezing.

“Why don’t you go help her get ready?” I asked. In my experience, most times, not all but most, women who were terrified, especially if another human had done the terrifying, responded better to other women than men. Especially big men who looked like me. And I was willing to bet a lot that it was a group of mostly if not exclusively guys after her. I believed that women were just as capable of evil as men, but…

Let’s just say that I’d encountered a lot more evil dudes than chicks so far.

Delilah moved forward slowly, apparently picking up my intention, and the pregnant woman did seem to relax a little. I turned around and saw Megan standing in plain view of the open door now, glancing periodically in while also keeping watch. I hopped down and joined her back on the road, taking a look around.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“There’s a pregnant woman in there,” I replied.

“Oh fuck,” Megan whispered.

“Yep. And people are chasing her apparently. Go check the cabin of the truck, I’m going to take a look around. We’re going to get her down to the house, okay?”

“On it,” she replied, and set off around the side of the semi.

I moved back over to the left side of the highway and looked carefully out over the structures, the river, the forested area beyond it. I tried to see evidence of people, someone moving around or standing in a window or near a building.

But there was nothing. No one.

We still seemed alone here.

I quickly moved across to the other side and checked it also. Nope, nothing there either. I doubted they’d come up here and somehow missed her, because it didn’t seem like she’d been in that truck for too long.

“Chris, need your help,” Delilah said.

I moved back to the rear of the semi to find the two of them standing there. “Here, I’ll help you down,” I said.

“Thank you,” she murmured.

“What’s your name?” I asked as she slowly sat down on the edge of the container.

“Elizabeth Patterson,” she murmured. Whatever Delilah had said to her while I’d been looking seemed to have calmed her down.

“Chris Weston,” I said. “There’s another woman here, her name is Megan. It’s just the three of us.”

“Okay,” she said, and I helped her slowly, carefully down onto the ground. I honestly had not had much experience around pregnant women, and I don’t know if it was sexist or not that I felt like they were like porcelain. I think it was more just fear that I’d hurt them on accident more than anything, not that I thought they were weak. And probably some residual primal urge to protect a pregnant woman. You know, that whole ‘perpetuate the species’ thing ticking along regardless of whatever the fuck was happening in the real world.

But I figured too much caution was better than too little.

“Here,” I said, taking off my jacket without really thinking about it, because she looked not only freezing, but just awful, like she was nearly dead on her feet. She had a jacket, but it didn’t seem like it was enough, and I’d make do without it, given we didn’t have far to go.

“Oh, I...thank you,” she murmured, putting it on. “Where did you say we’re going?”

I led her over to the guardrail and pointed. “There.”

She nodded. “Okay...I hope I can make it. I’m so tired…”

“I’ll carry you if it comes to it,” I replied.

She looked at me, and I saw conflicting emotions playing across her face. I knew what she was thinking: that she didn’t know me at all, and she was being forced to put her life in my hands. I felt good that she could trust me, but bad that I couldn’t meaningfully convey that. Ultimately, though, she just seemed resigned to the situation, probably too tired for anything else. I wondered how long she’d been going.

“Come on, let’s move,” I said.

Megan hopped out of the cab, startling Elizabeth. “Sorry,” she said. “Cab’s clear,” she added, looking at me. “We good?”

“We’re good. We need to get to the house. Will you go on ahead of us and clear it? I’d do it myself, but I’m worried Elizabeth here is going to pass out or something, and I’m probably the only one here who can safely carry her.”

Megan pursed her lips, then nodded. “Yeah, you’re right. I’ll get on it.”

She hopped the guardrail and began making her way down the snowy slope beyond, which was at a decent enough grade that she didn’t have much trouble navigating it. We, on the other hand, had to go to the off-ramp. We trudged along, walking through the snow, and I was careful to watch Elizabeth. I wanted to ask her questions, but she seemed to be having enough trouble just staying upright. I also resisted the urge to take a quick detour over to the opposite side of the highway and get another look to see if anyone was coming now.

In the end, I did do that when we reached the off-ramp. I had Delilah stay with Elizabeth and I jogged over and took another look.

Still nothing.

Good, I guess.

I hated unknowns, though. But whatever, I had a clear goal and a ticking clock. Although I didn’t know the specifics, I knew that it was bad for a person to be in the cold for too long, and it was worse for a pregnant woman. Pretty much all things were. Worse for a pregnant woman to fall down, get sick, go too long without sleep or food.

Elizabeth ended up taking my hand on the way down the ramp and I kept her upright. After what felt like too long, too many minutes, we made it down to the bottom. Megan had already disappeared into the house by now. I hadn’t heard any gunshots and the wind wasn’t too bad right now, so I felt confident I would if there were any to hear. Although it was possible someone could take her out without shooting her, or her getting a shot off.

Whatever. Regardless, I needed to get there.

I split my attention as best I could between the house and Elizabeth.

We made it maybe halfway there before she stopped, breathing heavily. “I...fuck...I need a break,” she murmured tiredly.

“Can I carry you? We’re almost there and we need to get you warm,” I replied.

She looked at me and for the first time actually smiled. “Okay,” she said.

I carefully scooped her up in my arms. Even noticeably pregnant, she didn’t weigh that much, and I was glad to see I could manage her weight pretty easily. I heard her let out a sigh of relief as we started walking.

“Thank for helping me,” she said, then yawned.

“You’re welcome,” I replied, kicking my way through the snow, very careful not to lose my balance. Fuck, that was the last thing I needed right now.

We kept on going, me waddling through the snow, trying to keep an eye out and an ear out for Megan, hoping she’d reemerge before we got there and give the all clear. Delilah had her gun out, and I was really glad I hadn’t had to tell her.

It was a near thing, but Megan beat me, coming back out of the house, looking calm. “It’s clear in there,” she reported.

“Thank God,” Elizabeth whispered.

“Did you come from this direction?” I asked.

“No, other side,” she replied, then yawned again.

“Tell me there’s a bed in there,” I said as we walked into the house. It was a two-story affair, though not too big otherwise.

“Up here,” Megan replied, and I resisted the urge to groan. Steps, great. My legs were aching after this and the three days of walking, but whatever, I could do it.

I did it, following her up, Delilah behind me. We came to a little hallway and moved to its end, where a door led to a master bedroom. There was, indeed, a bed, a king sized one, in the room. Megan pulled the blankets back for me and I carefully laid Elizabeth out. I began to ask her something, then realized she was passed out.

“Is she okay?” Delilah murmured.

“I think so, she must be exhausted,” I replied, carefully and gently getting my coat back, now that she was under blankets and I had to go back outside. “Okay, Delilah, stay here with her. Try and find some more blankets. Also, if you can, check her over. See if she’s cut or anything. I don’t think she is, but I don’t want her bleeding out. Megan, with me.”

Both women nodded and we set off. I led Megan back downstairs. There was a fireplace in a den at the back of the house, and it led right up through the bedroom upstairs. There was no firewood left in or around it, but when I went to the back door and stepped through into the backyard, I saw there was still a healthy supply in a bin nearby.

Megan and I stocked up. We brought a few armfuls in and piled some in the fireplace, then set the rest nearby.

“Can you get it started? I need to make sure we’re secure,” I said.

“Yeah, I’m on it,” Megan replied.

I got up and got to work.

ELEVEN

It was relatively easy to secure the house.

Locked down the windows, locked the front and back doors, then grabbed two of the remaining chairs from the dining room and shoved them up under the knobs. While the place had obviously been hit by wandering hands, it apparently hadn’t got to the point where people were breaking down furniture. After I finished locking everything down, I rejoined Megan back at the fireplace. She was just getting done with it.

Slowly, I sat down, groaning. “Fuck, I thought you were supposed to start getting old in your thirties,” I muttered.

She rolled her eyes. “You are. You’re not old, you’re just tired and sore.” Suddenly, she turned and stared at me with a new intensity.

“What?” I asked after a moment.

“I’m trying to decide if you’re really as good a guy as you appear, or if you actually just stepped up and saved that woman’s life so you could bang a hot pregnant chick.” I felt a flash of real anger at that and it must have registered on my face because before I could even respond she raised both hands immediately. “Okay. Whoa! Stop. Sorry. I-I didn’t-I was just joking,” she said quickly, which then made me feel bad because apparently I’d actually frightened her.

I hadn’t meant to do that.

I forced myself to relax. “It’s fine,” I said.

“No, it was a shitty thing to say. I’m really sorry.”

“I accept your apology. I just…” I sighed and looked at the fire for a moment. “I get so tired of having my motives questioned. Honestly, I get it for most people. It seems like everyone fucks you over or, at best, is just out for themselves. It’s worse than ever now, because there’s no real cops around. You have to watch out for yourself. But I’m not...an asshole. I just look like one, apparently, and everyone treats me like one.”

Megan leaned forward suddenly and hugged me to her. “Stop. Please,” she whispered. I hugged her back. “I’m honestly sorry. I just...it’s really hard to stop expecting the worst from people. Even people I like. I was mostly joking, anyway.”

I laughed, unable to help it, and I let myself laugh. I felt her body relax as I did. “Fair enough.” I gave her a kiss as she pulled back. “And, to be honest, I mean...if she came onto me…”

“Oh come on, you’re her fucking savior, I saw the way she was looking up at you when you carried her up to the house. I bet she’s having a wet dream about you right now.”

“I think I saw a ring on her finger…”

“Chris,” Megan said, like I had just missed something incredibly obvious, “fucking bet that one of the guys ‘after her’ is her husband.”

I blinked. Thought about that. Then nodded slowly, unhappily.

She was probably right.

Then something else occurred to me. Something unhappy. “If I were to have sex with her...would that be exploitative?”

Megan considered it. “Well, she is a desperate, pregnant woman on the run from people. If we take her at her word. Which I do, honestly. And you are in a position to help her, or withhold that help. I think that, even if you were fully going to help her even if she had no intention of having sex with you, and I believe that you do, if you were to ask, she might feel obligated to say yes, because she’d be afraid that you wouldn’t help her if she didn’t fuck you. So, this is what I think: don’t bring it up. Don’t mention it or even hint at it. If she wants to bring it up, on the other hand…”

“Then I’m in the clear?” I asked.

“Yes. I’d say make sure you have her explicit consent, make sure she’s comfortable with it, but, you know, you tend to do that anyway, from what I’ve seen. And just so you know, yeah, I’m cool with it if you fuck her. Since Delilah gets off on it, obviously she will be.”

“Yeah…” I shrugged after a moment. “I doubt it’ll come up, honestly.”

Megan laughed and rolled her eyes. “You don’t know people too well, huh? Most people tend to think about things they want to do, things they wished they’d done, after a harrowing experience. I’m willing to bet she wishes she’d banged more hot dudes in her life. I mean just about everyone wishes they’d had more sex, and there is something to the notion of arousal following a near-death experience. People all say that when it happens in the movies it’s bullshit, but honestly it’s not. I mean it’s all adrenaline, horniness and fear, why do you think so many guys take girls to horror movies on first dates? Gets the adrenaline pumping, and if you’re around someone you think is hot, it’s really easy for those wires to get crossed.”

“Huh,” I said. I laughed suddenly. “We have the weirdest conversations.”

“I like that,” Megan replied with a smile that was beautiful to see.

“Let’s make dinner.”

Megan nodded and we set to work. I frowned as I began getting the stuff out and preparing the meal. We had a fourth mouth to feed. Technically four and a half now. Because whatever happened, not only did I very much doubt that we were going to be able to safely part company for awhile, but I wasn’t going to leave her high and dry. Unless she outright betrayed us, which was still very possible, I knew nothing about this woman beyond the fact that she was terrified and pregnant and married, (probably, why else would she wear a wedding ring though?). Then I’d have to leave her. But why would she betray us?

I didn’t think she would. I thought she was genuine, and Megan and Delilah seemed to be in agreement with that assessment.

But that meant our food supply just got cut by probably a third.

We’d managed to shore up our meals a little bit with a few food items found on the three-day journey that got us here, but not by much. So we’d eaten into the supply of food we’d gotten from Dana during those days.

“I’m going to have to hunt tomorrow,” I muttered as we sorted through the stuff.

“If there’s time,” Megan replied.

“We’ll have to make time.”

“What if her hubby comes knocking?”

“We lie to him and see if we can throw him off the trail. If it comes to it, we blow him away,” I replied. Megan just grunted. I wasn’t quite comfortable with the fact that she didn’t even ask ‘what if Elizabeth did something to deserve this?’ Though honestly, and this was probably really biased, it was tough to justify the killing of a pregnant woman. Or maybe they weren’t looking to kill her, just control her. Yeah, much more likely.

Well, if she didn’t want to go back, I clearly was not in the habit of letting men try to control women.

“We’ll go for vegetable beef soup, yeah?” I asked.

“Fine,” she replied.

We took a moment, pouring in two cans of vegetable soup, one of the cans of surplus beef, and then fortified it with another can of mixed vegetables. I added enough water from one of my bottles, then stirred it up and set the pot in front of the fire.

“I’m going to go check on her,” I said.

“I’ll tend the soup,” Megan replied.

I nodded and got up. Heading upstairs, I glanced out one of the windows. It was pretty much full dark now. At least it wasn’t snowing, and the house was heating up nicely. When I walked back into the master bedroom, I saw Delilah had taken up a chair by the fireplace and was reading a book by the flickering light of a candle she’d set up and lit on the mantle.

“How are we doing?” she asked quietly as I came in.

“Good. We’re secure, we’ve got firewood, dinner’s going. I haven’t seen anyone or anything. But I’m going to have to hunt tomorrow, if possible. Unless some miracle solution presents itself, we’re going to take her with us. If that’s what she wants, and she seems like she’s outta options. Which means we need more food.”

Delilah nodded. “Yeah…”

“How is she?” I asked, walking slowly over to her, stopping an arm’s length away and looking down at her. I remembered meeting Delilah had gone a little something like this. Despite everything...yeah, I was honestly hoping she’d come onto me. I mean, why wouldn’t I? She was quite attractive. Some of her color had come back, though she was still very pale, and now that she was sleeping, she looked much more peaceful. She had chin-length dark black hair and I remembered her eyes being a wonderful shade of blue.

“She isn’t hurt, from what I could tell. Seems to be sleeping peacefully now.” Delilah stopped speaking abruptly and I glanced over. I was a little surprised to see her genuinely pissed. “What the fuck kind of pieces of shit send a pregnant woman into such a terrified frenzy that she ends up freezing half to death in a semi?” she growled.

“Pretty standard fare pieces of shit nowadays, unfortunately,” I replied.

“You saved her,” she murmured after a moment, seemingly getting herself back under control. “Just like you saved me. And Megan. Twice.”

“I guess so.” I looked at her again. She was out cold and I figured she’d probably be out for the rest of the night. We’d have to figure out sleeping arrangements. One of us, at minimum, would have to sleep in here with her. I didn’t want her to wake up alone in the dark, too much of a chance of her panicking, and rightly so, given how confusing the situation might be. She’d passed out under not great circumstances to begin with.

Delilah stood up suddenly. “Chris,” she said, coming over to me and looking up at me. “You’re a good person. Don’t doubt that. Okay?”

I opened my mouth, but ultimately nothing came out.

I didn’t know what to say.

“Thanks,” I said finally, because it was the only thing that seemed appropriate.

She hugged me. “I mean it.”

I hugged her back and something occurred to me. “If she wakes up when I’m out of the room, put in a good word for me. I’m not really looking to score any points with her-”

“You did that big time already,” Delilah murmured.

“-but,” I continued, “she needs to be able to trust us, and it’d be all too easy, from her perspective, if she’s smart, for me to lie and say I’m totally cool. No, she needs to hear it from you or Megan, and when I’m not in earshot.”

“Like with Dana,” Delilah replied, pulling back and looking up at me again.

I nodded. “Exactly.”

“Don’t worry, I already put in a good word for you back at the semi, and I will again.”

“Thank you. I appreciate it.”

I gave her a kiss, then checked on Elizabeth once more and, determining she was okay, headed out of the room.

It was time to start winding down for the night.

Something I was definitely looking forward to.

~

The next thing I did was pull out my flashlight and set to work searching the house.

It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Megan to do a good job, it was more for my own peace of mind. I was one of those ‘need to do it myself’ kind of people a lot of the times. I was bad at delegating. Upstairs I found a bathroom and a spare bedroom, nothing else but a few closets. All were clear, and there was a bed in the other bedroom big enough for two people. Still wasn’t sure how we’d handle sleeping arrangements, but whatever, a problem for later.

Downstairs was a living room, dining room, kitchen, a small bathroom, and the little den that had the fireplace. Once I was sure we were secure, I rejoined Megan and we spent the time waiting for the food to heat up, stirring it occasionally, sorting through our gear. I’d gone up and brought down Delilah’s stuff so she could stay up there and keep watch. It occurred to me that Elizabeth hadn’t had a backpack on her.

She must be in a bad situation.

We sorted through the stuff and after that I ended up nodding off for a little while. The food wasn’t ready yet, so I put my back to a wall, leaned my head against it, and suddenly, the next thing I knew, I was opening my eyes and Megan wasn’t there. I came awake in a jolt, suddenly worried something had happened, but she came back into the room before I could stand up.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Yeah, I...must’ve fallen asleep,” I muttered.

“Sorry, food got done, I brought up Delilah hers. I was going to wake you when I got back,” she replied.

“It’s fine. How long was I out?”

“Maybe half an hour at most.”

I just grunted and helped her divvy up the soup. She got a bowl for herself, and I split what remained between three thermoses. I took the time to quickly wash out the pot, then fill it with snow and set it to melt and boil, then I headed upstairs to join the three women. Elizabeth was still out, but I put a thermos near the opening in the chimney that was letting heat from the fire below into the room to keep it warm, in case she woke up. I also set a trio of water bottles there so that we’d be able to wash up at some point and have warm water to do it.

Then we ate. We didn’t say much. I noticed that the nap had given me an unexpected burst of energy, one that I hoped wore off soon. Now was not the time for insomnia. The soup was good though, and I was happy despite the unexpected development.

Sharing a meal in a warm, safe place with Megan and Delilah was a pretty surefire way of making me happy.

We were just finishing up our meal when Elizabeth came awake.

She opened her eyes and jerked at the sight of us, or maybe just me. We waited, not making any moves, as she sat up. She looked at us slowly, putting her feet on the floor, (we’d taken her boots off when putting her in the bed), and cradled her large belly gently.

“Chris. Megan. Delilah,” she said after a moment. “You saved my life. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. How are you feeling?” I asked, and got up slowly to retrieve the soup I’d set aside for her.

“Tired, but better. I guess I fell asleep? Last thing I remember is you carrying me into the house,” she said.

“Yeah. It’s been a few hours. We’re safe. It’s nighttime. Here. It’s beef and vegetable soup,” I said, offering her the thermos.

“Thank you so much,” she replied with enthusiasm. Unscrewing the top, she smelled it, then drank deeply. “Oh my God, this is fucking amazing. Thank you.” She drank more, then seemed to make herself stop. I didn’t blame her. Eating too fast sometimes meant throwing up, and you couldn’t really afford throwing up with food being scarce.

For the next five or so minutes, no one said anything. We had questions, obviously, and she knew that, I could tell, but I wanted her to be ready, and right now I think she was just trying to sort her thoughts out or get her head screwed back on straight. I knew what it was to wake up in a haze of pain and uncertainty, and even fear.

So we all finished off our meals, and sat, and waited.

Finally, she screwed the cap back onto the thermos and set it on the floor by her double-socked feet. “I imagine you have questions.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“And, given what you did for me, apparently out of the kindness of your heart-” she paused, grimaced, “...I mean that genuinely, not trying to disrespect you-”

“It’s okay. I get it,” I replied. “Kindness usually isn’t on the table nowadays, it seems.”

She nodded. “Yeah. Tell me about it. But you deserve to know what I’m mixed up in. It’s not too complicated, I guess. I’m sure you noticed this,” she raised her left hand, showing off her ring. It was a thin golden band topped by an impressive diamond. “I’m on the run from my husband and a few of his ‘pals’.”

“How many does ‘a few’ constitute?” I asked.

“Two. So three in total,” she replied. I nodded and she continued, though yawned first. “Short version is: I got real tired of my husband’s controlling nature and anger issues, which have only grown worse since he got me pregnant, and then he started scaring me.” She paused, hugged herself a little tighter. “Sorry,” she murmured, “this is hard to talk about.”

“I understand,” Megan said.

She sighed and shook her head. “He didn’t get physically violent...but I think the only thing that stayed his hand was the fact that I was pregnant. He’s gotten it into his head that the only way to make something of himself is to have a child. He talked me into it...I kinda feel like it was inevitable anyway. No birth control, no implant, no surgery. Protection is a lot harder to come by. It was gonna happen one way or another if we kept going the way we did. Honestly, I’m surprised it took as long as it had to happen.” She looked fully at us again, at me. “So that’s it. He and his two friends. They’re somewhere in the area, but I don’t know where. I’ve been on the run for a few days now. I’d pretty much run out of steam back there when you found me.”

“I’m really glad I did, that was a bad place to be,” I replied.

She nodded. “I’m glad, too. You saved my life, no question. My life and his,” she murmured, briefly looking down at her belly again.

“How far along are you?” Delilah asked.

“Seven months,” she replied.

That took a bit of the pressure off. No chance of her going into labor anytime soon. Well, not no chance, even I knew premature births were a risk, but we were probably good there. I considered the situation for a moment, but I was getting tired again. That little burst of energy I’d gotten was only temporary and I could tell I was flagging.

“So, um...I’m basically at your mercy,” Elizabeth said. She sounded surprisingly calm about this fact, but I thought it was just because she was so exhausted. And no wonder: she’d been running for days while pregnant and probably terrified. “What...are you going to do with me?”

“First of all,” I said, “don’t worry. We’ll help you. We’ll take care of you. I can promise you that right now. We’re heading for a town about forty miles north of here. The highway will take us straight to it, though we’re going to have to cross that river. Are you okay with going with us there? Because admittedly I can’t really change course,” I said.

“To be completely honest, that would be fantastic. I...have nowhere to go. Everyone else who was in my life is dead or missing. He was all that was left. I’m...basically adrift. So yes, I would be extremely grateful, but I’m going to have to be very honest: I will be a burden. I’m in decent shape, but I definitely need to eat more than before I was pregnant, I move slower, and I’ll definitely need breaks. I will slow you down and drain your resources faster. I’m willing to work and help out however I can, and I’m finding that I am actually kind of okay at this survival shit, but I haven’t had much chance to develop it at all, so…” She shrugged.

“I understand,” I said, “and it won’t be a problem. We’ll make it work.” I paused, suddenly realizing that I’d spoken for all three of us, not all that dissimilar from when I’d abruptly pitched Dana to join us a few days ago. I looked at the other two.

“Oh, Chris, I’m fine with this,” Megan said.

“Yeah, we have to help her,” Delilah said.

I felt a lot of relief at that. “Then it’s settled. For now, we need to sleep. I’d like us all to sleep in the same room, though as for sleeping arrangements...I feel like you’ll have to sleep in the bed you’re in now, and there’s a single-wide mattress that we can drag in. But it could only hold two of us, so I don’t know how you feel about that…”

She actually ducked her head and blushed. “About that…”

“Yeah?” I asked when she didn’t continue.

She chewed on one lip for a long moment, staring at the floor. I glanced at Megan, who was smirking with an I told you so look on her face.

Finally, Elizabeth muttered something, I thought fuck it, and looked up at me. “There’s, um, I have a question.”

“Shoot,” I replied.

She laughed nervously, then glanced back down, now playing with the ring on her finger, twisting it slowly. “I…” She fiddled for another moment or so, then finally let out a frustrated sound and looked up. “I have reasons for asking what I’m about to ask, and I can and will articulate them if I have to, but for now...are any of you in a relationship?” she asked.

“Um…” I hesitated, considering how to handle this. “All three of us are having sex with each other,” I said finally.

She laughed. It was a genuine laugh, one that seemed to catch the person laughing off guard. The kind of laugh someone enjoyed because they hadn’t had something to laugh about in a long time, and laughing felt good.

“Well that’s a good enough answer, I guess. Would anyone mind terribly if I had sex with Chris tonight? You and I can share the bed.”

“Can we watch?” Delilah asked. She was always the first to speak in situations like these, it seemed.

Elizabeth seemed to consider that. She seemed nervous. But then a look almost of determination came onto her face. “You know what? Yes. You can watch. If this is going to happen.”

“I’m very okay with this happening,” Delilah said.

“Yeah, I’m down to let this happen,” Megan said.

“I very much want to fuck you,” I said to her.

She seemed a little surprised, and I understood that. Talking openly about sex, I had found, and I think a lot of people either had also found or suspected, was kind of like diving into the deep end of the pool. You weren’t quite sure what you were going to get in return.

“Really?” she asked. “The whole…” She ran a hand over her belly. “You know, pregnant thing, doesn’t throw you off?”

“Oh fuck no,” I replied immediately. “That’s a bonus.”

“Oh…” She smiled, and it was the kind of smile I usually saw on Delilah when we were doing something sexual. It was a confident smile. It looked good on her and I was glad to see it. Feeling confident was a great feeling. “Well then, in that case, um...let’s do it.” She paused, frowning. “Although...I guess, I have to ask, do you have any STDs?”

“No, not as far as I know,” I replied. “And I’ve got that gold mesh birth control implant.”

“Oh! Yes, I’ve heard of those. Well...I guess that’s good enough for me,” she said.

