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Catch up on A Warm Place!

A WARM PLACE – PRELUDE

A WARM PLACE

A WARM PLACE 2

A WARM PLACE 3

A WARM PLACE 4

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

I opened the door the second I recognized Jessica’s voice.

Though I didn’t let my guard down completely, given the fact that she could’ve been here under duress, used as bait, or, hell, maybe she’d turned against us. Didn’t seem likely, but it wasn’t totally out of the question.

I slowly began to raise my pistol as, in the blowing whiteout that reduced visibility quite a bit, I saw not one but two figures.

Neither were armed though, and the other was a woman and another redhead, though that was all I could tell about her, bundled up as she was.

“What’s going on?” I asked as I stepped back to make way. Jessica and the other woman stumbled in, panting.

“I left my husband,” she managed, leaning against the nearest wall.

Great. All at once, a few pieces fell into place. At the very least, I realized that Jessica was making good on the promise I’d made her: if she really needed my help, she could come to me and I would help her. I wasn’t upset, and I didn’t plan on revoking that, but damn, she could’ve picked a better time for it.

“Did he follow?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” she replied.

I leaned out carefully and looked around, but it was practically useless. Visibility was down to barely ten feet. I couldn’t even see the trees at the edge of the property. I didn’t see anyone moving out there and no one was creeping up alongside the house. It would have to do. I shut the door and locked it tightly.

“Chris?! What’s going on?!” Susan called from the kitchen.

Right. Didn’t want to keep them in suspense. “It’s okay! It’s Jessica! Come here!”

“Jessica?” Lara called, and both women began walking closer.

“I’m so sorry to drop in like this,” Jessica said, looking at me as she leaned against the wall.

“I’m impressed you made it through the storm,” I replied. “And glad.” I glanced at the other woman, who had yet to speak. Her body language was standoffish, if not outright hostile. Her face was mostly hidden by a scarf and hat, only her eyes visible. They were extremely blue and they looked a lot like Jessica’s.

In fact, if she wasn’t standing right there, I’d have assumed I was looking at Jessica.

Those eyes were staring daggers at me, and they didn’t look away when I looked into them.

A sister, maybe?

Lara and Susan came into the hallway.

“Jessica,” Lara repeated, coming over and wrapping her in a hug. “What happened? Why did you go out in a fucking blizzard!? You could have died!”

“I know, I...didn’t think it through,” Jessica replied. “It was kind of sudden.”

“So what’s actually going on?” Susan asked. I glanced at her and noticed she was kind of standoffish right now, too.

Though that was really her natural demeanor.

“I got into a fight with Travis, my husband. It...escalated. I…” She broke off as Lara stepped away, shivering violently, and I realized she must be freezing.

“Come on, come to the living room, by the fire,” I said.

She nodded and she and the other woman followed us out of the hallway and into the living room. They both went to stand before the fire and I crouched down, throwing on another log and getting it a bit more blazing with the poker. “Did he hit you?” I asked.

“He shoved me,” she replied. “I hit him.”

“It’s about fucking time,” the other woman said, speaking for the first time.

“Hannah!”

“He deserved it.” I looked up and saw her taking off her scarf and hat. She let down short, vividly red hair, and as she revealed a strikingly beautiful face, I saw that there was no question: she was related to Jessica.

Had to be her younger sister, or cousin, maybe?

Jessica took off her own hat and tried to shake the snow from herself. “Anyway, uh, I left. We left. I remembered how to get here, from the time Lara showed me, and, well…” She looked directly at me now, blushing, uncomfortable. “You told me you’d help me. If I really needed it. And I really need it.”

“I’ll help you,” I said, and the relief on her face was obvious. As I stood up, she embraced me, and I hugged her back, held her tight.

Hannah’s body language definitely turned hostile and she crossed her arms, glaring at me.

What was her deal?

Did she know I was fucking Jessica? I guess that could be it. Could be awkward.

This wasn’t awkward, though. This was anger.

“Thank you,” Jessica murmured into my chest. “God, I’m so tired.”

“How did you actually make it here?” Lara asked.

“It wasn’t all that bad when we set out, but we did get lost for a bit. Honestly, I think it was just luck that we managed to get here,” Jessica replied.

“It was extremely lucky,” Susan murmured.

As Jessica disengaged from me, Hannah stepped closer to me. The way she did it kicked on some reactive instincts and I shifted my weight. I seriously thought she was going to swing on me or something. She hesitated, staring at me hard.

“You’re Chris,” she said.

“Yes,” I replied, wondering if I was going to get an answer as to why she was so pissed at me. The thought that maybe she was just pissed in general because she’d been through a trying, maybe even traumatic event, occurred to me, but no, it was obvious that it was at me.

“Thank you,” she said through gritted teeth after a few seconds, like she had to force it out.

“For…”

“Talking her into leaving that prick,” Hannah replied.

“Hannah!” Jessica hissed again.

“He is a fucking prick!”

“He is your father,” she replied.

“Whoa, wait, what?” I asked.

“Hannah’s your daughter?” Susan asked at the same time.

“Yeah...didn’t that ever come up?” Jessica asked.

But I was staring at Hannah, then looking over at Jessica, comparing the two. I was right, they were related, but…

Hannah didn’t look very young, then again, Jessica was forty years old. Though she didn’t quite look it. Hannah looked older, I thought maybe a few years older than me, but now that I looked at her more closely...yeah. She did look younger, youthful, and not just from good genes.

“What do you mean?” I asked finally, coming back around to what Hannah had originally said. “How did I talk her into it?”

“I don’t know, but that’s what she insinuated,” Hannah replied.

I looked curiously at Jessica, though the thought going through my head at that moment was that it made a little more sense as to why she didn’t like me.

I was fucking her mom, and she had to know that. Or, well technically I had fucked her mom at least once.

Jessica brushed some hair back from her face. She was blushing now. “When we...met, it made me think. About a lot of things. When you asked me why I was-” She glanced at Hannah. “-um. Why I was, uh…” she stumbled and her mind seemed to go blank.

Hannah sighed explosively. “God, mom! I know already, okay!? I know you’re fucking him and I don’t care! Dad’s a fucking asshole!”

“Hannah!” Jessica cried, part shocked, part exasperated. “You have no tact, you know that?!” The way she said it made me think that it was something she’d said hundreds of times and from the angry, volatile gaze in Hannah’s eyes, I could tell that was probably true. Or rather, she seemed like the kind of person who didn’t bother with tact.

Being as attractive as she was, she could get away with it.

I pumped the brakes there and put that in check. She didn’t seem like a teenager, although she very well could be, and honestly I was reluctant to go to that age. Not that I should even be thinking thoughts like that when I’d already hooked up with Jessica though.

Jessica looked back at me. “When you asked me why I was-” She stumbled again, but pressed on. “Why I was cheating on my husband, it made me think about it. Really think about it. And I started realizing a lot of things. And it ultimately led to the argument and us being here and…” She sighed softly and fell silent, looking just tired now.

This was too much. I glanced at Lara and Susan. Lara looked concerned, Susan looked…

Mad.

Crap. Now I had two of them glaring daggers at me.

And I at least knew why with Susan: I’d never run any of this by her as even a possibility. I really should’ve mentioned that I’d made a promise like that to Jessica, but I didn’t think it would come up so soon!

“Okay, um, this is a lot,” I said, stepping up and taking control of the situation again, because this was what at least some of the women in the room seemed to either want or be comfortable with, “so why don’t the two of you sit here and catch your breath and warm up. We’ll, uh, we were just finishing up lunch, so you can join us.”

“Fuck, I need to check on that,” Susan muttered. “Be right back.”

She disappeared into the kitchen and I looked at Lara, who gave me a worried look. No doubt she was concerned about something similar to myself: Susan was very close to blowing up at one or both of us. I can’t imagine she reacted to abrupt change very well, especially if she was already concerned about our living situation.

And that set off a fuse of anxiety inside my own head even as I thought it.

Now, instead of providing for three mouths, I was providing for five.

Shit.

And I had exactly one bullet left in the rifle.

Double shit.

Susan came back a moment later. “It’s fine, I took it off the stove.” She was clenching her jaw and a tendon in her slim white neck was taut as a bowstring as she stared hard at me. “Can I please speak to you somewhere else?” she asked tersely.

“Yeah,” I said. “We’ll be right back, just...relax here.”

“Okay,” Jessica said. Then she said, “thank you, again.” Then she added, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine, and you’re welcome,” I replied, and set off.

Susan and Lara followed after me as we walked down the hall and finally came to Susan’s bedroom. Once we walked inside, she slammed the door.

“What the fuck is this, Chris?!” she snapped, stepping right up to me and staring at me with obvious fury.

Submission be damned this woman did not back down when she was pissed.

I had to admit, I really liked that about her.

“I’m sorry,” I replied. “When we met, after we had sex and I got an idea of how shitty her relationship with her husband was, I...offered her help. If she ever really needed it. It was the right thing to do.”

Susan glared at me and crossed her arms.

“Susan,” I said, more firmly, “it was the right thing to do.”

She stared at me for a few seconds longer, holding my gaze with her angry green eyes, then she sighed and relaxed ever so slightly. “Fine,” she replied begrudgingly.

“You really want her to stay in an abusive relationship?” Lara asked.

Susan sighed more heavily and threw up her arms. “I said ‘fine’! I just…” She looked at me again and her expression grew less angry, more worried. “Chris, this is a lot to take in, okay?! God, this house is just big enough for three of us, and now there’s five of us!? We’re doing okay for food right now, but this will cut our reverses almost in half!”

“I know, I know,” I said. “I didn’t even know she had a daughter…” I muttered.

“I’m sorry I didn’t mention that,” Lara said.

“There was no reason to. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is: they’re here, they need help, we’re going to help them...right? We’re agreed?” I asked, looking at Lara, then at Susan.

“Yeah,” Susan said after a few seconds. “Obviously I’m not going to kick them out. They can stay here. But we’ll obviously need to rearrange things.”

“We’ll get it figured out later,” I said. “Let’s go eat for now. That’ll calm everything down.” I paused and looked at Lara. “Is there any reason Hannah would hate me? Beyond the fact that she knows I’m fucking her mom?”

“I don’t know, but I noticed that, too. If looks could kill you’d be fucking six feet under.”

“Well she’s got no tact,” Susan said, “so you’ll probably find out soon enough when she screams it at you, if it’s more than that.”

“I guess you’d know,” I replied.

She was turning towards the door but she spun back to face me. “I have tact you fucking giant prick!”

“How’s that not a compliment?” I replied.

“You are insufferable sometimes, you know that?!” she snapped, and I actually couldn’t tell if she was angry or just mock angry.

I decided to test it. I reached out and traced a finger across her throat. “Keep it up, and I’ll show you suffering,” I replied.

She gasped softly and shuddered, closing her eyes briefly. Okay, either mock anger or I’d just hit her with a hard injection of horniness and pushed aside real anger.

“L-let’s just get lunch,” she managed.

I laughed. “Yes. Let’s.”

We went back out.

When we returned to the living room, I found the atmosphere to be uncomfortable and awkward. They were both sitting on the couch at opposite ends, not looking at each other. They seemed to have warmed up now, at least.

“Come on, let’s get lunch,” I said, and pointed them towards the dining room.

“Thank you,” Jessica replied as they got up.

We took a few moments to get the mountain lion stew Susan had been preparing. She’d made a lot of it with the intention of freezing the leftovers, but as it was, it was just enough for five of us to have a full meal’s worth.

“What is this?” Hannah asked once we were all settled.

“Vegetables and mountain lion,” I replied.

“Where’d you find a mountain lion?” she asked, and I noticed a little bit, just the tiniest bit of edge came off her voice.

“Little ways up north. Susan and I had to fight it.”

“You killed a mountain lion?”

“Technically Susan did,” I replied.

She looked at me, then at Susan, then down at her food and didn’t say anything as she began eating. We all ate, and for several minutes, no one spoke. I could tell that Jessica was still pretty shaken up over the whole thing. She looked pale and unhappy and stressed, and I found myself wishing there was something I could do to help her.

Maybe I could give her a good, hard dicking. An orgasm would help her relax, I think.

Or maybe I was just thinking with my cock.

I glanced briefly at Hannah. Shit, this was gonna get awkward fast.

“So, uh, listen,” I said after several minutes, “this house isn’t really big or anything. There’s just two bedrooms. I was thinking Lara and I could move into the master bedroom,” I glanced at Susan, and she just shrugged and nodded, “and you two could take Lara’s room. We’ve only got two beds, although I guess we could move one of the couches in there…”

“No, I don’t care about sharing at this point,” Hannah said. “We’ve had enough shitty sleeping situations that it’s whatever.”

“That will be fine,” Jessica said. She looked around as she chewed on her lower lip, and her gaze came to rest on Susan. “I’m really sorry about this,” she said. “I know Lara and Chris had at least some idea something like this could happen, but obviously they never got around to telling you, and I’m so sorry to impose like this, I just-”

“Jessica,” Susan said, “it’s okay. I know. You didn’t have a choice. I’d rather be inconvenienced than have a good person in a bad situation.”

“What makes you think I’m a good person?” Jessica muttered, looking down at the table suddenly.

“Lara trusts and likes you, that’s good enough for me,” Susan replied.

“Well...thank you. Really,” she said after a long moment.

“You’re welcome,” Susan replied.

We went back to eating after that, and no one seemed to be able to think of anything else to say.

TWO

“It just hit me that you don’t have any backpacks or bags or anything,” I said.

As soon as we had finished dinner, Lara and I had stood up and excused ourselves to go start the process of clearing out our room while Susan stayed behind to clean up. Hannah had agreed to help her after Jessica suggested as much, and then Jessica herself had followed after us.

“Yeah, we...didn’t get a chance to grab anything on the way out,” Jessica said, looking embarrassed again. “I panicked. God, I’m such a fuck-up,” she whispered.

“Hey,” I said, dropping what I was doing and stepping over to her. I put my hands on her hips. “You’re not a fuck-up, Jessica. What you did was very brave.” A little misguided and poorly thought out, I added in my head, but she didn’t need to hear that right now. “And you got your daughter and yourself out of there, and you made it to a safe location, in a blizzard no less, and that’s what matters. You’re safe with me, you know that, right?”

“Yes,” she whispered, hugging me again, hugging me tight, squeezing me really. “I believe that. I feel stupid for believing it, we met once and it was just to hook up, but I do feel safe with you, Chris. I don’t know why, I just do.”

“He’s a good man, Jessica,” Lara said, coming over and gently rubbing Jessica’s back. “It’s because you have good instincts.”

She laughed bitterly. “If I had good instincts I wouldn’t have ended up with Travis.”

“You’ve been with him for two decades, Jessica, I can’t imagine he was an asshole the whole time. And I’m sure he was different when you first met,” I replied.

She was silent for a few seconds, her face still buried in my chest. “Maybe,” she said finally. “Yes and no, I guess. When you’re a teenager, it’s so much harder to pick up on red flags. Arrogance looks like confidence. Being an asshole, dismissive behavior, it all looks like ‘bad boy’ stuff, which for some reason makes a lot of women act stupid and horny. But he definitely got worse slowly over the years, and then he really got worse when the apocalypse happened.” She finally pulled back and looked up at me, and there was something different in her gaze now. Something needy and almost desperate and perhaps a little coy. “Chris…”

“Yeah?” I replied.

She licked her lips and glanced briefly over her shoulder, then back at me. “Will you fuck me?” she whispered. “Right now? I need it. I’m freaking out and it would help me calm down.”

“I’d be glad to fuck you calm,” I replied, and she laughed.

She giggled and then looked at Lara. “Can you run interference? I don’t want Hannah wandering back here…”

“Yeah, go on and get off, I’ve got you,” Lara replied. She leaned in and gave Jessica a long kiss that was very nice to see, then did the same thing for me, and then left the room.

“Should we do it here?” I asked.

“Can we do it in another bedroom? This is where we’re gonna live...although I bet you and Lara have fucked so much in that bed.”

“We have,” I confirmed, “but come on.”

I led her out of Lara’s and I’s old room and into the master bedroom. Despite the shockwaves in my life this detonation had created and, more importantly, would create in the near future, that good old hit of lust came down the pipeline and hit me like a shot that left me buzzing with excited sexual energy.

Holding Jessica’s hand was enough to get me ready and by the time we’d walked into the bedroom and gotten the door closed, I was fully ready for action.

As I turned back from the door to face Jessica, she glanced down and a small laugh escaped her. “Wow, that eager already?” she asked.

“Hell yes,” I replied as I took off my shirt and then began to undo my pants. “Does that surprise you still? I thought we talked about this last time.”

“We did,” she replied as she took off her own shirt. “Then I started wondering if you were just being nice, or maybe you were just excited to have sex with me because it was a new woman or an older woman or a married woman or maybe you were just doing Lara a favor-”

“Jessica, Christ,” I said, getting out of my pants and then stepping out of them, closer to her, putting my hands on her shoulders, “you’re amazingly attractive. Not even in a way that people feel the need to throw a caveat on, like ‘unconventional’! You are fucking hot. Like, most people would find you really attractive. Why are we even having this conversation? How can you not see that?”

“I don’t know,” she murmured after a moment.

I kissed her suddenly and then pulled back, staring into her eyes. “Sorry, I’m not trying to make you feel bad, I’m just...confused. I mean I’m glad you aren’t full of yourself but it’s just so weird that you aren’t confident at least in how you look. But look, right now, just accept that I think you’re so fucking hot and I am really fucking glad to be having sex with you and just forget everything else. Okay?”

She stared at me for a long moment, then nodded. “You’re right. Let’s just fuck.”

“Good.”

I helped her get her undershirt and sports bra off, freeing those fantastic tits of hers, and took a moment to admire them. She just smiled and blushed as I cupped them gently. Then I spent some time kissing her, slipping one hand down the back of her jeans and into her panties, groping her bare, smooth, fit ass as we tongue-kissed and I slipped my other hand over the back of her neck. Holding her closer, I tilted my head slightly and deepened the kiss and she moaned and shuddered against me.

After a moment, I pulled back and looked down at her. “Jessica, I should ask now, what kind of person are you in bed? What do you want?”

She looked up at me, a little startled. “I...I’m not sure,” she admitted.

“What are you like with Lara?”

She closed her eyes and thought for a moment. “First we were exploring, and then it became her kind of taking care of me, I guess, because she was so much more experienced.”

“How did you feel about that?”

“I liked it,” she replied, smiling and slowly opening her eyes. “I liked it a lot. I liked being taken care of by someone, by letting someone else just...run things. Do things to me, tell me what to do, I don’t want to think during sex, I just want to feel.”

“I can work with that,” I said.

“You’ll take care me?” she asked.

“I’ll take care of you. Your biggest concern will be keeping a lid on it.”

“Shit, right...if you feel the urge to put a hand over my mouth, I wouldn’t be opposed to that,” she said with a small smile.

Goddamn, how many submissive women was I going to run into out here?

Not that I was complaining.

I just grinned and pushed her back onto the bed. She gasped as she landed with a bounce and then I undid her jeans and pulled them and the thermal underwear and the panties I found underneath off, peeling them away and tossing them quickly. Soon she was naked and I had a full view of her nude, pale, fit body.

“Jessica,” I said, staring in something like disbelief.

“What?” she murmured, chewing on one lip, staring shyly up at me with a sly grin.

“Seriously. You are a fucking goddess.”

I leaned over her, held myself up on my hands, and made out with her for a bit. Then I kissed her neck, making her gasp and writhe a little, then I went lower and started licking across her wonderful pink nipples and large pale breasts.

“Oh my,” she whispered. “This is going to be difficult.”