“Very glad to hear it,” I said, getting to my feet. “Now, as much as I would love to jump you here and now, I have some winding down to do to prepare for bed that I know I’m not going to want or probably even be able to do after I’ve fucked you.”

“We can wash up while you work,” Megan suggested.

“Oh God, can we?” Elizabeth asked. “I haven’t washed up in days.”

“Wash up good, because I’m going to go down on you,” I said.

“Are you fucking serious?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“He’s good, too,” Megan said.

“Holy shit. I haven’t been gone down on in fucking months. Over a year. Jesus. Okay, yeah, get me soap, water, a rag, I’m going to fucking scrub.”

I laughed and headed downstairs to get to work.

I was quite eager to turn in for the night.

TWELVE

It was tough to do a thorough job, being as excited as I was about fucking Elizabeth, but I made sure to go slowly and do it right.

I had never been with a pregnant woman.

Okay, maybe I had. I knew that it was entirely possible to miss the fact that a woman was pregnant during the first few months. But I had never been with a noticeably pregnant woman. I’d heard stories that sex with noticeably pregnant women was really fucking good. It just felt better. Plus, given how much your own personal level of attraction to a person could affect the encounter, well...let’s just say that I was super into Elizabeth.

And in a way that I wasn’t quite into Megan or Delilah.

I hoped there wasn’t a jealousy issue in my near future.

I made sure we were secure, then grabbed the boiling water and carefully moved it upstairs so it could cool and I could replenish the water we’d used so far. As I came back upstairs, I saw that all three women were completely naked and in the process of washing up. I set the water carefully down on the floor, out of the way, and then simply stared.

Elizabeth had a very great body, and looked fantastic naked.

She was pale all over, her skin mostly smooth. I could see some stretch marks coming in, but that genuinely didn’t bother me. As I’d suspected, she had a fairly petite frame. Even seven months pregnant, her thighs were more pleasantly padded than thick. Same with her hips. Her breasts, on the other hand…

Damn. They were nice.

Big. Very big for her small frame.

She was maybe five four and somewhere north of a hundred and thirty pounds by now, and packing some double-ds.

She blushed and covered herself when she saw me looking. Delilah was helping her wash her back.

“You’ve got nothing to be concerned about,” I said as I walked over.

“It’s nice to hear someone like you say that,” she murmured, looking up at me. “Fuck, you’re tall.”

“Kinda,” I agreed, taking my coat off and hanging it from a hook probably meant for a robe. “It’s more that I’m broad in the shoulders and built. It makes me seem taller. But I am above average,” I continued.

“I like it,” she said quietly, still staring at me. Then she looked down at herself, slowly lowering her hands until they were settled on her belly. It seemed like something she did a lot, maybe without realizing it by now. “I’ve been married for ten years,” she said. “And we were together for two years before that. Met him when I was twenty and in college. I never cheated on him. Not once. And it wasn’t like I had an extensive history before we met, either. Just two boyfriends. So I’m not...experienced. And it’s been a very long time since I’ve been with someone besides my husband.” She paused. “God, over a decade,” she marveled.

“Elizabeth,” I said, my tone serious enough that it immediately got her attention. I came to stand before her, trying not to be intimidating, while also trying to convey my seriousness. “I want to be absolutely clear right now, before we go any further: if you don’t want to do this, you don’t have to. I don’t want you to feel like you have to sleep with me in exchange for helping you.” I paused. “Even though that is literally the arrangement I have with Delilah, but she’s the one who made the offer. And I don’t want you to feel like I’m going to leave you behind or treat you worse if you suddenly withdraw consent. Okay?”

She was smiling even before I had finished.

“Told you so,” Megan murmured from behind me as she cleaned up.

“I understand, Chris,” she said, then laughed a little. “God, I feel like I’m finally cashing in on all my bad luck. With all the bullshit that’s been happening for so long, it’s about fucking time something goes right. You’re a true gentleman, and I appreciate and understand what you’re saying. Despite how desperate I am, I don’t feel like you’re coercing me in any way. I’m comfortable with this.” She hesitated. “Okay, I’m not completely comfortable with this, but I want to explain that, just so there isn’t any misinterpretation on your part. If I hesitate, or seem uncertain, while we’re, uh, doing it, it’s not because I don’t want to.”

She paused, added emphasis. “I really want to fuck you, Chris. Let me be clear about that. I want to fuck you so bad. But if there’s any uncertainty on my part, it’s because I’ve got a voice in my head screaming at me ‘oh my fucking God, you are cheating you fucking whore what the fuck is wrong with you!?’. Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” I replied. “I get it.”

“Good. That, combined with the fact that I haven’t fucked another guy in over a decade is...it’ll take some getting used to. But I so want to do this, and I absolutely am not backing down from this opportunity. Now...can I please see you naked? I’ve been wanting that pretty badly.”

I laughed, blushing despite myself. “Uh, yeah.”

“There,” Delilah said as she finished washing her back and the backs of her legs. “You’re all clean.”

“Thank you so much. You are such a fucking sweetheart,” Megan said.

Delilah smiled as she came around the front, looking her up and down. “Well, I am, but I also have an ulterior motive.”

Elizabeth looked at her for a moment, then looked startled, then blushed. “Oh, wow. I, um, I guess that should have been obvious. You two seem so comfortable getting naked around me…”

“No pressure,” Delilah replied.

“It’s not that I’m not interested, exactly, just...inexperienced? I’ve never actually been with another woman before...but I’d like to, if I’m being honest.”

“Well, you sure met the right women. Especially with regards to Delilah.”

“Why especially her and not me?” Megan asked.

“You aren’t exactly the most welcoming of individuals, love,” Delilah replied, saving me the trouble. Her initial jealously of Delilah had faded a lot, I think it had to do with her sort of conquering her in bed, something I had no doubt Delilah had meant to happen, so she tended to fight with our redheaded lover a lot less than with me.

“Whatever,” Megan replied, rolling her eyes.

“Am I wrong?” Delilah asked, walking up to her and cupping her bare breasts.

“I guess not,” Megan admitted, then she kissed Delilah while grabbing her ass.

“Wow, you three are...I feel like I’ve only ever seen relationships like this in porn,” Elizabeth murmured as she watched, looking almost mesmerized.

I knew how she felt. To someone who probably hadn’t seen much in the way of live performances of sex, this had to be something else. There was something much more powerful, much more visceral, about actually seeing two (or more) real, live people doing it in the flesh. Well, this was going to be quite the experience for her.

Elizabeth’s attention turned to me as I stripped. She sat down on the bed and watched me with hunger in her gaze. I had to admit, it was nice to be looked at like that. Especially by someone who was so attractive. I sensed some hesitation there, like she wasn’t sure if I would go for her, when it should have been obvious. I wondered if it was the pregnancy. I’d known women to suddenly get very self conscious about their looks while pregnant and after, and I could at least partially comprehend. Pregnancy must take a toll on you, physically, and it seemed like the women underwent such rapid changes that it must be kind of freaky.

Shit, if my body suddenly started changing shape and flooding hormones over the course of a few months, it’d freak me out too.

But I wondered if there was more to it than that. I knew it was almost never simple. Sure, some women knew they were hot and owned it, for better or for worse. But I’d seen absolutely gorgeous women insist they were ugly or, at best, plain. I’d seen skinny women insist they were overweight. And that was just brutally miserable to watch, because I imagined it was so much worse to live. Society did a lot of damage.

Or somtimes just one person in our lives.

I shook off the unhappy thoughts and finished getting naked. I didn’t know much about her, but I had a good impression of Elizabeth. Maybe that was just my dick talking, but I thought she deserved to just have a night of fun. No worries, no anxieties, no concerns. Just fun. And what was more fun than having great, risk-free, (or as close as you were going to get to it), sex with an attractive stranger? I began washing up.

“Wow, you are something to look at,” she murmured.

I just shrugged and kept washing.

“You’re awfully shy for someone so big and take charge...how old are you?” she asked.

“Twenty five,” I replied.

“Really? Wow, I thought you were older. Shit, I thought you might even be older than me. And for the record, I’m thirty two. I guess it doesn’t really matter.” She paused and looked down at herself, then looked like she was going to say something else, seemed to think better of it, and instead opted to silently watch me finishing up.

Yeah, it definitely felt nice to be looked at like that by someone who looked like her.

I noticed her eyes stray several times to my left, where Megan and Delilah stood. They had pulled the other mattress into the room while I was downstairs finishing up, and now they were laying down on it, nude and clean and beautiful, embracing, kissing, caressing. Megan let out a moan as Delilah’s hand found its way in between her thighs.

“Wow,” Elizabeth whispered. “I’ve never, um, actually watched anyone have sex before.”

“It’s wild, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yes. It really is. Wow.”

I finished up and sat down on the bed beside her. She looked at me for a long moment, then took my hand and guided me towards the middle of the bed. We took a moment to carefully arrange ourselves, lying side-by-side, facing each other. She stared at me intently for a moment, then reached out and ran a hand across my face. My beard was definitely coming in. I hadn’t shaved in about two weeks at this point, and it was starting to bug me. Her touch was warm and gentle. She smiled, and I could read the nervousness in her face, her body language. This was going to have to proceed at the pace she set.

After another moment, she leaned in, hesitated once, then put her lips to mine. There was a wonderful moment of elation that came from kissing a new woman, an attractive new woman, and I deepened the kiss slightly. She moaned, a small sound that seemed to startle her, like she hadn’t meant to, so that had to be a good sign.

I gently cupped one of her big breasts in my grasp and I made a similar sound. Fuck, did she have some great tits.

We moved slowly. I got the feeling part of it was because she was anxious about being with a new person for the first time in twelve years, part of it was out of a desire for enjoyment. I was making sure to be careful. For a number of reasons, but also because it was obvious that she was making herself very vulnerable here, and I didn’t want her to feel like that had been a bad decision. I wanted her to come away from this encounter feeling great.

She slowly deepened the kiss as we made out, and eventually her tongue worked its way into my mouth, and as I wrapped and twisted mine with her own, I got to enjoy her unique, natural taste. I continued groping her breasts, massaging them gently as we made out, and then slid my hand down. I meant to go to her hip, but damn if my hand didn’t slide to her belly instead. I felt her shift, almost jump, and I broke the kiss.

“Sorry,” I murmured, raising my hand.

“No,” she said, taking my hand and gently laying it back across her stomach. “No, it’s okay. Just unexpected. It’s sensitive...but okay. More than okay, it’s welcome,” she added, smiling at me, her face barely an inch from mine.

“All right,” I said, and resumed kissing her.

I ran my hand over her rounded belly for another moment, my movements careful and slow, until finally it wandered off and found her hip. Then down lower, to her thigh. She had some great thighs. After a moment, she gently pushed me away.

“Hold on,” she murmured. “Um...here, help me get a pillow under me, to support me.”

I did as she asked, and as I did, saw that Delilah and Megan had stopped in their lovemaking to watch the two of us now. Once she was settled, I began to pleasure her. My fingertip sought and found her clit, which I gently began to massage, and my lips found her nipple. She let out a gasp, then a loud, long moan of surprised pleasure.

“Oh my fucking-oh!” she cried, twitching. “It’s been...fuck! Months.”

“Seriously?” I murmured, pausing briefly as I sucked on one of her big breasts.

“Yes. My husband-ah! Ah! Yes!-really fell out of sex. I swear he was getting it somewhere else, but I think-oh my God!” she cried and abruptly began to orgasm. For a long moment she devolved into a shuddering, writhing mass of pleasure, letting out a series of inarticulate sounds of pleasure. I continued licking across her breasts, her nipples, and rubbing her clit, trying to get the most out of her orgasm for her.

When she was finished, she went slack and I slipped a finger into her. She let out a fresh yell of ecstasy.

“Oh fuck,” she moaned, panting. “Oh wow. I’m not sure what it is, but orgasms are more intense now. Or maybe it’s just you. Holy shit...anyway, I thought it was because I was pregnant. I kind of got the idea that it turned him off.”

“If that’s true, it’s so fucking weird,” I said. “And it doesn’t matter now. Don’t think about him. It’s just us tonight.”

“Yes,” she whispered, running her fingers through my hair. “Just us. You’re right. I’m going to...ahhhhh fuck...enjoy this.”

I kept fucking her with my finger and sucking on her tits until I made the switch to oral. I got down quickly in between her legs and set right in, massaging her clit now with the tip of my tongue. She let out a series of loud, long, blissful moans of pure pleasure as she grabbed my head. I had her coming inside of another sixty seconds.

“Oh fuck! Just fuck me! Now!” she demanded as soon as the second climax had run its course.

“You got it,” I replied, happier than hell to plunge my throbbing cock into that sweet, pregnant vagina. I very much wanted to know what it felt like. “Can I come inside you?” I asked as I got into position between her spread-open legs.

“Yes,” she replied, hesitating only briefly.

I’d gotten used to doing it with Megan and Delilah, but sometimes I forgot what an intensely intimate thing that could be.

And now I was going to get to enjoy it with this beautiful woman named Elizabeth.

I let out a low, long groan as I slid into her.

She was fucking tight.

And wet as hell.

And the heat of her pussy…

It did feel different. I don’t know if that was just the power of the mind, but damned if that pussy didn’t feel just fucking amazing.

“Holy shit! You are fucking big!” she gasped, staring down the length of her pale body at me, her eyes wide, face flushed.

“And you are really fucking wet and tight,” I groaned in response as I slid slowly into her.

“I mean fuck, this might be the biggest dick I’ve ever taken,” she panted.

“Is it going in okay?” I asked.

“Yeah. Fine. It’s...fuck, it’s big, but I like it. I really like it,” she groaned. “Fuck! I never thought I’d be one of those shallow girls on about dick size but damn if this isn’t nice.”

“I get the feeling it’s different for everyone,” I replied, breathing slowly, nice and smooth, as I got into that pussy. Fuck me she felt so good. It absolutely was not bullshit: pregnant vagina felt good on a whole other level. “I’ve met women smaller than you who can absolutely take a pounding from this dick, and I’ve met women taller and bigger than you who have a lot of trouble handling it. Oh yeah. Holy shit, that’s good pussy.”

I quickly got lost in her, going a bit harder and faster now that I had the green light. She was fucking enjoying herself quite a lot, I could tell, and her big, fantastic tits started bouncing as I thrust deep and hard into her. And I gotta admit, seeing that look on her face, how much she was enjoying this, was making me feel a little cocky.

Shifting forward, careful of her belly, I put my hands on either side of her head and looked down at her as I stroked my whole length smoothly into that slick, hot, pregnant vagina of hers. Goddamn did that feel good!

“You like that?” I asked.

“Ugh yes…” she moaned loudly.

“I’m bigger than your husband,” I said, and she nodded emphatically.

“Yes. Much bigger. Fuck. Oh fuck it’s really good…” she groaned.

I started going a bit harder and she cried out. I wanted to make her come. I needed to make her come because I was so damned close to coming myself. I was just about to reach down and start rubbing her clit when it happened. Her eyes suddenly popped open and she let out a shout of pure bliss and then…

“Aw fuck…!” I moaned as her vaginal muscles clenched and fluttered around me, a hot gush of her sex juices escaping from around my dick as I kept thrusting into her. There were so many things to enjoy about her, and I saw them all as I switched back to just resting on my knees, looking over her body as I fucked her orgasming pussy.

The curve of her hips.

The sight of my cock disappearing into her pregnant pussy.

Her huge breasts, swaying and bouncing.

Her beautiful face, twisting and writhing in bliss.

What really did it for me, and I felt bad about it, was when I saw the ring on her finger. The knowledge that I was fucking a married woman, and that her husband would almost certainly gladly put a bullet in my head if he found out I’d done it, hit me like a hammer. It was fucked up, and probably some old, caveman part of the brain, but there was no denying that there was in fact a primal and perverse satisfaction in fucking someone else’s significant other. And it only was heightened if you knew they really didn’t want you fucking their wife. Yeah, I felt like a piece of shit for getting off on that, but right then I did not give a fuck.

Sounded like this asshole deserved it.

So I shot my load into that pregnant, married vagina with a deep, intense, and probably somewhat dark satisfaction.

I heard myself first groaning, then crying out as I started coming inside of her. My cock twitched and spasmed and kicked, jerking violently, each contraction releasing a fresh spurt of my seed and sending a shockwave of total fucking rapture throughout my whole body. It was like how I imagined hard drugs must feel.

Just pure, uncut bliss.

I pumped her pussy full of my stuff and blew one hell of a load inside of her, draining my nuts into that sweet vagina.

I’m not sure how long the orgasms lasted, but it felt like awhile. Longer than usual. When I was done, I came back into focus staring down at her. She was looking up at me, flushed, hair a mess, body slicked with sweat. My cock still in her pussy, her legs spread wide open. I reached out and ran my hands slowly up and down her thighs.

“I think that’s the best sex I’ve ever had,” she whispered after several moments.

“That was pretty fucking good,” I agreed. “Whew. Shit.”

I glanced over. Delilah and Megan were staring.

“So, uh, good show?” I asked.

“Yes,” Delilah replied emphatically, and then kissed Megan, tackled Megan, before she could say anything. I imagine she was so horny that she needed sex right then and there. Megan seemed equally horny and soon the two women became lost in each other.

“Wow,” Elizabeth murmured sleepily, staring at the two women. “You two are so beautiful. And sexy. I wish I could be that sexy.”

“You are,” I replied as I pulled carefully out of her. Damn, my cock was sensitive now. That had been an intense orgasm.

I had fucking felt that one.

“You really think so?” she asked, then yawned, looking at me. Abruptly, she looked down at herself, where my stuff was leaking out of her. “Oh holy shit you came a lot.”

“I’ll get you a rag,” I replied, getting up.

“Fucking goddamn that’s a lot,” she marveled, sitting carefully up.

“Well, you were an excellent fuck,” I replied.

“I guess so. So were you.” She yawned again as I returned and started helping her clean up. Though we kept getting distracted by Megan and Delilah as they fucked like animals on the mattress on the floor not far away.

All in all, it was a great night.

THIRTEEN

I opened my eyes and for a moment, didn’t know who I was curled up around. She had dark hair and she felt different, that was all I knew.

I thought Megan first, but this was a different shade of dark and the skin was way too pale.

Gray, early morning sun crept in through the blinds of the room I was in. I ran my hand slowly down her body, and then felt the swell of her belly.

That immediately brought everything back to me.

Elizabeth.

That brought a mixture of emotions, most good, some bad. I was nervous, though admittedly relieved. As much as I liked to be prepared, and thought I had prepared for some things, I knew that ultimately it was all too easy to wake up to a gun to your head. Sleep was fickle. Sometimes I was a light sleeper, sometimes it seemed like I could sleep through a fucking marching band. I carefully sat up and looked around.

Megan and Delilah were curled up together on the mattress nearby. They seemed fine. Elizabeth shifted and let out an unhappy sound as the blanket was lifted and cold air got in. I carefully extracted myself from the bed, leaving her to sleep while I got up and quickly washed myself off. There was a lot to do today, and the sooner I got to it, the better. While I prepared, I thought about last night. I’d fucked both Megan and Delilah as soon as they were done with each other, though neither session had been particularly long, given how tired I was.

Elizabeth had been all too happy to watch the live performance.

Once we were done, I’d crawled into bed and promptly passed out, and I don’t remember waking up once during the night. The room was mild, and I could tell the fire must be embers by now. As I finished drying off and began pulling my clothes on, Megan shifted.

“We okay?” she murmured, staring at me through falls of her wild, dark hair.

“Fine, as far as I know. Just woke up,” I replied.

“Mmm,” she said, looking around. “Fuck, I’m still tired.”

“I need your help,” I replied.

“Yeah, I know. Fuck.”

She grumbled and groaned a bit longer, then got up and started washing herself off. I finished pulling all my clothes and gear on and left her to finish getting ready. I wanted to see if anyone had paid us a visit during the night.

I did my thing, checking out the windows, the doors. There was nothing. I got outside and took a walk around the house, keeping an eye out for signs of passage or anyone watching us. Still nothing, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was around. Almost certainly that was paranoia, given the fact that I knew someone was after Elizabeth.

Or, well, trusted that fact.

Still didn’t know for sure.

I tended to the fire, got it restarted and roaring again, then headed back upstairs, where I saw Delilah had come awake and was slowly washing herself off. Megan was dressed and alert, which was good. I broke out cans of food, grabbing the black beans while Megan took a can of veggie soup and Delilah grabbed the surplus beef.

“Try not to finish that,” I said. “It’s our last one.”

The veggie soup had also been our last.

Delilah just nodded. I grabbed the thermos of last night’s dinner that I’d set near the opening in the chimney to keep it warm, as well as a bottle of water kept cold, and gently woke Elizabeth up. She came awake pretty quickly.

“Yeah?” she asked, looking alarmed.

“It’s okay. Just morning,” I said, and pointed to the thermos and bottle of water. “Breakfast. I need you to eat up and listen carefully while I lay out the plan. Then you can go back to sleep if you want.”

She nodded, rubbing her eyes as she sat up. The blanket fell away from her, exposing her bare, pale, wonderful breasts.

I made myself focus.

“Everyone listen up,” I said as I peeled open the can of beans. “Our main goal is to get across that river. Sooner we can do that, the better. Now, from what I saw, it’s just too steep on this side of the highway. The only way across is on the other side, where those cabins were, along the riverbank. So that’s where we’re headed. The ice should definitely be thick enough to hold us at this point. But we’re running low on food, now more than ever, and so I have got to go hunt something. Anything. I’ll be going alone, and I’ll go as fast as I can. Regardless, I’ll be back in an hour. If we need to, we can hunt on the move, or maybe get lucky and find some food in some of those buildings over there. Though I’m not sure what kind of time we’ll have. Your husband and his pals could be in the area, or long gone by now, and-”

I froze and Elizabeth barely managed to stifle a small shriek as someone pounded on the door downstairs.

“Shit,” Megan growled.

I pulled out my pistol and stood up, setting the beans aside.

“Elizabeth, get some clothes on and get in the closet,” I said. “Delilah, stay in here. Megan, you stay up here, near the stairs but out of sight, in case I need you. Understand?”

They all told me they did. Megan joined me while Delilah helped Elizabeth get her clothes on. Well, great.

This could be anything, but I thought it was her husband.

Time to face the music.

I came down the stairs nice and easy, boots sounding heavy, keeping a close eye on the front door while glancing quickly to whatever windows were in sight of the stairs. Just one, and no one seemed to be peering in. The front door was solid, no window there. I kept my pistol out and in hand, a reasonable precaution, I thought, but I kept it aimed down. I thought I was a quick enough draw for it to count, but don’t we all think things like that?

I got up to the door. “Who’s there?”

“My name is Jack Patterson,” came an amicable enough voice, and I knew at once I was dealing with Elizabeth’s husband. “I’m looking for my wife. She’s gone missing. I was hoping you could offer some help, tell me if you might have seen her.”

I paused. “You alone?”

“No, I’ve got two associates with me. They’re helping me.”

“Fine, I’m opening the door, hands where I can see them,” I replied.

“Fair enough.”

He sounded pleasant enough, but his tone rang hollow, like a politician or salesman.

Honestly, those were the same thing.

I opened the door and found three guys looking at me. One of them was a big dude, bigger even than me, and he looked dangerous. He was muscle, no doubt about it, so he was the obvious threat. The second guy was smaller, thin. I half-expected him to look furtive and anxious, but he didn’t. He was oddly calm, just looked back at me with a flat expression. He had a rifle slung over his shoulder. Hunter or sharpshooter. Great.

The guy in the middle was, I had no doubt, Jack. Elizabeth’s husband. Ex-husband. He looked to be in his late thirties, pale, dark hair, still wearing a nice coat and good pants and boots even with Armageddon having come and gone.

‘Nice’ as in expensive, not functional.

The smile he offered me was one that I think would have fooled most people. It rang hollow, though.

Again, I found myself thinking of politicians, or maybe lawyers.

“Thank you for opening the door,” he said, and offered his hand.

I almost took it, more out of reflexive action than anything else, but I stayed my hand. “All the same, I think I won’t shake. You understand.”

He nodded as if he did, lowering his hand, and if it bugged him, he kept it off his face successfully. I wondered if I should dial back the paranoia and suspicion, which bordered on open hostility, but then I thought no, this was natural. Three dudes, two of them openly armed, (I saw a pistol on the hip of the big guy), showed up unannounced on my doorstep. Grin or no, I thought I was right to be paranoid even if I wasn’t expecting them.

“I’ll cut to the chase,” Jack said. “My wife, who is quite pregnant with our child, has gone missing. I’m not entirely sure if she might have been kidnapped or run off on her own. I think it’s possible she ran off, though.” He stared at me for a moment, as though sizing me up, and an ugly smile replaced the politician’s smile. This one had more truth in it, and it was ugly not just because I recognized it for what it was, but because it was oddly collaborative, like he’d become aware of the fact that the two of us were in on a dirty little secret together.

Sure enough, the next words out of his mouth were: “I can assume that a man of your...stature, in this new world, knows how those fucking bitches can be.”

Ugh. Fuck. Here we went again. But I kept it off my face, even put a small, knowing smile on. Because here was an opportunity. If he believed that I was the kind of person who would help him out, he’d probably leave. That could backfire. If he thought I was the kind of person who treated women like he did, then he’d also probably conclude that I’d just keep his wife if I had her and lie to his face. But it was worth a shot.

“I’ve got a few of my own, I know what you mean.”