“You’ll do fine,” I replied.

“I really won’t,” she groaned as I started sucking on one of her tits.

I lingered there, working her nipple with my lips, letting my tongue flick over it occasionally, getting her to moan over the next few moments, and then I kissed my way lower, down her smooth, taut stomach, across her right hip, then licked up across her inner thigh.

She gasped. “Oh, Chris! That’s sensitive,” she whispered.

“I know,” I replied, getting down onto my knees.

I spent a moment working her up, teasing her pussy with my tongue, making her twitch and groan and gasp, and then, when I sensed her getting frustrated, I started licking her clit. She let out a moan that was cut off as she clapped her hand over her mouth. I put some good work in on her pussy, licking her clit and massing it and stroking it, making her squirm and tremble and try desperately not to be too loud.

Honestly, she needed it, and she deserved it.

I ate her out until she reached two orgasms, and then I got back to my feet. That was when I took off my boxers and got up against her. Jessica was flushed, sweating, and panting now, and she stared at me with wide, lusty eyes as I gripped her and pulled her closer to me in a sharp tug. She gasped with the movement.

“You’re so different,” she whispered, breathing heavily, “than him. I’ve never been with anyone like you.”

“He doesn’t matter anymore,” I replied, running my hands up her pale, thick, athletic thighs and then resting my cock at the entrance of her glistening, mature pussy. “Put your legs up.”

“Okay,” she said, nodding and raising her legs into the air, spreading them, giving me better access to her and then…

“Ahhhhh fuck…” I groaned loudly as I slid into that sweet pink pussy.

She was so fucking wet and the pure total pleasure of her raw vagina was fucking mind-blowing. I worked my way slowly into her, remembering that she’d complained about soreness the last time we’d had sex, and listened to her start to pant and moan again.

“Oh fuck. Oh, Chris,” she moaned. “Oh my God, you’re really big.”

I just grunted in response as I pushed deeper into her and she cried out. I rested her ankles on my shoulders, set my feet so I had a good, steady position to fuck from, and then I started giving it to her. I gave her my cock deep and hard once I was all the way in.

“I’m going to take care of you,” I said, panting as I felt that pleasure of unprotected pussy burning into me.

Raw sex was still the best thing I’d ever felt.

“Please…” Jessica moaned.

“Please what?” I replied, watching her big tits bounce with the rhythm of our sex, then looking lower and seeing my cock slipping into her again and again.

Goddamn she was wet! So fucking wet and hot and slippery and right now this pussy was fucking mine.

She was giving it up to me.

“Please take care of me,” she gasped. “Please. I need it.”

“You’ll get it,” I replied, and fucked her faster.

She lost the ability to speak coherently and I leaned forward, finding out how flexible she was as I pushed her legs down so that I could also put a hand over her mouth.

She was pretty flexible.

Her eyes opened wide as I held my hand flat and firm over her mouth, pressing her down into the mattress, and she let out a scream of pleasure.

I fucked her brains out until she had another orgasm all over my cock, reveling in the naked ecstasy of the encounter, lost utterly and completely inside of it.

Inside of her.

Not long after she was finished, I dumped my load into her and she moaned along with me as my legs locked into place and my hips jerked forward in reflexive reaction to the climax and I began spurting huge geysers of my seed into her.

I filled her pussy up for a long time, my cock convulsing as the shockwaves of pleasure blasted through me and my stuff jetted out of me.

It just went and went and went and oh my fucking God it was an amazing orgasm.

“Jesus,” I whispered as I opened my eyes back up and looked down. I’d made a fucking mess in her. I’d comed so much inside of her that it had overflowed and spilled out around my cock onto the floor and the edge of the bed.

I wasn’t sure if it was the most I’d ever busted, but it had to be up there.

I pulled out of her and then sat down beside her on the bed where she lay panting, gasping really, her eyes wide.

“Feel better?” I asked.

“Yes,” she murmured dreamily, “much better.” She paused. “I can feel it leaking out of me. It feels like a lot. Is it?”

“It was a hell of a lot,” I replied. “Jessica...maybe it’s a dumb question, but why are you insecure about the way you look?”

She sighed softly. “I guess it’s because of a few things. I’ve been obsessive about how I look for my whole adult life, even before that. And it basically became my job to look good after I became a trophy wife. I won’t say it was hard, exactly. I know that I was really lucky. I just look good. Honestly the hardest part was maintaining my body. I used to be fitter, honestly, but it does get harder when you get into your mid-thirties. But I guess what really got me started was the fact that after the first year into the apocalypse, I don’t know, it’s like he lost interest in me. And he started flirting with other women we’d run into, and I’m almost sure he fucked one of those perfect little blonde college-age sluts we picked up-” She stopped and sighed and shook her head. “I have to stop that. I don’t even have a right to be angry even if he did.

“Plus, to be honest, after I met Lara...oh my God. Look, I know I’m at least a certain level of hot, but Lara is just...I can’t compete with that.”

“Then don’t,” I said.

“It’s not that simple,” she murmured.

“Yes it is.” She looked at me now. “It really is. People have so many problems and, believe me, I know. I fucking know about problems. But the thing I’ve found is when it comes to insecurities, the answer is just don’t listen to them. I mean it’s one thing if you want to get in shape, or teach yourself something, or whatever. Self-improvement can be great. But that stupid fucking little voice in the back of your head that tells you you’re never gonna look good enough, you’re never gonna be smart enough, you’re never gonna be good enough? That voice is never gonna be satisfied, okay? You can never feed your insecurity enough. So don’t. Starve it. You don’t need it anyway. You’re plenty beautiful, Jessica, and you’re more than your beauty.”

“Am I?” she asked softly. “That’s all I’ve been almost my whole life. It became my job, my meaning, my main focus.”

“I’m sorry that it did,” I said. “And I know one conversation isn’t going to fix everything. But you made the hard choice: you walked away. Now you’re free. Free to figure out what you want to do, who you want to be. Don’t be scared to do that.”

“I am scared,” she murmured, “but I think you’re right...thank you. For everything.” She made a face suddenly and sat up. “I need to clean up. You made a huge mess.”

“Yeah, if I don’t try to clean this up, Susan will bitch at me,” I muttered as I got up too. While we went about cleaning up the mess, something else occurred to me. “Jessica, is there some reason Hannah would hate me?”

“Hate you? No, why?” she replied.

“You didn’t notice the way she was glaring at me out there? The way she had to choke out the thank you she gave me? She’s radiating hatred, and towards me specifically.”

Jessica looked startled. “I...I guess I missed that. Shit. I don’t know. Maybe because we’re having sex? I guess that’d be weird for her. Maybe I should ask her…”

“No, don’t. I think it’ll just piss her off more. As you pointed out, she has no tact. She’ll tell me soon enough, I think. For now, let’s just get you two settled.” As we finished cleaning up, something else occurred to me. Something that should’ve occurred to me sooner. Or, well, I guess it had, it was one of the first things I’d asked, but I should have followed up. “Jessica, I need to know: are we in danger? Because I’ve played this game before and I don’t like it.”

“What game?” she asked, starting to pull her clothes back on.

“I ran into a woman a few months ago. She was on the run from her abusive husband. He showed up with some hired goons and in the end we were forced to kill them all. Damn near got killed myself. That fucking game. So how likely is it that your husband or some hired muscle is gonna show up here looking for trouble? I met that guy, what was his name?”

“Thomas?” she asked.

“Yeah. Him. The big guy? I ran into him a few days ago while I was out hunting. He’s bigger than I am and he looks mean and dangerous.”

“He is,” she murmured. “He’s kind of our bodyguard. He’s traveled with us for a few months and he’s killed people before. But I-I honestly don’t know what will happen.” She looked at me again with that miserable expression. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” I replied as I pulled my own clothes back on. “Whatever happens, you made the right choice, okay? And whatever happens, I won’t let anything happen to you.”

“Or Hannah?”

“Or Hannah,” I replied. “Although she seems like she can take care of herself.”

“She can,” Jessica murmured, then smiled gently. “In a lot of ways, she’s so much more than I am. She’s tougher and smarter and stronger. Even before the apocalypse she was like that. But she still has a lot to learn…”

“You two will be safe here,” I promised. I finished getting my clothes back on and waited for her to finish as well, then went for the door. “Come on, let’s get you settled.”

THREE

The rest of the day was basically slowly falling tension, like a boiler that had gotten way too high-pressure and had to be eased back down to normal.

Lara and I moved all our shit out of the room we’d been sharing since I moved in and into what had been Susan’s room and was now ours. Once we were done with that, and changing the sheets and blankets of the bed, we went out into the living room and from the way Hannah looked at me I could tell right away she knew I’d just fucked Jessica. And from the embarrassed look on Jessica’s face, that only confirmed it.

“So, uh, room’s ready,” I said.

“We’ll have to figure out some stuff for clothes. We’ve got a fair amount of spares so I’m sure we can find you both at least a few outfits,” Lara added.

“Thanks,” Hannah said grudgingly as she stood, then she walked out of the room. We all listened as she walked back down the hall, then shut the door.

“Is she going to be like that just...all the time from now on?” Lara asked.

Jessica sighed softly. “I don’t know. I’ll try to talk to her. She’s always been...difficult. She’s smart and brave and so difficult. I love her but good lord.”

“We’ll get it figured out,” I said, walking to the nearest window and looking out. The storm was still in full swing, and if we were lucky it wouldn’t let up for awhile. At least through the rest of the day and the night. “So what are the odds that we’re going to run into problems with your husband?” I asked, turning away from the window.

“Ex,” Jessica murmured. She looked down suddenly at the ring on her finger and then took it off. “He’s my ex-husband now.”

“Your ex,” I amended. “And this bodyguard...how many people exactly are living there?”

“Five now,” Jessica replied, setting the ring down on the coffee table after a moment’s indecision. “My ex-husband. Thomas, the bodyguard. The two college girls we picked up, Ashley and Marla. And one other guy Marcus.”

“Is he dangerous?” I asked.

“God no,” Jessica replied. “No, we met him a few weeks ago. He’s middle aged, not very big, timid. Managed to convince us to let him join because he was a mechanic. Travis figured he might be useful, but he’s the kind of guy who’ll just do what you tell him so I think he just kept him around because he likes having people around like that.”

“And your ex? Is he dangerous?” I glanced over as I saw Susan come in from the kitchen, leaning on the door frame, listening to us talk.

“Not really,” Jessica replied. “I mean, he’s not a big guy, and he’s not a fighter. He’s not very fit. He’s shot people since this all began, though, so I know he’s capable of it. But he thinks he’s intimidating and smart. He isn’t really. I mean...not anymore, I don’t think. He was a CEO of his own start-up, so he was smart enough to do that. Though really, if I’m being honest, he capitalized on other people’s work, smarter people, and then bought them out or fucked them over.” She sighed. “I don’t know what he’ll do.”

“You think he’ll come after you?” I asked.

“That’s the thing, I don’t know. As far as I know, now that I’m gone, maybe he’ll be happy. He’ll be free to fuck Ashley and Marla. We’d been arguing more recently, too. He would complain that Hannah and I were a drain on resources, we didn’t do enough, but he also wouldn’t really let us do anything. I’m willing to do stuff, but honestly Hannah’s been trying to learn how to hunt and clean kills and all sorts of survival stuff and he wouldn’t let her.”

Huh. Maybe that was a way to make peace with her. I had to admit, I wasn’t looking forward to living in a house with someone who hated me and was always angry.

“Well, if either him or Thomas shows up, we’ll be ready,” I said. “We can defend ourselves, and we are armed. Though not quite as armed as I’d like.”

“What are we going to do about that?” Susan asked.

“Hunt for supplies,” I replied. “I’ll figure it out. For now, I think I’m going to go down to the basement and finish sorting through those boxes. See if there’s anything useful.”

“Can I come?”

“It smells like blood down there, it’s where we gut the kills.”

“I don’t care.”

“Okay then, come on,” I replied.

We headed downstairs, leaving Susan and Lara alone to talk. They probably had things they wanted to discuss. Beyond these most recent developments, it was obvious that Susan was still figuring out everything with her own evolving sexual orientation and relationship with Lara. Jessica and I went down into the basement and didn’t talk about much. Mostly she asked me questions about myself and I answered them.

I think she just wanted something normal to happen, something calming, after that big emotional upheaval, and I could understand that.

So I did my best to accommodate.

Not much happened the rest of the day. It was pleasantly bland. After a slightly less uncomfortable dinner, I finished sorting through the rest of the stuff downstairs, finding not much more than a couple more books, some more clothes, and some stuff to burn. When it came time to sleep, I did my check of the area, (which I did from inside and poking my head out both doors, the storm was still blowing), made sure the fire was going and would last, and then went and fucked the shit out of Lara and Susan.

We did our best to keep it down.

“This sucks,” Susan muttered after we were all done, laying there together in the darkness of our shared bedroom.

“What?” Lara murmured.

“I finally fucking having not one but two super hot people to have sex with and now suddenly we’ve got roommates and I can’t just scream like a banshee every time one of you makes me orgasm. It’s...annoying.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s not your fault. I guess it’s no one’s fault. Except that jackass husband of hers.”

“Ex,” I murmured.

“Yeah. Ex. Good. Guy can go fuck himself.” She paused, and when she spoke up again, worry had crept into her voice. “Chris, if him or that big guy comes around...you can handle it, right?”

“I can handle it,” I replied.

She laid more firmly against me. “Good.”

I kissed the top of her head and hugged her. “Go to sleep.”

“Okay,” she said softly, then yawned.

I kissed Lara and pretty soon we were drifting off.

~

“Chris...Chris, wake up.”

I came awake all at once, my eyes opening up and my head raising, looking around. I saw Jessica standing there, wearing a t-shirt and longjohns.

“What? What’s wrong?” I asked.

“What’s going on?” Susan muttered sleepily.

“Oh shit, I didn’t think this through,” Jessica said, suddenly looking anxious. I tried to figure out what was happening. It was somewhere around dawn, I knew that much due to the dim gray light coming in through the windows, and Jessica wanted something.

“What’s up?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I just...I was horny,” she whispered. “I wanted a ride, but I kinda forgot it wasn’t just you and Lara in here. You’ve both had sex with me before, and I…”

“Susan? You care?” I asked.

“I don’t care, just don’t take too long,” Susan replied, rolling over and resettling.

“Are you sure?” Jessica asked.

“Do him, Jessica, or I will,” Lara murmured.

“Thank you!” she whispered, and tossed off her shirt and leggings and panties she wore underneath, and climbed into bed with us. It took a certain amount of maneuvering, but I soon found myself happily beneath Jessica as she slipped my erection into her sweet, wet pussy. We both groaned in sexual unity as she started riding me.

“Oh yes,” she whispered, “oh my God that’s so good. It’s been forever since I’ve had morning sex. It’s just...oh fuck…”

“This is so hot to watch,” Lara murmured.

I groaned as I grabbed Jessica’s wonderfully fit ass, feeling her move against me, feeling her taking me into herself again and again.

She fucked me until she’d gotten herself off, and then she let me pump her full of seed and I was blinded by bliss.

When she was finished, Jessica got off of me, then cursed and held a hand over her pussy. “Shit, I forgot about that,” she muttered.

“There’s water and cloth over there on the dresser,” Lara said as she started climbing atop me.

“Oh, is it your turn now?” I asked.

“Yeah, duh,” she replied, grinning as she took my sticky erection into her wonderfully wet pussy and I groaned again as she started to ride me.

Fifteen minutes later, after Susan had made Lara get off after she’d, well, gotten off, but before I had for a second time, and then ridden me and I’d finished in her, making her complain about the mess, I was up and clean and dressed. I left Jessica sneaking back into her shared room, hoping she managed her covert fuck without Hannah knowing, and then I began the process of waking the house up. When I got outside to do a perimeter check, I saw it wasn’t as early as I’d thought. It was just that the clouds were still hanging around.

I didn’t see any traces of people or animals having hung around, but it had snowed for a lot of yesterday so some wolves could’ve come sniffing around at some point and their prints could’ve been wiped away.

After gathering firewood and getting the snow boiling and all that crap, I started putting breakfast together. I needed time to think. Because obviously the equation of how I was going to live my day to day life had just changed. I threw together a stew of deer meat and vegetables, because most of our meals were stews nowadays, and then I did a quick survey of our food storage. Running some rough calculations in my head, I figured that we now had probably, at a stretch, enough food for a week. In reality, probably closer to five days.

Not enough.

The first thing I wanted to do was to go and check out Hank and Abigail’s farm. Hopefully they were gone and somewhere safe, if not happy, by this point. I felt a little thrill of lust and fondness as I remembered Abigail.

She’d get tucked away in my memories forever as the hot married cougar who jumped me more than once.

Damn, she’d had nice hips.

Before long, Susan came into the kitchen, and I heard Lara moving around in the living room. She poked around in the cabinets and fridge for a few minutes while I tended the stew, probably worrying over the same thing I was.

“How are you going to handle this?” she asked when she was done.

“A lot of hunting. Figuring out a schedule for all five of us to pitch in on stuff. Searching some buildings and areas for supplies. Starting today with the farmhouse.”

“I want to come with you,” Susan replied.

“Okay.” I studied her for a moment. “How you feeling?”

“Anxious, mostly.”

I began to respond, but suddenly there was a pounding on the back door. It was almost like an exact repeat of yesterday. Although this time I still had my pistol in its holster from my little walk around the exterior.

“Shit,” Susan hissed.

“Go tell Hannah and Jessica to stay in their room,” I said as I walked into the living room. “Lara, wait in the kitchen.”

“Okay,” she replied, already standing, fear obvious on her face.

She walked past me and Susan as we headed into the main corridor. Susan went back towards the bedrooms where I saw Hannah’s head poking out. Once Susan had them safely behind a closed door, I stepped closer to the door, my pistol out.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“My name’s Thomas, I’m looking for someone,” came a semi-familiar voice. Great. “Open the door,” he added when I didn’t do it right away.

I glanced back at Susan. She had a hand on her own sidearm, ready to draw it. I nodded. “At the floor,” I murmured.

She nodded back, drew it, aimed it at the floor.

I opened the door.

Sure enough, there was Thomas, looking big and bad and mean. Probably the intent. He had a big baggy overcoat on and a rifle peeking up over his shoulder from where it was slung. He looked at me, at the pistol in my hand, then behind me at Susan.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

“Yeah. I’m looking for someone. Two women. Redheads. Are they here? Have you seen them?” he asked. Clearly he suspected as much. The guy had no subtlety.

I thought about how to handle this for the moment. I could lie, but this probably wasn’t just going to go away.

Finally, I decided I needed to talk to Jessica and Hannah about what they wanted to do, how they wanted to handle it.

“Give me a minute,” I replied, and began to close the door.

“Hey,” he said, putting his hand on it, “are they here or not?”

I stared at him for a few seconds before speaking. “I’d rather this not turn difficult.”

His eyes narrowed and I could see him weighing his options. I imagined he wasn’t used to being told ‘no’ very often.

“Fine,” he said, counting the odds and apparently not liking what he was coming up with. He removed his hand. “Two minutes.”

“Fine,” I repeated back to him, and closed the door in his face. I considered locking it, but I didn’t want to antagonize him any further.

“Now what?” Susan asked.

“Now we figure this out,” I replied, walking past her. “Watch the door.”

She grunted in response and I walked back to the bedrooms. I knocked once and then opened the door, found Jessica sitting on the bed and Hannah pacing the room.

“Well?” Hannah asked.

“It’s that guy, Thomas. He’s looking for the two of you, seems to think you’re here. How do you want to play this?” I replied.

Jessica sighed. “Maybe lie to him...convince him we aren’t here?”

“No,” Hannah said with a sharp shake of her head. “This isn’t just going to go away, mom. Even if he does, he’ll keep looking for us. We need to face this here and now. We tell him we’re here, and we’re staying here, and he can fuck off.”

“Hannah...I don’t want to provoke him,” Jessica murmured softly, as if afraid of being overheard. She was afraid of him. I didn’t blame her.

“I don’t give a shit if we provoke him,” she growled.

“She’s right,” I said, and they both looked at me. “We should deal with this here and now. If it’s going to turn violent, I’d rather it turn violent here, with backup, instead of at some random point in the future.”

Jessica sighed miserably and slowly stood. “You’re right. You both are. Let’s...do this.”

Hannah seemed happy enough to march out after me. We walked down the hall together, the three of us, and Susan held her ground.

I opened up the door with Jessica standing beside me and Hannah standing behind us.

Thomas’s eyes widened in surprise and anger as he saw them. “They are here? What the fuck-okay, come on,” he said, reaching out towards Jessica’s arm. “We’re going.”

“Whoa,” I said, stepping between the two of them. “They’re staying here.”

“What? Bullshit they are,” Thomas snapped.

Jessica found her voice. “Thomas, just go back to Travis and tell him we’re done, okay? Tell him Hannah and I are done with him. We’re staying here. Tell him...tell him to consider last night a divorce, okay?”

Thomas looked at her as she spoke, but before she’d even finished speaking he looked back at me. “Look, man, just give them back, okay? Don’t make this difficult.”

Before either Jessica or I could respond Hannah exploded and shoved between us. “Ex-fucking-cuse me?!” she yelled, stepping right up to him and staring up into his face, (she was actually pretty tall, I realized in that moment). “He can’t ‘give us back’ because he doesn’t fucking own us! You can fuck right off with that shit!”

“Hannah-” Jessica began, but she cut her off.

“No! I’m sick of this shit! You fucking pricks treat us like we’re fucking pawns or pieces of meat-fuck you!” she screamed and shoved him.

I tensed, my heart kicking in my chest as she did that. Big as he was, it only sent him back a step, but she’d laid hands on him.

He put his hand inside his coat, no doubt reaching for a gun. “Don’t make this difficult,” he said, glaring at Hannah, then at me.

“You have your answer. Leave,” I replied.

“You really should give them back. This is the man’s wife and daughter,” he said.

“I wasn’t asking,” I replied flatly.

That seemed to get the message across. Something changed in his expression, and it was a rapid evolution. The first change was that he knew I wasn’t going to do what he wanted, and he was preparing himself for violence. Then he probably remembered Susan and her gun, and probably figured he didn’t know if there were other people around, maybe aiming for him from where he couldn’t see, and decided he couldn’t win this fight.

“We’re not going to leave this alone,” he said finally.

“You’d better,” I replied.

He sneered at that, and then finally he turned away and started walking. I stepped out into the snow and watched him until he’d disappeared into the trees. When he was out of sight, finally, I came back inside, shut and locked the door, and looked at the others. Susan was still standing there with her gun out, looking tense.

Hannah was practically trembling with anger, and Jessica was trembling with fear and anxiety.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I think so,” Jessica replied. She let out a long sigh. “Is he gone?”

“Yeah. He’s gone.”

“Okay. I’m gonna go...sit down. Ugh. I feel like I’m going to throw up,” she muttered, turning and walking into the living room.

“Is it safe?!” Lara called.

“Yeah!” I replied.

We all ended up in the living room, Lara sitting with Jessica and holding her while Hannah leaned against the wall, Susan sat on the coffee table, and I tried not to pace. This was definitely going to complicate things.

“What do we do?” Hannah asked.

“Susan and I have somewhere we need to go today. I want to stick around, just in case, but...eventually there’s going to come a point where we have to go, and if we have to go at some point, then it makes sense to do it sooner instead of later. We can’t let the fear of Thomas or your ex lurking around keep us locked in here.”

Hannah sighed. “Well don’t we have enough food to last awhile?”

“Technically, about a week at most,” I replied. “But you’ve always got to be thinking ahead. You really don’t want to be in a situation where you get down to a day’s worth of food, try to get more, and realize you can’t. Either there’s no game around, no people to trade with, or bad weather trapping you,” I explained.

She looked like she wanted to argue, but also looked like she saw my point. “So what then?” she asked finally.

I considered it. We still only had three guns between us. My nine, Susan’s thirty-eight, and the rifle with a single damned shell.

I looked at Hannah. “Can you shoot?”

“Yeah, I know how to work a gun. I’ve shot them before,” she replied.

“Are you a good shot?”

“I think so,” she replied. I studied her, wondering if she was being serious or that was just bravado. I couldn’t tell.

“You?” I asked, looking at Jessica.

She sighed and shook her head. “I’m bad with guns.”

I grunted and then began taking off my holster. “Hannah, I’m going to leave this pistol with you. It’s got twenty bullets. Don’t use it unless you absolutely have to.” I handed the holster and pistol to her. “I can trust you with this, right?”

“Yes,” she grunted, taking it and attaching it to her own belt.

I looked at Susan. “I need your pistol.”

She stared at me, then sighed, probably realizing that my argument would be that I was a better shot than she was. She handed me the holster and pistol. I thanked her, checking her thirty-eight over. Still nine shots in the magazine.

Hopefully I wouldn’t need them.

“We’ll stick around an hour, see what happens. If nothing has, we’ll leave and go visit the place we need to. We’ll be gone a few hours. After we get back, we’ll talk a little more and try and figure out a more long-term plan,” I said.

FOUR

An hour passed, and nothing happened.

I was tempted to stick around a bit longer, just because I kind of did want something to happen, some obvious threat that I could deal with, but after a perimeter sweep that turned up nothing and double-checking that Lara, Jessica, and Hannah would really be okay for a few hours, Susan and I finally headed out.

It was a nice enough day, at least.

Well, okay, it wasn’t actively snowing and the freezing winds had mostly died off.

As we made the trip out of the forest and across the freshly fallen snow, it occurred to me that Susan was angry. She hadn’t been earlier in the morning, and at first I thought it was just residual anger or fear from the encounter with Thomas. But as we passed the lake and crested the hill in front of the farm, I began to sense that maybe it was something else.

Approaching the farmstead, I tried to consider how to deal with it.

I’d asked for this, I supposed. I wanted to be close to Susan, now that I’d committed to a relationship with her and Lara and I was going to bring them back to Pine Lake with me. I just wish that I was better about stuff like this. In a way, I felt like I could be the poster boy for ‘guys who missed super obvious signals women try to send them’.

“Are you doing okay?” I asked as we passed the perimeter and began to head for the first building on the list of places I wanted to search: the barn. The doors were open and it looked empty inside. I imagined that was where they had been storing their vehicle. I had the impression Abigail and Hank were gone by now. There was no smoke coming from the chimney at the farmhouse, at least. I guess we’d find out.

“I’m fine,” she replied in a tone of voice that indicated she obviously was not fine.

“Susan…”

She sighed angrily as we stepped into the barn. “You didn’t tell me about any of this! And now we’ve got two more women living with us!” she snapped.

“I...I’m sorry,” I replied. “I thought we covered this yesterday. I mean, it was a bad situation and we can’t just send them packing-”

“Yeah I fucking know,” she snapped. “Let’s just search this place. I don’t want to talk about it.” And with that, she headed off to the right.

I considered whether or not to try and coax more out of her, because I was positive there was something I was missing, and finally just left it alone for now.

There was a job to be done anyway.

I puzzled over it as we took our time poking through the barn, though it wasn’t like there was a whole lot to poke through. A few crates at the back, a pile of old hay, a loft with a rickety ladder that Susan ended up opting to climb because she was so much lighter. We covered the whole space in about twenty minutes and came up with exactly zero useful things. From there, we headed around the side of the farmhouse and instead went to the equipment shed behind it. I wanted to get it out of the way before hitting the main house.

As the cold minutes went by while we searched what little there was to search in there, I both continued mulling over the situation and waited for Susan to be forthcoming. About halfway through our search, something abruptly hit me.

“You’re jealous,” I said.

“What?!” she snapped, sounding more startled than anything else.

“Are you jealous of Jessica or Hannah? Is that your problem?” I asked.

“No!” she replied immediately. “I’m not fucking jealous!”

“Okay then,” I said, deciding to wait her out.

She kept working in stony silence until we’d finished searching the equipment shed, finding little more than dirt, trash, and scrap metal that would be of absolutely zero value to us, and we finally made for the farmhouse. Susan maintained her silence as I worked to secure it, finding it had no basement. I checked out the ground floor and the second story, and confirmed that yeah, Abigail and Hank had indeed abandoned the place.

I hoped they were okay.

Then we started in the master bedroom upstairs and began our search, as the couple had promised to leave some stuff behind for us. I was hoping that no one else had made it here ahead of us. It didn’t seem that way, at least.

“Okay,” Susan said after several long minutes, “maybe I’m jealous.”

“You don’t have to be,” I replied, feeling a little triumphant.

“You know what, Chris? That’s easy for you to say because you’re banging every one of us except for Hannah. You don’t have any fucking competition.”

“Susan,” I replied firmly, staring at her and holding her angry green eyes with my own as she glared at me defiantly, “you don’t have any competition either.”

She let out a short, angry sigh. “You keep saying that but-”

“But nothing,” I said, cutting her off. “It’s not a competition. It’s a relationship.” I paused, scrutinized her a little more closely. “You’re not one of those people who keeps a checklist, are you? Marking it down in your head every time you do something nice for your significant other, and whenever they do something nice for you, and meticulously keeping ‘score’? Are you?”

“No!” she replied a little too loudly. I pursed my lips. She growled and crossed her arms, looking away from me.

“Jesus, you really are just a ball of fury aren’t you?” I muttered, walking over to her.

“I’ve had a lot to be furious about,” she replied after several seconds.

“Susan.” She wouldn’t look at me. I gently took her chin in my fingers and turned her head slowly to face me. She resisted for just a second, then let me do it. I tilted her head up so she was looking up at me. “You’ve been through a lot of shit. I get it. I really do. And I know that our relationship is young, and that it started in kind of a weird place, but...do you trust me?”

“You’ve already asked me that,” she muttered.

“Answer the question.”

“Yes, I trust you, Chris.”

“Then trust me when I say that you’re plenty hot to me, and I’m just as thrilled to fuck you as I am Lara or Jessica, or any of the girls you haven’t met yet back home. And trust me when I say that I’m into you for more than just your tight little goth body.” That made her smile and blush.

“Like what?” she mumbled finally, looking away as I let go of her.

“Like how you aren’t afraid of me.”

“I kind of am.”

“Yeah but that doesn’t stop you. You fucking stepped to me this morning, Susan. No hesitation, no fear. I respect that. You’re tough. You just need to let that seep into the rest of your life.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you need to reconcile the fact that you can be a tough, badass survivalist chick and be a submissive little whore in a harem of other girls.”

“I thought you didn’t like that word,” she said with a small smile.

“Lara’s now the second woman to use it in a positive light to describe my relationship...s, so maybe they have a point.”

“Who’s the other?”

“Delilah’s said it a few times. Anyway, my point stands.”

She seemed to think about it for a few seconds, then groaned and let out a huff of annoyance. “Yeah, it does. You’re right. That’s annoying. But...thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” I reached out and dragged my fingertip slowly across her throat, which had the same effect it always did, forcing her to freeze up and close her eyes and shiver violently. “You aren’t wearing your collar. Why not?”

“New people are around, I felt...self-conscious,” she murmured, slowly opening her eyes up again.

“Put it back on when we get home,” I replied.

“Yes, master,” she murmured.

“Good. Now get back to work.”

When she turned around I smacked her tight little ass hard enough to make her let out a small shriek of surprise, then she got to work.

We both did.

The next two hours passed slowly as we hunted through the rooms, checked in all the closets, under and behind the furniture, in anything that opened, looking for stuff we could use. Hank and Abigail had cleared the place out, though not completely. We found some more blankets and clothes upstairs. A book of matches. Some candles. A little stash of bandages and painkillers. That was all that was left upstairs. Downstairs bore a little more fruit in the form of some canned vegetables and some seasonings.

Unfortunately, by the time we wrapped it up and started heading back home, we had failed to find the thing I’d been looking for the most.

Guns. Ammo.

I’d take a good bow and arrow set at this point, honestly.

But there was nothing. No bullets of any kind, any caliber, and although we walked away from the farmstead with fuller packs than when we’d arrived, I didn’t feel much better.

~

The door to the house opened before we had a chance to actually get up to it, and my hand dropped automatically to the pistol on my hip.

Hannah stepped out and I relaxed.

“There you are,” she said, narrowing her gaze at me.

“Yeah, did something happen?” I replied.

“No, nothing happened. I wanted to talk to you,” she replied, closing the door and walking up to me, staring at me hard the whole time.

Still that hostile body language.

Maybe now I’d find out what the fuck her problem was.

“Go on in, I’ll be inside in a minute,” I said to Susan, who gave me a ‘good luck’ gaze and nod and headed off.

“Okay, what do you need?” I asked once the door closed behind her, and Hannah and I were alone.

“What I want is for you to start training me, teaching me. Hunting, fishing, skinning, cleaning, survival shit,” she replied all at once, her voice taking on a defensive, hard edge, like she was prepared for me to say no.

I was honestly caught off-guard by the request. I thought it would be something...well, I didn’t know what I thought it would be, but not this.

And apparently I hesitated too long. After everything else that had happened, it took me a moment to find my voice, and that was one moment too long for Hannah.

Her expression turned ugly and angry and she stepped closer to me. “Oh what? You want something from me? You want me to fuck you in exchange for it? You going to tell me to suck your cock and then you’ll do it?! Huh!?” she snarled.

I held up my hands. “First of all, take it down a notch. Second of all, what the fuck are you talking about?”

I mean I’d made deals like that before but never with anyone so openly hostile, fuck.

Her face was turning red and she actually shoved me. “Isn’t that what you’re doing to my mom you bastard?!” she screamed in my face.

Behind us, the door was yanked open and Jessica stepped out.

“Hannah-” she began, but Hannah whirled on her.

“I told you I could handle it! I said stay inside mom goddamnit!” she screamed.

Jesus, this was getting out of control.

But suddenly, a lot of shit made sense.

“Hannah, calm down right now,” Jessica said as she stepped outside, and she had that tone of voice that I’d heard mothers use before.

That ‘do not argue with me right now’ voice.

That seemed to take some of the venom out of Hannah because she at least stopped screaming.

“Hannah, it’s not like that,” I said.

She twisted back around to face me, still stricken with rage. “Don’t fucking lie to me, I see how they are around you!” she snapped. “You’ve got them under your fucking thumb and-”

“Hannah I swear to God you’d better calm the fuck down right now!” Jessica snapped as she marched over and got a physical grip on her shoulder.

“Mom, you know I love you, but if he’s taking advantage of you-”

“He is not taking advantage of me, Jesus fucking Christ,” she replied. “Is this why you were so mad at him? God, I knew I should’ve explained this to you but how the fuck am I supposed to explain to my daughter that I’m cheating on her father because he stopped having sex with me months ago and he stopped loving me years before that?! How, Hannah!? How exactly should I have worded that to you, and when!?” Now Jessica was the one who was pissed, and it was almost like a transference. Jessica was angrier, Hannah was calmer.

“Can we just...have a conversation about this?” I asked. “Just a calm, level-headed discussion?”

Hannah looked at me, then back at her mom, then finally at the ground. Abruptly, she snapped her gaze back up to us. “I need a minute to cool off. Don’t follow me.”

With that, she turned and marched off into the forest.

“Hannah!” Jessica called.

“Don’t fucking follow me, mom!” she snapped, disappearing into the trees.

“She’ll be okay,” I said.

An uncomfortable moment passed as Hannah’s crunching footfalls disappeared and we lost sight of her. A cold wind blew.

“I’m sorry about this,” Jessica said.

“So am I. Goddamn. That’s why she hated me so much. She thought I was forcing you to have sex with me in exchange for living here. From that perspective, after what you just went through together, yeah, I can see why she’d hate me.”

Jessica sighed heavily. “How was I supposed to tell her?”

“I mean, I don’t know. There’s no good way to have that conversation, I guess? You have a good point, how the hell are you supposed to explain to her why you were hooking up with someone a decade and a half younger than you and cheating on her father ‘cause her father sucks? Although it sounds like she already knew that last part.”

“She’s...never really been a fan of this. They haven’t gotten along for a long time now.”

“Why don’t you head inside and let me try to talk to her? Then you can talk with her after? There’s obviously more going on here than just your and I’s relationship. She has a lot to process, not to mention the background tension we all now carry thanks to Armageddon,” I suggested.

Jessica hesitated, lingered for a few seconds, then nodded. “Thanks,” she murmured. She paused. “I don’t suppose I have to tell you that I’m very protective of my daughter?”

“No,” I replied. “Trust me.”

She stared at me, then nodded once. “I do trust you.”

Jessica walked inside, leaving me alone in the cold. Though not for very long. I soon heard Hannah’s returning footfalls. When she came back, she seemed...well, technically calmer. At least more in control.

She came to stand before me and crossed her arms. “I’m ready to have that conversation,” she said, her voice flat but mostly neutral at least.

“All right. What do you want to know, then?” I replied.

“What my mom said is true?”

“You’d believe me over her?”

“I believe her, but I want to hear what you say.”

“Fair enough. It’s like she said: we had sex once last week because she just wanted to feel good and experience sex with another man, since she hadn’t done so for like twenty years.”

“And you? Why’d you do it?” she asked.

“You’re kidding, right? She’s a straight fucking ten.” I hesitated. “Maybe that came out wrong. If you want the brutal truth: I was horny, but I also did it because I believed her. That she just wanted some happiness and relief. There were never any conditions. I didn’t try to make her do it. I didn’t extort anything out of her. We hooked up, it was nice.” Hannah sighed and looked away briefly. “Hey, you asked.”

“I know,” she growled, looking back at me.

“I told her if she ever really needed help, I’d help her.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m nice.”

“No, I mean really why?”

I stared at her, pausing for emphasis. “Because. I’m. Nice. Really.”

“I find that too hard to believe.”

“Look, I helped save a whole fucking town, I rescued pregnant woman on the run from her ex-husband, I saved two women from being sold in slavery. All within the past four months. I’m just really fucking nice, okay?”

“You honestly expect me to believe-”

“I could give a shit what you believe!” I snapped, then regretted it. She was really trying my patience, but the look of fear that came across her face made me force myself to calm down. “Look, believe what you want, but the fact is: you live here now and your mom and I are an item and it’s not going to stop and I’m sorry if that’s weird. I’ll do what I can not to rub your face in it or anything and keep it to myself. Another fact you have to face is that you want something from me. Now, I could try to make you negotiate for it, but I’m not going to. You want my help learning about hunting and survival stuff, yeah?”

“Yes,” she replied.

“Then I’ll teach you what I know, no strings attached.”

“Out of the goodness of your heart?” she replied, sarcasm obvious.

“Yes,” I growled. God, this girl was really pushing my buttons. She didn’t trust me, that much was obvious, but it was hard to blame her.

I was just getting sick of not being trusted.

But it was just a function of being alive right now, I guess.

“I’ve only got one requirement: lose the fucking attitude. I get it, you’re in a shit situation and you’ve been through a lot. We don’t have to be friends, but we also don’t have to be enemies. You don’t gotta suck up to me, just...be chill around me, okay?”

“Fine,” she said, slowly uncrossing her arms. She stared at me for a moment longer, and finally said, “I’m sorry. For flipping out. And shoving you.”