That damned smile of his only grew. “Fucking whores,” he said, and he said it with casual contempt that not only did it twist my guts, but it stamped out any and all concern I might’ve had about the validity of Elizabeth’s claims. “Have you seen her?”

“No,” I replied. “Haven’t seen anyone out this way for awhile. But I’ll keep an eye out.”

“I’d appreciate it. I’m very willing to offer a reward for her return, should she turn up.”

“What’s she look like?”

“A little on the short side, very pale, black hair, thin but noticeably pregnant.” His face soured very slightly as he said this last thing, and I suddenly had the intuition that Elizabeth’s own intuition about why he hadn’t slept with her for awhile was true. Not necessarily the cheating part, (although given how he seemed to feel about his wife of a decade, I was almost positive he was or had been), but about the pregnant part.

Still weird.

“I’ll grab her and hold onto her if I see her,” I said.

“I’ll come back and visit tomorrow or the day after. We’re going to keep searching.” He paused. “I’d appreciate it if you were careful with her.”

“Of course,” I replied. “No damaging the goods.”

He smiled his ugly smile. “Knew you’d understand. Well, good day.”

“Good day,” I replied, and closed the door as they started walking away.

I frowned, waiting, listening, coming down from the anger. Shit, I would have been a good actor. With a soft sigh, I turned and moved back upstairs.

“Are they gone?” Megan murmured softly from where she waited, just out of sight.

“Yeah,” I replied. “You heard that?”

“Yes.” She paused. “Sorry they believed you.”

I let out a small, bitter laugh. “Well, it served its purpose,” I replied. How many abusive assholes were going to look at me and see one of their own? But I didn’t have time to dwell on that, not right now, and even so, did it matter?

What I did mattered, not what I looked like.

I had to keep reminding myself of that.

We rejoined Delilah and Elizabeth. Delilah was carefully peering out one of the shuttered windows.

“See anything?” I asked.

“Yeah. They’re heading back towards the highway.”

“All three of them?”

“Yes.”

“Keep watching them.”

“Okay.”

I moved to the closet and opened it up. Elizabeth stood inside, hugging herself, wearing a t-shirt and some leggings. She looked frightened. Not angry or resolute or anything else. Just scared. I felt bad for her, worse than before now.

“Are they gone?” she asked in a quiet, unsteady voice.

“Yes. They’re gone. They don’t think you’re here,” I replied. I opened my arms. “Come here, Elizabeth.”

She didn’t hesitate this time. She immediately hugged me, and I enfolded her in my arms, hugging her back. After maybe ten seconds, she started crying. That hurt my heart, and I held her a little closer to me. Then I started stroking the back of her head, feeling her soft hair.

“Don’t worry,” I said to her. “I’ll keep you safe.”

She said something into my chest as she cried but I couldn’t understand. I guess it didn’t matter too much because she didn’t try to articulate herself. Just kept crying. We stayed like that, standing in the doorway to the closet, for close to five minutes. It wasn’t like I had anywhere else to go right now. Yeah, I had to hunt, but I wanted to wait at minimum a good half hour, maybe an hour, for those assholes to get farther away.

I did not trust them not to come back and try to assault, if not kidnap, Megan and Delilah. Even though I trusted Megan and even Delilah to put up a fight...I’d rather they not have to go through that again if at all possible.

Finally, Elizabeth stepped back and rubbed at her eyes. Megan appeared silently at my side with an old t-shirt she’d probably found somewhere in the room, and offered it to Elizabeth, who thanked her, took it, and blew her nose and tried to clean up with it.

“Fuck,” she muttered. Then she tossed away the dirty shirt when she was done. She looked up at me. “I’m sorry...and thank you.”

“You don’t have anything to be sorry about,” I said. “And you’re welcome.”

She let out a small laugh that was less bitter than I thought it might be. “I don’t know if you heard but...when you told me you’d keep me safe I said that I believe you. And I do. Maybe it’s stupid, but...I believe you, for better or for worse.”

I nodded knowingly. “I understand. You can never really know until that moment of truth comes. I don’t know what more to tell you than I already have.”

She smiled a slightly forlorn smile. “You’ve said all you can by now, Chris. I guess we’ll see how the next few days plays out. But I do trust you. The three of you. Whether that’s desperation speaking or intuition, I genuinely don’t know, but I just hope I’m right. But I don’t want to talk about trust anymore.”

I nodded and made way for her. She stepped out of the closet and walked back over to the bed, slowly, carefully. I guess you must feel even more vulnerable during times like these if you were carrying another life around inside of you. I know if I was pregnant I’d be fucking terrified of tripping even a little.

Something ugly occurred to me and I knew there was no denying it. I thought of putting it off, but knew that was a bad idea. Instead, I walked over to her and sat down on the bed beside her. “Elizabeth, there is something we need to talk about. Something I can’t put off. It’s ugly and miserable, but we need to discuss it.”

“What?” she asked, steeling herself.

“I may have to kill your husband.”

She didn’t quite relax, not exactly, but she didn’t react negatively to it. Instead, she just looked sad. Maybe a little defeated.

“I know,” she said quietly. She looked down at her ring, started twisting it on her finger. “He’s my ex-husband now. I knew that the moment I chose to walk away. To run away. I’d have gotten rid of this fucking thing, but it’s probably worth a lot to someone. Plus, that old rule still applies in this new world, though not as much, maybe. About how some women wear a ring in public, even if they’re single, just to keep guys from hitting on them. Doesn’t work all the time, but hey, I’ll take fewer guys bugging me, or, in this case, trying to fucking snatch me.”

“Yep,” Delilah and Megan said with a resigned bitterness that hurt to hear.

There were definitely things women had to deal with that I knew I never had to or would.

“I get it,” I replied. “So…”

She sighed softly. “I hate that it’s come to this, but yes. I won’t try to stop you and I won’t hate you if you have to do it. Honestly...I don’t think he’ll stop anyway. I think, unless I know he’s dead, I’ll always be looking over my shoulder. If it was just me, he probably would’ve let me go, but now that I’ve got our child in me...no. He won’t stop.”

“There’s another thing,” I said after a moment. She looked at me. I shifted uncomfortably. “There’s something about me that brings out the worst in some guys. I think it’s really easy for assholes to see me as ‘one of the guys’. The way he was talking about you...he definitely seemed like he was trying to get a piece of property back.”

She sighed and rolled her eyes. “I guess I’m not surprised.”

“You want to talk about it?” I asked.

She considered, then shook her head. “Not right now.”

“What do we do?” Megan asked.

“Wait for another twenty minutes at least, see where they go. If they leave completely from sight, we stick to the plan.”

FOURTEEN

I ended up waiting about forty minutes in total, just to be safe.

They got up onto the highway and started walking back the way we’d initially come from, and walked out of sight of the house. I waited a little bit longer, then finally decided enough was enough. It was time to go to work.

Megan wanted to come with me, but I had her stay. I went alone, taking the rifle and the bare minimum of survival gear with me, wanting to move light. After double-checking that we were still secure, I made sure Megan and Delilah started getting everything ready. Make sure stuff was washed, water was replenished, basically that we could up and leave right away if we had to. And I think it was a testament to how much the past few days had drained her that five minutes after we wrapped up our conversation, Elizabeth crawled back into bed, and five minutes after that, she was fast asleep. Which was good, she needed her rest.

There were a lot of long days ahead of her.

The skies overhead were low and gray, and a thin mist clung to everything as I walked away from the house and into the forest behind it. This was probably what led me to comparing the stands of dead trees to collections of headstones. Nothing but dead wood and snow everywhere, all of it presided over by miserable slate skies overhead.

Rifle in hand, I stalked carefully through the woods, making sure to maintain my notion of where the house and highway were so I could find my way back. I was good with navigation, but it wasn’t impossible that I’d get lost out here, and now was really not the time for it. While I hunted for the deer with a little more desperation than normal, I thought about my situation. I’d traveled in groups before, but I’d never so clearly been in charge. In spite of her personality, I could tell by now that Megan saw herself as second-in-command.

Even if she might not admit that.

And that wasn’t me just chest-puffing and feeling important. At least, it didn’t feel like it. It was more just me recognizing reality for what it was. I didn’t necessarily want to get into a fight over who was in charge and I was willing to listen to and act on ideas if I thought they made sense, but I thought the true importance of someone being in charge and making decisions was that you ultimately got shit done. Right now was a lot closer to a ‘we don’t have time to argue, just do what I say’ situation than I’d been in for a little while.

Although, thinking back to the past few weeks since meeting Megan and Delilah, maybe that wasn’t quite as true as I thought.

Regardless, however Megan might feel, I could tell Delilah and Elizabeth had fallen in line. They’d do whatever I told them. There was a power trip in there, I’ll admit, but there was also fear, because I knew that a good leader didn’t just tell people what to do, they also took responsibility for the consequences of their orders.

Their lives were now in my hands.

And that was a frightening thing.

Though not as frightening as I expected it to be. The world was a dangerous and shitty place, and I knew that, but I felt surprisingly confident in my abilities to see us through this. Was that just arrogance, or was that actual confidence?

I guess I’d never know for sure, but I also thought someone like Megan was a great barometer. She’d tell me if I was sticking my head up my ass.

I froze as I caught movement ahead and to the right. Staring between the trees, raising the rifle, I spotted a deer. Holy shit, maybe luck was with us after all.

I took aim.

~

It wasn’t all good, but it was as good as it was going to get, I thought.

The deer was small and a little undernourished, but I’d killed it clean, one shot, and that was fine by me. I hurried forward, scooped up my kill, and then started hurrying back to the house. It wasn’t going to provide a lot of meat, but it would probably be enough, I thought. It was going to have to be, anyway.

As soon as I got back to the house, I checked in with the others, who were surprised and happy to see me back so soon. Nothing had happened. While I started gutting and chopping and cleaning the dead deer, Megan and Delilah went about making final preparations to move out. I tried not to work too quickly, but I was starting to feet the pressure. I wanted out of this house, across that river, and out of this region. The sooner we could start putting distance between us and them, the better. If possible, I wanted to avoid a confrontation.

Because it was still all too easy for any of us to end up dead.

In the end, I managed to get perhaps two days’ worth of meals out of the deer for all four of us. Well, maybe two days, if we stretched and fortified it with extra stuff, or rationed it a bit hardcore. It was going to have to do for the moment. Once I got it all squared away, packed into the plastic containers we had with us, I headed upstairs and found the others just about ready to go.

“You should really finish this,” Megan said, handing me my can of beans.

My stomach growled as I took it. “Fuck. Yeah. Forgot about that.” I hastily began eating it and looked at Elizabeth. “How are you feeling?” I asked between bites.

“Better,” she said. “Going back to sleep really helped. I thought I wouldn’t be able to but…” She looked anxiously at the window. “He hasn’t come back, has he?”

“I haven’t seen any sign of him or anyone else,” I replied, and glanced at Megan.

“Nothing. I’ve been watching the highway.”

“Do you think he’s still around?” she asked.

“I honestly don’t know,” I admitted. “It’s possible he left, it’s possible he’s hanging around. And one of his friends had a rifle and looked like he knew how to use it.”

“So what’s the plan, exactly?” Megan asked.

“Delilah and Elizabeth are going to bundle up and hide their faces.” While I had been out, Delilah had gone through and searched the house, coming up with a few more articles of clothing, two of which were quite useful. “Elizabeth, you’re going to wear that ski-mask, Delilah, you’re going to wrap that scarf around your head and pull your cap down low. You’re both almost the same height, and if we bundle you up in the right way, it’ll be too hard to tell from a distance if one of you is Elizabeth. Megan, you’re taking the rifle, since you’re the best shot. Be ready to use it. We’re going to head up over the highway, down through the buildings, and across the river. We’ll go for as far as we can before finding a place to stop. Keep a very sharp eye out for anyone following us. If we’re lucky, we can get out of here without a problem.”

“And if we’re not lucky?” Elizabeth asked unhappily.

“Megan and I are very good shots and…” I hesitated, frowning. “We have experience killing people that need killing.”

“I see,” Elizabeth murmured. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, me too. Come on, sooner we move, the better.”

~

As I stepped outside, I felt a wave of frustration and even fear hit me.

“Fuck me,” I groaned, looking up as a burst of frigid air smacked into me.

“What?” Elizabeth asked, fearful.

“It’s probably going to storm soon,” I replied.

“Do we want to just stay here, wait it out?” Megan asked.

I stared into the gray skies, considering it for a long moment. This is what it meant to be a leader: the one to make the choices and then deal with the consequences afterwards. And often you had no fucking way to tell if you were making the right call or not. All I truly had to go on was intuition. Just my gut and experience.

“We need to get across that river,” I replied, and started walking.

“But what if we get caught in a storm?” Megan asked. “Or if there’s nothing over there?”

“We’ll get to the riverbank and reassess,” I replied, relenting a little. “But something tells me we don’t want to linger here. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think so. Worst case scenario, we hole up in one of the other buildings over there.”

Megan knew for a fact that wasn’t the worst case scenario, but she glanced back at Elizabeth and Delilah. Our redheaded friend had been tasked with helping keep Elizabeth upright and mobile. The sleep and food, (and probably sex), had done her good, but it was too easy to fall in snow even under great conditions. I didn’t think she’d shatter if she fell down once, but...let’s just say I wanted to risk as few falls as possible.

Staring at the other two a bit longer, Megan apparently decided to keep her peace. There was enough to worry about and I guess she trusted me to figure it out. That was a good feeling and a bad one. I might be wrong. I might fuck this up and we all freeze to death. As we kicked our way through the snow, towards the highway, I considered how I’d approach this. Really considered it. Because Elizabeth added in a new level of caution. She had been speaking the truth last night, although...I glanced back at her briefly.

I didn’t think she was as much of a burden as she thought she might be.

Well, that’s a classic sign of abuse. How much had her ex-husband worn her down? How much had he belittled and insulted her? How much had he insisted she rely on him for shit? She was obviously pretty tough, even now she was keeping up with us. I went over the plan while I scanned the highway and my half of the area. Megan and I were the lookouts, with Delilah pitching in whenever she could. We’d get up to the highway and spare a moment to take a look around, see if there was anything to see on the other side, or if there was anyone about. From there, we’d get down to the riverbank, which would be a journey on its own.

Once at the riverbank, I’d make the call whether we stop and hole up in one of the buildings down there, or press on.

Shit. I hated this.

But this is what it meant to help people. This is what it meant to lead people and make decisions. And I had absolutely no intention of backing down or choking. Of course, no one ever intends to fuck up, they just do.

We managed to make it back up the ramp and onto the highway without a problem. I sent the women over to the other ramp to scout it and wait for me while I hurried over to the ruined bridge. I took a moment to double-check the semi, (it was a great place to hide, at least temporarily), but there was no one in it. I went on to where I’d stood yesterday and scoped the situation out. The winds were worse now, colder and stronger and more consistent. I looked as best I could at the area beyond the riverbank on the opposite side.

It was hard to tell if there was anything worthwhile. There was just a frozen, rocky shore and a trail leading up into some woods, and the rest was blocked by the rise in the land the bridge was built into. I thought I could just barely make out some kind of structure at the edge of where I could see into the woods, but that might have been my imagination. I glanced skywards, then began hurrying back. I guess we’d find out.

The problem with a storm like this is it might take five or forty five minutes really get going. Sometimes up to an hour.

So basically you were gambling each time.

It was rare, but it might also collapse back into nothing. I wasn’t counting on that. I never counted on that happening, for obvious reasons.

“Anything?” I asked, raising my voice to be heard over the winds.

“Nothing,” Megan replied.

“I think I see a building on the other side, in the woods. Can’t be sure. Let’s go.”

They nodded and we started making our way down the other ramp. I looked over at the little section of civilization that we were heading for. Not much there. A gas station. A restaurant. Those string of log cabins I’d noticed earlier along the riverbank. A few other places. I’d seen a hundred little pit stops like this, maybe two or even three hundred by now. Sometimes they held people, converted into small settlements, but I think that was becoming a little less popular now. The highway gave people easy access to your settlement if it was just off the ramp, and that kind of thing cut both ways. And I think for a lot of people it had cut the wrong way once too often as a group of assholes with guns came screaming down from the highway.

I didn’t see any movement but I was paranoid that anyone could be in any of those buildings. And we didn’t have time to stop and search them. Damn I hated rushing. If anything was antithetical to this new world, it was rushing. The cold, dead world had taught me, often through brutal means, to take my time with things.

Patience was crucial to survival now.

But sometimes you ended up with situations like this where you just had to hurry up. I looked back over my shoulder at Elizabeth for several seconds as we hit the road and began making our way down it. If I had it right, we could just follow it to the end and make a right turn, and it would take us to the riverbank. I tried to assess Elizabeth, see how she was doing, but it was tough given that she was covered head-to-toe and all I could really see was her eyes and her mouth. Seeing her lips gave me a flash image of her sucking my dick, something that had yet to happen and something I really wanted to happen, and I shook my head and forced myself to focus, feeling guilty. All our lives were on the line right now.

I thought she was winded by now but still going fairly strong.

There still wasn’t anything to see. No movement among the buildings, but it was hard to see into most of the windows. We trudged on, and on, and then further, making our way down the lengthy road. It wasn’t terribly long, but it was still quite a walk, especially in the snow. Or at least it felt that way. As we got to the turn at the end of the road that would lead us down to the riverbank, which sat a mere football field’s length away, I looked at the sky again. I thought that the fact that snowflakes hadn’t started falling by now was a decent sign, even though the winds hadn’t really let up. It was pretty fucking cold by now.

“Chris, we need to take a short break,” Megan said. I looked back and saw that Delilah and Elizabeth were lagging behind.

I considered it, then nodded. It’d buy me some time to think. There was an abandoned car nearby and I worked to get the front door open, then the back door. I performed a quick search and found nothing, but it would make for a decent resting place.

“Here, sit,” I said. “Both of you.”

“Thanks,” Elizabeth replied, panting. I felt bad but we had to keep moving. God fucking knew where her ex-husband and his two asshole cronies were. They both had the feel of hired muscle. Lots of that going around nowadays. Part of me didn’t want to stop at all because I couldn’t help but imagine that rifle trained on me from a quarter mile away.

They sat in the car and I leaned against the trunk with Megan.

“What do you think?” she murmured, first glancing up, then looking around.

“I think we should push on,” I said after a few seconds. “Weather feels stable. Could be wrong, but I really want to get across that river.”

“What if they’re ahead of us?” she asked.

I was silent for a few seconds more. “I don’t know,” I admitted finally. “But if they are, we’ll take them. Guess I’d rather be in the woods than out in the open like this.”

She sighed. “Yeah.”

I expected her to say more, and glancing at her, I thought she wanted to. But she just looked at me very briefly, then looked back the way we’d come, scanning the highway. Again, I thought she didn’t want to upset Delilah or Elizabeth. I looked at the sky one more time, took one more long look around us all the way and, upon seeing nothing obvious, stood back up. It’d been about five minutes now and we had to keep moving.

“How are you feeling?” I asked, coming up to Elizabeth.

She smiled up at me, a little grimly, I thought. “I’m okay. I can keep going.”

I decided to take her at her word. “All right. Let’s move it out.”

They got up and we moved on. The walk down the snowy road was quick and smooth enough, but I was growing more and more anxious as we drew closer and closer to the riverbank. It looked steady, the ice looking thick, but it could be hard to tell. Not everywhere had so thoroughly frozen over. I considered how best to handle the situation as we made our approach, and I didn’t exactly like what I was coming up with. I wanted to go first, but I wasn’t sure that was the best idea, given I was the heaviest.

The river itself was, right here, perhaps thirty feet across.

The other side seemed irritatingly close and yet hauntingly distant.

“Who goes first?” Delilah murmured unhappily.

“I’ll do it,” Megan said. “I’m lighter than you, Chris. And quicker. If the ice is bad, I’ll have a better chance of getting away.”

I nodded reluctantly. It was the same conclusion I had come to.

“Pay attention to where she’s walking,” I said. “After her, Delilah, you go, and then Elizabeth. Stay a few feet apart, move carefully, but as quickly as you can. I’ll be behind you, Elizabeth.”

They all nodded and Megan got right to it, diving in, so to speak.

That woman did not lack bravery.

I watched her, tensing as she set out, preparing to hurry forward and somehow pull her out of the frigid waters without going down myself if necessary. I listened for that telltale cracking, but it was hard to hear over the heavy winds. And I also forced myself to keep a lookout. Now would be a perfect time to attack, while we’re all distracted.

Megan kept going, one foot in front of the other, making a good enough balance between keeping up a good pace but also being cautious, that I wondered how many times she’d done this before. Finally, she made it over to the other side.

“Seems fine!” she called.

“Okay, Delilah, go now,” I said.

“Yeah,” she murmured anxiously, and headed out. She was hesitant at first, and just as I was about to tell her she needed to pick up the pace, much as I didn’t want to, she started going a bit faster. I turned to Elizabeth.

“Go now,” I said.

She looked at me and for one awful second I was convinced she was going to say ‘I can’t do this’, and something would have to give. Instead, she just nodded, paler than before, and stepped out onto the ice.

While she got going, I took a look around. It was getting windier, and the skies had definitely grown a bit darker than when we’d first set out. I still didn’t see anyone or anything behind us, and Megan looked like she was doing a good job covering her side of the river. I turned my attention back to the others.

Once Elizabeth had moved past the halfway mark, Delilah about three quarters of the way there, I set off. The ice had a decent bit of snow layered atop it, so it wasn’t terribly slippery, but I felt my muscles tense and my guts shift as my body truly registered that I was stepping out onto ice. It was a miserable feeling.

Taking my own medicine, I made myself walk forward.

I put one foot in front of the other, measuring the ice. I was heavier than all of them and now I was a fourth person who had gone over this particular path. I could break left or right, and would if I had to, but so far this path had held true. It just had to hold true for one more person. The seconds went by very slowly over the wind-tortured, icebound river. I kept my eyes ahead, watching the others as I went foot by foot.

Delilah reached the other side and joined Megan, turning to face Elizabeth, who had lagged a little behind. It was getting windier. A particularly strong gust hit me and almost caused me to lose my balance. I saw Elizabeth stumble and felt my whole body freeze in fear. She waved her arms briefly, then found her footing.

Fuck. I hated this.

Even for me a fall on the ice could be very bad. Potentially fatal, if I broke something and caught an infection. We had antibiotics, but they were old, and they weren’t always a certainty anyway. I kept going, forcing myself on, and finally hit the halfway mark. Elizabeth was now maybe three quarters of the way over. I kept expecting a bullet to shriek out and hit me in the back of the head, or maybe just my back.

I’d been in tenser situations before, but this was probably up there.

Finally, Elizabeth made it to the other side. I let out a sigh of relief and kept on walking. As I reached the three quarters mark myself, I felt the ice shift noticeably under me and an ominous cracking sound reached my ears.

“Oh fuck,” I whispered, freezing for just a second.

“Chris, move it!” Megan snapped.

I took another step forward and the ice cracked again. Preparing myself for the worst, I kept going. But the ice held. I took another step. No cracking. Another step and suddenly another particularly strong gust of wind hit me. This time it sent me sprawling. I cried out as I went left, twisting, trying to break my fall. I expected my hands to break straight through the ice, and though I heard an ominous, sharp crack as I hit the ice, nothing happened but pain. It was closer to landing on the ground.

The women shouted my name and Megan actually took a step out onto the ice.

“Stay!” I snapped as I carefully got back up to my feet. It was a laborious process, but I managed it. Pain ebbed and flowed from my hands, my wrists, my shoulders, and one hip and knee, and my neck was hurting a bit too, but otherwise I thought I was okay.

I started walking again, all three of my companions staring anxiously at me.

After way too long, my feet finally hit solid ground, and I let out a long sigh of relief.

“Fuck,” I muttered, standing there for a minute with them all, my legs shaking, body pumping with adrenaline, head pounding.

“Maybe we should take a break,” Elizabeth murmured.

“I think-” I began, then fell silent as, all around us, snow started to come down.

FIFTEEN

“No breaks, keep going,” I said immediately, and started up the snowy embankment.

Right now, the snow was coming down in little flakes. Lots of them, but they were small. And there was a lull in the winds, but that wouldn’t last. I knew what was coming: a storm. A bad one. The kind you didn’t want to be caught out in.

“Let’s go!” I called.

“Where are we going?!” Megan yelled back.

I glanced over my shoulder. She was at the back, behind Elizabeth and Delilah, who were following after me as quickly as they could.

“I thought I saw a building ahead,” I replied, and then kept going. I wanted to confirm or deny that possibility. I wasn’t sure what the fuck we were going to do if I couldn’t find a building. I guess huddle up around a fire at fucking anywhere we could build one where the wind wouldn’t blow it out. There were a lot of trees around, so that was a plus, at least. But I had to act fast. I was at least relieved that we were over the fucking river.

The notion of being forced to go back over it again made me shudder.

Finally, I reached the top of the incline and found myself a few yards shy of the beginning of the forest. There was a slim path through the trees, more of an animal trail than anything else, and...yes! There, I could see it, some kind of building maybe a football field’s length away, ahead and to the right a little bit.

“There’s a structure!” I called. “A cabin or something, come on!”

That got them moving. I kept watch while they came up after me. Still no sign of bad guys, but the snow was enough of a problem. I got my pistol out as the women reached me and then began to lead the way into the woods. The next several minutes passed in terse silence, (save for the blowing winds, which were already picking back up), as we navigated the trail between the icy dead trees. I kept shifting my focus between the structure we were closing in on and the area around us. If we could just make it there, we’d probably be fine.

The snow began to come down harder after we made it maybe twenty yards through the graveyard forest. The cabin, (I was sure it was a cabin now), was closer, but now less visible in another way as the snow obscured my sight.

Didn’t matter. I had it affixed firmly in my head and I knew we were going to get there. So long as nothing else went wrong-

I caught movement off to my right and snapped my head and the pistol in that direction.

My guts went cold all over again at what I saw.

“Wolves!” I snapped, taking aim.

“Fuck!” Megan yelled.

There were four of them, stalking towards us through the trees, heads down, teeth bared, growling deep in their throats.

I took a step towards them. “Go! Now!”

“Chris-” Megan began.

“FUCKING RUN!” I screamed and fired a shot.

It missed, kicking up snow next to the lead wolf. I might as well have been firing a starting pistol. Though the lead wolf hesitated, the other three took off towards me. The women ran past me, towards the cabin. I backed up several paces, making snap decisions to try and react to the situation as effectively as possible.

All my choices were reduced to one, however, when I saw the leftmost wolf break off and go towards Megan and the others. Cursing, I aimed and fired three shots in rapid succession. The first missed but the other two connected. One punched into its stomach, the other its chest. Blood sprayed on the snow and the thing fell to the ground, yelping.

No time to feel bad about that now, the other three were coming for me.

Two were close and the one formerly in the lead had rediscovered its courage. Shit. This was fucking bad. I aimed and fired again, and my hands were thankfully steady enough that I managed to put a bullet right into the head of the nearest wolf. It went ragdoll and skidded to a halt as it died instantly, kicking up snow as it went. This seemed to only spur the other two on further. Fuck, I didn’t need another goddamned wolf bite. The most recent one had only just finished healing. I fired twice more and missed both times.

The first wolf that came at me presented me with a perfect opportunity to boot it in the face, which was exactly what I did. I brought my foot up in a hard kick that connected with the bottom of its gray-furred head and send it stumbling and whining. The other came right at me, jumping up to rip my throat out.

I dropped the pistol, going on autopilot now, grabbed it by the neck and used my body and its momentum to swing it around. I could feel its jaw snapping closed repeatedly and it fought viciously to wriggle out of my grasp, and it would have successfully done so if I’d held onto it any longer. As it was, I swung it around and hurled the four-legged fucker as hard as I could into the nearest tree. It smacked into the dead frozen bark with a solid, painful sound and let out a yelp of its own. Turning back to the other survivor, I saw it was making another go at me, so I brought my foot up and slammed my bootheel into its face.

That did it.

With a series of high-pitched yelps, it turned tail and ran. Before the survivor could get back to its feet, I snatched my pistol from the snow and took off in a stumbling run towards the cabin. I could see Megan waiting for me by its side, holding the rifle. She shouldered it suddenly and cracked off a shot. I skidded to a halt and turned as something hit the ground behind me. The wolf I’d thrown into the tree had apparently started coming after me, but now half its head was missing. Hesitating for only a second, I doubled back, snatched it up, threw it over my shoulders, and then resumed my loping gait along the trail to the cabin.

Might as well carve one of these bastards up if I was going to be stuck inside for who the fuck knew how long.

“You okay?” Megan asked as I approached through the thickening snowfall.

“Fine,” I replied, wincing slightly. My body still ached from that fall on the ice. “Let’s get inside.”

“About that…” Megan said, and I felt my guts twist yet again.

Fuck, now what?

She led me a little further along the side of the cabin and the problem became immediately apparent: half the goddamned building was missing. It looked like a fire had raged at some point in the past, and it had taken a good half or even two thirds of the structure with it. What had once been a bedroom and living room was now covered in a drift of snow. Delilah and Elizabeth stood near the back of it, by the only remaining intact door.

“Fuck,” I muttered, tossing the wolf down into the snowdrift for the moment. I sighed. “Let’s see what we’ve got to work with.”

Delilah got the door open as I approached and then stepped back for me to check inside. I did, pistol out and ready. It was a bathroom. And not a particularly big one. But it was a room: four walls and a ceiling, intact.

It would do.

“Megan, Delilah, go gather up whatever wood you can and toss it in the tub, now,” I said as I put my pistol away, got out of my pack, and opened it up. “Elizabeth, come here.”

I walked into the bathroom and set my pack down on the limited counterspace available. She came in wordlessly behind me. I pulled out all the spare clothes I could and made a makeshift pillow on the closed toilet lid. Then I pulled out the thermal blanket I had on me and passed it to her. “Wrap yourself up and sit,” I said.

“Okay,” she murmured, wrapping herself in the blanket and then sitting carefully on the toilet. “Thanks,” she added.

“Welcome,” I replied brusquely as I zipped my pack closed and hauled it back on. “Wait here,” I said, and left, mostly closing the door behind me.

It was very cold and it was going to get colder quickly.

The snow was coming down harder now, the wind blowing more powerfully. I joined Megan and Delilah in gathering up whatever wood I could find. The next ten minutes passed miserably, but we managed to gather up enough wood to get a fire going and, hopefully, keep it going for a few hours. The only good thing about this storm was that it was going to be way harder to track us...if that was even a thing that was happening.

I still had no fucking clue if they were long gone or even had been killed in some accident, or maybe by wolves, or another group of assholes with guns.

But I didn’t think so.

We tossed most of the wood into the tub and I assembled it, first opening the smoked-glass window that was built into the wall beside the shower (why was this such a common thing?) a crack to let the smoke out, and then I lit the fire. It was fairly easy, given how dry the wood was, and as I did, a calming, comforting warmth immediately began to fill the room. I let out a sigh of relief and looked at the others.

Delilah was sitting on the counter and Megan stood by the door, which was firmly shut. Elizabeth looked tired and a little dismal sitting on the toilet, wrapped in the shiny thermal blanket.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Fine,” she replied. “I just...feel guilty.”

“Why?” Megan asked.

“For having to rely so heavily on...well, basically the kindness of total strangers.”

“We aren’t exactly strangers after last night,” I said, which made her laugh.

“I guess that’s true,” she murmured, smiling. But it didn’t last for long. She sighed. “I’m sorry for this mess.”

“It isn’t your fault,” Delilah said.

“It’s your ex’s fault,” I added.

“Yeah, I suppose so.”

We all got settled after that. I ended up taking Megan’s place by the door, sitting down with my back to the wall beside it. There was just enough room on the floor for Megan to stretch out and lay on her back, using her pack as a pillow. Elizabeth and Delilah held their positions after squirming around and getting as comfortable as they could under the circumstances. The cracked window did its job, letting in some cold, yeah, but it let out the smoke and the fire kept us warm. As far as temporary setups went, it wasn’t so bad.

It was cramped, to be sure, but for once I didn’t mind.

“Chris,” Elizabeth said after a bit.

“Yeah?”

“I wanted to thank you for last night. It was, uh, really good. I don’t just mean physically,” she murmured, hugging herself, not quite looking at me, “but emotionally. You’re very kind, and I’ve been realizing how much I’ve needed that recently, and how much I honestly needed it during my first real sexual encounter outside of my marriage.” She laughed softly. “Honestly, last night was the kind of night I often fantasized about. Just fucking some hot stranger and it feels amazing and there’s no risk and no consequences…”

“That’s basically what happened,” Delilah said.

“Yeah. I guess I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop…” She looked hesitantly at Megan, then Delilah. “Thanks to you too, for, um, sharing him.”

“Don’t worry, I don’t do jealousy,” Delilah said easily.

“I’m working on it, but don’t worry about me, Elizabeth. You deserved it. Honestly, you both do. You’ve been through a lot and Chris is actually a really great guy.”

I laughed. “I like how you had to add actually on there.”

“Sorry,” she said.

I looked at Elizabeth. “Do you want to talk about...what happened to you?”

“Kind of,” she replied after a bit of consideration. “There isn’t too much, to be honest, now that I’m thinking about it. I guess that’s life: a lot of boring stuff punctuated by occasional moments of great upheaval. Or what seems to be, anyway. I grew up in Wisconsin. Went to college in Missouri. I went for a degree to be a teacher. I wanted to teach elementary school kids. Two years in, I met Jack. He was...I guess kind of typical of what you’d expect of a college guy. He was rowdy and kind of a jackass, but clearly he had charisma and some smarts. He was going into finance. He was going to be one of those rich executives. We met at a party and hooked up and he asked me on a formal date and I figured ‘why not?’.

“We started dating. It got serious by the third year. That was when we got an apartment together. He already had some money from his family. They were paying for college. I wouldn’t say they were wealthy, exactly, but definitely well off. It was nice. He bought me things, paid most of the bills. We graduated and got married. He landed a job in Iowa through his connections right out of college. We moved, rented a house, and I found a job teaching. We had our nice little life for the next three or so years and I…” She sighed.

“Admittedly, I got tired of teaching before too long. I thought it would be my lifelong passion, and in a way, it still might be. I could see myself doing it now...but my way. I hated how broken the education system was, how we were teaching kids what to think, not how to think. I wanted out. Around the time I hit twenty six, Jack got a promotion and a big raise, and some stock options. It was enough to buy a house and for me to quit my job and...basically I became a housewife after that. I thought he’d ask me to get pregnant, and I would have considered it, but it didn’t come up. And for the next few years I just...lived that life.”

“When did you notice the...less appealing aspects of the relationship?” I asked.

She sighed heavily. It was a tired, sad sigh. “I suppose I noticed them from the beginning, in little ways. He had a short temper, but he never got physically violent. He liked to drink a little too much. He was very dismissive of my concerns, but for the longest time he successfully masqueraded that under the guise of ‘being the man who takes care of business’. Once I became a housewife, he pretty much took total control of the finances, which made enough sense at the time. It was his specialty and job. But he started tightening control. I think it would have gotten worse in a certain way if the apocalypse hadn’t hit. But then it became bad in a different way, only I was too scared to really notice or do anything about it. I just…” She paused.

“I just wanted someone else to take care of me,” she admitted, looking down at the floor. “It sounds pathetic to say it out loud.”

“I think most people feel that at one point or another,” Megan said. Elizabeth looked up at her. “You just want to give up, you don’t want to think or make decisions. You just want to be. You want someone else to make things happen. Some people are just wired that way, some people eventually break down that way. Shit, I’ve been there.”

“Really?” Elizabeth asked, sounding genuinely surprised. “Because I’ve gotta admit, Megan, when I look at you, all I see is this hardcore badass. You’re really intimidating, honestly.”

“I don’t feel like that, most of the time,” Megan said, looking vaguely uncomfortable. “I’m just...angry and stubborn. And a good shot. I bet you’d be good at at least some of this survival shit if you put your mind to it. I mean, fuck, look how far you’ve made it, and while being pregnant.”

“Honestly, I have tried to get into survival stuff over the past few months. I think that was part of what led to me leaving. It took awhile, but the shock finally wore off and I wanted a more active role in our decision-making. Jack...didn’t like that. We started arguing more. In the beginning, that worked more often than not. He just told me he’d handle it, whatever it was, and I’d kind of just shut down. Because that’s what I’d done for years. But after I got pregnant...I don’t know. Something changed in me. I wanted, I needed to do more. I started learning from anyone who’d teach me. How to build a fire, what kind of berries to avoid, how to make a rabbit snare, how to ice-fish. That led to more arguments between us…” She sighed again.

“Sounds like you made the best choice you could,” I said after a few moments.

“Yeah. I mean, given the way things have turned out so far, I have.” She yawned. “Fucking hell, I’m tired again already.”

“Why don’t you lay down and try to get some sleep? Megan, Delilah, try to get her a bed thrown together. I’m going to go out and carve up that wolf since we’re stuck here.”

“I appreciate it,” Elizabeth said as she slowly stood up and Megan and Delilah got to their feet.

I headed out and got to it.

SIXTEEN

It took me longer than usual to get that wolf skinned and carved up, because I had to take a few breaks to warm up, but I did it and we ended up with maybe another day, day and half worth of meals. So that was good at least.

We used the opportunity to get our strength back. There was just barely enough room for all four of us on the floor. Barely. It was a tight fight. Delilah and Elizabeth ended up curled up together on a rat’s nest of clothes and thermal blankets. Megan sat beside me, shoulder to shoulder, and we watched over them. Elizabeth slept, and I think Delilah might’ve dozed, but me and Megan really just sat there and conserved our energy.

The winds blew for probably close to two and a half hours.

Finally, they started to let up. When it became obvious that the storm was dying down, I woke Elizabeth and Delilah. We spent ten minutes packing everything back into our respective packs and once my own pack was finished, I pulled out my pistol and headed outside. I scoped out the immediate area surrounding the half-collapsed cabin. The snow had stopped falling and now it was just the wind we had to contend with, which was finally calming the fuck down. I didn’t see anyone or anything out there, but that could change on a dime.

I briefly toyed with the idea of going back and grabbing the other dead wolves, but the snow would have buried them and besides, I still felt the urge to get a move on. I wanted to put some real distance between us and here with whatever daylight we had left. After another few moments, the door opened and the women emerged, looking ready for whatever lay ahead. I hoped we were ready, but it was impossible to tell for sure.

“We good?” I asked after I had gone back into the bathroom to double-check and make sure we weren’t leaving anything behind.

They all reported that they were good and ready to go. Once more, I considered waiting and grabbing lunch, it was probably lunchtime by now, but decided against it. So far, we’d been lucky, I wanted to take advantage of that. So we set off, making our way through the woods, back towards the highway. I didn’t exactly want to get back onto it, but it’d be good to stick close by it and use it as a guide as we pressed on.

Five minutes passed in silence, save for our breathing and the crunching of the snow. That was another thing that still bugged me from time to time: the absolute totality of silence in this new, snowbound world. Snow absorbed all the sound, it seemed, and if you weren’t moving, and there was no wind, it was easy to believe you might’ve gone deaf. Thoughts drifted through my head as I walked on, leading us to the highway.

Now that the most obvious of the danger had passed, I couldn’t as successfully push away the thoughts of Elizabeth.

I wanted to see her naked, pale, pregnant body as she knelt before me and sucked me off. She’d said she wanted to repay me for that oral, so it was most certainly coming in my future. God, how fucking good it would be to blow my load directly into her mouth, between those sweet lips of hers. And then stuff my cock back into that shockingly tight, hot, pregnant vagina and fuck it raw until I exploded once more inside of her and just filled her up. The particular satisfaction of our only sexual encounter (so far) had been out of this world.

Honestly, I got a hard-on just thinking about it.

And this was what I was thinking about as we finally cleared the woods some fifteen minutes later and came to stand on a strip of land maybe twenty yards across. There was the highway again, though it was little more than a road in these parts, and part of the way down it, I could just make out a house sitting in an open space among the trees.

“Think we should check that out?” Delilah asked as we started walking towards it.

“It’s tempting,” I replied, “but I’m not sure if we have the time.”

She nodded in agreement and we kept on going. The next several minutes passed as we tromped our way through the snow, going foot by foot, yard by yard, the scenery passing with a painful slowness around us.

My mind started wandering off again as we walked through the snow. This journey was going to be more difficult with Elizabeth, not that I was going to leave her or make her feel guilty for that. It wasn’t her fault she was in this situation and there was never a question of whether or not I was going to help her. I think...even if Delilah or Megan had objected, I would have done it, even if it meant one or both of them walking away, as painful as that would have been. But not only had that not come to pass, it seemed almost impossible, given what I knew about them. Thank fucking God it hadn’t come to that.

What I wouldn’t give for my car!

Although, to be totally honest, it would’ve been fucked anyway thanks to that bridge. Not like you can fucking drive over a frozen river. Or, well, maybe some you can, but no way would I risk it. But that didn’t matter now. Whatever happened, I’d accepted responsibility for getting Elizabeth somewhere safe and sound, along with Delilah and, in some capacity, Megan. I was comfortable with that, but it meant I needed to take the situation as a whole more seriously than I had been already. Although what, precisely, that would look like I wasn’t sure-

A gunshot rang out and a puff of snow shot up right at my feet.

We all shouted in surprise, me mostly in anger.

“Go! Get in the house!” I snarled as I pulled out my pistol and looked to the right while taking off at a loping run.

No one on the highway.

No one in the immediate area beyond.

I thought I saw a flash of light, what had to be the dim sun reflecting off a scope, somewhere in the treeline maybe a hundred and fifty to two hundred yards away from us, and then there was a real flash of light as the rifle cracked again and I felt something tear at the back of my pants, over my right thigh and that got me moving. I didn’t bother firing as I ducked my head and ran for all I was worth. We were close to the house, thank fucking God, and Megan was already there, kicking the door in and shouting for Delilah and Elizabeth to get in.

I thought I was toast. That last shot had been way too close, I was sure this next one would be the one that knocked the life out of me.

Then I heard another shot, but this one was much closer, and I realized it was Megan who had fired.

“Move it!” she screamed.

I moved it and we stumbled into the house. She slammed the door shut right as a round came shrieking through it, right next to my head.

“Now what?!” Delilah cried.

“Just give me a second!” Megan snapped as she stormed through the house, moving to the right of the main entrance we’d just come in through. I followed her, not quite thinking clearly, and came into a kitchen. She walked up to a window, bashed it out with the butt of the rifle, then tucked the butt tightly into her shoulder and took aim.

“Megan,” I said.

She ignored me completely. I was about to yell for her to get down, because surely this motherfucker had her in his sights, when she fired. The shot was incredibly loud in the dusty, abandoned kitchen, but her laugh after was louder.

“Holy shit!” she cried, sounding genuinely shocked. “I got him!”

“You did?! Seriously?!” I replied.

“Yes! I saw that fucker’s face disappear! God-fucking-damn! Can’t believe-”

Something smashed loudly behind us and we both whirled around even as I heard thundering footsteps. Almost before I could even fully realize what the fuck was going on, a huge, burly figure came barreling through the open doorway at the back of the kitchen. Both Megan and I tried to get our weapons up at the same time to take him out, and it dawned on me abruptly that we had been funneled into this house, that this had to be some kind of a trap, because I recognized this motherfucker. He was one of Jack’s bodyguards.

And then the man smashed into me, fucking tackled me to the floor, and the wind was knocked right out of me. The world went sideways as I went sprawling and my gun went from my hand. I felt strong, really fucking strong, hands go around my neck and start strangling the life out of me. There was shouting, confusion, the rifle discharged and I heard someone else, a man’s voice, yelling. But right now my whole world consisted of this bearded giant who was presently trying to murder me with his bare hands.

My body was panicking thanks to the lack of oxygen and the no doubt primordial response to hands on the neck, given how long we’d all tried to kill each other this way, and my own hands went to work. I made a fist and smashed it into the side of the guy’s head. He seemed ready for it and only loosened his grip a little.

I did it again, harder.

And then I got my other fist into play and brought the two of them together as hard as I possibly fucking could with the guy’s big stupid fucking head in between.

That seemed to get my goddamned message through.

“Get the fuck off me!” I half-screamed, half-gasped as I bucked furiously. He wasn’t moving, though. He probably had a good eighty pounds on me, maybe more. A look of frustratingly mild annoyance came onto his face as he socked me in the eye so hard I immediately saw stars. So I was probably dealing with a fucking sociopath who committed violence as easily as he changed his socks, with the body weight to back it up.

Great.

I returned the favor with a solid punch to his throat as he tried to get his hands back around my own neck and that got his eyes bulging as he gagged and his hands reflexively left my neck and went to his own. I twisted and bucked again and this time he came off of me. There was more struggling and shouting elsewhere in the kitchen and I saw Megan was wrestling around on the floor with someone wearing a familiar fancy coat.

Motherfucker!

They had fucking followed us!

With a scream of rage I leaped onto the burly bastard and started pummeling his face with my fists. My anger that I worked so hard to keep in check was out and this time I wasn’t checking it. I let it be fuel on the motherfucking fire. Something cracked as one of my fists landed and the guy screamed. Good. As I prepared to finish the job, something I knew I had to do fucking real soon or I might lose my nerve, (killing people with your bare hands is not easy work, mentally or physically, I don’t give a shit what the movies or video games might have to say about it), I heard another scream, one that froze my blood.

Megan.

I looked up and saw her going down. She hit the floor and didn’t move. Jack was on his knees, staggering to his feet, his hand going for a pistol on his belt.

“Jack! Stop!” Elizabeth screamed at the top of her lungs from somewhere behind me.

He did stop, turning to look at her, and that’s when the big fucker’s hands found my throat again. I gagged and it suddenly occurred to me that I had a fucking knife in a sheath on my own belt. I reached down, fumbling with it, struggling, and got the clasp undone. Out came the knife as my fingers wrapped around the hilt. I raised it up and brought it down directly into the burly guy’s wide eye, plunging it straight through into his brain.

His hands fell away and he began to do an awful jerking dance beneath me.

I fell off of him and heard Elizabeth scream again, this time sounding incoherent with rage and terror. I looked up as I got onto my hands and knees.

Looked up directly into the barrel of a gun.

Jack was on the other end of it, his face a mask of anger, teeth gritted, eyes wide.

Well, I found myself thinking, I guess this is how I die. That sucks.

Then a bloody hole opened up on his forehead as a loud pop sounded and his head snapped back and the gun jerked away.

He collapsed into a heap.

For a few seconds, I was aware only of my own heavy breathing and my heart thundering uproariously in my ears.

Then I became aware of other things.

The winds shrieking.

Someone panting.

Someone crying.

Megan still hadn’t moved. I crawled hurriedly across the dusty kitchen floor towards her and began to check her over.

“Is she okay?” I heard Delilah ask in a distant voice that sounded nothing at all like her.

“Yes,” I said after checking her pulse. “I think. She’s still alive and breathing, at least.” I thought Jack had decked her in the temple and knocked her cold during their struggle. Slowly, I got to my knees, grimacing at the pain that flowed through my body. I scooped her carefully up in my arms and then got to my feet.

Turning, I looked at the other two women.

They both looked the same: stricken, ashen, staring at Jack’s corpse. Both for a different reason, I suddenly realized when I saw Delilah’s little twenty-two six shooter. Fuck. Was this the first time she’d had to kill someone?

And now Elizabeth was looking at her dead husband. Ex or no, that was going to seriously fuck with her, I had no doubt.

Shit.

Talk about aftermath.

“Come with me,” I said, and walked between them, deeper into the house. We hadn’t even secured it yet.

I walked into the living room, across it, and to a door at the back that led into a hallway that ran the length of the house left to right, dividing it. The first door led to a bathroom, the second led to a bedroom that thankfully had a queen size bed in it.

“Delilah, help me,” I said.

“What do you need?” she asked numbly.

“Pull the blanket back.”

She did so wordlessly and I laid Megan out, rearranged her a little, then covered her up and turned back to Delilah.

“Delilah.” She was staring down at Megan with a slight frown and glazed eyes. I put my hands on her shoulders. “Delilah.”

She shook a little and looked up at me. “What?”

“I know you’re messed up right now, but Megan’s hurt. I need you to watch over her, okay?” I asked. “This is important,” I added slowly.

That seemed to break through a little bit, and the glassy look seemed to fade a little from her eyes. “Okay,” she said, nodding slightly, and she sat down on the bed beside Megan.

I looked around. Elizabeth had drifted after us, but come to a halt in the doorway. She was staring in at us, but not really seeing us. She looked in shock, too, paler than before, her eyes a little vacant. Shit. I walked over to her.

“Elizabeth,” I said, gently taking one hand, “why don’t you sit down?”

“Yeah,” she murmured, then she paused and looked up into my face. “Oh wow, your eye…”

“I’ll be fine, come here,” I said. I knew I was bleeding at least a little, but I continued ignoring it and led her across the room. I sat her down at the foot of the bed, not far from Megan’s feet, and looked at her for a long moment. “Are you going to be okay?”

“Yeah,” she murmured, but I thought it was an automatic reply.

I got a bandage out of my pocket (I kept a few there for quick cuts) and put it on the cut over my eye. Not perfect, but it’d do the job for now.

She and Delilah were largely running on autopilot. I’d seen it before. Shit, I’d been there before. Violence had a way of doing that to some, even most, people. For a moment, I just stood there and looked over the three of them. This wasn’t exactly an emergency, but it wasn’t a great situation to find ourselves in. I had things that needed doing, the sooner the better, because it was obvious that we weren’t leaving this house for the rest of the day. They all needed a break, and so did I. And with the assholes dead and not chasing us any longer, then there wasn’t really a reason to keep pressing on. Plus, I doubted a long walk was in the cards for any of us.

Megan and I needed physical rest, and we probably all needed emotional rest.

“I have to go take care of some things. Will you be okay?” I asked finally.

They both gave somewhat vague but affirmative answers. I still didn’t like leaving them, but I thought there wasn’t anything I could actually do for them right now, and something I’d been taught by this new world was: you only get so much time, spend it wisely.

So I got to work.

SEVENTEEN

The first order of business was securing the house.

Wasn’t it always?

I took the time to check out the room, looking under the bed and in the closet, just in case someone might be hiding there, because it wasn’t impossible. But the room was clear. And so was the rest of the house, I was glad to learn. No one in the closets, the bathroom, the living room or kitchen or the laundry room I found near the back where Jack and his asshole minion had stormed the place. They’d kicked the door in apparently. I closed it as best I could, same with the front door, and then moved back to the kitchen.

Looking at the two corpses, I suddenly wondered why they hadn’t used their guns to begin with. Then, abruptly, it hit me.

They didn’t want to hit Elizabeth.

And, I reluctantly decided, they wanted to save Megan and Delilah if at all possible. I could easily see them either wanting to ‘make use’ of the two women for themselves personally, or for sale later, or very likely both.