“I forgive you,” I replied. “Honestly, I get it. She’s your mom and you care about her. If you thought I was taking advantage of her, I can see why you’d want to rip my throat out. So just...consider it done and buried, okay?”

“Okay,” she said.

“Good. Now let’s get back inside. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

FIVE

We went back inside but I didn’t want to be inside, not yet.

I went to put away the stuff we’d uncovered and found Lara and Jessica laying in our bed together.

“How’d it go?” Lara asked as I walked in and started unpacking my backpack.

“Well enough, I guess. No troubles, but no real find, either. Hank and Abigail are gone and the place is empty. Found some food but not much. A bit of supplies, nothing special,” I replied as I packed away the blankets and set out the clothes for Jessica and Hannah to try on.

“Abigail and Hank?” Jessica asked.

“This married couple who lived on a farm not far from here. We helped them prepare to leave recently.”

“And we fucked Abigail,” Lara whispered.

Jessica’s eyes went wide as she looked over at Lara, then back at me. “So. I’m not the only married woman you’ve been fucking.”

“You’re divorced now, and no, you’re not,” I replied.

“Well I can’t blame Abigail,” Jessica murmured.

I finished putting the stuff away and pulled my pack back on. “I’m going hunting. I’ll be back later today.”

“Okay, um, are you all right?” Lara asked.

“Fine, just...I need to think. Alone,” I replied.

“All right.”

I headed out, saying much the same to Susan and Hannah, then grabbing a can of tuna for lunch whenever I was ready to have it, then I was gone.

~

I spent almost all of the remaining daylight hours outside, in the forest to the south of the house, hunting game.

It was difficult, because not only was there not very much game to hunt, but I had to really, really be choosy.

I had exactly one shot left in the rifle, and besides the fact that I had to not fuck up the shot that I did decide to take, I also had to choose the right deer. Didn’t want to waste it on something that was only going to give us a couple of meals. Of course, the risk there was that maybe I’d go the whole day without feeling like I’d find the right one and get nothing. On the other hand, another risk was giving in when I felt like I’d found one that was ‘good enough’, bagging it, and then running into what would have been the perfect one on the way home.

Such was life, I guess.

When I got hungry and cold enough, I built a little fire, sat on a log, and ate tuna. And thought. Mostly I thought about how I was going to handle this latest development. There were certainly enough options for me to take, although how those options would pan out was anyone’s guess. But I also thought of fucking.

Fucking Susan and Lara was really nice, but now Jessica was in the house and…

I wondered if I could convince Susan to have sex with me and Jessica.

It seemed like a long shot, but honestly, I’d pulled off a lot of long shots recently, it felt like.

Speaking of which, as the sun was starting to go down, (I hated how quickly it set during the winter), I decided that the next deer I saw was going to be the one I shot at. I decided this as I began walking back towards home, and I encountered one, lined up the shot, took it, and landed it hardly five minutes later.

When I walked over to the corpse, steam rising from the blood that had sprayed across the snow, I saw that it had been a clean kill. The deer was somewhere between medium and large. As far as spending my last rifle shell went, I definitely could’ve done worse.

Grabbing it, I started hauling the kill home.

~

I made it home, confirmed nothing had happened in my absence, then cleaned my kill in the basement, my mind still churning over possibilities.

There was part of me that wanted to just say ‘fuck it’ and head to Pine Lake. But I didn’t think that Jessica and Hannah were quite ready to make that kind of decision yet and I didn’t want to force it on them if I didn’t have to.

I also had the idea of finding something nice to bring back with me, something worthwhile and maybe kind of rare. I hadn’t really found anything like that yet, but I wanted to, and for whatever reason I felt sure there was something like that around. The feeling was probably bullshit, but either way, I wanted to keep looking.

So for now I focused on staying here and working with what I had.

We ate dinner, and I was glad to see that Hannah had mostly chilled out. She still held some tension in her body and on her face, but it struck me as something closer to the average tension most people had nowadays. This was a new environment for her, new people, and she’d gone through a big change recently.

The conversation was light, but by the time we were finished with dinner, I decided it was high time to get serious.

“All right,” I said, garnering everyone’s attention and laying out a piece of paper I’d found and drawn up earlier in the day. “Now that Jessica and Hannah are officially residents, I think it’s time to get a few things figured out. Lara and Susan have already become comfortable with the idea that I’m the person in charge of this household. I make the decisions.”

It wasn’t precisely a lie, I knew Susan was still wrestling with certain things, but at the very least she had agreed to it.

“Do either of you take issue with this?” I asked.

“No, you seem like you know what you’re doing, and I obviously trusted you enough to come to you,” Jessica replied.

“It’s not like we had a lot of options,” Hannah said. Jessica sighed and looked at the ceiling, as though praying for strength. “I’m not wrong, mom.”

“Just because he was our only real option doesn’t mean he was a bad option, Hannah,” she replied.

Hannah pursed her lips and fell silent. Her gaze settled on me finally and I stared back at her. “If it helps,” I said, “and I’m sure you’ve heard this too many times before, but I’m not some jackass on a power trip. I’ve survived out here, largely on my own, for a long time now. I know my shit. The decisions I make are genuinely in the best interest of everyone here. My goal is to keep you all alive at the least, happy at the best. Do you believe me?”

She stared at me for several long seconds and finally relaxed a fraction. “I suppose I do,” she admitted. “For now.”

“Fair enough. Now, I’m not a dictator. If you’ve got something to say, speak up. If you think you’ve got a better idea than I do, tell me to my face and we’ll work it out. With all that said, what we need to do is figure out a schedule for all of us…”

We spent about half an hour hashing it out, going back and forth on a few things, determining who felt most comfortable doing what or, barring that, who could tolerate what. Susan, Lara, and Jessica ended up taking on the majority of the more mundane duties like collecting firewood, cooking, melting snow for water, washing clothes, and foraging for any fruits, vegetables, or herbs that might be growing in the area.

I’d feel worse for settling on that particular decision, except that the three of them were more than happy to take on those roles because it meant I was going to take on the more miserable and physically demanding role of hunting and cleaning kills, and going out on expeditions to search structures. And since Hannah had basically petitioned me to teach her stuff, that meant that she went where I went. Once we got that all written down, I hammered it to the wall in the living room, so it would always be there for reference.

And then coaxed Jessica into the bedroom with me, asking Susan and Lara to keep Hannah busy. Although I guess I should say it was the reverse of that: I had to coax Susan and Lara, Jessica was eager to be whisked away to the master bedroom.

“This still feels weird, but oh my God I’m so horny,” Jessica said as she quickly stripped out of her clothing.

“Same,” I agreed.

I’d been low-level horny and irritated all day long and it was time to get off, and I had to admit, I wanted some alone time with Jessica right now.

I wanted to explore her wonderful, mature body of hers some more.

Soon we were nude and kissing and embracing on the bed. I ran my hands over her body, massaging her big breasts and then kneading the flesh of one firm hip, then lower, to a thick, athletic, smooth thigh. Her tongue probed my mouth and I enjoyed her natural taste as I twisted my tongue with her own, lust thrilling through me with an almost startling intensity. I wanted to take her so bad and so hard that I had to make myself slow down.

Though I started in with the foreplay right away, rubbing her clit and getting a moan out of her as she arched her back.

“Oh yes...fuck, I’ve missed this,” she groaned. “You’ve-ah!-had a lot of practice at this…”

“Definitely,” I replied, kissing her neck as I fingered her. “Does that bother you?”

“I thought it would...oh my...but it doesn’t. Lara told me-” she gasped as I hit a particularly sensitive spot and her hips bucked and then she regained control of herself. “-she mentioned you have other girlfriends somewhere.”

I laughed. “Uh, yeah. It’s...complicated. Don’t worry, I’m not cheating.” I paused. “That wasn’t meant as an insult.”

“No, I get it,” she moaned. “And hey, neither am I, anymore.”

“That’s right. You’re all mine right now,” I replied.

“Yes...all yours,” she groaned. “Oh fuck, just take me. I need it.”

“You need it, huh?” I replied, pulling my hand back and propping myself up, looking down at her wonderfully fit body.

“Yes, dammit!” she snapped, her eyes popping back open. “Don’t make me beg for it.”

“I believe,” I replied, tracing a fingertip across her breasts and circling one nipple, making her shudder, “that you said I was in control here.”

“You are just...I’m horny…” she moaned, breathing heavily.

“Fine, get on your hands and knees.”

She let out a sigh of relief and did exactly as she was told. I took a moment to admire her body, because fucking seriously, she was like a work of art, especially when she was posing like that, and then I started just fucking nailing her.

I’ll admit, I kind of forgot, or stopped caring, that other people were in the house who might not want to hear our sex, and she had to bury her face in the pillow as she started shrieking from the pleasure of my cock.

I grasped those firm hips of hers, looked down at her fit, pleasantly padded, pale ass, and enjoyed the sight of my dick slipping into her glistening, mature pussy again and again. As she had just confirmed: Jessica was all mine now.

Did that mean she was sticking around, too?

That she would come back with me to Pine Lake?

Again, too soon to ask, but this was getting a little ridiculous. Lara and Susan had been enough, but now I had another woman eager for a regular supply of dick from me and I honestly didn’t know if I would be able to keep up.

I was okay with having this problem.

I fucking wrecked Jessica’s vagina over the next several minutes, making her scream her way through two full-bodied orgasms, before I unloaded into her. I groaned and grunted loudly as I felt my cock pulse and twitch, draining my nuts into her, and I again pumped her full of my seed. As soon as the aftershocks of bliss had stopped crashing through me and my dick gave the last dry-kick and I was emptied out, I pulled out of her and we cleaned up. A few moments later, we were curled up together naked on the bed, basking in the glow of the encounter.

“Why are you so comfortable around me?” I murmured into her ear, spooning her and holding her naked body against my own.

“I don’t know,” she replied dreamily after a moment. “I’ve been asking myself, ‘Am I crazy? I just met this guy. Am I just fucking insane?’. But then I remember something that happened when we first had sex. Somehow, in some way, you communicated to me, not with anything you said, just with your actions or maybe your body language or fuck, I don’t know, maybe your fucking aura, not that I really believe in that stuff, but you effectively communicated to me that you would never hurt me. That you would always be kind to me. That I could trust you. I just...knew it.” She sighed suddenly. “I don’t know, maybe I’m being stupid. Isn’t that what everyone thinks? That they’re good at reading people? At figuring people out?”

“Yeah, they do. Some people are better at it, some people suck at it. I don’t know how you measure up. But if it helps, you’re right about me. I wouldn’t hurt you. I won’t abandon you. But, at the very least, I will make you orgasm. I’ve proven that.”

She laughed loudly. “Yes. You have. Whew, can you ever fuck.” She rolled over, now facing me, and looked into my eyes with her clear, bright, beautiful blue ones. “Whatever happens, I’m glad we met.” An uncertain expression marred her happiness then.

“What?” I asked.

“I know you agreed to train Hannah, and I agree that it should happen. She wants it, you’re willing, she’d be better off with the knowledge, I just…”

“You’re worried about her.” Jessica nodded. “I know. Try not to. I won’t let her do anything stupid.”

“She’s very stubborn,” she warned.

I laughed. “I’ve had experience with stubborn women at this point, and I’ve...handled them.” I hesitated. “That came out wrong.”

Jessica stared at me for a long moment, looking stern, then she sighed and lost the look. “If you and her end up hooking up, I can’t really be angry. I mean I can’t think of a better man for my daughter, and isn’t that what all mothers want?”

“I don’t really have any intention of pursuing her. It’s complicated enough already,” I replied, then I paused. “For the record, how old is she?”

“Twenty. I had her when I was her age, actually,” Jessica answered.

“Huh. That’s pretty young but I guess not too young.” I shook my head. “Whatever, I’m not pursuing her. Like I said, complicated enough as it is.”

“She might pursue you,” Jessica replied.

“She hates me.”

“She thought you were taking advantage of me. She realizes that isn’t true. Her hatred is gone. Now she’s just...herself. Difficult and headstrong and impulsive. She’s made a lot of progress, actually. She’s got anger problems but a year ago or even six months ago, she wouldn’t have walked away to cool off, she would’ve just kept yelling at you.”

“I understand, I’ve had anger problems myself,” I replied.

“Really? I wouldn’t have guessed that.”

“Well I had a long time to practice keeping it in check. So I’ll see what I can do to help her. That she wants to control her anger and is actually taking steps towards it is a big deal, that will help a lot. But yeah, don’t worry, I’ll keep her safe. Or, really, as safe as I can.”

“Okay,” she said, hugging me. “That will do.”

I kissed the top of her head and held her and just enjoyed being there with her.

Whatever was coming ahead in the future, I’d really come to realize that it was these quiet moments together with the women I cared about, and I already knew that I cared about Jessica, that were the most meaningful moments left in my life.

SIX

I jerked awake to a banging on my door.

“Chris, come on!”

“What is it!?” I demanded, scrambling out of bed and grabbing my pistol from where I’d set it on the nightstand. “What’s wrong?!”

“Nothing! You promised to train me starting today! It’s today!”

I groaned and put my pistol back down. “All right, just...give me some time,” I replied, trying to contain my rage.

Fuck, I’d thought we were under attack.

“I’m going to strangle that bitch,” Susan growled from the bed.

I went to the window and peeked out the blinds. It was early morning, maybe seven AM judging by the sunlight. No more overcast skies, at least.

I glanced back at the bed, where Lara and Susan were shifting around, probably hoping to catch some more sleep.

Unfortunate for them.

Unable to help myself, I hopped back into bed.

~

“So where are we going? What’s first?” Hannah asked.

“What’s first is patience,” I replied as I led her away from the house and into the woods. We were moving north, and quickly broke through the treeline.

After fucking both Susan and Lara awake, I’d gotten on with the rest of my morning routine while having to endure Hannah’s pestering.

I wouldn’t say that she liked me now, exactly, but she was clearly much more willing to speak to me and interact with me, and she had no compunctions about being impolite, either. She might be mature for her age, but I had to admit, having her around made me remember why I had my policy of not dating (or, let’s be honest, fucking) more than a few years younger than myself.

“Ugh, come on, fuck patience,” she said.

I sighed, my breath fogging the air as we walked towards the frozen lake. “Okay, Hannah, there’s a few things we need to discuss. Here’s the first thing: patience is the rule of law out here. If you truly, genuinely want to learn how to survive, then you must not only know that, but accept it. Lots of shit takes patience. Starting fires. Skinning kills. Lining up the perfect shot. Searching buildings. Hiding and waiting for someone to pass. Walking from one place to another. You’re going to have to learn how to be patient.”

“Oh come on, don’t talk to me like you’re some wise old sensai from a kung fu movie-”

I stopped abruptly and turned to face her. Okay, this had to be addressed and right now. “Hannah,” I said flatly, and she heard the shift in my voice, saw the change in my body language and expression, and stopped with me.

“What?” she asked.

“I realize this might sound redundant, given what you’ve been through, but it’s dangerous out here. As in: ‘you can fucking die really easily’ dangerous.” Her expression changed just a little, and I was relieved to see that she could at least sense the gravity of my meaning. “I’m going to need you to listen to me. I mean actually listen, not just nod along and pretend you’re listening or wait for me to finish talking so that you can talk, I mean genuinely listen to and comprehend what I’m saying. I’m not trying to insult you, I just want to get across how serious this is. Do you understand?”

She took a deep breath and let it out, then nodded. “Yeah, I understand.”

“All right.” We started walking again. “Probably the other foundational lesson I want to give to you is this: you are always potentially in danger. I’ve seen wolves around here. Susan and I fought a mountain lion a few days ago. You never know who might be passing through and what their intentions might be. When you’re outside, when you’re in an unfamiliar building or environment, you need to always be on alert. Listening, watching. Your body has instincts, and you need to learn to tap into them. They’ll tell you things you didn’t even realize you noticed. You’ll just suddenly be on edge sometimes when you’re out and not realize why. There’s a decent chance you saw something without realizing it, or heard something. You have to learn to cultivate that. It can help so much.”

“How long have you actually been out here like...doing stuff?” she asked.

“Over a year,” I replied. “At this point, about a year and a half. I started in Florida. Eventually, I got tired of sitting around doing nothing much so I just started walking. I already knew a fair amount about survival and I’d been honing some of those skills for awhile in a town I was staying in. I’ve been wandering ever since.” I paused. “Well, sort of. Anyway, there’s one other thing I want to get out of the way before we start discussing specifics.”

“What’s that?” she asked, a little defensively.

“You’re very...confrontational.”

“Yes. I am. It’s the only way I can get anyone to take me seriously. The only thing anyone sees when they look at me is some young dumb slut. You saw how Thomas was with my mom and me. When she started talking, explaining the situation that was about us, he didn’t even wait for her to finish talking before he just checked out of that line of conversation and turned back to you. And he told you to fucking ‘give us back’, like we’re just pieces of fucking meat you took or something. That’s how most people treat me. Well, most men. Christ, even my own father treated me like a fucking roadblock or burden to just put up with.”

“And I appreciate that fact,” I said, “but honestly, you have got to dial it back.”

“I am not going to fucking reign it in and be a ‘well behaved girl’ for them. I’m not.”

“This isn’t about that.”

“You aren’t going to get it. You aren’t a woman. And don’t fucking tell me I’m playing the gender card or whatever other dismissive bullshit you’ve got ready to go.”

“I’m not dismissing you,” I replied. “You are right. Thomas was an asshole, and I’ve encountered a lot of assholes like that and it’s generally a problem. But the point I’m making is separate from that, Hannah.”

“And what point is that?”

“You need to reign it in. You can be assertive without being confrontational. At the very least, you need to not be so willing to get physical. Because you’re going to get yourself killed doing that. You look at me and I bet you think I fight a lot, right?” I asked. She nodded. “I don’t. I don’t fight or shoot unless I absolutely have to. It’s last resort. People are way more likely to kill you nowadays, and I don’t even mean like choose to, I mean like reactionary. It’s so much easier to just panic-kill someone than you’d think. And if you’re going around getting in people’s faces, shoving people…”

“Okay, maybe you have a point,” she muttered, and I wondered how many close calls she’d had. “But how do I know when to fight? Because I can, and I will.”

“It can be hard to tell for sure,” I replied. “Bottom line is: you try to get good at reading people, paying attention to what they’re doing. People have voluntary and involuntary things they do to give themselves away before they’re about to attack you.”

“Like what?”

“Well, a good involuntary thing is that before people turn things physical, they tend to suck in a breath. Nothing necessarily dramatic, but if you look for it, you can see it when it happens. Now, every time someone breathes a little more deeply than normal doesn’t mean they’re about to throw a punch your way, but it’s a potential warning sign. As for voluntary, some people know how to hide the action. For example, let’s say I was talking with someone and I wanted to sucker punch them. One way to do it with more success is to, while you’re talking, repeat a simple action over the course of a few minutes,” I explained.

“Such as?”

“Rubbing the back of your neck. If you’ve got glasses, reaching up and adjusting them. Rubbing your nose. Something that gets the person used to the notion of your hand coming upwards. Do that three or four times so that when your hand starts coming up for a punch, they subconsciously have already filed away that motion as something nonthreatening and won’t react as quickly.”

“...you’ve thought about this shit a lot, haven’t you?” she asked.

“Yes. I’ve had to. Honestly though, this is last resort stuff. On the whole, avoidance is the best survival skill.”

“That does not sound like something I expected to hear you say.”

“I don’t go looking for fights. I have nothing left to prove. On the whole, if you can avoid a fight, that’s the better outcome.”

“You’re lying,” she said after a moment.