Fucking Christ.

Resisting the urge to kick the corpses, I started patting them down. First, I yanked my knife from the big guy’s head and went about wiping it off on his pants. That guy had really given me ‘get off on killing people’ vibes and I was glad he was dead. How many people had he killed? Well, no one else now, at least.

Once I was done with my knife, I pulled everything I could off of him. First I went through his pockets, and he had some goodies on him. The pistol, first of all. It was a big, giant three-fifty-seven revolver and it was fully loaded. I found a box of bullets that was half full in his pants, which were heavy work pants with lots of pockets, and set it and the gun aside on the kitchen table. I found a big combat knife with a sheath, a box of matches, a switchblade, a battered, old cigarette pack with a dozen hand-rolled cigarettes in it, and some dried out meat wrapped in wax paper. I put the meat back, (didn’t trust it), but tossed everything else onto the table.

I was surprised that the guy didn’t have more on him. The pants were pretty filthy and I didn’t feel like fucking with them, but I got his coat and his boots though. They were in good shape, if a little dirty. Most of the blood had missed his coat, thankfully. With an effort, I hauled his heavy ass out of the house, through the back, and into the yard. I didn’t know what exactly I wanted to do with him, beyond wanting him out of the house, so I just left him there for now and went back inside, then repeated my search with Jack.

It felt weird, searching him.

Really only just because I had banged his wife, well ex-wife, and she was pregnant with his kid, and I knew this was likely going to be a whole thing. Emotions and relationships were rarely cut and dry. He was a piece of shit, sure, and probably he’d been a dick to some degree the whole time he’d known her, but she had obviously loved him, and still kind of did, I thought. It wasn’t easy to just walk away from someone, even if it made perfect sense, even if it was crucial, for most people. And the man she’d spent over a decade with, depended on, married and shared a bed with for years, was now laying dead on this dirty floor.

I just hated him more, because it was completely his fault that she felt so shitty.

Her and Delilah.

If I remembered right, (had it come up? I couldn’t remember for sure right now), Delilah had never had to kill someone before.

That fucked you up.

I knew.

There wasn’t much on Jack, either, which bugged me. A nine millimeter with just a single magazine of ammo loaded into it and none to spare, the gun he’d intended to kill me with. A little flask of something strong that was half-full. A little book of matches. And a handful of jewelry, mostly rings, a necklace, a pair of nice earrings.

Were they Elizabeth’s?

I thought he’d brought them along for quick trading items.

Nothing else. Shit. What was wrong with this picture? Where was all their shit? I knew they hadn’t come tramping for days through the wilderness with just this. Where was their food? Their backpacks?

As I was getting Jack’s coat and boots and pants off (his weren’t filthy and they were nice), it occurred to me that this was an assault. A planned one. So they wouldn’t want to be weighed down. So they would have left them somewhere.

Where?

I began to feel a little disheartened as I finished my search and began pulling Jack out after the other guy. He was easier to manage, at least. But as I finished the job and tossed him down next to his buddy and looked out over the forest behind the house, feeling that disheartened despair getting worse because they could’ve put it anywhere, it abruptly occurred to me where it was: their asshole sniper friend.

And I knew where he was.

Or, at the very least, I was pretty sure I could find him.

I walked back inside, securing the door behind me, and headed back into the bedroom. As I walked into the room, I saw Megan’s eyes were open.

“Chris...you’re okay, thank God,” Megan muttered. She sat up, then groaned and laid back down. “Fuck, I’ve got a ringing goddamned headache...is everyone okay? I mean really?”

“Physically,” I replied.

“Phy-oh,” she murmured, glancing at Elizabeth, who was in the exact same place I’d left her. She’d seemed not to have heard any of this, she was just staring at the floor between her feet, both hands on her belly.

Delilah still had a distant look, too.

“Can you, uh, handle things here? Just for maybe an hour, probably less. I have to go track down the third guy who was sniping us. I want that rifle and all his shit,” I said.

“Yeah...I can manage that,” Megan said, grimacing slightly. Probably even that was asking a lot of her right now, (fuck I hoped she didn’t have a concussion), but she could probably read it in my face that I really needed her right now.

We all needed each other right now, but Delilah and Elizabeth especially needed us to be the ones in charge, getting shit done, because they were down for the count.

“I’ll take care of the bigger stuff once I get back, just...stay with them,” I said.

She nodded, then winced again. “Yeah. Hurry up.”

“I’ll try.”

~

It had warmed up a little outside, which made the walk easier, at least.

I left the house and crossed the highway and got to the trees on the other side without any real problems. I almost slipped once on the road, but that was it. My memory was good, and my ability to visually map out an area quickly was apparently also good. Or maybe it was just boosted in times when someone was trying to murder my ass. Either way, I had a clear impression of where that sniper dick had been hiding and, sure enough, I managed to get to him inside of fifteen minutes. As I approached, I really began to appreciate Megan’s handiwork.

She had, in fact, shot the guy right in the face.

Right in the nose, I think, dead center, but it was hard to tell. His face was fucking ruined, the back of his head blown out in a hideous display of chunky brain matter and skull fragments. And a lot of blood.

Fucking shit, man.

Death could definitely be gross.

But my guess was on the money. I found three backpacks of supplies leaned around a tree just a few feet from the already freezing over corpse. The guy’s hat had come off and I saw the remains of long, dark hair pulled into a ponytail. Ugh. Don’t know what it was, but I never fully liked guys with long hair like that. I know it was a stupid way to judge and I did my best to never actually treat someone bad just because they had long hair, but it always seemed like the guys I ran into with the ponytails were greasy, weaselly assholes trying to rip me off or sell me something fucked up. Like used car salesmen.

I found his rifle and saw it was basically a copy of the one Megan had: bolt action, scope, thirty-ought-six rounds. Looked to be in decent condition, too. Well, that was fine by me. By my count, we were down to maybe a dozen bullets for the rifle. I picked it up out of the snow, dusted it off, and checked it over. It was almost empty, only a single bullet left. Was he a lousy shot or had he just been herding us into that house?

I guess we’d never know, one way or another.

After that, I worked quickly. One of the packs was almost empty, so I consolidated it and its contents into the others. I’d left my own pack behind so that I could carry anything I might’ve found out here. At a glance, I found food, medicine, some more bullets, and some clothes stuffed into the two backpacks. I also found a nice hunting knife, some more matches, some chewing tobacco, and a few other random odds and ends in the guy’s pockets. I stripped him down to his underwear and stuffed everything into the packs, then pulled the heaviest one on over my shoulders, slung the rifle, picked up the remaining pack, and then took off.

It was time to head in for the day.

~

When I got back to the house that was now ours for the time being, nothing had actually changed. Megan was still laying in bed, still awake, at least, and Delilah and Elizabeth were still in their same positions. I didn’t know whether or not to try and convince them to help me with the busywork or let them be, so I settled on checking Megan for a concussion. She answered the questions and I surmised that she probably didn’t have one.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Better now,” she murmured. “I hate laying here, being useless, but that really knocked the fucking wind out of me, especially after the storm and the river. My legs feel like jelly.”

“I know how you feel,” I replied.

She crossed her arms, looking irritable. “Yeah right, you fought that huge guy off and then walked around in the snow for an hour and still are going to do things. I’m fucking pathetic-” she began, her voice lowering in anger.

“Megan,” I said, firmly, putting a hand on her thigh. She looked at me, glared at me really. “You aren’t. You need a break, and we’re lucky enough to be in a position to where you can take on. Just…” I sighed softly. “You aren’t weak, all right? Don’t feed that. You’ll head down a dark path and be in a shit mood all night.”

She stared hard at me for a long moment, and I wondered if she’d dig in her heels and fight me on this, but then her shoulders slumped and she sighed softly. “Yeah, fine, you’re right,” she muttered, then she sat up suddenly. “But you need that cleaned,” she said, looking at my eyebrow.

“Yeah, I do,” I agreed. And because it did need doing, and she needed something to do, and I didn’t quite trust Elizabeth or Delilah to do the job in their current state, I got some medical supplies and let her at it.

“Damn, you’ve got a bad black eye,” she muttered, wincing slightly in sympathetic reaction as she pulled the bandage away. “Ugly cut.”

“No surprise there,” I replied.

I sat through the miserable experience of having a fresh wound cleaned up and finally she placed a fresh bandage over it.

“Probably won’t need stitches,” she said.

“Good.” I stood, looked around. I didn’t like how quiet and staring Delilah and Elizabeth were. Megan looked around as well, then back at me.

“Go on, I’ll take care of everything in here,” she said quietly.

I nodded and headed out of the room.

~

For me, at least, it was mostly calm and normal after that.

I did my stuff for the next few hours. I secured the house, then I got a fire going in the wood-burning stove that we were lucky enough to have and got some snow boiling, then I performed a thorough search of it. I only found a handful of items, nothing really special or important, stuff that might make for good padding to a trade.

Once that was all done, I got to work making our lunch slash dinner. I decided, in light of both our recent surplus and the events of the day, a good, hearty meal of comfort food would probably do all of us some good. I fried up half the deer meat and half the wolf meat, then tossed the wolf meat into a pot of the rest of our mixed vegetables and black beans. I doubted we’d eat all of it, but it’d get us through today and maybe even tomorrow with leftovers.

At some point while I was cooking, Delilah emerged and began searching the kitchen. I realized she was doing her own duty of checking the place over, and I thought to make conversation with her, but the look on her face and her body language said she really didn’t want to talk about it. Twice I checked on Megan and Elizabeth. The first time they looked the same as when I’d left them, the second time Elizabeth had finally laid down. I thought she was napping but it was hard to tell, as she was facing the wall.

Eventually, lunch was done and I served it out after washing some plates and silverware that I found leftover in the kitchen.

Nice little score there, at least.

I managed to get everyone out into the living room, where we all sat around a coffee table. Megan and I ate as normal, but Delilah and Elizabeth only picked at their meals. After about five minutes, I was going to try and strike up a conversation, but abruptly Delilah seemed to gather her courage and spoke up.

“Elizabeth,” she said, and Elizabeth almost dropped her fork as she looked over.

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry,” Delilah said, and at once her eyes were filled with tears. “I’m sorry. I had to do it. I-I had to do it. I had to kill him!”

That was as far as she got before dropping her face into her hands and breaking down completely into tears that were extraordinarily painful to watch. I thought Elizabeth might follow suit, but something seemed to resolve in her and abruptly she got up out of her chair and sat down next to Delilah, wrapping her in a hug. Delilah immediately hugged her back, crying loudly, and Megan and I glanced at each other.

I could see the same pain I was feeling written on her features. Neither of us really knew what to do, but Elizabeth seemed to know how to handle it.

Probably this was where she was strong.

For the first few minutes, she just held Delilah and let her cry, murmuring to her, and I did see tears in her eyes as well, but she didn’t cry. I thought she would, before the end, but not yet. After awhile, Delilah seemed to wear herself out, but still hugged herself to Elizabeth.

“Delilah,” she said, and Delilah let out a muffled response. “I know this has been so hard, and I’m not mad at you. You did what needed to be done. I forgive you, if it makes you feel better. And I was going to apologize to you.”

That made her pull back, she looked incredulous.

“Why!?” she asked, bewildered.

“Because my shit of an ex-husband forced you to kill him, and that was horrible for you, and I’m so sorry you had to pull the trigger. He was a monster, I can see that now more clearly than ever before, and this had to go down this way. I hate it, I hate that it did, I wished he would have just gone away, but I knew he wouldn’t. I saw the look in his eyes...he would have captured and forced you and Megan and me into sex and God knows what else. You did the right thing, Delilah, don’t ever question that. You saved Chris’s life, our lives, but I’m sorry you had to do it.”

“I’m sorry too, Delilah,” I said quietly. She looked at me. “I should have been the one to do it. I tried, God knows I did, but it just didn’t work out that way...and she’s right. You absolutely saved my life. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she murmured, looking miserable and tired and bewildered. “God, I hate this so much. This is all awful...I can’t believe I killed him,” she whispered.

“I know,” Elizabeth said, hugging her again.

“How long will it take to get over, Chris? Megan?” she moaned as she hugged Elizabeth back.

We shared an uncomfortable look.

“I honestly can’t say,” Megan murmured.

“I think it’s different for everyone. For now...you just need time to process. You’re in shock. We’re going to stay here for today, maybe tomorrow if you want, hell, even three days or longer if that’s what it takes, but I’ll help you however I can,” I looked at Elizabeth, “both of you. I know he was a piece of shit, but this has to be hard for you.”

She sighed. “It is. I feel awful. I hate it so much. But...I think I’ve been preparing myself for this possibility for days now. Maybe even weeks. I think, at some point, I knew this would come to pass. I loved him, and there’s a part of me that still does, even now, as stupid as it is...or maybe I loved what we once had, but in my heart, I know this had to happen...it’ll take a bit, but I’ll be okay.” She laughed softly, bitterly. “I think we’ve all had practice getting over terror and tragedy and despair over the past two years.”

To that, we all murmured in agreement.

“I do want to stay here today,” Delilah said. “As for tomorrow? Fuck, I don’t know. I guess I’ll see how I feel.” She gave Elizabeth a gentle squeeze. “Thank you...for being kind. And for understanding.”

“You’re welcome, Delilah. You’re a great person, I hate seeing you suffer.” She looked around. “You all are, you don’t deserve this.”

“Neither do you,” I replied. “Whatever happens, I’ll take care of you while I’m around. I can’t promise that’ll be forever, but at the very least I will make sure the two of you are somewhere safe and secure where you want to be, and that you feel comfortable.”

“Oh but not me?” Megan asked.

“I know what happens when I offer to take care of you,” I replied, unable to keep from rolling my eyes, and that actually got a laugh out of the other two.

“You do seem really ‘I can fucking take care of myself’,” Elizabeth murmured.

“I can, that doesn’t mean I always want to,” Megan replied.

“Yes, Megan,” I said, laying a hand on the back of hers. “Obviously, I will take care of you inasmuch as you want me to.”

“Good,” she said.

Delilah’s stomach growled then. “I am actually really hungry…”

“Then let’s eat,” Elizabeth said, and they got back to their meals.

I considered the two women as I resumed eating as well. I didn’t think they were okay, not really, not yet, but they would be. And I thought Elizabeth was right, about our practice and abundant experience with despair and tragedy.

Whether they wanted to or not, they’d probably be back on their feet soon.

~

As unhappy as it was, there was no sex that night.

I didn’t push it, didn’t even hint, because clearly Delilah and Elizabeth weren’t in the mood, and I didn’t blame them. I thought Megan might have been, but she didn’t say anything either. We ended up relaxing for the rest of the day and well into the night. There was a lot of cuddling. All three of them came to me at one point or another to be held. That seemed to be something they all wanted, and I was sure happy enough to give.

We ate leftovers for dinner, and I ended up gathering some more firewood before sundown. After that, I really just laid around after taking some painkillers. I had a few bumps and bruises and scrapes, but all in all, I’d come out the other side okay. And I was overall feeling good about our new surplus of supplies. I wouldn’t call it a treasure, exactly, (they hadn’t been that well-stocked), but it definitely was going to be a boost.

When we got tired enough, the four of us just barely managed to squeeze into the queen-size together, beneath the blankets.

It was a tight fit, but that was fine by us.

Despite the bad shit that had gone down so far, I thought that this trip was going well, all things considered.

I hoped that kept up.

EIGHTEEN

“Chris, are you all right?”

It took me a few seconds to actually register the question, and then I realized I’d been just staring into the trunk of this car for almost five minutes without actually seeing a damn thing. I glanced to my right, where Megan was standing now.

“Yeah,” I murmured.

“Bullshit, something’s wrong. What is it?” she asked softly.

I held her eyes for a moment, then frowned and looked back the way we’d come, at a second car where Delilah and Elizabeth were searching.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

But she was right, something was wrong.

It had been about five days since we’d had the showdown with Jack. Although I thought they’d want to stick around another day, Elizabeth and Delilah had agreed to leave before noon the following day. I’d considered it, found the skies to be clear, and decided we could get some decent travel time in given the circumstances.

So we’d set out.

I thought that Elizabeth was working through a lot of stuff in silence, and that apparently translated to an almost ferocious pace on her part. Despite my concerns, she didn’t need too many breaks during the day, and during that day and the following two days, we made it a good twenty five miles along the highway. I knew some of it had to do with luck. There were no real obstacles and despite a handful of derelict cars and just a couple of small structures, there wasn’t much to hold our attention during that stretch.

When I’d made that initial two week estimate of travel time, that had been with a few days of rest thrown in there, and I thought that even with all that had happened, we might still actually make that window. Even if we didn’t, it wasn’t like it mattered, we’d get there when we got there. But up ahead, I could see a sign.

PINE LAKE – 29 mi.

We were definitely three or four days out now.

But on top of her ferocious work ethic, Elizabeth also had a ferocious appetite. She seemed embarrassed by it, but we had all warned her, more than once, not to try to hide it. She couldn’t afford to be malnourished right now. And, she’d revealed at one point, she was one of those petite chicks that could put away huge meals. She had a high calorie burn naturally, and now she was doing something that burned even more calories.

Consequently, our food was going faster than I’d have liked.

The wolf and deer meat was gone, including the deer I’d killed and skinned day before yesterday. I was considering trying to hunt again, but there was nothing but plains around now. Apparently the forest-planters hadn’t quite made it this far, or maybe they’d just run out of time. Either way, I didn’t see a damn place to find food beyond the occasional car or truck still on the highway. And they weren’t yielding much fruit.

“I mean, did you see something?” Megan pressed.

I sighed and looked back into the trunk, rooting around in it. “I honestly don’t know,” I admitted. “Just...something.”

“Is it Tanner?” she murmured.

I’d had another bad nightmare the night after the assault, and had had to go through the whole spiel with Elizabeth, but it had been a one-time recurrence, thankfully.

“No, I don’t think so,” I said. “I don’t even remember having any dreams last night.”

I’d woken in a bad mood this morning. We’d stayed in a little dingy gas station some five or so miles back, lucking into a pair of dirty mattresses in a back storage room that had served us well enough for sleep.

I thought, maybe, it was the lack of sex.

I’d fucked Megan twice over the past several days, and that was it. I’d been right that Elizabeth and Delilah were having a lot of trouble handling what had happened. I didn’t blame them at all, and I helped as much as I’d could. We’d had several long conversations about it while walking, during meals, laying awake at night. There had been more crying, and I’d done the best I could to help. I wasn’t exactly great with this kind of stuff. But while neither Delilah nor Elizabeth had been in the mood, Megan and, especially myself, had been.

We didn’t want to make them feel bad though, so opportunities to actually do something about it were few and far between.

But it wasn’t that.

I’d awoken...not irritable, but anxious. Like something bad was going to happen. I’d been looking for clues all day but hadn’t really seen anything in particular. The winds were particularly cold and had been picking up slowly ever since we’d set out, but that wasn’t exactly a new problem. The light from the sky had been a little...odd. But that wasn’t new either. Thanks to the screwy weather, strangely colored sunlight happened every now and then. Nothing crazy, more just stuff that we mostly weren’t quite used to seeing.

It wasn’t the food, either, at least not now.

Not long after waking, we’d come across a sign promising a rest stop, like a real one, a truck stop, and although there was no promise of food there, I thought there was a decent chance we’d find something there.

Plus, I thought tonight was the night where we were all going to have sex again. Delilah seemed pretty much back to her usual self by now. She’d been flirting with me and Megan, and even hitting on Elizabeth, who blushed a lot and seemed to be taking well to it. Elizabeth seemed to be relying more on Delilah than before, which I found a little interesting, given their roughly ten year age gap and differences in background and personality. But that was how it went sometimes. I’d seen them holding hands more than once today.

If anything, that should put me in a great mood, because I’d never had a chance to fuck three women at the same time.

Let alone three women this downright hot.

So what was it?

As I continued rooting around in the trunk (there was mostly just trash there that obviously lots of other people had pawed through and found useless, like myself currently) I couldn’t help but think about some stories I’d heard of how people could feel dangerous weather on approach. Like tornadoes. They could actually sense the changes in the air pressure and their body would start panicking. Or those stories of how some dogs could sense earthquakes incoming. Birds flying away when a tsunami was on the horizon.

Was it weather?

I mean, if it was weather then surely there’d be signs, like in the sky-

“Oh my God.”

“What?” Megan asked as I looked up. “Chris, what!?” she demanded.

For several seconds, I couldn’t reply. I could only stare.

Stare up at that strange alien sky that had formed above me.

I knew only mindless terror for a few seconds as I stared. It was like hearing a little noise in the middle of the night, getting up and going to your door, and opening it to see a bear or something waiting for you in your hallway.

Megan gripped my arm. “Chris!”

I shook my head. “We have to get inside,” I replied.

“Why!?”

“What’s wrong? What’s going on?” I heard Elizabeth say from somewhere behind me.

“Holy shit, what’s going on with the sky?” Delilah asked.

Overhead, the sky had begun shading towards an awkward teal color, but it wasn’t the color that had me flipping my shit. It was the horizontal lines. They cut through the clouds that covered the sky horizon to horizon, east to west.

They looked unnatural.

That strange teal light bled through each of the lines.

“Let’s go!” I snapped, and immediately started walking towards the truck stop maybe a quarter mile ahead of us.

Would it be enough to keep us safe?

I wasn’t sure, but I caught sight of a house to the right and a few more buildings off to the left. One of them was going to have to do.

“Chris, tell us what the fuck is going on, now,” Megan demanded as she strode up beside me.

“I’ve only ever seen clouds like this once before. It was about a month after I started walking around. Pure fucking luck I happened to be in a small town, staying at a pretty secure place. I saw those exactly clouds and that day, a blizzard hit. A bad one. I mean really bad. It was a freeze, a deep fucking freeze. It was like negative eighty or ninety or something. All I know is that a lot of people froze to death. It was cold.”

“Holy shit, I’ve heard about this happening,” Elizabeth said.

“I haven’t. Jesus,” Megan whispered.

“What do we do?” Delilah asked.

“How long do we have?” Megan asked.

“I think we’ve got a few hours at least. If I remember right, the last time this happened, there was about a six or seven hour gap between when I first noticed the sky and the actual blizzard hitting. It got steadily worse, getting colder and windier, and then it hit like a fucking hammer. It lasted all night and partway into the next day, and then just broke. If I had to guess, I’d say it lasted twelve hours once it actually hit.”

“Great,” Megan muttered.

“We’re going to need to find a secure place to bunker down for the night, seal it off as best we can, get a lot of stuff to burn, prepare for the worst.”

No one responded, which was fine by me. I thought I’d gotten through to them just how severe this was going to be. Instead of talking, we buckled down and hurried up. It often felt like time was short in this new world, but now it was shorter than it had been in a long while. I wasn’t completely sure if we were going to survive this one.

But I fully intended to try my hardest.

I’d heard all sorts of weird stories and rumors and almost fables now about weird weather or strange things happening. I remember hearing a story about how one place had endured a rain of ice needles. There was another story of a strange, glowing blue fog that had rolled into one town and killed everyone before blowing on. I’d heard that one a few times now. Some say it happened over in California, someone else told me it was up in Maine, another guy said he’d heard it over the radio of it happening in Sweden.

Did that mean it was bullshit or a phenomenon that happened all over the place?

If it killed everyone, how did anyone know it was a glowing blue fog?

People talked about mutant wolves and giant bears. Bigfoot had come back with a vengeance, it seemed. And there were more stories than ever of UFOs nowadays. Shit, I’d had one guy tell me with a dead straight face that his brother had encountered a giant spider in a cave. Fuck, maybe he had, I didn’t know, I wasn’t there.

I always liked myself a good horror story and the notion that there were monsters or mysterious phenomena or aliens out there was very entertaining to me in its own way, but I’d never truly believed most of it, much as I might want to in some cases. All too often, the truth seemed to be something boring. Like it was a strange and unique, but grounded in reality, set of circumstances. Or someone was confused. Or lying, either the person telling the story or someone pulling a prank trying to convince others.

Some of the stories had to be true though, I thought.

It was just impossible to tell more often than not which ones.

This wasn’t a fable though. All it took was one skyward look to bring my panic back and remind me of all those frozen dead people I’d found that next morning. Maybe two thirds of the town had died that night. It was just luck that I hadn’t. I had hoped to never see something like that again, and yet here we were.

Goddamnit.

I scoped out what we had to work with as we approached the truck stop. It wasn’t one of those big giant ones I’d seen in some places, more just a few shops stitched together on the right side of the road. Beyond it, maybe a half mile away from the highway, was a house. That might be our place to go, if the truck stop didn’t work out. Off to the left, down past the ramp, I saw three buildings, none of which I could tell precisely what they were.

There might be enough time to check all the places out for any and all supplies that might help us stay alive and not freeze to death.

If we were lucky.

As I approached the truck stop, in the lead now, I didn’t like what I saw: a lot of broken windows. That was a bad start.

“All right, guns out,” I said as we made it to the parking lot. From what I could see, the structure, or technically collection of connected structures I guess, was shaped roughly like a barbell. The building on the right, closest to us, was clearly a garage. The one on the left was a gas station. The long, low building with all the broken windows connecting the two in the middle was probably a restaurant of some kind. I had also made out some kind of fourth building attached to the back of the middle one.

No idea what that one was, but given what I normally saw at truck stops, either an adult store or a strip joint or something like that.

My horniness briefly broke through the haze of anxiety that gripped me: maybe we’d find some lube. I’d fucking love some of that.

I pulled out my pistol and checked that the others did the same. Elizabeth was now toting a small backpack with some extra supplies and (I didn’t tell her this, and if she realized it she hadn’t said anything) her ex-husband’s nine millimeter he’d tried to blow my head off with. Delilah had her twenty-two out and although she looked a little anxious, she was doing better than I’d hoped. I was really hoping not to put her in a situation to fight for her life again. It was very hard to tell, but I was afraid she might choke if she had to pull the trigger again. If she hadn’t pulled the trigger that first time, I’d be dead right now.

Taking the lead, I brought us up to a door that was ajar in the side of the garage. The two big rolling doors at the front were closed, though several of their windows were broken out, too. Carefully nudging the door open the rest of the way with my foot, my pistol in both hands, I peered inside. The light was good enough to show me a big, mostly empty space. I quickly checked left and right, and didn’t see signs of people around, or any animals that might’ve taken up in the building. So far, those were all good signs.

“Stay here and check this area out. I’m going on ahead,” I said after I felt decently sure that there was no one in the garage.

“Be careful,” Megan said.

“You too,” I replied as I headed off.

I crossed the grease-and-oil-stained floor, passing some trash and the occasional discarded nut or bolt no doubt stuck to the floor. I moved through the door opposite the one we’d just come in through and found myself in a tiny waiting area where there was just enough room for a desk that personnel would no doubt wait behind and three uncomfortable plastic chairs on the other side. Through a glass panel behind the chairs, I could see into what was indeed a long restaurant. It looked also to be quite vacant.

Fine, that’d make it easier, but it also mean there’d be less things to burn.

I quickly moved down the length of the building, seeing a lot of splinters and kindling remains from broken down tables and chairs, though only a few examples of complete furniture. I paused to check behind the counter and duck into the kitchen area. It was pretty cleaned out, most cabinets missing the doors, drawers torn out of their sockets. Nothing in the pantry or the walk-in freezer, or the bathroom that I found.

There were two exits. I hesitated only briefly before deciding to head on to the far end of the stop, what would be the interior of the gas station, because the door leading to the final mystery area at the back was shut tight for now.

The sounds of the wind whistling and picking up came to me as I stepped into the derelict gas station. More broken windows, more barren shelves. Empty freezers and cold cases. Made enough sense, given how many people would’ve come through and plundered over the past few years, but that didn’t mean I had to like it. Feeling the press of time yet still, I quickly checked behind the counter, in the freezer-stocking area, and in the pair of tiny bathrooms, and found a whole lot of nobody. At this point I was basically just doing a quick bombing run, a security check to make sure we were alone and nothing else.

As I jogged back into the restaurant and made for the final section, I was already making plans in my head. The next course of action was going to be to leave the girls here, as much as they might not like that, and get my ass down to that house to scope it out. I needed to know exactly what we were working with before making a serious plan of action. The first order of business was that, and the second was to find and secure a base of operations. Once we got that out of the way, I’d have a better sense of our survival chances.

I opened the last door and laughed softly as I saw what was inside.

It was a strip club. Of course it was.

I shook my head and then hurried in to complete my search.

NINETEEN

I didn’t find anyone in the strip club.

It was a pain to force myself to do a thorough search, and even then I might’ve missed something, as there were damn near no windows in that part, for obvious reasons, and I had to break out my flashlight, but I thought we were clear.

I hurried back to the garage, where I found the women hunting the place over.

“Okay,” I said, getting their attention, “it looks like we’re alone here. I want you to comb this whole place over as fast as you can. Grab whatever supplies you find, but I want you to gather up anything that burns and put it in the central room behind me, the restaurant, in a pile. Wood scraps, wooden furniture, paper, whatever you find that we can safely burn. And obviously keep an eye out for food, but also keep an eye out for tape, specifically duct tape, and anything we can use to cover up windows. Plastic sheets, clingwrap, blankets. Anything.”

“What are you going to be doing?” Megan asked, already picking up on where this was going.

“I’m going to head down to that house back there and see if it might be a good place to hole up. This place might do, maybe, but I’d prefer a place with an actual chimney and fireplace or wood-burning stove at the very least.”

“One of us should come with you,” Megan said.

I shook my head sharply. “No,” I said, with more force than I meant to. I sighed. “Look, this is bad, okay? This is really bad. Just please...do what I say, okay?”

She must have sensed how close I was to panic, and this was probably as worried as they had ever seen me, because Megan didn’t argue.

She just nodded. “Okay. We’ll get to work here. Just...be careful, and hurry.”

“I will, you too,” I replied, and then I was off and running.

There had been an exit at the back of the strip club, in what had probably been a manager’s office, and that’s where I went. I’d already poked my head out back and got a better look at the house. I didn’t need to bother with the off-ramp because the slope down to the plain the house rested in was gentle enough. Better yet, it was huddled up next to a cluster of trees. A small forest. Once this freeze was over...provided the animals survived it, anyway, I could do some hunting, maybe. The impression I’d gotten from that first freeze I’d endured was that it had been very localized. I didn’t know for sure, but it seemed to have been maybe ten miles across at most. So a really damned small storm. What the fuck caused it?

Shit, I don’t know. What caused any of this stupid shit?

I jogged down the snowy incline towards the lone house, finding myself wondering vaguely who kept building these houses just off the highway. It was lucky enough for us, I guess, but did people really want to live this close to a highway? Maybe the house had come first, the highway later. Some of these houses did seem pretty old.

I looked at the sky again and then decided maybe I shouldn’t.

It was really freaking me out.

Thoughts came and went with a shaky speed through my mind, zipping by with a bit less substance than normal. I won’t say I’m particularly smart, but I could focus when I really had to. It was harder to now, though. So shit, maybe I couldn’t quite focus when I had to, because I fucking had to. When I was about halfway between the truck stop and the house, a hard, particularly frigid gust of wind smacked into me and nearly knocked me to my feet. I stumbled, recovered, and kept going at a somewhat less brisk pace.

This was really just reminding me that complacency was something to be fought against, at least a little bit. But was it even possible? Even if I woke up every morning and ensured that I reminded myself not to take things for granted, to prepare for the unexpected to occur...wouldn’t that then just become a part of my routine and lose its meaning? It seemed like I’d have a few good weeks, maybe even a month at a stretch, where things largely went how I thought they should go, with a mishap or two thrown in there…

And then something like this would happen.

How the fuck did you prepare for something like this?

I guess by working stuff like exercise, survival training, and situational awareness into your everyday routine.

To a certain extent, I already did that, although admittedly I’d been slacking on the exercise recently. Although to that although I had to say I was still getting a lot of exercise in other ways, so it probably balanced out.

It was this relative devotion to situational awareness and my own heightened state of anxiety that probably let me survive what happened next.

I was maybe thirty yards from the house when the front door suddenly opened and I realized all at once I’d made a mistake. I should have approached it from the woods, but I didn’t want to take the extra time of wandering over to the woods first and then getting to the fucking house. But that impatience might cost me my life, I saw, as someone leaped out with a pistol and opened fire on me. I took off towards the woods. They were close, but they seemed impossibly far away as bullets came at me.

“Stop! Stop!” I screamed. “I don’t want trouble!”

Apparently they did want trouble because they wouldn’t stop shooting. Bullets cracked off, flying by me, punching into the snow at my feet and touching off like miniature explosions. I started to feel that rage come back, that anger that used to be more commonplace in my life, as I ran and staggered towards the woods. Would the girls hear this? I doubted it, the winds were pretty loud just now. Abruptly, it occurred to me that I wouldn’t make the woods unless I gave them something to fucking cry about.

I whipped out my pistol and turned around.

“Stop or I’m gonna put a bullet in you!” I screamed.

Someone else was on the porch now, also brandishing a pistol.

Not only did the first guy resume fire, but the second guy joined him!

Motherfuckers!

Apparently, they were shit shots. I wasn’t. I aimed and fired. The first guy screamed and dropped as a nine millimeter bullet punched into his leg. I fired again and the second guy let out a cry as I winged his right shoulder.

Good enough for now.

I turned and shoved my pistol back into its holster for safety’s sake, (just what I’d need, dropping it and then having to go hunt for it in the snow, losing all the seconds I’d just potentially bought myself), and then booked it as fast as I could through the snow and worsening winds. Maybe fifteen long, long seconds later, I hit the treeline and disappeared into the trees, making my way a few yards in and then breaking for the highway.

This was going to complicate things.

~

There were no more potshots at me as I hustled through the trees, going as fast as I could. I only fell over once, thankfully.

I guess they were too busy patching each other up. I heard voices shouting, and I thought I heard more than two, but it quickly became impossible to tell thanks to the way the winds were picking up even more. Goddamnit! This really threw a fucking wrench into an already shitty situation. I could feel my blood boiling and part of me, a part that scares me, to be honest, wanted to march back there and shoot every last one of those motherfuckers in the face.

By the time I came out of the forest, (which thankfully came right up to the highway), I was a bit more cooled off, telling myself they were probably just scared and that while I was indeed a murderer, I didn’t have to be a fucking psychopath. Despite these thoughts, I did keep my pistol out as I started hurrying back along the highway. I had to get back to the ladies and I fully intended to survive the trip back to the truck stop.

I hesitated briefly as I began to run out of forest to protect me. There was about a football field and a half of space between the edge of the forest and the truck stop, and that was just big, wide, open, exposed space.

If they had a rifle, I was probably fucked.

Then again, if they had a rifle, I thought they would probably have at least tried to use it on me by now. It was hard to hit someone in a forest, but not impossible. Finally, working up my nerve, (which took only one glance skywards), I set off at a jog. It was a pain in the ass to do it on the snowbound highway but I moved it, hustling through the snow and making for the truck stop. Glancing towards the house, I didn’t see any activity on the porch. The door was shut and the windows appeared to be closed.

Good for me, now it just had to stay that way.

I kept my eye out for any other movement, careful not to look at the sky, (seriously, it freaked me the fuck out just to look at it, like how I think certain images made people ill), and kept on trucking. I was trying to toss together a plan. The house was obviously out. I was basically convinced that the truck stop was out, but in a pinch, maybe, that strip joint might do. Regardless, next on the list was checking out the three buildings off in the other direction. Wouldn’t it just be great if some wolves or a bear got involved?

Best not to jinx us.

Took fucking forever, but I finally hit the parking lot of the gas station, stumbled over something in the snow and went sprawling, picked my ass up and rushed into the gas station interior. I heard distant voices and as I staggered into the restaurant it just barely occurred to me to announce myself, which I should’ve done immediately.

“It’s me! It’s me! Get out here!” I called. “Now!”

“What happened? What’s wrong?” I heard Megan ask as she emerged from the strip club. Elizabeth was behind her and Delilah appeared from the garage exit.

“People in the house,” I said, panting, then groaned and put my hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath. The air burned cold in my lungs. “They shot at me. At least two of them. Ah...goddamn, my chest hurts.”

“Were you shot!?” Delilah asked immediately.

“No, no,” I replied. “Just had to run my ass off, and it’s freezing out there...shit. I’m fine. Just tripped once or twice. Don’t worry.” I paused, shook my head. “I mean, worry, just not about me. I shot them both. Well, I shot one guy in the leg and grazed another. They would not stop shooting at me. Fucking assholes.”

“I’m surprised we didn’t hear it,” Elizabeth said.

“The wind,” I replied, then glanced at the pile of stuff they’d gathered in the restaurant. It wasn’t as big of a pile as I’d hoped. There were a few chairs and several fragments of wood. Not a whole lot to work with, unfortunately, but better than nothing.

I grabbed two of the chairs.

“Grab and pack whatever you can of that into your packs, fast. Megan, keep your hands free and that rifle out. We’re moving,” I said.

They all began to comply, thankfully, instead of first asking questions.

“Where are we going?” Megan asked as she shoved wooden fragments into her pack.

“The nearest building,” I replied. “It looked decently sturdy, two stories, might be a good place to hide out for now. Once we get down there, I’ll check out the other two buildings while you search that one. Hopefully one of them will be in decent condition.”

They looked uncertain, and I didn’t blame them, but at least they didn’t question me further. I think they already knew the answers: this plan was about as good as it was going to get, and yes, it relied too much on luck.

But that was what the world was throwing at us right now.

Sometimes, all you could do was throw the dice and hope.

Five minutes later, with two chairs awkwardly grasped in my hands, I led the way out of the truck stop, across the highway, and down the off-ramp towards the nearest structure. Megan reported the all clear and she watched our back as Delilah and Elizabeth followed after me with bundles of broken wood and kindling wrapped up in their arms. Apparently, they’d found next to nothing beyond the wooden scraps during their search of the truck stop, just random scattered items that might be of some use at some point.

We were going to have to find something great, some cache or store of food and supplies, or our chances of survival were going to drop.

The winds were picking up and I almost fell once, (seemed to be a lot of that happening to me just lately), but we made it to the bottom of the ramp and made a beeline for the building. As we drew closer to it, I began to make out the sign hung over the front door. All I could see that was still visible was the word GUN, so good chance it was a gun shop. Cool. Although I didn’t like the plate glass in the front, I did like that it was covered by iron bars and still apparently intact. The front door was shut, but I didn’t see anyone moving behind the plate glass windows, nor the pair of more regular-looking windows set into the front of the second story.

“Okay, lemme clear it out,” I said as we got up to the front.

I set the chairs down, pulled out my pistol, and headed inside. It was definitely a gun shop. Lots of glass cases that had once been solid but had fallen to the sands of time. Or snowflakes of time at this point, I guess.

Or, to be totally accurate, people spending enough time trying to bash them in.

I didn’t see any guns in the cases, around or behind the cash register. Didn’t see much of anything on the first floor. I quickly checked the front area, then got behind the register and peered under the counter, checking in the dark niche there in case someone was hiding in the shadows. I had come into places that someone was already occupying and they’d tried to hide when they heard me coming. Usually they were friendly, or at least not violent.

But sometimes they were laying a trap.

I checked in a little storage area that had been kicked in at some point, and then a tiny bathroom, and found no one.

“Come in!” I called. “Looks clear!”

I still had to check out the second floor, accessed via a simple stairway at the very back of the shop, behind a set of high shelves that went almost to the ceiling, but I didn’t want them waiting outside in the cold any longer than necessary. They walked in after me and Megan took up guard duty by the door, rifle still in hand.

“Where do you want this?” Delilah asked.

“Dump it anywhere, in a pile, and bring in the chairs, then get started searching the place over,” I replied.

Then I headed upstairs. I was really, really hoping that this turned out to be one of those places that had an apartment in the second story…

I got to the top and opened the door.

“Oh fuck yes, holy shit,” I whispered.

There was, indeed, an apartment up there. The bedroom, kitchen, living room, and ‘dining room’, such as it was, were all crammed into the same room, which took up nearly the entire second story. The only other space was a bathroom.

It had two things that made me very happy: a king-size bed that would comfortably fit all four of us, and a fireplace. A good, solid looking one at that. There were even a few logs left in there. Maybe one of the dickheads from the house had been using this as a base for themselves. Well, now we needed it. It was a do or die kind of situation.

I finished up my search, checking out the bathroom and looking under the bed, only to discover that the thing the mattress was resting on was a solid piece. No one was hiding in here, which meant it was ours for the taking right now.

We might just survive this.

I hurried back downstairs.

TWENTY

“We’re in business,” I said as I came back down to the ground floor.

“What’d you find?” Megan asked. From her tone I could tell she was a lot more worried than she was letting on.

“There’s an apartment up there with a big bed and a fireplace. Looks decently sealed. Now…” I considered my next action for a moment, staring at the three women. They looked back at me expectantly. “I’m going to go search the other two buildings.”

“Let me go with you,” Megan said.

“No,” I replied immediately. “I need you here in case one or two of those shitheads shows up and starts causing problems.”

“One of us should go with you,” Megan said, not backing down.

I sighed. She was probably right. It’d go faster with two people. Well, at least the choice was obvious. “All right, Delilah, let’s go. Megan, keep watch. Elizabeth, search this place as quick as you can. Find anything to burn, and any cloth. Blankets, clothes, anything. Preferably blankets. We’re going to want to seal up the apartment as much as we can to keep the heat in.” I shrugged out of my backpack and started emptying it onto the counter. “Here, Delilah, bring me your pack.” I paused. “Wait, scratch that. Megan, give me your pack, Delilah, leave yours here.”

Megan had the second biggest pack now.

I emptied my pack of all but the essentials and pulled it back on, then did the same with Megan’s pack and handed it to Delilah. “Get this shit upstairs, we’ll be back as soon as we can. And get a fire going,” I said as I headed for the door.

“On it,” Elizabeth replied, and I was glad to see she took no issue with me giving out orders.

I glanced out the plate glass at the sky briefly. We didn’t have time for issues. I thought there was enough left, probably, but that could change in an instant. Even what Delilah and I were doing right now was risking our lives.

“Chris,” Megan said, and I looked over at her. She looked pale and anxious. “Are we gonna make it?”

“Yes,” I replied. She looked at me for a moment longer, pursing her lips, then she just nodded tightly and readjusted her grip on her rifle.

I didn’t know if it was the truth, but I thought it was what she needed to hear.

“Come on,” I said, and headed out the front door with Delilah.

~

Outside, it was already colder and windier.

Still no snow, thank God, but these were bad signs. I’d guess it was probably twenty below right now, maybe even thirty.

Delilah kept up with me as we left the gun shop and worked our way around back. I wanted to get to that building behind it and off a little ways, whatever it was, first. It looked small and I doubted there would be much in it, but you never knew. Right now, we needed more good luck to compound what we’d had so far.

I kept an eye out on the highway and the off-ramp as we cleared the building and hustled off through the snow. Still no signs of the assholes who’d shot at me, no signs of wolves or bears either. That’d make things just even better, and hey, why not have one of us fall down and break a fucking leg for good measure? I sighed softly and tried not to fall into a pit of frustration and despair as the frozen air burned my lungs and my legs began to ache from all the hurried snow-walking. I reminded myself that the only way to deal with this was to just deal with it, and as quickly as possible too. And soon enough I’d be in a (hopefully) warm bed with three naked women.

That alone was worth the fight.

As we drew closer, I realized that the area in front of the building was oddly shaped, and abruptly it occurred to me why: snow was covering a lot of cars. Long rows of them. Fuck, we weren’t going to be able to search them all, there just wasn’t time. I got up to the one closest to the edge and took a moment to wipe off the windshield to look inside. As I did, I revealed a faded yellow sticker that read 600$!

“Oh,” I murmured, looking around, “it’s a used car lot.”

Well, that almost certainly meant most of these cars didn’t have anything useful in them. Unless someone had used them for storage or a campsite. But then, why would they use a car when there was a building right there?

I led Delilah between two rows of snow-covered vehicles and at last came up to the main entrance. The two front doors had been kicked in and broken long ago, and the light that bled into the lobby beyond didn’t reveal a whole hell of a lot.

“Careful in here,” I said as I got my pistol back out.

“I’m ready,” she replied.

We stepped in and got to work, but honestly, there wasn’t much work to be done. The main lobby was cleared out. I didn’t see even a single piece of furniture around, no leftovers, hardly even any trash scattered across the barren floor.

“Watch my back,” I said, resisting the urge to have her search as well. I had to remember that Delilah wasn’t Megan. I didn’t think she was a pushover exactly, but certainly Megan was more capable of handling a threat than Delilah.

“Okay,” she replied, lingering in the lobby.

I hurriedly checked through the other rooms there. Just a bathroom that would have been miserable even back when this place was running, a little break room, two tiny offices, and one last room that held nothing at all. I didn’t find any people lurking and no supplies or burnable stuff jumped out at me, so I rejoined Delilah.

“Like I thought, nothing here. Come on,” I said.

She nodded, looking paler than before, and followed me back out into the driving cold. I checked the highway again. Still nothing.

“You doing okay?” I asked, raising my voice and sticking closer to her to be heard.

“Not really,” she replied with a grim ‘I’m trying’ smile.

“Don’t worry, we’ll get this sorted out,” I said. “I’ll keep you safe.”

“I believe you, I just…” She looked up at the sky briefly. “What if it’s too much? What if we can’t manage it?”

I was silent for just a few seconds. I didn’t want to tell her: Freezing to death probably isn’t that bad. Because that would be an answer that would probably freak her right the fuck out, which was the last thing I wanted.

“We’ll manage it,” I replied, because sometimes, as hesitant as I was to do so, being in charge meant lying. Or, at the very least, bullshitting. If these were her last hours, I’d rather she spend them filled with hope instead of fear.

And, you know, I could probably manage this, with their help.

By the time we crossed the distance to the final remaining building, which was opposite the used car lot, a little to the left, and about a quarter mile away, the strange teal light had grown much stronger, and now it cast its curious, chilling glow across the landscape. I didn’t even have to look up to see it any longer.

As we came up on the building, I caught a look at the faded pink sign that hung over the door and had to laugh.

“Holy shit,” I said.

“What?” Delilah replied immediately.

“It’s an adult store,” I replied.

She looked up with me and let out a little laugh. How fortuitous. Hopefully. It was called Pink something, I couldn’t make out the rest, but the cleavage between the words was obvious enough. Guns in hand, we went inside and started clearing it out.

While we worked, Delilah lost her smile. “Chris…”

“Yeah?” I asked, glancing over at her. The inside of the place had been plundered, to be sure, but there was less taken than you’d think. No porno magazines left, but there were random things left here or there.

Honestly, I was looking for lube and maybe a present for all three of the women in my life.

“I’m sorry.” She looked guilty.

Now I was frowning. “...why?”

“I haven’t been holding up my end of the bargain. I can tell you’ve been horny recently. I should have done something about it.”

“Delilah, no,” I replied immediately. “There’s no way we’re having sex if you don’t feel up to it. I’m not mad at you about it. Something fucked up happened to you and honestly, it can be a really bad idea to have sex if you’re in that state of mind. You might end up connecting sex to the fucked up feelings.”

“Oh...shit, I hadn’t even thought of that,” she muttered. “I guess it’s good neither of us tried.” She regained at least a small smile. “Well...thanks. You’re really nice. Honestly I feel lucky to have found you, you’ve been really good to me. I promise I’m going to be good to you tonight,” she said, and then, before I could respond, raised one hand. “And I promise that I’m ready. I wasn’t horny at all until this morning. I woke up horny as fuck but you really wanted to get a move-on...I think Elizabeth’s ready, too. She was asking a lot of questions about you today...sexual questions. And talking about stuff she wanted to do with you…”

She smiled suddenly. “And me.”

“God, I would love to see that,” I replied.

“You will. Tonight.” She frowned suddenly and looked at the strange teal light coming in through the windows. “If we make it.”

“We will, don’t worry,” I replied. “Keep searching.”

She nodded and got back to work.

We worked our way through the ruins of the store, shifting what remained, hunting for anything that might help us.

Either in our survival or our sex life.

All in all, we managed to find a handful of very useful things. We tracked down an actual box of a dozen tubes of sealed, basic lube, the kind that keeps forever. We found a strap-on dildo that I immediately began to imagine Megan banging Delilah with. We found a little vibrator that would be useless until we found some batteries but hey, nice find. We also found a few blankets that I definitely intended to use, and someone had tucked away a little stash of emergency supplies in the back of a storage closet that held some food and medicine. Nothing great, but hey, it was always great to add to our own supplies.

“Tonight, provided we can make everything else work, is going to be absolutely fucking awesome,” I said as we headed back out.

“Oh yes it is,” Delilah agreed, and it was good to hear the same confidence as before in her voice. She was back on her own territory, and I had the idea that she probably looked at Elizabeth as someone to conquer, sexually speaking.

Outside, it was colder. The winds seemed to have calmed down very slightly, but it was definitely colder. Delilah and I immediately began making our way back towards the gun shop. I really was not sure if this was all going to be enough. I had been hoping to find more stuff, but it seemed like we might be shit out of luck.

Sometimes, that was just the way it happened.

While I was considering this, considering how exactly we were going to make this whole thing work with the supplies that we had managed to scrape together so far, wondering about what sort of window I had left to play with, a gunshot suddenly rang out.

A bullet landed somewhere to my left. We were maybe twenty yards out from the gun shop. There were three figures up on the highway, bearing down on us.

Shit!

I grabbed for my rifle as all three of them opened up with pistols. Thank God, they didn’t have a rifle. But fuck, what if there was another one trying to get into the gun shop? Or another one with a rifle hidden somewhere?

“Go! Get inside!” I shouted as I brought the rifle to bear.

They were raining down fire on me and Delilah, but they were apparently bad shots, combined with the way the wind was blowing and the distance, and that was keeping us alive for now. I aimed and fired off a round. I didn’t hit any of them, but it did cause them to stop firing and fall back briefly. I heard the door to the shop burst open and glanced very briefly that way just to confirm that it was a friend and not a foe.

Megan came out with her own rifle.

“Delilah get in here!” she snapped, then took aim and fired.

She did not miss.

They all had decided to immediately return fire and I saw one of them take the bullet straight through the skull. Fuck she was a great shot. I really wanted to press this opportunity, so I lined up my own shot and squeezed the trigger.

Fuck! The winds were picking up again and I just barely missed the second guy, who then ducked back out of sight. They had the high ground, the highway maybe twenty feet up an incline on this side, and that was going to make this difficult.

I hurried over to join Megan, who never took her eyes from their location or lowered her rifle. “I take it this is them?” she asked.