I laughed. “Wow, okay. What brought you to that conclusion?”

“I don’t mean about the idea itself, I guess it makes enough sense, but that’s not how you live your life. If it was, you never would’ve willingly put yourself in the middle of this mess and offered my mom help...unless you really just did it for the sex. And yes, I know, you’re nice. But that isn’t just nice. You don’t put yourself in front of danger, which you very obviously did when you stood up to Thomas, just because you’re nice. That’s more than nice.”

“Okay, fair enough,” I said. “I’ll be honest: yes, some of it is because I’m horny and your mom is a goddamned fitness model.” She made a face. “Again, you brought it up. But on your other point, yes. It’s more than just being nice. I decided, a few months ago, that I was going to help people.”

“What, like...in general? Everyone?”

“Not everyone, but people I come across who need help and I think I can help.”

“Why?”

“Everyone needs a purpose in life.”

She looked like she wanted to say more to that, but either needed to ruminate on it some more, or didn’t know what to say. We made it into the farmhouse and after I did another perimeter sweep of the place to make sure no one had moved in since the last time I’d been here, we came to rest in the master bedroom.

“Okay, so, what are we doing?” she asked, looking around.

“First test. Susan and I already checked this place over yesterday. I’m pretty sure we found everything. I want you to search this place from top to bottom and see if I’m wrong. See if you can find anything else.”

“Seriously?” she asked.

“Seriously.”

“Anything like...what?”

“Anything useful. Tools. Food. Matches. Candles. Medicine. Stuff we can use to stay alive, stay sane, or trade with other people.”

“And you’re gonna do...what, exactly?”

“Wait. Watch. Make sure nothing sneaks up on us.”

Hannah looked at me for a long moment, her arms crossed. “So are you serious right now? You want me to just search this place?”

“Yes. I’m dead serious. This is a crucial survival skill. I want to see how you fare at it.”

She sighed and looked around. “All right, fine.”

And she got to it. I left her to the task, walking to another bedroom and looking out the window. I’d planned for this, actually. While Susan and I were searching the place, before we’d left for the day yesterday, I had planted a mostly-empty lighter in a hard-to-find place on the first floor to see if she would find it.

Plus, there was the genuine possibility that we missed something.

We didn’t talk at all over the next hour as she went through the house, though this time around I had the sense that Hannah’s silence was due to her meticulous concentration on to her job as opposed to anger, which I took as a very good sign. Lessons and how you conveyed them were crucial, but just as crucial was the willingness of the person you were trying to teach, and how seriously they took the lessons.

Much as it annoyed her, Hannah took this task seriously.

That was an excellent foundation to build upon.

I had a good feeling about Hannah. Based on what I’d seen of her so far, I saw several qualities in her that I’d come to realize in myself, and maybe that meant I could help her become a truly adept survivor. Maybe that was arrogant to think, but by now, it seemed pretty obvious that I was good at what I did.

Now it was just a question of if I was smart enough to figure out how to effectively pass that knowledge on to someone else.

That was a shakier proposition.

As it turned out, either Hannah was lucky, or I was right in my assessment.

By the time the hour had passed and we ended up back near the front door, Hannah presented her findings to me, looking rather pleased with herself.

She’d found the lighter I’d planted.

She’d also found a simple gold ring, a single double-A battery, and tin can of tuna.

“So, how’d I do?” she asked as I inspected each item and passed them back to her.

“Excellently,” I replied.

“You aren’t bullshitting me, are you? I don’t need ego-fluffing.”

“No, I’m genuinely impressed. I’ll admit that I did leave the lighter there to see if you’d find it, but I actually thought Susan and I had cleared this place out earlier. That you found three things, let alone one of them being actual food, is impressive,” I replied.

She put the stuff away in her pack, looking at me cautiously, and I’d seen that look before. On Megan, and Susan, and a few other women I’d encountered. They were deciding whether to believe me or not, whether or not I was full of shit.

Given that Hannah let out a little nod and adopted a small smile as she pulled her pack back on, I figured that there must be something about me that was trustworthy. Hidden somewhere among all that intimidation and frightening potential anger everyone saw written on my face, in my body language, there was trustworthiness.

It was good to know.

Or maybe I was completely misinterpreting it and it was just something else entirely.

“Now what?” she asked as we stepped outside.

“Now we do a repeat performance of a place I haven’t searched thoroughly,” I replied, and we struck off northbound.

~

“Why did you bring the rifle?” Hannah asked after a few minutes. “It’s empty, right?”

“Yes, but it makes for an impressive visual. Half of all intimidation is bluffing. The problem is, no one knows which half,” I replied.

“So...what you’re saying is, if someone saw us from a distance and saw that rifle, they’d be less likely to attack us, because they don’t know it’s empty?”

“Exactly.”

“Huh.”

I waited a few minutes before deciding to try and ask this next question. I was curious, but obviously it was a sensitive topic.

“Hannah...if you don’t mind, could you give me the lowdown on, uh, what exactly is up between you and your parents?” I asked.

She stared at me for a few seconds, then let out a small sigh and stared at the ground. We were slowly passing the frozen lake. I was taking her north, towards the tunnel we’d fought the mountain lion near. I wanted to search the campgrounds.

“Yeah, that’s a fair question,” she replied. “I don’t really know the whole story of how they got started. They met in college when they were teenagers, she got pregnant with me when she was nineteen. Had me when she was twenty. She was going to college to be a teacher but she got some work as a model just before she got pregnant and then apparently there was a demand for pregnant models so she kept the job and-are you still paying attention?”

“Yes,” I replied, but I’d been drifting off a little, to be honest.

“Were you thinking about her pregnant? Is that like a fetish of yours?” she asked with the sudden enthusiasm of someone who believes they have discovered something deeply personal about another person and might want to use it for later.

I sighed. “Yes and yes,” I admitted.

She snorted. “For real? Pregnancy fetish? How many girls have you gotten pregnant? Obviously you don’t lack for company,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“Zero,” I replied.

“You that good at pulling out?”

“Wow you really do have no tact,” I said.

She heaved a sigh. “You really care? I thought you wouldn’t give a shit.”

“I guess I don’t. No, I’m not that good. I’m really bad about pulling out, if you want the truth,” I replied, deciding to throw tactlessness back in her face.

She grimaced. “Gross.”

“Turnabout is fair play,” I replied.

“What’s that mean, exactly? I’ve heard people say it but I’m not sure I fully get the context.”

“In this case, it means you say whatever the fuck you want to me, I get to say whatever the fuck I want to you. And if you bitch about it you’re a hypocrite,” I replied.

She growled. “Fine. Fair enough. So how can you be so sure about the pregnancy thing?”

I considered her words for a moment. There seemed to be a reason she was asking this, but I couldn’t really figure out why. Maybe she was nervous I was going to get her mom pregnant. “I’ve got a birth control implant. It’s extremely effective.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Oh. So continue.”

“Right. Mom dropped out of college after the pregnancy and realized she was still in good enough shape after to keep modeling and that it was paying good money. And my dad had this idea for a start-up and had money from his parents and it worked.”

“What was it?”

“I don’t know. Selling things over the internet or something. Maybe. I didn’t ask much and he didn’t tell me much. Eventually my mom stopped modeling and just became a trophy wife, but it let me and her spend a ton of time together, so that was nice.”

“Is there a particular reason you hate him?” I asked. “I mean I get it now but…”

“He’s an asshole,” she replied. “I don’t know, maybe things were okay in the very beginning. I have some good memories of him. But mostly I just remember him arguing with me, yelling at me, ignoring me, or just not being there. And you know what? I honestly could accept the ‘not being there’ part if it wasn’t for all the other bad shit, and for the fact that he wasn’t there because he didn’t want to be a father. He’s told me before that he regrets having me and that I was an accident.”

“Jesus Christ,” I muttered.

“Yeah. I’ve gotten my mom to admit that they weren’t intending to get pregnant but to be honest, who the fuck does as a teenager? I don’t care whether or not I was an accident, I care how they treated me after. She treated me great, he treated me like shit. I love her, I hate him. And I am glad that you talked her into leaving, even if I don’t like your relationship with her.”

“Why not? I mean we already established that she likes-”

“Because she’s my mom and I don’t want to think about it, fuck!” she replied.

“Okay, fair enough.”

A long moment went by before she reluctantly spoke up again. “There is one thing I’d like to know.”

“Yeah?”

“How old are you? I just can’t figure it out.”

“I’m twenty six.”

“You’re fucking serious?” she asked. I nodded. “Oh my God. That’s...weird. I thought you were older. Like thirty at least.”

“I don’t know, is it that weird?”

“I...you know what, I don’t know. I don’t care. Whatever. Let’s just get to where we’re going.”

And with that, we marched on in silence.

SEVEN

The atmosphere grew slowly less awkward and tense as we reached the tunnel.

Where it promptly got tense again, but for a completely different reason.

“We gotta go in there?” Hannah asked, frowning as she stared long into the dark tunnel.

“Yes,” I replied. “And just so you know ahead of time, there’s a corpse.” She sighed. “It’s totally frozen over. Or should be, anyway.”

“Let’s just get this over with,” she muttered.

“That sentiment will help you a lot in irritating survival situations,” I replied, and set off into the tunnel.

As we began making the walk, I made sure my pistol was ready for quick access. The light was better than it had been on that day Susan and I had been here, but it was still dark. I’d left the nine millimeter with Susan and taken to carrying the thirty-eight for myself. It had a decent amount of ammo, as far as ammo went nowadays, and I was most suited to handle it. That thought sent a pulse of worry through me as we walked on, getting deeper into the darkness. I needed to find more ammo. For any of our weapons.

It would be a little different if we had something else, some other renewable resource. Fishing equipment, a bow and set of arrows, something.

But we didn’t. We had knives and two pistols and not a lot of ammo.

I supposed it didn’t entirely matter all that much. I mean, we weren’t looking to dig in and survive here for months or years. One way or the other, I was going back to Pine Lake. Though I didn’t relish the thought of leaving Jessica and Hannah here. I thought I could talk them into going. Then again, I’d have to stock up enough food for the journey itself, which was going to be more difficult with five people.

We passed the frozen corpse, which was just barely visible in the better lighting, and it seemed unchanged, which I took as a good sign. After several long, uncomfortable minutes, we finally emerged back out on the other side.

A paranoid part of me half-expected to see another mountain lion waiting for us somewhere in the vicinity, but I saw nothing but trees and snow and the remains of the campground on the other side. I pointed to the broken rope, which was still there, blowing gently in the wind.

“You wanted to know about the mountain lion,” I said. “Susan and I came up here to retrieve something from up there. That’s where I made the climb.”

“The rope looks broken,” Hannah replied softly.

“It broke while I was coming back down. I got lucky. We fought the damned lion actually at the other end of the tunnel. It was...a close call.”

“I’ve never actually seen one before,” she said. “I mean, not in real life. Was it big?”

“I remember it being fucking huge, although we didn’t get that much meat out of it.”

She sighed softly as we started walking down the hill. “Is skinning and gutting really as gross as it seems? I haven’t actually done it yet.”

“Yes. But you get used to it,” I replied. “And it’s a good thing that you’re willing to learn. Honestly, I’m surprised you haven’t yet.”

She growled. “I’ve read books, I’ve watched people do it, not up close though. I wanted to learn, but my dad kept saying no. When Thomas joined our group, he offered to teach me some stuff, but it was pretty obvious he offered just to try and fuck me.” She paused, then looked at me sideways. “Is that why you agreed to help me?”

“No, Hannah. I have no intention of trying to sleep with you. Don’t worry. I won’t even ask,” I replied.

“Why?” she asked after a moment.

I laughed. “Seriously? Besides the fact that you seem to hate me, I imagine it would be pretty weird.”

“I don’t hate you,” she replied, rolling her eyes, then chuckled. “Yeah, it would be weird. And I imagine my mom would rip your head off or something.”

I opened my mouth to respond, then hesitated, for a few seconds caught between wanting to lie but also remembering what Jessica had told me.

And Hannah was actually pretty sharp, she picked up on that right away and, apparently accurately, interpreted it.

“Wait,” she said, stopping and putting a hand on my shoulder, “you two have talked about this already? About you and...me?”

“Uh…” I still felt caught in the awkward zone.

“And she was okay with it?!”

I decided to try and get control of the situation. “We didn’t talk about it. It hasn’t come up,” I replied, and started walking again.

“You’re lying!” she cried, hurrying after me and grabbing my arm.

“What did I tell you about getting physical?” I replied.

She sighed and let go. “Yeah but you’re not going to fucking panic-kill me. I’m right, aren’t I? You talked about it and she’s okay with it? What the fuck!?”

“I didn’t bring it up!” I snapped, then regretted it.

What the hell was it about Hannah that brought this out in me? I mean yeah, she was abrasive and rude and had no filter, but I’d dealt with that before.

“She brought it up?!”

I sighed and closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose. “Hannah, let’s just leave it at this: it came up, she wasn’t opposed to the idea because she wants you to be happy and trusts me, I still don’t intend to pursue you. Can we please drop this and you not mention this to her?”

I dropped my hand and opened my eyes back up, staring at her. She gave me a hard stare back, and then looked away. “Yeah, fine. And good, don’t try to sleep with me, because I’m not interested.” She paused, then gave out something between an exasperated sigh and a growl. “Fuck!”

“Hey, you are the one who made it weird, okay? Stop asking questions if you don’t really want to hear the answer.”

“I-whatever! Can we just do this?!” she replied.

“Yes!”

We set off again towards the first campsite, both of us in a huff, and didn’t share another word for the next two hours as we made our way slowly and meticulously across the campgrounds. Like most searching, it was slow work, but having another person around helped. Even if she wasn’t talking to me. Honestly, I really couldn’t blame her. Hannah seemed to have a unique ability to draw uncomfortable and awkward conversations out of me.

I considered what exactly I was going to teach her as we hunted for useful supplies. Skinning, gutting, and cleaning, obviously. Hunting, clearly. Weapon maintenance. I’d have to check her fire-starting skills. Building a temporary shelter if need be, though I’d been lucky enough not to have to use that one for a little while.

I didn’t hold out much hope for finding bullets at the campsite, but I knew it was possible. I’d come across corpses with all sorts of incredibly useful gear in the past.

Unfortunately, this time, my hope failed me and we ended up at the final campsite with not a whole lot to show for all our efforts. Just a knife that might be useful when cleaned and sharpened, a few articles of clothing that were torn up but might be useful for repairing other clothes or, barring that, wrapping around a stick and using as a torch, and a dented but intact can of kidney beans.

Not a terrible find, but I had hoped for at least a bit more.

As we started making our way back and I began to try and think of a way to kickstart the conversation again, I heard something behind me.

From the way Hannah froze up beside me, I saw that she did indeed have those instincts I’d been telling her about.

“Something’s wrong,” she whispered as I pulled the pistol out.

“That’s those instincts I mentioned earlier,” I muttered as I turned around.

And froze.

“Shit.”

“Wha-shit.”

Two wolves were slinking through the trees towards us.

“Hannah, back up, now,” I said flatly.

Thankfully she didn’t argue, just backed away without a word. I raised the pistol. That seemed to set the wolves off and they both started coming for me. I felt oddly calm as I took aim and fired twice. The first shot was dead easy, as the wolf was coming right for me, no problem. The other one took a little more aiming as the sound scared, but didn’t deter, the slim, dark gray animal. I adjusted, tracked, and made the second shot.

The sound of the pistol firing echoed away all around us and I looked around for more wolves, or anything else for that matter.

I didn’t see anything.

Slowly, I put the pistol away in its holster and looked at Hannah. “This is actually perfect,” I said, “you can get some practice in gutting one of these. Come on, you’re carrying one home.”

~

When we got home, I heard one of my least favorite things: an unfamiliar voice arguing with a familiar one.

“Oh you’ve got to be shitting me,” Hannah growled as we hurried to get home.

“What?” I asked.

“That’s my dad.”

Great.

We came around the back of the house and found Susan and Jessica standing outside with an unfamiliar man. Lara stood in the doorway uncertainly, looking worried. Jessica and her ex-husband, what had been his name? T something. Thomas? No, that was the big guy, and I was suddenly wondering if he was around too. Whatever his name was, they were locked in an argument and right away, I could see what Hannah was talking about.

Jessica was not quite yelling about how he’d been treating her, about their marriage and how it was over, and his body language, the way he was looking at her, it all but shouted casual dismissal. Like he was looking at a kid throwing a temper tantrum.

And this was his wife.

Well ex-wife.

They all turned to look as we came around the corner. I tossed down my wolf into the snow and took a few steps closer. “Can we help you?”

“So you’re the guy, huh?” he asked, turning away from Jessica and walking over to me. Hannah threw her own wolf down and came to stand next to me. “You’re the son of a bitch who thinks he can steal my wife and daughter.”

“I’m the guy who your wife felt safe enough with to bring her daughter to and I think it’d be best if you left right now,” I replied as evenly as I could manage.

I didn’t like this guy, and not because of what I’d heard so far.

I wouldn’t have liked him if we’d come across each other totally at random. He reminded me of every other prick jacked up on his own ego. He had dark blonde hair, a wiry build, and the kind of looks that I imagine probably made him popular in high school and college. He also had blue eyes, though unlike Jessica’s, they didn’t shine with excitement, they seemed flatter, duller, but definitely angry. I could see anger in there.

I knew where Hannah got it from at least.

“You’re fucking her, aren’t you, you little limp-dicked shit?” he growled, suddenly going from a shit-eating, cocky grin to barely-controlled rage in a second flat. “You think I’m scared of you because you’re taller than me? Fuck you!”

He swung on me. He actually swung on me.

I saw it coming, at least, and managed to dodge it, leaning back quickly. I’d call him brave but I could tell he was just cocky.

That was probably what made me take the next step.

I shoved him. Hard.

He stumbled backwards and fell right on his ass.

“Chris!” Jessica cried when I took a step closer, because I was angry. Something about his bravado and showboating hadn’t just pulled on my anger trigger, it had fucking yanked on it. Jessica’s worried yell helped get me back under control, bringing me back to reality, keep me from doing something stupid.

“Motherfucker!” her ex-husband, (Travis, I remembered suddenly), snarled as he shot to his feet. As he came up, I didn’t realize until too late that he was reaching into his coat and then out came a black and silver pistol that he pointed right at my chest.

“Travis!” Jessica screamed.

“Drop it!” Susan snapped as she drew her own pistol.

Travis looked at her, but kept his gun trained on me. The second he did, Hannah shifted beside me. She grabbed my pistol out of its holster and aimed it at her father. The action drew his attention back in our direction and something changed in his expression then. It was like he’d assumed that he’d been playing a game and suddenly realized that he wasn’t. Like he’d gone swimming in the ocean assuming those gray things just over there were dolphins and then realizing that they were, in fact, sharks.

And he was on the menu.

“Hannah…” he said.

“Get out of here, dad. Now,” Hannah growled. I glanced over. Her finger was on the trigger.

“Don’t do anything you’ll regret,” I muttered to her.

“You’re serious right now?! He pulled a fucking gun on you after trying to punch you!”

“Yeah and you hate him and I get that but if you do this you’ll regret it,” I replied.

“Put your gun away, dad, or I’m going shoot you in the leg. I won’t regret that,” she growled, lowering the pistol to aim at one thigh.

He flinched, stared at Hannah, his eyes flicked hatefully in my direction, and then he glanced briefly at Susan to his left.

Finally, slowly, he lowered his gun, and then put it back.

Gently, I put my hand on my pistol and slowly lowered Hannah’s arms. She sighed and let the gun drop. Susan kept her own gun aimed at him.

“This isn’t over,” Travis growled.