“I think so,” I replied. “Can’t be sure, but probably. Listen, I’m going up the ramp. Keep me covered. We have to take them out if they’re this violent.”

“Yep,” she agreed. “Go.”

I saw that Delilah had disappeared into the gun shop and caught just the barest sight of her embracing Elizabeth, and then I was off and running.

The next however long of time seemed torturous in how long it seemed to take to pass. It took forever to get to the base of the ramp, and then it seemed to take an eternity to get up it. Megan kept firing and at one point I heard someone scream, so apparently she’d seriously wounded one of them. I kept looking back over my shoulder, rifle at the ready, which is part of what made the journey take so fucking long. It would be all too easy for one of them to pop off a lucky shot and nail me. But only a few shots came my way, all missing, thankfully.

Although one bullet buried itself in the snow right beside my foot.

I was careful as I finally got towards the top. It took it slow then, realizing that there were no more gunshots from either side. I glanced briefly back over at the gun shop as I got my breath back and saw Megan was still there, still holding her shooting stance. Good. My head finally broke the surface of the highway and I got my first real look at it. The off-ramp was close to the truck stop, opposite it, and I wondered if any of them had hidden there.

This would be a perfect place for an ambush.

But something about these guys didn’t strike me as smart.

This all seemed pretty reactionary.

I saw something that was, well, if not inspiring then at least grimly satisfying: two corpses, and a blood trail that led across the snow directly to the truck stop. Well, they looked like corpses, anyway. I knew for sure one of them had taken a shot to the head.

The other might just be playing dead.

And the third guy might actually be setting up an ambush right now, even wounded. And from the blood trail that was rapidly disappearing beneath the snow being disturbed by the heavy winds, he was indeed quite wounded.

The trail led up to and inside of the gas station. I couldn’t see any movement in that direction and decided to chance checking on the other two assholes. One way or another, I was going to have to turn my back on someone, and it seemed to me that confirming these two were, in fact, all the way dead, would be the best solution.

I ducked down, tossing a glance towards the house in the distance. No one there, nothing stirring, and nothing in the area around it that I could see. I was almost positive that the guy I’d shot in the leg was still there, no way he’d come up here with a gunshot wound to the leg. Well, probably. Something about this group seemed off.

Coming up on the two who were downed, I quickly realized that yes, they were, in fact, dead. One guy’s right eye was nothing but a bloody crater, the other had half his fucking skull blown away in a disgusting spray of gore behind him.

I glanced briefly back at the gas station, still saw no movement, then looked down at Megan and waved for her to come up.

She looked back into the shop, I imagine said something to Delilah or Elizabeth or both of them, to update them on the situation, and then started coming towards me. I crouched down for a moment and checked the bodies over for anything immediately useful. Nothing but the guns, which I put on their bodies to keep them out of the snow, and then hesitated as I caught a strong whiff of something. Leaning down, I sniffed and confirmed it.

Yep, these guys were piss stinking drunk.

That explained a lot, actually.

In a way, I found it kind of inexplicable, but I had to remind myself that not everyone who was still alive was a hardcore survivor who always knew what they were doing and always made the better decision that was required to stay alive.

Like, you know, not wandering out into a fucking storm blind drunk to take potshots at a random stranger.

I thought that by now, two years in, people like that would be dead because of the fact that their stupid-ass decisions would have killed them.

But that wasn’t always true.

It had killed a lot of them, to be sure, but not all.

I got back up and began to head back towards the top of the ramp to meet Megan.

I thought this whole situation had just changed, and maybe for the better.

TWENTY ONE

“One of them is still alive,” was the first thing I said to her.

She was already looking at the blood trail. “Let’s get him them. I shot him in the chest, he can’t be in too good of shape.”

“I’ll take care of him,” I replied. “I need you to do two things.”

“What?”

“Go back to those bodies there, strip them of anything useful, and keep a watch on the house while you do it. I’m positive there’s at least one other guy, the one I shot in the leg. They were drunk,” I said. “Not as much of a threat, but still a threat. So just keep close watch. I’m going to go check on this guy, put him down if he’s still alive, then I’ll join you.”

“Fine,” she said. I thought she was getting annoyed with me that I kept splitting us up, but we were seriously running out of time.

Especially for what I was considering next.

We split up and I got my pistol out. The blood trail was quickly fading in the shifting snow being kicked up in the heavy winds. I kept my focus entirely on the structure ahead of me, not moving too fast, preparing myself to react. A gunshot to the chest, especially a rifle shot, would take most people out of the game, but I’d seen some people take a shot that should’ve done that and keep going, and obviously this guy had made it to the gas station. Being drunk could be as much a help as a hindrance too, maybe.

Either way, I had to be careful.

I got up to the door and carefully looked in through the window beside it, one of the few still left intact. The blood trail, already freezing over, continued for a ways into the room beyond. I didn’t quite see where it ended, and I didn’t see a body, either. Nice and easy, I went into the gas station lobby and began checking around, trying to hear over the winds. Following the trail led across the lobby, around a large shelf, and then up to the door that led into the restaurant. Shit. He was almost certainly waiting for me there, perfect place for an attack.

I stared at the open door, feeling like I was in a horror movie, the wind shrieking madly all around me, blood on the floor, gun in my hand.

Swallowing, I forced myself on.

In a way, it was a little like finding a spider in your bedroom right before you went to bed, trying to kill it, failing, and it scurried off and now you can’t fucking find it. No way you could sleep until you had found and killed that fucker.

There was no way I was going to feel comfortable if someone who had tried to murder me wasn’t fully accounted for.

Slowly, very slowly, I got up to the side of the door, then carefully edged my head around, exposing as little of myself as possible.

What I saw made me relax, though I was still paranoid.

The blood trail continued into the restaurant, ending maybe a few yards into it in a body sprawled out on the floor. Could be another person in there. I was dealing with drunks, but you never knew how situations could change.

I didn’t get this far by assuming everything was gonna be just fine.

It took me another minute to get into the restaurant and scope it out. But it was as it appeared: the man had collapsed. He’d dropped his pistol and I nudged it away with my foot, then, covering him carefully with my own pistol, I kicked him onto his back. He was dead, I saw, wincing at the ugly wound in his chest.

He also reeked of booze. Jesus, what the fuck were they doing? I honestly felt kind of bad about this whole thing, but shit, if this was how they reacted to me just walking up to their house then how many other people had they murdered, or worse? They reminded me of the shitheads I’d rescued Delilah and Megan from.

That made me think of Tanner, which was a can of worms I didn’t want to open up again, especially not now.

Taking one more quick look around, I headed back outside. Megan was making her way back towards me and I met her halfway.

“Well?” she asked.

“He’s dead,” I replied. “Very good shots. Now-” I began, but she cut me off.

“Chris, you’re not going off on your own again,” she growled.

“Megan, I have to, and I don’t have time to argue. I know it’s a risk, and I know I’m asking a lot. Please, just do this. Okay?” She looked at me for a long moment, I wasn’t sure if she was going to let me. Abruptly, I said, “I found a vibrator.”

A look of confusion and surprise came across her face. “You really think that’s going to change my mind?” she asked.

“...maybe? Also found a strap-on. Sooner we stop arguing, sooner we can put it all to use,” I said with a shrug.

She growled. “Okay, fine. Goddamnit. What do you want me to do?”

“Strip him of everything you can, then go back home. Have Elizabeth lock the place down and be as secure as she can, then take Delilah to the woods. Gather up as much firewood as you can. Only do one trip, all right? I’m going to the house. I’ll go with you down the ramp, because I want to approach the house from the woods, and I can only do that by entering the woods on this side. I’ll be back as soon as I possibly can with whatever I find, okay?”

“You’d fucking better not die out there, understand me?” she replied with a growl.

“I don’t intend to,” I replied. “Now come on.”

~

We stripped the third corpse down quickly, grabbed some more of the wood that had been gathered and left behind earlier, then headed back outside and down the ramp.

As soon as we hit the bottom, I gave her a hug and a kiss and started moving as quickly as I could, no longer taking my time. It was fucking freezing now and I was starting to go numb. I didn’t even want them to go get that firewood but we honestly needed it. I pushed myself, hurrying along the bottom of the hill the highway sat atop on this side. It slowly rose up the closer it got to the forest. My plan was relatively simple.

Hit the forest on my side, cross the highway after doing the bare minimum of scouting, move through the forest on the other side until I was near the house, the sneak in through the back if possible. Although it was possible there was more than that one injured guy in there, I thought it unlikely. I didn’t really look forward to the thought of breaking in and killing some guy I’d already shot but...and this definitely sounded like a shitty justification to me: he was probably gonna die soon anyway. Even if the hellish blizzard didn’t get him, almost certainly an infection was going to set in thanks to the gunshot wound, and I doubted he’d fight it off.

God did I just want this to be fucking over with.

We were close, really close, but our survival rates were going to depend heavily on what I found in that house. Maybe they had some good stuff, or maybe not. It was a total crapshoot. They might be thieves who’d gotten lucky in less drunk times, or maybe they were on the verge of starvation or something. Maybe desperation had driven them to attack. Maybe they were cannibals. That was becoming more of a thing nowadays.

Not that I’d quite be willing to eat human flesh.

There, finally! Fuck! I hit the forest and rushed up the remains of the incline until I reached its edge. Peering out onto the highway in either direction, I didn’t see a soul. Good enough for me. I glanced back very briefly to the gun shop and saw Megan and Delilah just setting out in my direction. Good. I trusted them to get their job done, and hopefully Elizabeth was in the process of getting the place set up inasmuch as she could.

I crossed the highway at a brisk pace and hit the woods on the other side maybe five or seven yards deep, hopefully enough to hide me from view as I approached the house. The next several minutes passed by in frozen misery as I navigated through the iced-over trees, stomping through the snow, constantly seeing that teal light, listening to winds shriek, feeling my whole body going numb, shivering violently.

By the time I actually reached the little house in the plain, standing at the edge of the forest maybe ten feet from its side, I was honestly wondering if I was going to be able to aim my pistol, let alone use it. My fingers were mostly numb and stiff. But I kept it out, finger on the trigger, and shifted a bit farther down, to the back of the house, and came out of the trees.

As I began approaching the front door, it began to snow.

Fuck, fuck!

I was really under the wire now. Shit!

I got up to the back door and tried it. Not locked, thank fuck for that, at least. I twisted the handle and opened it up, pistol raised and ready, or as ready as I could make it. As I slipped into the house, I again found myself thinking of Tanner and his people. I’d done the same thing just a few weeks ago. I’d never quite done shit like this before. My life had been, if not easy, then at least simple before now, before running into Delilah and Megan. At worst, I had to fight for my life every now and then. I don’t know if I was just lucky or if maybe, in some way, I was asking for trouble now. Here I was, breaking into another house.

But my hand felt forced.

I found myself looking into a teal-lit hallway. Several open doors there. Great. I slipped in and checked the first door on my right, straining to hear anything beyond the window. It led into a messy kitchen, the counters covered with blood and the remains of whatever animals these guys had been hunting. Nothing else in there that I could see, so I moved on. The door opposite it led to a little disused bathroom that held nobody either.

As I moved on down the hallway, I thought I heard someone move or shift. I waited. The wind blew. I waited a bit longer, then kept going. I was truly about to get fucked here by the weather. I wasn’t even sure there was time to get back home now but I had to hope. Next door led to a bedroom with a bunk bed that looked well-used. I carefully checked behind the door and in the closet. There was stuff in the room and the closet, useful stuff, but it could wait for now. I left the bedroom and kept walking.

Reaching the end of the hall, which led into what I imagined was the living room, I was glad to find that my fingers were a bit more functional now.

Good thing, too.

As I stepped through the next door, someone screamed and tackled me, pretty much blindsiding me. We went crashing to the floor and both of us shouted in pain.

“You!” I heard a voice cry out, and a fist connected with my face as my gun left my hand and I tried to get back up. “You fucker! You shot me! Where are my friends!?” the slurring voice demanded. Before I could answer, it declared, “I’m gonna fucking kill you!”

That was when I saw the gun, and looked into the eyes of the man I’d shot in the leg while making my initial getaway. I grabbed for it and managed to get my hand around his wrist, but, even drunk and shot, he was apparently a wily bastard. For a few seconds, I felt the full weight of the past several hours, the past several days bearing down on me, and I genuinely didn’t know if I was going to be able to get the gun away from him. He snarled, staring at me with dull, bloodshot eyes and a pasty, pale face behind a large beard, baring his teeth at me.

I could see it in his eyes he really did want to kill me, and he intended to.

Then the adrenaline kicked in, and kicked in hard. I headbutted him and managed to smash my forehead right into his nose. He screamed as it cracked viciously and I twisted and bucked, throwing him off of me while yanking on his wrist with one hand and wrapping my other around the barrel of the gun.

I managed to wrench it from his grasp and while he dealt with his broke nose, I brought the pistol around and put it to his temple. He screamed one, inarticulate sound, bellowed it in my face, before I pulled the trigger and put an end to him.

“Fuck,” I muttered, my ears ringing.

Nothing but me and the wind now.

I forced myself up and looked around. It was clear that someone had definitely set themselves up in the living room, and there was just one more door to check out. As I headed for it, I paused, seeing something sitting by the door. I smiled as I laid eyes on it, realizing it was going to make my life a whole lot easier: a sled. A sturdy one, too. I could pack a lot of shit onto it and drag it back. I frowned, glancing out the window.

If I moved fast enough.

I slipped into the final room, which turned out to be another bedroom, where probably the leader of the group, whoever he’d been, had been staying. I checked it and the closet out, making sure there was no one else hanging out, and confirmed that I was, in fact, alone. I realized, suddenly, that it was actually quite warm in the room.

Then I realized why.

“No fucking way,” I whispered, looking around.

I spied three small, sleek, powerful heating units set up around the room. They were fancy. I grabbed one and checked it out. I’d seen these before. I wasn’t quite sure how they worked, but they could fit in my pocket and were battery or solar powered. This one was halfway charged. Oh thank fucking God. I immediately turned it off, then did the same with the others, then put one into my inner coat pocket (the other inner pocket, not the one that held the journal, no fucking way I was risking burning that up), and put the other two in my backpack. We might actually have a real chance of making it through this thing.

Looking around, I set to work.

This was going to have to be fast.

~

In reality, I was probably in that house for, at most, twenty minutes.

But while I was fervently hunting through it, stuffing my backpack with supplies and then loading up the sled I’d found with everything else, it felt like I was taking hours. The mounting winds and increasing snowfall only made things worse. But it was worth it. Finally, I had come to a place that was worth it.

Those guys hadn’t been starving, I knew that much.

Although it wasn’t super well packed, I found an appreciable amount of deer meat. I also found a nice supply of cans of fruits and vegetables, and two bottles of red wine. I knew that was going to make the ladies very happy.

Well, two of them anyway, considering Elizabeth’s condition.

I grabbed some bullets that I found, some medicine, whatever firewood they had collected, and mainly I loaded the sled down with blankets, sheets, and clothes. I snatched every last fucking blanket I could find, which was over a dozen between the sleeping areas and closets. Generating heat was one thing, but keeping it in and the cold out was another.

After grabbing everything I thought was there, I turned on the heater in my pocket after making sure the blankets were secure with bungee cables, and then I opened up the front door, preparing myself for the final run.

I wasn’t ready.

I stopped dead as a blast of absolutely fucking freezing air hit me like a motherfucking hammer. The snow wasn’t bad, not yet, the flakes still small, coming down in flurries, but I knew the wallop part of the storm was close.

My chest immediately hurt as I breathed in the frozen air. How cold was it now? Negative sixty? More? Jesus fucking Chris, what a nightmare.

Well, I had to do this.

Even if I could set up here and wait it out, I didn’t think Megan and Delilah and Elizabeth would survive without these supplies and, well, I was willing to risk my life and suffer through this cold for them, apparently.

Without giving myself a chance to think about it, I set off.

It was hell.

It was colder than I’d ever remembered being as I stepped out onto the porch. For a few seconds I slowed, then stopped, then actually, briefly considered going back inside just to escape the torturous freezing cold. But then the moment passed and I walked down off the porch, into the snowfall, and set off towards the highway. I could just make it and the truck stop out through the shifting snow. I kept my sights firmly on that highway as I put one foot in front of the other. That was how I was going to get through this.

One foot in front of the other.

Bit by bit, yard by yard.

I walked on. And on. And on.

I genuinely don’t know how long it took to get to the highway, I only know that it felt like fucking forever. I was freezing all over, mostly numb save for my chest, where the heater was. It was painful but I kept it on because I was honestly worried I’d die without it. At this point, I was convinced I was going to die regardless of what I did but even beneath this awful teal sky I found that I couldn’t give up.

So I kept walking.

When I made it to the highway, I didn’t even realize I’d done so until it occurred to me that the quality of the ground I was walking over had changed. I looked around again, (the visibility was worse now), and just saw the truck stop to my left. It occurred to me abruptly that at some point I’d lost track of it without even realizing it.

Shit, I was starting to lose it.

I was exhausted, mentally and physically, and even emotionally at this point.

Turning, I struggled through the winds and the snow towards the off-ramp. I had made it this far, I just needed to make it a bit farther.

Only a bit farther felt like I might as well be walking to the moon.

As I crossed the highway, I realized I was talking, really muttering to myself, but I couldn’t even make out what the fuck I was saying because I was shivering so violently. My brain felt like it was offline, my body just staggering on by itself. More than once, I had to glance back to make sure I hadn’t lost the sled or that it was still secured and everything wasn’t falling off of it. I’d be god-motherfucking-damned if I came this far just to lose all the shit I’d killed for and dragged this far. Somehow, someway, I was getting to that gun shop.

Another fucking hour seemed to pass before I finally hit the top of the off-ramp. I couldn’t see my destination any longer.

Inspiration abruptly struck and, shivering violently, I turned around and grabbed the sled. Hauling it forward, I got behind it, bent down and started pushing it ahead of me. Once it got even a little bit of momentum, I laid down on my stomach and held on. It didn’t move too fast, the incline of the ramp wasn’t super steep, but the wind was to my back and the incline was just enough that I could make it work. As a result, I got down to the bottom a lot faster than I would’ve otherwise. I hit the bottom and cried out, or really gasped, as I hit a snowdrift and stopped abruptly. Falling off the sled, it took ages to get back to my feet.

Turning around, I started stomping off towards home.

Or where I thought home was.

Time disappeared as I marched into the blowing snowstorm. My reality seemed to change as well. I might as well have been stomping across Antarctica, or an alien world. I honestly don’t know how long I walked for and eventually I began to wonder if I was even walking in the right direction any longer.

The teal-white world began to turn to gray.

I lost all feeling in damn near my whole body.

Right before darkness began to consume me and I collapsed into the snow, I just barely caught sight of a single figure appearing out of the snowstorm, directly ahead of me.

And then I was out.

TWENTY TWO

I opened my eyes and came into a world of ache.

Not pain, exactly, not agony, but definitely suffering. Everything ached, like I’d been through the workout of my fucking life.

For several long moments, I had no fucking clue where I was.

Then I became aware of hammering. Also quiet conversation. And a fire crackling. And, beneath it all, an eternally shrieking wind.

I groaned when I tried to move.

“Oh shit, he’s awake.”

“Thank fucking God.”

I heard movement and I tried to ask a question but just another groan came out. Suddenly, I felt the thing I was laying on shift and then Delilah appeared over me. A second later, Elizabeth appeared on my other side.

“Chris,” Delilah said.

“What happened?” I managed.

“Here. Drink this,” Elizabeth said.

She put something to my lips and I drank. It was water. It was fucking liquid gold and I drank everything she gave me, then something went down the wrong tube and I started coughing up a storm. She winced and apologized, pulling it back. I took a moment for the coughs to die down, and damn did they hurt.

My whole body felt like it had been through a pulverizer.

“Not your fault,” I managed.

“I saved your ass,” Megan said from somewhere nearby. “You had almost made it back. I just barely saw you. I was waiting by the door.” Her voice grew louder and I heard her walking closer. A moment later, she also sat next to me, looking down at me. “I headed out when you collapsed and hauled your heavy ass up onto that sled, then dragged you inside. Took all three of us to get you up the fucking stairs.”

“Thank you,” I murmured. “Are we okay?”

“Seem to be,” Megan replied. “Still getting the blankets and stuff in place.”

I yawned suddenly and an intense desire for sleep began to roll over me, like being trapped in quicksand.

“You need to sleep,” Delilah murmured.

“How long was I out?”

“It’s only been about forty minutes,” Megan replied. “But you were out there for an hour, Chris. It’s a fucking miracle that you made it back alive.”

“Yeah,” I groaned. “Fuck. Got any painkillers?”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said, and she smiled suddenly, looking down at me. “And I have something else for you. I think you earned it.” She laughed softly and shook her head. “No, I know you earned it.” She stood up and began getting out of her clothes.

“Ah shit, really?” I asked, making all three of them laugh.

“Yes, Chris,” she replied.

“Here,” Delilah said, and gave me three painkillers. I took them and propped myself up slightly so that I could drink from a thermos. I looked down at myself and saw that I was down to my thermal underwear and undershirt.

“Aw shit,” I said as something occurred to me. “There’s a heater in my inner pocket-”

“I got it already. Your jacket is fine,” Megan replied. “Good fucking find, by the way.”

“Thanks,” I muttered, and then, while Elizabeth got undressed, I took the time to make sure that all my fingers and toes were still functional and feeling. It took a moment, but I confirmed that yeah, they were still there, still good.

No frostbite, thank fucking God.

“Oh my God you are so hot,” I whispered as I laid back down and saw Elizabeth naked again.

She giggled and blushed. “Thank you.”

“You all are. Fuck, you three are fucking angels,” I muttered.

“Let’s get you naked and settled,” Delilah said.

“Thanks for helping me.”

“Of course, Chris.”

Delilah and Elizabeth helped me get my clothes off while Megan kept hammering away, putting blankets up on the walls. It was cold in the room, but not unbearably so.

“I should wash,” I said.

“I can do that,” Elizabeth replied.

After I was naked and the blankets had been pulled back for me and I was resting about as comfortably as I could, she came back with a washcloth, a bottle of at least lukewarm water, and some soap. She got to work washing my cock, which was already on the way to becoming hard.

“I hope I can make this work,” she murmured as she started washing me off, running the cloth slowly over my dick, which immediately stiffened up the rest of the way.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I’m not sure I’ll be able to get it comfortably into my mouth,” she replied.

“I think you’ll manage,” Delilah said. “I can handle it and I think you’ve got a bigger mouth than I do.” She paused. “I meant that literally, not, like, an insult.”

Elizabeth giggled again. “I know. I’m just...like I said, I’m not used to, uh, bigger ones. I was glad to find that my pussy handled it fine without being sore, but it’s just...intimidating.”

“It’s not that big,” I replied.

“It is to me,” she said. “All right, you’re clean. Now, just relax and I’ll administer an extra dose of painkillers and then you can get some sleep, because you seriously fucking earned it. I looked out the window and it’s fucking terrifying out there.”

I was thinking of something to say to that as she settled down in between my legs, eventually laying on her side with a pillow for some support, and then my already frazzled and abused mind went blank as her tongue found the head of my cock.

A throb, a pure pulse of fantastic bliss careened through me as she began to lick me, and that was when I finally felt myself begin to relax.

I had done it. We had done it.

We were probably going to be okay.

I looked at her just amazingly beautiful, nude, pale body and those fucking awesome big, beautiful tits of hers as she worked my cock with her tongue. She licked across the head for a good, long minute while Delilah sat beside us and Megan worked in the background. Well, half-worked, she kept looking over. Then Elizabeth ran her tongue up and down my shaft, lingering on the more sensitive area at the base of the head.

And then she put my cock in her mouth.

She began a slow, sensual blowjob, her lips slipping down over the head and then back up. Down and up again. Nice and slow and oh my fucking God it was so fucking good…

“Holy shit, Elizabeth…” I groaned loudly, watching this seductive, dark-haired, pregnant beauty work my dick with her amazing mouth.

She let out a little laugh and seemed to relax slightly.

“Yes, you’re doing a great job,” I said as I realized she actually was worried about that. I had no idea how she could worry, she really was a fucking angel to me right now.

“Yeah, you look so good doing this,” Delilah murmured.

Elizabeth just closed her eyes and kept on working, quickly growing more confident as she took more and more of my dick into her mouth. She moaned softly as she worked it, getting her hand involved, moving her fingers in tandem with her seductive lips. I felt her tongue flicking across the head again and again.

Sleep was coming, I knew it, and I hovered at the edge of it, beginning to fade.

I could feel my orgasm coming on and knew I’d be gone the second I finished coming, or maybe even gone before then.

“Ugh...yes...Elizabeth...keep going…” I begged, twitching occasionally as the waves of hot pink pleasure rolled through my aching body.

When the orgasm came, it was intense, like a flare, a volcanic eruption.

I cried out and my cock jerked violently and I heard her let out a startled sound. But her mouth never stopped its wonderful work.

I could feel my seed not just leave but erupting from my cock in the first contraction. As it did, a shockwave of blinding ecstasy slammed through me. I cried out again as I started draining my nuts into her mouth.

And Elizabeth just fucking sucked my cock dry.

And then I was passing out once again.

~

When I came back awake, I was aware of only two things.

The first was that I was insanely fucking horny.

The second was that there were three naked women in bed with me.

“Oh thank God, you’re awake again,” I heard Delilah say as I shifted.

“How long?” I asked, sitting up and looking around me. Holy shit they looked amazing. Delilah and Megan were to my left, Elizabeth was to my right.