“I strongly suggest you let it be over,” I replied. “I will kill you if I have to. If you or your man comes around here again, you aren’t walking away intact. And you might not walk away at all. Do we have an understanding?”

“Fuck you,” Travis said, then he turned around and walked off.

I sighed and took my gun from Hannah. I hated to admit it, but there was a part of me, stronger than I thought it would be, that wanted to just raise the pistol and shoot the guy in the back of the head and end it here and now.

I didn’t, but I really wanted to while he was still in my field of vision.

When he was finally gone, and I could no longer see or hear him, I put my pistol away. Susan did the same with her own.

I surveyed the group, trying to get a feel for everyone. Hannah and Susan both still looked pissed, though Hannah more than Susan. Lara just looked like she was in shock. Jessica was somewhere between those two states.

Abruptly, she turned to face Hannah. “What were you thinking?!”

“I was thinking that a hostile asshole had drawn a gun on one of us! Look, mom, I know you don’t feel the same way, but you are just going to have to accept that at some point one of us might have to shoot him.”

The two women stared at each other, hard expressions on their faces, and suddenly Jessica’s expression broke and she started crying. She spun around and marched back into the house, past Lara, and the sound of her crying hurt to hear.

“Goddamnit,” Hannah muttered, “now I feel like a fucking asshole.”

I wanted to take the opportunity to reinforce my point about tact and not escalating, but it really wasn’t the right time.

“Should I talk to her?” she murmured uncertainly.

“No. I’ll talk to her. Come on, inside everyone,” I said, picking up one of the wolves. I pointed the second one out to Hannah, who still seemed distracted by everything that had happened, and she picked it up.

We went inside and I had her follow me downstairs, where we dropped the dead wolves off.

“We’ll skin and gut them soon,” I said.

“Okay...tell her I’m sorry,” Hannah replied softly.

“I will.”

We went back upstairs and I took off my coat and checked in on Susan and Lara, who were in the living room.

“You doing okay?” I asked.

“Fine,” Susan said. “Glad you got back when you did. He wasn’t going to leave, he wasn’t even really listening to her. I was going to shoot the prick on general principle.”

“Lara?” I asked.

“I’m...okay. Scared. This is happening too often,” she muttered. “But, I guess that comes with the territory if we’re going to help, huh?”

“It does,” I replied. I gave each of them a hug and a kiss, to try and calm them down. Susan actually seemed fairly calm, all things considered, and Lara seemed like she was beginning to come down from the anxiety of the confrontation, and then I headed back towards the other end of the house to see if I could help Jessica.

EIGHT

Her door was closed and I could hear her crying quietly.

I knocked on it lightly twice.

“Who is it?” she asked.

“Chris. You want some company?”

“...I don’t know. Yes,” she replied.

I opened the door, stepped in, and closed it behind me. She was sitting on her bed, her shoulders slumped, tears streaking her pretty, pale face. I walked in and sat down next to her after trying to get a read on her mood and determining that she seemed welcome to my presence. I knew I’d guessed correctly as she immediately leaned against me.

I put an arm around her. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have started a fight.”

“You didn’t. He did,” she muttered.

“Well then I shouldn’t have committed to one. He...he’s a guy who really fucking pisses me off,” I replied.

“That’s not why I’m upset. I’m upset because Hannah’s right. And I just...I don’t know if I can handle that. I’ve never had to deal with something like this before. I always thought that the worst thing that could happen between him and me was maybe him slapping me and then us going through a nasty, bitter divorce. I didn’t think the situation would end up with him...dead.” She started crying again and leaned into me harder.

I held her for several long minutes, having learned that at this point, the best thing I could do was just be there to be cried on and try to comfort her.

After a bit, her tears ran out and she slowly separated herself from me and cleaned her face off, then came down and sat next to me again.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“You’re welcome. Hannah says that she’s sorry.”

She laughed. “Well, that’s a big step for her.” Then she frowned. “Although I know that ‘I made my mom cry’ is a really hardcore shortcut to an apology for someone.”

“She meant it,” I replied.

“Oh I’m sure she did. It wasn’t you or her. Like I said, I just don’t want to face the reality that one of us is going to have to kill him.” She hugged herself suddenly and looked down. She seemed very tired, very weary. “But I’ve had to face a lot of realities that I haven’t wanted to since this began. And it’s just going to keep happening.”

“It is,” I murmured. “I wish it wasn’t true, but it is.” I hesitated, then pushed forward. “If it really does come down to it...I should be the one to do it.”

“You’re right,” she said softly after a few beats of silence. “I hate talking about this but you and Hannah are right and there may be no avoiding it. He’s gotten more unstable over the past few months and he was just...that conversation we were having. It was like he wasn’t listening. It reminded me of when he and Hannah would argue when she was younger. He wasn’t really listening. He doesn’t really talk with people, he talks at them or over them or down to them.” She looked at me. “You meant it, didn’t you? You’d really kill him.”

“I would,” I replied. “Believe me, I’d rather not. But I’ve had to do it before, and I’ll have to do it again, I’m sure. And if it meant protecting you or anyone here, including myself, yes I would absolutely do it. And I’m sorry.”

“It wouldn’t be your fault,” she said. “I know he’d make it necessary.” She took a deep breath and let it out slow and long. “I need to calm down.”

“Why don’t you go spend some time with Lara? If you want, I’ll stick around, but I promised to teach Hannah how to gut, and we got two wolves out there,” I said.

“No, that’s fine. Go teach her. I’ll see Lara. We were about to make lunch when Travis showed up.” She sighed. “God, he’s such an asshole.”

“That he is,” I agreed.

I left her to it, sending Lara in and tracking down Hannah, who was hanging around awkwardly in the kitchen.

“How is she?” she murmured.

“She’s better. I told her you apologized. She’s not really mad at you, she’s just stressed about everything,” I replied. “You might want to consider that in the future. I know she’s your mom and twice your age, but you’ve got to recognize that some people react to stress better than others.”

“I know, I know,” she muttered, looking down at the floor. “I’m not handling it so well myself. I get stressed, I get angry. I just get so fucking angry.”

“I know the feeling,” I said. “You’ve got to get it under control.”

“I am...I mean, I’m working on it.”

“Your mom mentioned that. And I appreciate the effort. If you couldn’t tell, I’ve got anger problems, too.”

She looked back up at me. “Really?”

“I mean yeah. I shoved your dad on his stupid ass out there.”

She laughed. “After he took a swing at you. That seems like a reasonable reaction.”

“Maybe it is, but I was fucking pissed. I consider that a loss of control. Not necessarily the action itself, but the reason behind the action. That was reflexive, reactive, and born of pure rage. I can really see why you have anger issues now. Having him as a father must have been very difficult.”

“It was,” she muttered.

“I was going to teach you to gut and clean with the wolf, but if you’d rather do it later…”

“No, now’s fine. I’d rather be busy.”

“Okay then. Only question is whether you want to do it before or after lunch. Both carries risk,” I said.

“Why?”

“Do it before, you might lose your appetite. Do it after, you might lose your lunch.”

She considered it, then stepped closer. “I’d rather risk losing my appetite. Let’s do it now.”

“Okay then.”

~

Hannah was better than I’d thought she’d be.

She balked, a little, but once she got past the initial visceral reaction to digging around inside of a corpse, I could tell that she at least had some practical knowledge. We each skinned and gutted and salvaged meat from one of the wolves. She would need some practice, but she got more meat out of it than I’d initially hoped for.

And, luckily, by the time we were done and we’d cleaned up and packed away the meat, she was still hungry, and there was some leftover lunch.

I was going to eat when I heard some...I honestly couldn’t tell if it was laughing or crying, coming from elsewhere in the house.

“Why don’t you get started eating, I’m going to go check on the others,” I said.

“Okay,” she replied.

I tracked down the source and found all three women sitting together on my bed in the master bedroom. They had stripped down to t-shirts and panties and it was, I was happy to find, laughter, not crying.

Giggling, actually.

Jessica gasped and her eyes widened as she turned to look at me. “Chris!” she said, raising her hands up and slopping some of the booze in her glass onto her wrist and the bed in the process.

“Oh, Jessica! You’re getting it onto the blankets!” Lara complained.

“Sorry!” she said, then broke into a fit of giggling again, and then Susan and Lara did the same.

“Found our alcohol, did you?” I asked.

“I didn’t find it, Lara showed it, uh, me to...mmm, me right to it,” she murmured. She took another drink and then frowned. “You’re not mad are you? I don’t know if I could take it if you’re mad at me…”

“I’m not mad, Jessica,” I replied. “Just a little surprised. It’s fine.”

“I haven’t been drunk in forever,” she said, regaining her smile. “It helps me relax. I’m not drunk, you know, just...tipsly. A little.” She drank the rest of what was in her glass.

“You’re more than ‘tipsly’, Jessica,” I replied.

“Do you know what else it makes me?”

“What’s that?”

“Horny.” And then she turned and kissed a very surprised Susan, who didn’t pull back, exactly, but didn’t lean into it either. It seemed like a moment of impulse and Jessica abruptly pulled back. “Oh no, I’m sorry! I thought...I thought you might, um, be into it…I’m sorry!”

“It’s fine,” Susan replied, then laughed. “I-I just...that was a surprise. I’m not not into you. I’m just...I’m figuring some things out right now.”

“I’m really sorry. That was so rude,” Jessica said.

“It’s okay,” Susan replied. She was blushing fiercely. “It wasn’t unappreciated. I...think you’re very beautiful.”

“Thank you! You’re so pretty too! And I’m not saying that because I’m drunk!” She paused. “Tipsy! I really think you are. And so is Lara...and Chris is so handsome...God, I’m surrounded by young hot people,” she murmured, and then fell back onto the bed between Lara and Susan. “Chris…” she whispered, raising her legs. “Take my panties off.”

I hesitated, glancing back behind me at the door, then looked at Susan. “Would you mind, uh, going and keeping Jessica company?”

“I wanna watch…” she replied, slurring a little. They were all drunk. Well, at least Susan and Lara were buzzed or tipsy, it was Jessica who was drunk.

Did that make it wrong?

“Chris, why are you hesitating? I thought I made you horny,” she murmured. Lara leaned down and whispered something in Jessica’s ear. “What? Really?” Lara nodded and she sat back up. “Chris, you already know I want to fuck you. You’re not takin’ advantage of me ‘cause I’m drunk.”

“That...is a great point,” I replied, and closed the door.

She giggled deviously, passed her empty glass to Lara, and took off her shirt. “Claim me,” she said.

I quickly stripped naked and then pulled her panties off, revealing that smooth, perfect, mature pussy of hers. Susan and Lara sat on either side of her, making space for us, as I crawled onto the bed and then ran my hands up her long, smooth legs.

God, I loved her thighs.

“Just fuck me,” she moaned as I touched her. “I’m so fuckin’ wet and horny right now. Just stick it in my pussy…”

“You said you wanted me to claim you,” I replied as I got up into position between those excellent athletic thighs of hers.

“Yes…”

“What does that look like to you?”

“Fuck the shit out of me, tell me I’m yours, and bust your nut on my face,” she said.

I laughed. “I can do that.”

“God, that’s gonna be hot,” Lara whispered breathlessly.

I slid right into Jessica and found her to indeed be incredibly wet. She moaned loudly as I parted her legs and dove in.

“Oh God you’re so big!” she cried.

“Shh!” I replied, immediately feeling bad for Hannah.

“Oh shit, Hannah!” she whispered loudly. “I can’t-oh! Oh! Yes!” she cried as I continued fucking her. I couldn’t help it.

Her fucking pussy was so damned wet!

And she wanted me to claim her. I could absolutely do that.

My resolve to not make her scream too loudly crumbled in the face of how fantastic her mature pussy felt to screw raw and how goddamned good her perfect pale tits looked bouncing and her drunken moans of pleasure. She started out at least attempting to keep it down, falling into a kind of panting series of gasps, but that soon gave way to cries of pleasure and then it changed to just outright screams of blissful release as she orgasmed the first time. After that, I clapped a hand over her mouth and lowered myself closer into her.

I stared into her eyes, my face inches from hers. “You are mine, Jessica. Do you understand me? You belong to me now.”

She moaned an incoherent response from behind my hand as I kept fucking the hell out of her. Lara leaned in and cupped one of her breasts as she put her lips up to her ear.

“Are you a little whore, Jessica?” she asked.

Jessica moaned loudly in response.

“What was that?” she asked, playing with her nipple. “I didn’t hear you.”

I pulled my hand away from her mouth briefly and then regretted it immediately as she shrieked, “I’m a whore! I’m a fucking slut!”

I clapped it back over her mouth and she let out a muffled shriek as Lara reached down and began rubbing her clit and she started orgasming again almost immediately.

I was not lasting much longer. I pounded that hot, drunk pussy for as long as I could stand it, then snapped for Lara to move, which she did deftly, as I pulled out and got up on top of Jessica. Straddling her, I started coming all over her incredibly beautiful face. She moaned, opening her mouth, letting my seed get onto her lips and inside of her mouth and on her tongue. It got onto her cheeks and her nose and her forehead and I busted a huge fucking load all over her. When I was done, I put it in her mouth and had her suck it clean.

“Holy shit that was hot,” Susan murmured.

“Oh that was good,” I groaned as I got off of her and then sat down on the edge of the bed. “Goddamn, was that a good one.”

“Yes, it was,” Lara said.

“Can you help me? I’m so dirty now…” Jessica said dreamily.

“Yes, love, I can help you. Hold still,” Lara replied, going and getting a rag and then helping clean her face off. I watched her do it, finding the loving way in which she did it endearing and oddly intimate.

Not for the first time, it occurred to me that Lara was a very loving person.

I glanced at Susan. She was watching the display and was apparently not sure how to feel about it. I reached out and ran a hand up and down her thigh, distracting her.

“We on for tonight?” I asked.

She grinned. “Yes. After that display, I’m going to need it hard tonight.”

“Good girl,” I replied.

I cleaned off and pulled my clothes back on.

“Oh God, I was so loud,” Jessica moaned, covering her face. “This is so humiliating!”

“You asked for it,” I muttered, not unkindly. “I helped as much as I could.”

“I know, and thank you, just...ugh. Someone should talk to Hannah,” she muttered, then hiccuped, then yawned. “I need a nap…”

“I’ll talk to her,” I said.

“Maybe it shouldn’t be the guy who just fucked the shit out of her mom,” Susan murmured.

“Maybe, but you three are drunk. Not that I’m complaining, though for future reference, please consult me before doing something like this. I’m not trying to be a controlling asshole, but I need to know if I can count on you for backup if something bad happens,” I said.

“You can count on me, I’m not too drunk!” Susan replied, a touch angrily.

“Could you shoot straight right now?” I asked.

“Yes!” she replied immediately. I stared at her and crossed my arms. She blushed and looked away. “Okay, maybe not. Maybe you’re right...sorry.”

“It’s fine. You three relax, I’ll talk with Hannah.”

I headed out and closed the door behind me. I checked in their shared bedroom, hoping she wasn’t in there, and found it empty. I found the dining room and living room empty, too. And the kitchen. I started to get worried, checking the bathroom and the closest just to be sure, and then realized she must’ve gone outside.

Walking out the back door, sure enough, I found her sitting on a tree stump at the edge of the clearing.

She glared at me. “Okay, now I hate you.”

I felt heat rushing to my face as I slowly approached her. “I’m sorry.”

“No you aren’t.”

“I am, actually. I...they got drunk and your mom was...very persuasive. And she just needed to unwind and-”

“I heard what you made her say,” she muttered.

“That wasn’t me! And we didn’t make her do anything. Lara just asked her a question...Hannah…” I sighed and ran a hand over my head. My hair wasn’t stubble anymore. Maybe I should buzz it again, I liked the look, honestly. “I know you find it hard to believe, but I don’t...ugh, how do I put this?” I muttered.

“What? What exactly are you trying to tell me?” she asked. She was angry again and I didn’t blame her. I thought I knew what it was about. “Just be tactless,” she added when I hesitated for too long.

“Fine. I don’t make women submit to me, they just do. Saying stuff like that...it’s a part of sex. Not for everyone, obviously, but for a lot of people. A lot of women. And it doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Don’t...think less of her because of that.”

Hannah stared at me for a moment, then hugged herself tightly and turned away from me, hunching forward on the stump. “I just don’t see how her saying that stuff about herself can be a good thing,” she said finally.

“Hannah…” I sighed, reaching blindly for the right words. Fuck. How did I explain this? Something abruptly occurred to me. “You aren’t very experienced, are you?”

She glared at me, then looked back at the ground. “No. I’m not. For your information.”

“That wasn’t a judgment! God, you have to stop taking everything so fucking personally. Just...trust me, okay? I really don’t want how your mom acts with me to change how you look at her or feel about her. Okay? Please?”

She looked over at me, and her expression softened. “Yeah, okay,” she muttered. Slowly, she stood up. She wouldn’t meet my eye. “I don’t really hate you.”

“Thank you,” I replied.

“I just…” she let out a long sigh. “Don’t want to talk about it.”

“That’s fine. Let’s go inside, get lunch.”

“Okay.”

We headed back into the house.

NINE

The rest of the day went well enough.

Jessica either was hiding out or napping, or both, for awhile. I didn’t feel good enough about leaving the house after my confrontation with Travis, unconvinced that he might not come back while I was out, so I just stayed in for the rest of the day. After all we’d been through, Hannah seemed okay enough with that. She and I made dinner together, and Jessica emerged blushing with Susan and Lara not much later. Hannah was pleasant enough, and Jessica seemed deeply relieved as a fairly mild conversation got picked up. Mostly it was Susan and Lara telling their story of how they’d ended up here and what they’d done over the course of the snowy apocalypse.

I wound down the house after that, taking the opportunity to wash my clothes and melt some more snow and then pick up a novel I’d been intending to try out. Somewhere around nine, I headed for bed and found Susan and Lara nude and reading.

It took me close to half an hour to strip naked, fulfill my promise to Susan (and then Lara), and clean up after.

We ended up curled up together as we did every night now, naked and happy, listening to the cold wind blowing outside. There was moonlight tonight and it peeked in through the window, casting a ghostly light across the bed. I could see Lara and Susan clearly.

“There’s been something I’ve been meaning to ask. I wanted to ask earlier, but we’ve been distracted by everything happening recently…” I said, breaking the silence that had fallen over the three of us.

“What is it?” Susan replied softly.

“How are you two handling your...relationship development? I know you’ve had some difficulty with it, Susan…”

“I’m…” She paused. I could see Lara looking at her with a small smile from across my chest. “I love Lara. As a friend. And as a lover. I know that. I kind of just, well, it sounds stupid, but I was alone yesterday and I said it out loud to myself and it just felt right and made sense. I don’t know how to describe it really, but...I’m okay.”

“How do you feel about me?” I asked.

She seemed less certain now. “I...trust you,” she replied. “And I love having sex with you. And being around you. I feel safe with you. But I’m still...I’m getting used to this. It was a surprise to me that I’m bisexual. Like ‘I have full-on sex with women’ bisexual. And that I’m now dating my best friend. But now there’s a guy involved that we just met a few weeks ago and he’s amazing and I trust him but also he has three other girlfriends and is fucking this random MILF that’s like a million times hotter than I am-and I know. I know. It’s not a competition. I’m still-that’s a different problem. But all that other stuff with you, Chris, is...I’m still having some trouble with it. What if I hate your other girlfriends? What if they hate me?”

“Delilah will love you,” I replied. “Trust me. I can at least be sure of that. Elizabeth will, at the very least, be kind to you. She’s a very loving, kind person. And she’ll be busy raising her child. Megan...you might fight with Megan. But I think she’ll respect you, and she’ll, once she gets past her own insecurities, fall head-over-heels in lust with Lara.”

“And Jessica?” Lara asked.

I sighed. “Susan isn’t the only one figuring some things out.”

“Fair enough. How do you feel about Lara and I, how the relationship is going?”

“I mean fine,” I replied. “You’re both excellent, I’m glad I met you, I love how this is going.”

“That’s it?” I nodded. “It’s that easy for you?”

“Yeah.”

“I guess it would be. You’ve done this before and it means you get to fuck us both regularly. What about you, Lara?” she asked.

“I love you, Susan, and I’m very happy. And I’m also very happy with Chris.”

“Even though our relationship started out with you selling me your body?”

“Especially that. I mean, come on, I seduced you into being our boyfriend.”

“That’s a low bar,” Susan murmured.

“How, exactly?” I replied.

“Shit. I didn’t mean-I’m just saying, Lara, you can do that to like anyone.”

“Not anyone,” she murmured.

“Susan has a point,” I replied. “But regardless, it sounds like we’re closer to being comfortable with the relationship,” I replied.

“I’m already there,” Lara said.

“I’m getting there,” Susan said. “I think I won’t really be there until after I meet these other women…” She smiled suddenly. “Jessica likes me.”

“Shouldn’t surprise you,” I replied. “You’re really hot.”

“I know you two think I’m attractive, and I’m not taking that for granted, just...I guess I didn’t expect to get that much attention from another woman so quickly.”

“You think you’re gonna hit it?” Lara asked.

“You sound so hopeful,” Susan replied.

Lara laughed uncomfortably. “I mean...yeah. Why not? I want to see you do things with other women, but it’s okay if you don’t want to.”

“I have to admit, it’s, uh, interesting, having the sexual attraction of someone who is that attractive.” She hesitated. “I mean, you’re more attractive, Lara, but it’s different. We’ve been friends forever. Just…”

“She’s new. I get it. I had years to build up an attraction to you, but Jessica just met you, and that’s really exciting. Plus, you’re both kind of in the same boat. I’m the first woman she’s ever been any kind of serious with. Maybe you two could talk about that.” She yawned suddenly, a long and loud one, then blinked sleepily. “Shit, I’m tired.”

“Go to sleep,” I replied, then kissed both her and Susan, and we all got settled for the night.

~

“What are we doing today?”

I glanced over as Hannah posed the question. We were striking out away from the house once more.

“Searching places,” I replied.

She sighed but didn’t say anything else. I knew how she felt, but I was restless and anxious about our ammo situation. With those two wolves, we’d managed to put off the food situation for a bit longer, and I intended to use it to do some more thorough searching.

We were heading for the lake.

There were five buildings around that lake, and I wanted to do a search of them all. Even the lakehouses I’d cleared. Hannah might see something I’d missed.

“I know it’s boring,” I said, “but that’s something else you’re going to have to get used to. Being bored. Right now, this is important. We need ammo.”

“How much do we actually have?” she replied.

I patted the gun on my hip. “Eight in this one, twenty in the one back home.”

“Twenty eight seems like a fair amount…”

“If we had to get into any kind of serious gun battle, that’ll be gone before you know it. But besides that, if we really expect to be effective at hunting, we need more bullets for the rifle. Among other reasons. So this is another lesson: prioritize. Right now, we’re doing okay for food, so we’re taking the time to do other things that need to happen.”

“All right,” she said.

I glanced at Hannah. She seemed more subdued today, which was, in its own way, a blessing. I thought she’d still be mad at me for last night.

Which I take some responsibility for.

Though, in all truth, I’m not sure I could have possibly said no to Jessica with an offer like that. Especially considering Lara and Susan were there, too.

We made it to the first of the two lakehouses and got to work. We spent close to an hour on each house, going over them thoroughly and meticulously, and managing to find only a single semi-useful item: a can-opener. We already had one, but more was still better. I pocketed it and we made the walk over to the island.

“God, I’d hate to have to climb that,” Hannah muttered, looking up. “Do we have to...wait, it looks like the stairs are broken.”

I laughed bitterly as we looked up at the watchtower. “Yes, they are very broken. They very nearly broke me.”

“You were up there?” she asked.

“Yeah. I searched it and when I was coming down, the stairs broke right out from under me. Pure fucking luck I didn’t fall to my death. I got the shit knocked out of me, though. I’ve still got all sorts of nasty bruises along my back and ribs.”

“Damn,” she muttered.

We moved over the snowbound island, searching it as well as we could, and unfortunately came up with nothing. As we moved over to the pair of cabins on the other side of the lake, Hannah asked me more about my past and I began filling her in. I told her about growing up in Florida, the first months of the apocalypse, and finally some of my adventures since then. I also left out Delilah and Elizabeth and Megan.

Things were weird enough as it was.

The cabins were a bust, and I found my hope diminishing with each passing hour. As we finished searching the final one, we took a seat and broke out a quick lunch.

“What were you like, before all this?” Hannah asked.

“Quiet. Shy. Introverted. Awkward,” I replied.

“Come on, don’t lie like that.”

“Have I actually lied to you once?”

She stared at me for a moment, pausing in her meal. “You definitely tried yesterday, at the campgrounds.”

“Okay, fair enough. Yeah, I tried to. Otherwise, I haven’t been lying. I don’t really lie.”

“Come on? You’re really going to tell me you were shy and awkward?”

“Not, like, immensely. But yeah, I didn’t have a whole lot of friends, I lived alone. Mostly I worked out and camped if I wasn’t working or sleeping.”

“You must’ve had a lot of girlfriends.”

“I wouldn’t say a lot. What about you? I’m sure you had boys lining up.”

She laughed. “Yes, I did. It was annoying. I never really...I never found anyone I really liked. The closest I ever got was just being really turned on by someone. I went on a lot of dates, but after like twenty guys turned into fucking entitled dickheads the second they thought they had me, or they thought it would help get into my pants, I got like a neurological complex about it. Every time I found myself getting attracted to someone, the thought immediately following it was ‘okay, in what way is he a giant fucking asshole?’.”

“That sucks.”

“Yes. And you can imagine how watching my mom and dad interact over the years has fucked up my perception of relationships as well.” She paused, looked anxious. “If I tell you something, will you not repeat it?”

“Absolutely,” I replied.

Hannah waited a second longer, then quickly finished her meal and put the can back into her pack. Then she looked at me intensely. “I love my mom, and respect her, but I don’t...get her. I don’t understand why it took her so long to leave my dad, but what I don’t get even more is why she had to run to you. I mean, I get it in the immediate sense: my dad is dangerous, so is Thomas, neither of us are good enough at defending ourselves, probably, but you are. Probably. But now that I’ve seen her around you, I can just tell...she’s going to do the same thing. She’s going to just stick with you if you let her. She barely knows you. Why do some people just have to be with someone? I get the feeling that if it wasn’t you, it’d be someone else.”

“Shit, I don’t know,” I answered after considering it for a minute. “Some people are just built like that. Some people want to be alone. Some people can’t stand it. Some people like being single, some people go fucking crazy being single. Some can go either way. But I guess my question to you is: is it really that much of a problem? Is it really so bad? Also, I don’t think I’m that bad of a catch. Do you?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes. “That isn’t what I mean. I’m not mad she ran to you, personally, although it’s a little weird now that I know how much younger you are than her, I’m mad that she can’t just...do this on her own. Be independent. I don’t want-” She stopped speaking abruptly and looked away.

And then suddenly her line of reasoning, her anxiety, dawned on me. “You don’t want to be like that,” I said. “You want to be independent. And you’re afraid that because your mom is codependent, then maybe that secretly means you are codependent.”

She didn’t say anything, but she nodded.

“Hannah, I believe you get to choose to be who you want to be, but I also believe that some things are just buried in us and we don’t get to choose certain aspects of ourselves. I’m straight, like super boring predictable straight. I didn’t get to choose that anymore than Lara got to choose that she’s bisexual.” I paused, considered it. “Hannah.” She looked at me and I looked into her eyes. “Here’s a thing I wish someone had told me sooner: don’t force yourself to be the kind of person you think you should be, be the kind of person you want to be. I used to be more confrontational, before all this snow fell, and it wasn’t just because I have anger problems. It was kind of because I believed that’s what I had to do to be taken seriously by people. This was back in high school. Eventually, I realized that at some point you’re just going to have to let your actions speak for themselves, speak up for yourself every now and then, but mostly just let people fuck off. Who gives a shit if people think you’re weird?” I asked.

“Sounds easy,” Hannah muttered.

“Tell me this. Let’s say two women and a man are in a relationship together. The women are both submissive to the man. Would you look down on them?”

She sighed and crossed her arms. “Why do you have to ask that?”

“Because I want to know the answer.”

“I...don’t know,” she admitted. “I mean, truthfully, it’s not my business. But…”

“But?” I prompted.

“Why do they have to be submissive? Is he forcing them?”

“No. For the sake of argument, they are doing it not just with consent, but happy consent.”

“I don’t understand how someone could do that happily.”

“Okay then. Do you need to understand something to respect it?” I asked.

She opened her mouth, closed it, looked down at the floor and thought for several long minutes. I finished my own lunch while she did and glanced out the nearest window. I could just make out the final building we were going to investigate, what looked like an equipment shed that may very well hold the fishing equipment I was looking for.

“I guess I don’t have to understand it to respect it,” she admitted, looking back up, “but I also kind of don’t believe it.”

“You don’t believe that, out of billions of people, there are none who would enjoy being submissive to someone?”

“I mean I guess I can believe that there’s a few of them, but…”

“I think it’s a thing you’re just going to have to accept, Hannah.” I stood up. “Listen, I don’t understand it either. But I’ve met a lot of women who were sexual submission. And submission in other areas of their lives, too. I didn’t make them submit to me, or coax them into it, or lie to them, or anything. Most of the time, they offer. Obviously, you can see why I’d like to be submitted to, yeah?” She sighed and nodded, getting to her feet as well. “But I’ve stopped trying to understand it. I think it’s just a personality type that either you have it or you don’t. You get it or you don’t. And you need to not look down on people just because you don’t understand. Your mom is strong, don’t doubt that, she just wants someone to be nice to her and take care of her. Can you honestly fucking say that you can’t appreciate the notion of wanting someone else to just fucking be there for you and handle things because you’re scared and tired?”

It wasn’t exactly the point I was trying to make. Even though I didn’t fully get it, I had the idea that there was a difference between what I had just described and being turned on by being submissive, but I think there was enough overlap that my point wasn’t total bullshit. Either way, that seemed to strike a chord in her, and she slowly nodded. “Yeah...okay. I get that.”

“Good.”

We headed back outside, into the cold. It was windier today, but at least sunnier. I didn’t see any storms or clouds on the horizon, no dark gray forms slinking low to the ground anywhere, nor any taller forms stalking among the trees or buildings. I was paranoid that Travis would send Thomas after me in some capacity, or perhaps do the dirty deed himself, but no, it made more sense for him to make someone else do it.

I was hoping that I was wrong, that they would actually let it go, but I didn’t hold out much in the way of genuine hope for that.

Travis seemed way too petty to let this go, and Thomas seemed stupid enough to be talked into trying to kill me.

That was another reason I really wanted ammo for the rifle.

Even just a few rounds would do it.

We got to the equipment shed, which, up close, was smaller than I would have liked. I got my pistol out and checked around the perimeter, to see if anyone was hiding behind it, then carefully opened the door. It was a single-room place, and it had obviously seen a lot of attention over the past few years. I spied a few empty boxes, some barren steel shelves pushed up against the far back wall, and a single rusted desk.

“Okay, let’s see what we can find,” I said, and set to it.

I checked the shelves and found nothing on them. Hannah began digging into the desk, opening the drawers to hunt for useful items. I moved the shelves, grunting with effort to wrestle them out of position and see if something useful had fallen behind them or rolled beneath them, but there was no such luck there either. Shoving them back into place, I checked the boxes, then under them. Still nothing. Goddamn.

I then spent the next fifteen minutes checking along the floor, the walls, the ceiling, looking for hidden compartments or anything else useful.

Yet still more nothing.

“Any luck?” I asked.

She sighed. “Nothing.”

“Here, let’s move it.”

She finished her search and then helped me lift the heavy metal desk. We got it out of the way, and that’s when I saw…

“That looks deliberate,” Hannah murmured.

I crouched down, carefully fishing out a tightly folded piece of paper that had been shoved not just behind the desk, but into a space where the floor met the wall.

“Let’s see what we’ve got here,” I muttered, unfolding it and then laying it flat on the desk. Hannah stood beside me, peering down at it.

I immediately recognized a map of the area, hand-drawn and hasty. There was nothing new on the map, in fact my own map had more locations, except for just a couple of things in the wooded area to the south, to the southeast of our house.

Abruptly, I realized what I was looking at. “It’s like a treasure map.”

“Really?” she asked.

“I think so. Those don’t look like buildings, these little sketches here, they look like landmarks. Well, except for this one. And this one here looks like a little camper…”

I flipped it over suddenly and found writing on the back, read over it quickly.

Mac,

Found a camper full of stuff.

Can’t carry it all myself.

Heading north, meet me at Satchel.

Here’s a map to the camper.

-Lloyd

And below that were a series of quick instructions.

“I bet we could find this,” Hannah said, sounding excited.

“I bet we could,” I agreed, studying it for a few moments before folding it up and tucking it into my inner pocket. “Let’s go treasure hunting.”

TEN

“So you think it’s bullshit?” Hannah asked as we walked south.

“No,” I replied. “I’ve found stuff like this before. Notes. Maps. Sometimes it’s a trap, or it was at one point, but usually the traps are way more obvious than that.”

“Obvious like how?”

“It would be in a more accessible location. Like it would’ve been in one of the drawers.”

“I’ll have to remember that…”

“Yeah, although something crucial to remember is that just because something looks very obvious doesn’t necessarily mean it is. Sometimes a note is just a note that was poorly hidden. Bottom line: be ready for anything.”

“Oh wow, so helpful,” she muttered. Then sighed. “Sorry. You are actually being helpful. And this is actually kind of fun.”

“That’s another piece of advice I have.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Find fun where you can. The world has always sucked, and now it sucks more than ever before. So find it where you can to keep yourself sane.”

“Is that what you’re doing with Susan and Lara?” she asked, with a small, teasing smile. “Finding fun?”

“I mean...yeah,” I replied.

“Oh my God, are you blushing?” Her grin broadened.

“No.”

“You are!”

I sighed. “Whatever.”

She laughed, then she looked guilty. “I’m sorry.”

“For what? Teasing me, it wasn’t that-”

“No. For before. I thought you were...taking advantage of Susan and Lara. But it’s obvious that you’re very...um, you’re sweet together, with them...you look guilty all of a sudden, why?”

“Okay, so I’ll just tell you this now, so it doesn’t come up later in passing and shatter this picture you’re painting in your mind of us. When we met, not too long ago, Lara offered me a deal: protection and providing food in exchange for sex. I agreed. Though to be honest, our relationship has hardly changed. She treated me like a boyfriend from the start.”

I waited, glanced at her sidelong, watched her chew over that particular piece of information. “I don’t know how to feel about that, I guess.” She looked at me. “I don’t suppose you have something smart to say about it? Any further justification for that deal beyond ‘I like pussy’?”

I laughed softly, then sighed. “I know it’s probably harder to hear from me, given what you’ve seen and experienced, but I guess...everyone has assets. Everyone has talents. And you shouldn’t look down on people for knowing that and acting on it. And yeah, I know it’s convenient for me to say, given that my talents are things like strength and hunting and skinning and that’s stuff that’s useful everywhere and isn’t invasive or seen as demeaning. I’ve never had to sell my body.” I paused. “Well...not like that, I guess. I’ve had to sell myself into labor sometimes, but I get it. I still stand by my point, though.”

She was silent for several moments, then just grunted noncommittally in response.

“Fuck, does every conversation we have need to turn all dark and serious?” I asked.

She sighed. “I’m sorry. I guess that’s where I’m different from my mother. She’s always called me gloomy. I guess she’s not wrong.”

“There’s a lot to be gloomy about nowadays,” I muttered.

“Yeah. But that’s always been true. She tells me I should lighten up, try to see the bright side sometimes. I used to think it was bullshit, just something she said because she didn’t know how to handle my fucking gloominess, but I don’t know, maybe not.”

“She’s right,” I said. “Looking for reasons to be happy, or even satisfied, is pretty fucking important these days. Survival is one thing, sanity is another.”

“Sometimes I do feel like I’m starting to go a little insane.”

“So have fun with this,” I said. “We’re following a literal treasure map.”

“You’re right,” she replied, favoring me with a genuine smile.

We hit the treeline of the same forest our house was in, entering it a little to the east. The map was a bit dubious, and we had only a few landmarks to go off of.

“So what’s first?” she asked as we walked along the treeline, looking for a path.

“Well, after we find this path, a ‘Y tree’.”

“Why tree?”

“Like in the shape of a Y.”

“Oh. Should be easy enough to find.”

A few minutes later, we found the path, or what I hoped was the path, and began following it. As we walked, I noticed Hannah seemed to finally start relaxing. Though not completely. Good. She remembered my point about always being in danger outside. And forests were plenty dangerous. Lots of places for wildlife and thieves to hide. Which made me wonder why I liked forests so much. I liked being in them, even now, when damn near everything was dead. Maybe they just reminded me of my camping trips before the apocalypse.

Luckily, finding the first landmark was really just as easy as following the path for about five minutes.

“That definitely looks like a Y,” Hannah said as we spotted the tree in question. It was big and imposing, the trunk splitting about fifteen feet up.

“Yep,” I agreed, checking the map.

“Now what?”

“Now...we’re looking for an abandoned shack. About a football field’s length southwest of here.” I pulled out my compass.

“That’s...a hundred yards, right?”

“Yeah.” I lined up with southwest. “Okay, let’s do it.”

We set off once again, leaving the path and plunging deeper into the forest. I made sure to try and pay attention to my surroundings to keep a rough idea of where we were. I’d gotten lost before, but I was pretty good about a sense of direction.

As we walked, I kept an eye out for edible plants and advised Hannah to do the same. We stopped every now and then to harvest something: a potato, some green beans, peas. At one point I found a bell pepper and couldn’t help but smile wide when I grabbed it.

“What’s up with you and that pepper?” Hannah asked not long after we’d found it.

I glanced at her. Either she was sharper than I was used to my traveling companions being, or my regular traveling companions just noticed a lot of stuff and didn’t say anything about it. I supposed it could go either way.

“You really want to know?” I asked.

“It’s a sex thing, isn’t it?”

“...yes. It’s okay if you don’t want to know.”

“Okay, now I’m just curious. What the fuck could a bell pepper have to do with sex? Is it weird or gross?” she asked.

“No, it’s not. Well, I don’t think so. Not too long ago, I ran into an older married couple who lived at that farmhouse we searched. The wife made a deal with me. She loved bell peppers, had seen some growing in the region. If I found one for her, she offered to have sex with me. I found it and we had sex. And before you ask, no, she wasn’t cheating.”

“How is that not cheating?” Hannah replied.

“I thought it would have been obvious: they had an open marriage.”

“So this guy knew you were fucking his wife?” she asked. I nodded. “People are so fucking weird.”

“People are weird,” I agreed. “But again, you asked...look, there’s the shack.”

We walked up to it and came to stand before it. It was a tiny, sad little thing made of wood and corrugated metal siding. It looked extremely makeshift, though surprisingly it had held up rather well given the environment it existed in. I took a look inside, poking my head in through the open doorway, as there was no door, if there ever had been, and found the place empty with a snow and dirt floor. I wondered who had built it or why, but knew it would be a mystery. With that found, I pulled the paper back out and studied it.