All naked.

“Several hours,” Megan growled. “I know you needed sleep, probably still do, but we were kind of hoping getting in bed with you like this would wake you up. We were close to just shaking you. We’re all fucking horny but Delilah made the very valid point that it’d be absolutely unfair of us to start without you.”

“Thank you, Delilah,” I said.

She smiled and kissed me. “You’re welcome. Now...can we begin? I haven’t had sex in like five fucking days and I am horny.”

“Same,” Elizabeth murmured. “And I’ve only had sex once in the past like three months,” she added, running a hand across my bare chest.

“Yes,” I replied, and kissed her while taking one of her big, wonderful breasts in my grasp. She let out a small gasp of surprise as our lips met and then moaned and deepened the kiss immediately. Her tongue slid into my mouth and I gladly touched mine to hers. She tasted wonderful. Behind me, I could feel as much as hear Delilah and Megan begin to go at it. My hands wandered hungrily over Elizabeth’s pleasantly padded, pregnant body, across her large breasts and down across the swell of her belly, to her hips and wonderful thighs.

“God, it is so good to feel wanted again,” she whispered, her lips so close to mine they brushed them when she spoke.

“You are extremely wanted by everyone in this room,” I replied. “I have no fucking clue how any straight dude could look at you and not immediately want you.”

She responded by kissing me again, wrapping her fingers around my cock and starting to massage it. Her touch was electrifying, and I decided to return the favor. My hand slipped between her pale thighs and I slipped a finger between the lips of her pussy. She moaned loudly into the kiss as I found her clit and began to rub it. Feeling her hot, smooth body begin to writhe and twist at my touch was an intensely rewarding experience.

“Yes…” she moaned loudly, opening her legs wider. “Oh fuck yes, that is really good…”

I started sucking on one of her big breasts as I fingered her, and kept it up until I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“Yeah?” I asked, twisting slightly

I found Delilah’s grinning face. “Let’s switch partners,” she suggested, and pushed me onto my back, then rolled over me, kissing me in passing, and landed between me and Elizabeth.

“All right then,” I replied, scooting closer to Megan, who gave me a smirk that told me right away she’d found and gotten the wine. “Someone’s been drinking.”

She giggled, and it was rare to hear her giggle and not let out her sharp, slightly cynical laughter. “Yeah,” she said, grinning more broadly, her face flushed. “You found some good stuff. I’m very appreciative.”

“Show me,” I replied, and she showed me, kissing me while taking one of my hands and bringing it up to her bare breast.

While we made out, I kept one eye on Elizabeth and Delilah.

“I’m a little nervous,” Elizabeth admitted as Delilah ran a hand up and down her arm.

“Don’t be,” Delilah replied in a very calming but also interestingly authoritative voice. “No one here is going to get mad at you. No one here is going to laugh at you. No one is going to make you do anything you don’t want to do. We’re all just here to get along and have fun and enjoy. I know this is going to be your first time with a girl, but trust me, I’ve handled this before.”

“You’ve broken in a lot of girls, hmm?” Elizabeth asked, and she did seem to relax.

Delilah laughed. “Yep. Women questioning their sexuality find it very hard to resist me.”

“I think everyone finds it hard to resist you,” Megan said.

“Yep,” she repeated, grinning.

“I’m ready,” Elizabeth said.

Delilah responded by kissing her on the mouth. Elizabeth let out a low moan and closed her eyes as her hand found Delilah’s generous, hot breast and began to grope it. Delilah groped her right back, the redhead deepening the kiss with a practiced ease.

They made a remarkably erotic couple.

Megan and I became distracted for a few moments while they tongue-kissed and groped each other, and even more so when Delilah began to finger her and suck on one of her pale breasts. After a bit, Megan took my hand and brought it down to her crotch. I took the message immediately and resumed kissing her as I started to rub her clit. She groaned and shuddered, pressing herself more tightly against me as she shoved her tongue into my mouth. She was drunk and clearly very fucking horny right now.

Delilah and I kept pleasuring our respective partners until they each experienced a screaming orgasm. Megan grabbed me and kissed me hard as I kept fingering her, now fucking her with two fingers as she came, and I heard Elizabeth crying out in almost shocked ecstasy as she enjoyed her own climax.

When Megan was done coming, she went slack against the bed, panting. Then, after a moment, got up and walked across the room. She came back with a bottle of wine that was about two-thirds gone and drank deeply from it, then set it on the floor beside the bed and climbed back onto it, grinning at me as she crawled.

“Your turn,” she said, and got down between my legs.

Now it seemed it was Delilah’s and Elizabeth’s turn to watch us as Megan started sucking me off. She bobbed her head smoothly, her lips and tongue going to wonderful work as she closed her eyes. I definitely liked drunk Megan a lot. I liked her sober for sure but...she was more agreeable drunk, I was finding.

And not just because she was sucking my dick.

A moment later, I felt the bed shift and Delilah joined her, and they both began dragging their tongues up and down my cock.

“Wow that is...amazing to see,” Elizabeth murmured as she scooted closer to me, laying up against me as the two women pleasured me.

“It really is,” I agreed and began to make out with her again.

That was how I spent the next several moments: making out with and groping an amazingly hot pregnant woman while two other amazingly hot women took turns sucking my dick. This, by far, had made everything I’d gone through to get to this point more than worth it. I had to stop them before they made me pop because I had a goal tonight, and that was to shoot my load inside of all three of them, specifically in their pussies.

Well...I wanted to fuck Delilah in her amazing looking ass and finish up there.

But even now I could feel how exhausted I was, the past couple of weeks still taking its toll on me physically.

“Okay, now what?” Megan asked, blowing some hair away from her face.

“Sex,” I replied. “I want to fuck someone.”

“How about I grab that strap-on and I fuck Delilah while you fuck Elizabeth?” Megan suggested with a sultry grin.

“Yes, please!” Delilah shouted happily.

“Sounds good to me,” I replied, and we both got up.

While Megan began pulling on the strap-on Delilah and I had tracked down in that derelict adult shop, I grabbed Elizabeth’s ankles and began pulling her towards me, where I stood at the foot of the king size bed.

She let out a happy shriek and laughed as she slid across the bed.

“You cleaned that, right?” I asked as Megan finished getting it on.

“Yes, Chris. This isn’t my first orgy,” Delilah replied. “But thank you.”

“Come on, I’m super horny,” Elizabeth complained, poking me with her foot.

“All right, all right you slu-” I stopped and abruptly realized that this was only the second time we were having sex and we had met within the past week.

Elizabeth, thankfully, just favored me with a smile. “I don’t mind. Honestly, I don’t care what comes out of your mouth at this point.”

“I’m going to take you at your word then,” I replied, and I opened her legs as I stepped up to her. “Now I’m going fuck you like a whore.”

“Please do,” she replied. “I really need it.”

“Same,” I said and rubbed the head of my cock between the wet, smooth lips of her pussy. Glancing to my right, I saw Megan getting ready to deliver a good, hard fucking to Delilah as well. I hadn’t actually seen one chick fuck another with a strap-on in real life before, so this was going to be another happy first.

I slid my way into Elizabeth’s stunningly tight, pregnant vagina and for several long, blissful seconds completely lost myself in her. I groaned loudly as I gripped her hips and began fucking her, stroking smoothly into her again and again. She cried out each time I buried my cock into her and goddamn was she so fucking tight! And the heat of her pussy...it was fucking unreal! Making out, sucking on tits, getting head…

It was all great. No question.

But fucking raw vagina was on an entire other level and I was in fucking love with it.

“Oh my fucking God, Elizabeth,” I groaned as I reached up and grabbed her tits. “Your fucking pussy is phenomenal. Just...fuck!”

“I love your cock so much, Chris,” she moaned in response.

I heard Delilah start crying out in bliss and we both looked over. Megan was fucking her and it was glorious to see. She grinning fiercely, grabbing Delilah’s pale ankles and holding them as she started humping her with the strap-on. Both of their fantastic pairs of breasts were bouncing with the rhythm of their sex as they fucked. Delilah was crying out, her eyes closed, mouth open, hands gripping the blankets beside her.

Megan looked absolutely stellar, a beautiful, tan-skinned, dark-haired goddess, her body fit and firm, moving with an agile ease as she screwed Delilah, taking an obvious satisfaction from pounding the little redhead given the look on her face.

I returned my attention to Elizabeth and kept stuffing my cock into that blissfully tight vagina again and again, my cock encased in a place of absolute ecstasy. She was so fucking slick, so fucking hot inside, and her body! I was finding that I really, really had a thing for pregnant chicks, because although it was no stretch of the imagination to imagine Elizabeth as super fucking hot before, for me, she was especially attractive right now because of the fact that she was pregnant, because of the ways her pregnancy had changed her body.

“Chris,” Megan said after another moment.

“Yeah?” I asked.

“How about, before you fucking ruin her pussy with a goddamn gallon of cum, we switch partners? I wanna fuck her too,” she said.

“You good with that?” I asked.

“Yes,” Elizabeth replied. “I’ve never been fucked with a strap-on before.”

“You’ll enjoy it,” Delilah murmured.

“You just want his cock,” Elizabeth said.

Delilah laughed. “Guilty.”

I pulled out as Megan did the same and we switched.

“Let’s switch positions, too,” I said. “Get on your hands and knees.”

“Yes, sir,” Delilah replied.

“Yeah, I do wanna fuck you from the back,” Megan said. “You good with doggystyle?”

“I like it a lot,” Elizabeth replied. “Just need to give me a minute.”

Delilah was up and on her hands and knees quickly, and I slid right back into that sweet, pink, tight pussy of hers. Fucking hell did I love wild redheads like her who were just down to fuck like there was no tomorrow.

“I want to fuck you in the ass tonight,” I said to her as I stroked into her and ran my hands over her beautiful, pale ass.

“I want that, too,” she replied.

“Excellent.”

I fucked her good and hard, relishing the satisfaction of making her scream and shout. She was definitely one of those petite chicks who could handle my dick without a problem and there was a particular pleasure in that. Delilah was the kind of girl you could absolutely destroy and she’d ask for more. I listened to both of the women scream in ecstasy and kept switching between looking down at Delilah’s hot ass and over at Elizabeth getting rammed by Megan from the back. Megan seemed just enamored with Elizabeth’s curvy body, running her hands over her ass, her hips, up under her and groping her big tits.

“You are crazy hot,” Megan said as she stroked the fake cock into her.

“Thank you-ah! Fuck, that’s so good…” Elizabeth moaned.

“OH CHRIS!” Delilah shrieked, forcibly returning my attention to her as she began to orgasm all over my dick. I groaned, enduring the intense pleasure and holding onto my own orgasm, fucking her climaxing vagina as she squirted and screamed.

When she was done, I pulled out of her and looked at the other two.

“Would you ride me Megan?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure,” she replied, and pulled out of Elizabeth, then gave her ass a smack. “You want a turn with this? I’m sure Delilah would love to get rammed by you.”

“I think for now I just want to keep getting rammed. Actually, I want to get eaten.”

“I’ll do it,” Delilah said.

We all switched places. Elizabeth sat on the edge of the bed with her legs spread while Delilah dropped to her knees.

As I ended up on my back, I was glad to find that all of the preparations the girls had set up while I was out seemed to be holding. I wouldn’t call the room toasty, but it was definitely tolerable. It probably helped that we were all getting a lot of hot, sweaty exercise that was getting the blood pumping.

Megan climbed eagerly atop me a moment later, after pausing to have another drink, and immediately began bouncing on my cock.

“You’re not getting out from under me until I make you fucking come,” she said, looking down at me with wide eyes as she gripped my shoulders.

“Well fuck, all right,” I replied.

She laughed, her tits bouncing perfectly as she rode me, and oh how fucking good her pussy felt slipping down over my dick again and again.

“Come on,” she growled, going faster, “come on! Fucking come for me!”

“You really want me to make a mess of your pussy that bad?” I asked.

“Yes!” she yelled.

“All right.” I grabbed her ass, adjusted my hips, and started thrusting up into her. She let out a scream as I pounded the fuck out of her pussy and before long both of us were coming. I shot my load into her sweet, sweet pussy as she began to squirt and we both made a mess out of the other. I came so fucking hard inside of her, my whole body contracting in pure bliss as I drained my cock into her raw pussy.

I filled her up, boiling in bliss.

When I was finished, she got off of me and flopped onto her back, panting, staring at the ceiling, face flushed, hair a mess, looking very beautiful.

I leaned down and kissed her. “You are a fantastic fuck,” I said.

She laughed. “So are you.”

Right as I shifted closer to the other two, Elizabeth began orgasm again. Delilah was eating her with an obvious expertise, working her pussy with not just her mouth but her fingers as well. I watched the beautiful pregnant woman orgasm as Delilah made that pussy dance, and then Elizabeth fell back onto a few pillows, panting.

“Holy shit, that’s...oh wow...oh my…” she panted.

“You ready for more dick?” I asked as I stood before her and Delilah.

“Yes,” she replied emphatically.

“Good. Delilah, get ready for anal,” I said.

“Yes, sir,” she replied immediately, getting out of the way.

I got up to Elizabeth and resumed the position I’d enjoyed with her earlier. Slipping back inside of her pussy, I found her slicker than ever, and she let out a long, loud cry of pleasure as I started fucking her again.

I was not lasting much longer, even after just coming inside of Megan.

This pregnant vagina was just too fucking good. It was like fucking pure pleasure.

Sure enough, a few moments later…

“Ah...fuck!”

The rapturous ecstasy blasted through my body as I came inside of her, shooting what felt like another big load into her, filling her up. Each time my cock contracted it was like a shockwave of pleasure smashing into me. I had gripped her ankles at some point and was holding her legs out wide and up, thrusting deep into her each time another orgasmic contraction hit me. I went for what felt like awhile.

When I was done this time, I pulled carefully out of her and sat down next to her.

“So...how was that?” I asked, looking over at her.

She had the same look as Megan, laying on her back, pale face flushed, that look of sedate joy, staring up at the ceiling.

“Great,” was all she said. “Wow. You fuck like...no one I’ve ever been with. Holy shit.”

“Glad I could make you feel good,” I replied.

“You ready for me?” Delilah asked.

“Almost,” I said, looking at her. Damn did she look good. She walked over and sat down next to me, holding a tube of lube and setting it between us.

“You can go hard if you want, I like it hard in the ass,” she said.

“You are honestly a really perfect traveling companion,” I replied after almost opening up that potential can of worms that was ‘I love you’, because fuck, in that moment, I fucking loved her. Or really how sexual she was.

She just smirked. “I know.”

I took a break, and while I did, Megan and Elizabeth began to clean themselves up. Delilah kept toying with me, running her hands over my body, kissing me, teasing me, still horny obviously, so it didn’t take all that long for me to get hard again.

“I take it you want doggystyle?” she asked.

“Actually…” I replied, considering it while she rubbed my cock down with lube. “I think I want to do missionary anal.”

“Okay,” she replied.

“This’ll be nice to watch,” Elizabeth murmured.

“These two are always nice to watch,” Megan replied.

“Yeah, like that time-”

“Don’t you fucking dare!” Megan snapped, blushing immediately.

“What?” Delilah asked innocently.

“What...what am I missing?” Elizabeth asked.

Delilah and I laughed but kept silent, just looking at Megan. She heaved a loud sigh after a long moment. “I...spied on them having sex. When we first met.”

“Oh my God, you perved on them!?” Elizabeth asked, looking absolutely delighted.

Delilah laughed on her back and brought her legs up, spreading, folding, and holding them to herself.

“No!” Megan snapped.

“She did! She completely perved on us.”

“That’s such a dumb phrase,” Megan growled. “Ugh, I was out getting firewood, it was the first day we’d met. Chris had saved me from some assholes who had captured me, they started fucking while I was out, I happened to walk by a window that looked perfectly in at the bed they were slamming in and the curtain was open just a little and...I mean, yeah, I couldn’t help it!”

“I said we weren’t mad-ooh!” Delilah said with a little gasp as I started working my way into her ass.

“Fuck’s sake you have a tight ass,” I muttered as I got in.

“Yeah...nice and...ah...keep going,” she groaned.

I kept going, working my way into her fantastically tight ass.

“So you liked the fact that she was spying on you?” Elizabeth asked.

“Hell yes,” I replied. “I figured if she saw us naked and fucking, that was a big step closer to her taking off her clothes and spreading her legs for me.”

“Wow, Chris,” Megan said, rolling her eyes.

“Was I wrong?” I asked.

She growled and crossed her arms, staring at the ceiling for a moment as I kept getting deeper into Delilah’s fantastically tight ass.

“No,” she admitted. “You were not wrong.”

“You don’t think it’s a compliment?” Delilah asked.

“It’s...whatever. We’re fucking, and I was a pervert-”

“Was. Yes,” Delilah murmured, then groaned.

“Oh like you aren’t a completely perverted little fucking slut-whore,” Megan snapped.

“Never claimed otherwise-oh yes!” she cried.

I was all the way in and now began to stroke smoothly into her.

“Ahh...fuck, I’m not lasting,” I admitted right away. “Your ass is just too good...goddamn that is fucking tight.”

“Just use me however you want,” Delilah replied, her eyes closed now. She looked fantastic like this, on her back, her legs spread, tits bouncing, taking my dick up her amazing ass. I used her. I fucked her in the ass, stuffing my cock in there again and again, bathing in the raw bliss that was Delilah’s amazingly tight ass.

I lasted a few minutes, and then I started busting my third, and probably final, nut for the night. Laying my hands across her big, pale tits, I groaned loudly, my legs shaking, as I came up her ass. She moaned and cried out with me as she took my load. My cock jerked and kicked and twitched, my hips leaping forward in time with my orgasm with each spasm. What was left of my stuff spurted out of me and into Delilah.

And then I was done, sexually at least.

Once I pulled out of her, I laid down beside her and just rested for probably fifteen minutes, my head spinning. I still needed a full night’s rest, among other things, but I had regained enough strength to get a few things that needed doing out of the way.

Despite everything, there was still the tiny but insistent doubt about our security. It wasn’t that I doubted Megan and the others, more than I hadn’t personally seen to it. I was bad at delegation. Once I was done with the initial rest after our amazing fuck session, I took the time to wash myself up, as I really needed it after all that.

Once I’d gotten washed, I pulled on a fresh pair of boxers, two fresh pairs of socks, my thermal underwear, and my long-sleeved undershirt. Then I did a quick inspection of our exterior. It looked like we were inside of some kind of wild, makeshift tent or on the inside of a patchwork doll maybe. Between what we’d all managed to find scattered across the region, there had apparently been enough blankets to cover damn near every square inch of the place, and that included floor and ceiling. They’d hammered blankets, pillowcases, and sheets everywhere, covering both doors and leaving only the fireplace uncovered.

“We actually managed to find a little store of plastic covering and tape,” Megan said while I was inspecting. “There was enough to cover the windows.”

“Excellent job,” I replied.

The fire was roaring and there was a healthy store of wood, twigs, and kindling nearby to be added as needed. They had also set up two of the portable heaters, both of them on opposite ends of the headboard.

“Where’s the third one?” I asked.

“Here,” Megan said, guiding me over to one of the windows. She pulled back the blanket and showed me. I saw a slight opening in the plastic covering the window, and could immediately feeling the cold radiating off of it as the winds continued to shriek wildly outside. I saw the third heater resting inside. “It was the lowest one on power, and since it’s still daylight out, I figured I’d try and let the thing charge with what sun there was. Here, lemme see if it’s even working.”

She reached in and pulled two items out, passing me one. “Check this shit out.”

I looked at the freezing rectangle of metal in my hands and realized I was looking at a thermometer. It was hovering around negative sixty five, which probably meant it was negative seventy five or even eighty five outside right now.

God knew what the fucking windchill was.

“Hey, it is working! Not as much as you’d think, it was down to around ten percent charge when I put it in after you got in, and it’s maybe thirty five percent now, but that’s progress!” She put it back, then took the thermometer from me, checked it, grunted, and put it back, too. After putting the plastic and blanket back, she turned to look at me. “Chris, I wanted to say now, you did fucking amazing. I…” she hesitated, looking down briefly, then seemed to make herself look back up at me. “This is hard for me, but you handled this like a real badass. We’re alive now entirely because of you. And you risked your life, more than once, to make this happen, so...thank you.”

She hugged me.

As I hugged her back, I looked over, saw Elizabeth and Delilah had settled on the bed again. They were looking at us. “She’s right,” Delilah said. “Thanks.”

“Yeah, Chris. I...don’t even have words. I mean, you just fucking show up out of nowhere, save my life, more than once, fuck me better than I’ve ever been fucked, and your super fucking nice to me and take care of me? Thank you seems way too shallow,” Elizabeth said.

“You’ve more than thanked me enough so far, and it’s fine,” I replied. “And all of you helped me do this. I didn’t do it alone. But what I did do, I don’t regret or resent at all. You three are fantastic. Let’s just leave it at: we’re all here, we’re all safe, and we’re all grateful. Yeah?”

“Fine by me,” Delilah said.

“Yeah, that’s fine,” Megan said, pulling back slightly and looking up at me.

“All right, although I feel like I’m going to be thanking you for awhile,” Elizabeth replied.

“Well...not gonna say no to that,” I replied.

Megan laughed and gave me a kiss. “I’m starving,” she said.

“Yeah, me too. Let’s put dinner together.”

And that was what we did next. Given it was easiest and probably best under the circumstances, we cooked two big pots of stew made from fried up deer meat and some vegetables, mostly corn and peas, all recovered from that house.

Once the meal was made and distributed, we sat together on the bed and ate, careful not to spill anything, given the fact that we probably weren’t leaving this bed for the next who knew how long. Hopefully the storm didn’t last too long.

But we were here, and we were safe, and we were happy.

All in all, given the circumstances, I thought that was more than enough.

EPILOGUE

The storm lasted the rest of the day, and through the night, and a little ways into the next day, although periodic investigations of the thermometer revealed that it began to calm the fuck down sometime around dawn.

We slept a lot, especially me and Elizabeth.

We had sex, and all three of them blew me at least once.

And that was fucking awesome.

Although the storm finally died off a little bit around noon, and the sky was back to normal a couple hours after that, we opted to just stay in for the rest of that day and night, too. We ate, fucked, talked, relaxed, and finally slept.

The next day, we packed up everything we could, having to leave most of the blankets and extra cloth behind, but I had to be honest, I was flying high. The guns alone were a huge fucking find and great bargaining, but we’d also managed to find a decent store of food, and some medicine and other random supplies to help boost our stock.

Plus, those mobile heaters, hot damn.

Big find.

It took us another four days of walking before we at long last completed our journey.

~

“I gotta admit, I’m nervous,” Delilah said. “What if she’s not there? What if...shit, what if something’s happened to her?”

We were walking through a forest. We’d left the highway, as the town wasn’t actually directly off the highway, but a few miles east of it. The rest of the trip out here had been wonderfully uneventful, and I’d even manage to bag a deer yesterday.

“It’s a possibility,” I said, trying to ride the line between being supportive but also being realistic for her. “But whatever happens, wherever she is, I’ll help you find her. Our first order of business is to get a place, and get settled. Are we all cool to live together for now?” I asked.

“Obviously I’d love to, you’re the closest people to me in the entire world now,” Elizabeth said.

“Yeah, I’m down to live together,” Megan replied.

“Yeah,” Delilah said, distractedly. She was looking at the sky.

“See something?” I asked.

“I...yeah. It looks like smoke,” she murmured.

I looked up. She was right. Through the thick forest of trees, I could see smoke wafting on the air high overhead. That could be a big bonfire but…

I sniffed a few times and smelled burning on the air.

Also could be a bonfire or something like that but…

It might not be.

Delilah apparently picked up on that possibility too and suddenly took off.

“Shit, Delilah!” I said, and headed off after her. “Stay with her!” I snapped to Megan, and then I was off. Delilah was fast when she wanted to be.

I didn’t have to go far to catch up with her, however, because I saw her standing still as a statue just beyond the edge of the forest up ahead.

Moving quickly, I came to stand next to her.

“Oh my God…” she whispered.

Now I stood still as a statue. “Holy shit,” I muttered.

“What’s wrong?” Megan asked as she and Elizabeth approached.

Neither of us said anything. We stood atop a natural rise in the land that gave us a clear, clean view of the town of Pine View. It was a low sprawl of buildings settled across a broad, open area cut through by roads, a few creeks, and a river. There were small clusters of structures and individual buildings spread out here and there, but the bulk of the town resided near the middle of the area, what had once probably been eighty or so buildings.

Now, most of them were nothing more than burned rubble.

“Oh fuck me,” Megan muttered as she and Elizabeth came to stand beside us.

“Shit,” Elizabeth whispered.

We stood there in a line for a long moment.

Eventually, I began to realize there were people moving among the smoking ruins, and that probably a dozen of the buildings in the central mass, near the edge closest to us and maybe a mile distant, were still standing.

“Come on,” I said, “we need to see if we can help.”

A WARM PLACE 3 IS COMING MARCH 2021!

If you’re reading this, then thank

you for finishing my story!

If you would be willing to leave a review,

I would deeply appreciate it!

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ABOUT ME

I tend to write stories that blend adventure and sex, usually with a harem or polyamorous twist. I separate myself from most other authors in this genre by rejecting typical ‘alpha male’ type protagonists, and creating more realistic protagonists. I tend to emphasize things like trust, respect, vulnerability, and communication.

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A WARM PLACE 2. Copyright © by Misty Vixen.

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entire coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.