“Okay, next is...a weird rock.”

“Gee, so specific,” Hannah muttered.

I laughed. “There’s a little sketch.” I showed it to her. It was basically a boulder that looked like it had one side of it carved out, leaving some overhanging rock. It was distinctive enough to go off of. Apparently it was a quarter mile south, so we got reoriented and resumed walking. We picked up a few more useful vegetables and I saw a deer in the distance that made me regret, again, not having found any rounds for the rifle. Would’ve been a good chance to see what kind of shot Hannah was. She claimed she was a good one but there was no way to know without actually seeing her shoot, and I didn’t want to waste any bullets practicing.

We found the rock after awhile, and whoever had done the sketch had done a decent job. It was a weird rock.

From there, it was a simple process to follow the final instruction and go east again. That was where the RV was supposed to be.

We found it ten minutes later.

“I’m surprised it’s actually there,” Hannah muttered as we slowly approached it. It appeared to be in a small clearing at the end of a long dirt road that disappeared off between the trees. I hunted around for anything that might be lying in wait.

“All sorts of shit has been left in weird places now,” I replied. We reached the edge of the clearing. “Wait here, let me secure the area.”

“Come on, don’t just leave me here,” she said.

“Hannah, I’m the only one armed, and I don’t want you getting in the way if I need to shoot something or someone. Okay?”

“Fine,” she said.

I had my pistol out by now and made a slow circuit of the clearing’s perimeter. No wolves around, at least. Or bears. At least that I could see. I tried to get a sense of what was in the RV, it wasn’t too large and it had obviously been there awhile. The fact that the door was ajar didn’t really bolster my hope that it held a large cache of supplies like the map promised, but you never knew until you actually checked.

Once I was sure the clearing was empty, I got up to the RV and carefully pulled the door open. It felt dead and empty inside. I slowly entered, careful of any traps or people hiding out. The thing shifted and creaked as I walked up inside and then began poking around, cautiously checking everything out. No one in either of the seats up front, no one in any of the closets or compartments where a person might conceivably hide, and no one in the sleeping area in the back. I walked to the window in the back bedroom and pulled it open.

“We’re clear, come help me search it,” I said.

“Coming,” Hannah replied, beginning to jog over.

She joined me in the RV and we got to work.

It wasn’t quite the same, searching this place as opposed to most of the others I’d searched, especially with another person involved. Mainly it was just that there wasn’t much room to move around in. We made it work, but it became clear that yet again many others had gotten here ahead of us. I added some silverware that had been overlooked to my pack, a few articles of clothing, a paperback novel, but nothing else.

After almost an hour of hunting around, carefully, meticulously, I was almost ready to give up. And then I found it.

One of the beds in the back had a carefully concealed compartment beneath it and, with a knife and some effort, I managed to get it open.

“Holy shit,” Hannah muttered.

“Holy shit, indeed,” I agreed as I stared into the compartment.

It was tightly packed with stuff. First and foremost, I carefully extracted the clear case I spied that held what appeared to be a fishing rod. A good one. I also extracted a small tacklebox beneath it and set both down on another nearby bed.

“See what else there is, if there’s any ammo,” I said as I started to open the cases. Hannah nodded and got to it.

I inspected the fishing rod, taking a moment to screw it together. It was of a good make and in great condition. It had fishing line, and in the tacklebox I found all the things necessary for good fishing. Oh thank God. A way of getting food that didn’t require a rifle. Although it would be meaningless if that lake was devoid of life. I guess I’d find out. I carefully broke the rod back down and put it away, then looked over the stuff Hannah found.

Food. That was a decent find. Not a lot, but there was a satchel filled with a dozen cans or so of food. Meat. Vegetables. Fish. There was also a smaller satchel with some spices thrown in, so that was nice. I found another knife, this one a nice hunting knife, complete with a leather sheath that could attach to a belt, and gave it to Hannah.

Unfortunately, there were no guns, no bullets, no other weapons of any kind.

But we found some basic medical supplies. Painkillers. Bandages. Another thermometer. Suture kit. And…

“Fuck,” I whispered, studying the tube of lubricant. Could it be? I checked it over, unscrewed the top and found the plastic seal to still be unbroken. It was a decent-sized tube, too. Holy fucking shit, I couldn’t believe this.

Honestly, this was the best part of the find for me, personally.

I screwed the top back on.

“What is that? What’s got you so excited?” Hannah asked.

“Nothing,” I replied.

“What?” Now she turned to look at me. “What are you hiding? Come on, what is it?”

“Do you really want to know?” I asked, slipping it into my pocket.

“Yes.”

“Lube.”

She made a face. “Gross.”

“Yet again: you asked.”

“Why are you so obsessed with sex?” she asked.

“I’m not obsessed with it, I just-it feels amazing! Why wouldn’t I be actively working towards it? What fucking else is there to do nowadays besides survive, sleep, and read?”

“Whatever,” she muttered, bitterly, I noted. I wanted to ask if there was more there, if something had happened, more than what she’d already told me, but knew it wouldn’t go well. I tried to look at it from her perspective as we packed all the stuff away. If the only person around that I could really sleep with was already hooking up with my parent, and two other people, even if I was attracted to them, yeah I could see that being very frustrating.

I felt bad for her, but how could I help her?

Literally my only thought was: help her by relieving her sexual frustration myself, and that wasn’t an option.

So I guess there was nothing I could do to help beyond be nice to her.

Once we had everything packed up and had completed our search of the camper, we headed back outside and started making the trip home.

~

“Do we have to go home?” Hannah asked as we came within sight of the house.

“I mean I guess we don’t have to. I need to at least check in and drop this stuff off,” I replied. “Why?”

“I want to keep doing stuff. I spent so fucking long cooped up in the lodge and now we’re out and about and doing shit...I just don’t want to go back inside.” She shivered suddenly. “Well, for more than just a bit. I would like to warm up.”

I considered it silently as we kept walking, and decided this was a goddamned blessing in disguise. And I’d take it.

“All right, how about this: after we get back and you warm up, I’ll see if Susan wants to take you foraging.”

“Okay,” she replied.

Oh thank God, I thought. Finding that lube had made me horny. I wanted to put it to good use and fuck Lara in the ass because she probably had the best ass I’d ever seen. And she’d let me know that once we had access to any kind of lube, she’d be happy to let me do it. Susan might be annoyed, but I figured she’d go along with it.

At the very least I could promise her something in return.

We got inside and found the house to be as peaceful as we’d left it. I found Susan in the living room, laying on the couch, reading.

“You look excited, what’d you find?” she asked, setting the book aside.

“Some food and medicine and fishing equipment in an old camper,” I replied.

“Holy shit, we can have fish?” she asked. “Like caught fish? Not tuna from a can?”

“Hopefully,” I replied, setting the supplies down on the coffee table. “I don’t actually know if there’s anything still alive in that lake. But we’ll find out soon enough. As for now...would you be willing to take Hannah out foraging? Show her a few tips?” I asked, raising my eyebrows in a somewhat pleading fashion.

She pursed her lips, studying me, then Hannah, who was standing by the fire, warming herself up. She could tell something was up, there was some reason I was asking, and finally she nodded and relief hit me almost as hard as the fresh, crashing wave of lust.

“Okay,” she replied.

“Thanks. Where’s the others?”

“Back in the master bedroom, hanging out,” she said.

“All right. Don’t forget your gun. Good luck.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” she murmured, mildly annoyed.

I was definitely going to have to do something nice for her later.

I hurried back towards the bedroom.

ELEVEN

I could hardly contain my excitement as I walked back down the hallway.

I had to at least wait for Hannah and Susan to leave the house, but they would hopefully be doing so in just the next few minutes. I knocked on the door.

“Come in!” Lara called.

Opening the door up, I stepped inside and pushed the door closed behind me. Much like yesterday, I found the two beautiful women laying on the bed, this time beneath the blankets, apparently relaxing and conversing.

“You look very pleased with yourself,” Lara said. “You find something out there?”

“Yes. Food, medicine, and fishing supplies. But, most significantly…” I reached into my pocket, extracted the lube, and tossed it to her. She caught it and her face lit up with excitement.

“Holy shit, you found some. This is awesome.”

“What is it?” Jessica asked.

“Lube. Now Chris can fuck me in the ass.”

“You seem pretty excited about that.”

“I am. I love anal.”

“I have been wanting to fuck Lara in her fat ass ever since I met her,” I replied as I began getting out of my boots.

“Well, since you two are going to get sexual anyway, can we have a threesome? Like a full on one? I feel like we’ve never quite managed it,” Jessica asked.

“I would love to,” I replied.

She smiled, then frowned. “What about Hannah? God, I’ll be so loud…”

“Susan has already agreed to take Hannah out foraging, and she’s bringing a pistol with her for protection and-”

“All right, we’re leaving!” Susan called.

“Perfect timing.” I hurried back over to the door, opened it, and poked my head out. Looking down the length of the hall, I wished them luck and watched them go. Once the door was shut and locked, I closed the bedroom door and quickly resumed stripping.

Lara and Jessica immediately pulled back the blanket and started getting out of their clothes. They had stripped down to t-shirts and leggings already.

“You know, I still feel bad about this,” Jessica said as she undressed.

“About what?” Lara replied.

“This. Having sex with...anyone besides my ex-husband. We’re separated now, I think that couldn’t be clearer, but I still feel guilty, just a bit, whenever we hook up.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Lara replied, reaching over and running a hand soothingly up and down one smooth thigh of Jessica’s. She smirked suddenly. “You just need practice.”

Jessica laughed, and it made her breasts bounce nicely. “Practice at sex?”

“At having sex and not feeling bad about it. Chris and I will be very happy to help with that.”

“Do you think...Susan would be interested in helping?” she asked. Then, before either of us could answer, she quickly added, “Not that I don’t appreciate the two of you!”

Lara laughed easily. “Don’t worry, Jessica, it’s fine. Susan...just needs time. I think she likes you, she’s just wrestling with the fact that she likes girls at all.”

“I still feel the same way. But I already feel like I’m getting past that. It doesn’t feel weird anymore when we do it,” she murmured.

“We’ve had a bit more time to get used to each other,” Lara replied.

I finished getting naked and crawled onto the bed with them, then set the lube on the nightstand to make sure we didn’t lose it in the sheets and blankets. Before I knew it I was making out with Jessica, hands roaming over her body as I felt Lara’s hands moving over my own. I groped her wonderfully firm breasts, slid down to her excellent hips, her athletic thighs, all as we started tongue-wrestling, and the response I got from her was as thrilling as her own hands touching me. I could feel the excitement in her response, in her body, feel her thrumming with sexual energy. To have a woman as attractive as Jessica, a literal former model, and a forty-year-old MILF, be this excited to be sleeping with me…

It was this kind of interaction that felt like the light at the end of the tunnel, the tunnel being all the physical, mental, and emotional suffering that was now just a part of surviving the apocalypse and the snow and the cold.

These connections made it all worth it.

A moment later Lara took me, greedily kissing and touching me, shoving her tongue into my mouth as her hand found my cock and started massaging it. We kissed with a passion that was already becoming familiar to me, and I wondered if it spoke to how much experience I’d gained or if it was something unique to her that we’d connected so quickly, so intensely. Maybe we were just super compatible.

Even during that first encounter we’d come together like magnets.

She kissed me until she broke away suddenly, my hand on one of her huge tits, and then she leaned over me and kissed Jessica. I continued feeling her up for a bit as I watched the two women tongue-kiss, and then my hand went lower and I started to pleasure her. She moaned loudly, breaking the kiss as a shudder ran through her.

“Fuck, that’s-oh yes!” she cried.

“You really know how to push her button,” Jessica murmured.

“I know how to push both of your buttons,” I replied, rubbing Lara for another good, long minute and then switching over to Jessica and doing the same thing. The redheaded MILF let out a loud, high-pitched cry of bliss as I got to work on her. While I was in the midst of that I let out a moan of my own as I felt sudden, hot, wet pleasure envelop my cock and I glanced down to see Lara’s wondrous lips wrapped around my shaft, her head bobbing.

Jessica and I kept fooling around while Lara sucked my dick, and I felt myself becoming more energized with sexual energy with every second that passed. As soon as Lara came up for air, I had her switch places with me and then I returned the oral favor. She let out a loud, inarticulate sound of bliss as I began licking her clit, bathing it in bliss and making her thighs tremble around my head. I looked up the length of her wonderfully curvaceous body as I ate her out, seeing her passionately kissing Jessica, both women groping each other.

I ate her until she orgasmed, and then I switched over to Jessica, settled between her athletic thighs, and started eating her out.

“Oh fuck, Chris!” she cried, running her hands over my head. “Fuck that’s-oh! Yes! Shit! Don’t stop!” she begged.

Lara began sucking on one of her breasts as I ate her out, and I had her orgasming in no time at all and we both sat back and watched that wonderful event occur.

“Fuck me,” she moaned as soon as she was finished. “Please, put that big thing in me, Chris.”

“All right,” I replied, getting on top of her and slipping right into her. She let out a shout of pleasure as I pushed into her and I held myself up, head swimming with the raw rapture of getting into that mature pussy of hers, staring down at her fit body as I began fucking her. “You’re mine now, remember?” I panted.

“Yes,” she moaned loudly. “I remember...oh fuck...you claimed me.”

“You begged for it.”

“I did...oh lord…” she panted. “I...really want you to just take control of me. Every time I see you.” She was grabbing at my back now as I drove into her, pounding her into the mattress. “I’ve never met anyone like you…”

“I don’t think Chris minds adding another beautiful girl to his harem,” Lara murmured, tracing a circle around one of Jessica’s nipples, making her moan and shudder again. “Especially a sexy mature MILF like you, Jessica.”

“Is that what you and Susan are?” she whispered, then cried out. “His harem?”

“He has trouble calling it that, but yes. We and three other girls…”

“What?!” she cried, staring up at me.

“Oh shit, you hadn’t brought that up already?” Lara asked.

I felt a pang of anxiety, but it was offset by the fact that Jessica sounded more surprised than angry. That and the fact that I was still deep inside of her.

“Not exactly,” I replied.

“I’m sorry!”

“I’m not mad, really, just...three more?!” she panted. I hadn’t stopped fucking her. “Where?!”

“I was hoping to get to this later but I’ve got three girlfriends in a place called Pine Lake several days’ journey south of here,” I replied.

“Susan and I are going back with him when he goes,” Lara said.

“When’s that? When were you going to mention this?” Jessica asked.

“At some point in the next several weeks,” I replied, finally pausing in my frantic thrusting. “I’m sorry, I didn’t want to overwhelm you, given all you’ve gone through, but yes, I was going to mention it. I was going to ask you and Hannah to come back with me.”

“I...I need to think about it,” she murmured.

“I know. And that’s fine. There’s no pressure, but if you’d like to come along, I’d be thrilled to have you.”

“I’m sorry,” Lara said, blushing, “I thought-”

“It’s okay, I’m not mad,” Jessica replied.

“I’m annoyed,” I said, looking over at her. I pulled out of Jessica and then pushed Lara onto her back. “You’ve been a bad girl.”

“I have. I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Are you going to punish me?”

“Yes,” I replied as I got between her legs and then speared her hard with my cock. She gasped and yelled as she accepted my entire length into her fantastically wet pussy. She continued crying out as I started fucking the shit out of her, making the bed shake beneath us.

“You bad, bad girl!” I yelled, pounding her brains out.

“Oh master, I’m so sorry!” she screamed.

“You’re going to be!”

I fucked her harder and noticed Jessica was watching all of this wide, fascinated eyes.

After several minutes Lara gasped, “I think I need to be taught a harder lesson.”

I glanced at Jessica. “Is it gonna freak you out if this turns...violent? Not between you and me, just between me and Lara.”

“I...no, it won’t freak me out,” she murmured, and I had the idea that she was extremely turned on, and wanted more.

“Good.” I looked back down at Lara. “You do need to be taught a harder lesson.” I slapped her, and not softly, either. She cried out.

“I’m sorry!”

“Shut up!” I slapped her again and she moaned.

She was close to coming, I knew that. I kept fucking her and then I wrapped one hand around her throat. Her eyes went wide, but there was nothing but begging for more in her gaze, in her body language, so I started choking her. She gasped, gagged, went stiff.

“Master…” she gasped.

“I said shut up, slut!” Still choking her, I slapped her hard with my other hand.

That did it. She began to come. I kept screwing her good and hard, letting go of her throat halfway through the orgasm, and she gasped and shrieked in pure bliss. Her pussy convulsed and fluttered around me as she squirted, and damn was it hard not to bust inside of her. I wanted to so badly, but I wanted to bust inside of her fat ass even more.

When she was finished, I pulled out of her.

“Lay there and think about what you’ve done,” I said, and got back on top of Jessica and started screwing her again.

Apparently our little display her turned her on massively because she immediately started crying out in blind bliss and I had her orgasming as well within thirty seconds. This time, it was a very near thing, but I managed not to come again.

As soon as she finished her orgasm, though, I pulled out and shifted back over to Lara.

“I’m not done with your punishment yet,” I said, reaching over and grabbing the lube. “Get on your hands and knees, you stupid whore.”

“Yes, master,” she replied. She chewed on her lower lip, looking at me with false anxiety as she got up. “Don’t punish me too hard…”

“Shut the fuck up,” I replied as I got behind her, lubed up, and gave her ass a hard smack. She cried out. I got into position and took a moment to study her perfect ass. Seriously. Goddamn. Lara had the fattest, curviest, most perfect ass I’d ever seen in my life. “You’ll be punished as hard as you need to be punished. You have a lesson to learn.”

“Yes, master,” she whispered.

“That’s what I thought.”

I took my time getting into Lara’s ass. She moaned and shuddered and pleaded with me not to go too hard on her.

“I said shut up!” I snapped, slapping her ass even harder than last time. “Every time you ask, I’m just going to go harder.” Which I thought was exactly what she wanted. There were some women who liked anal sex.

And then there were some women who liked rough anal sex.

I had the idea Lara was one of those.

God, I fucking hoped Susan was.

Before too long, I had my whole length in Lara’s thick ass, and once I got comfortable in there, I grabbed her hips and just settled in to fuck.

And holy God. I lost myself.

For the next several minutes, I lost myself in her perfect ass. She moaned and cried out and shouted occasionally, all against the backdrop of our skin clapping together and Jessica’s heavy breathing, and I just watched my dick disappear into her perfect ass over and over again. It was pure paradise, it was fucking heaven.

At some point, the realization hit me that I wasn’t lasting much longer.

“All right, Lara. You’ve been very bad,” I growled, gripping her more tightly. “And it’s time to be punished.”

She screamed as I started fucking her ass harder, and for the next thirty seconds she did nothing but cry out and yell as I fucked her ass as hard as I could, just slamming into her. And when I came, it was like an explosion.

Overwhelming, absorbing, annihilating.

I felt consumed by the orgasm as I started pumping her ass full of my seed. I could feel my cock twitching and spasming violently within the tightness of her ass and nothing else. Each spasm sent a jet of my stuff out of me and into her, and a cracking eruption of blinding, overpowering ecstasy rushing through my entire body.

I came for what felt like ages.

When I did finally come down from the high, and my cock stopped dry-kicking, and I was done, it occurred to me that she had enjoyed an orgasm along with me, which was a very nice bonus to the encounter.

I didn’t say anything as I pulled out of her ass, just let out a wordless grunt that became a moan as I came out. My cock was so sensitive it was painful to touch. I flopped onto my back, gasping for breath, staring at the ceiling, feeling drunk off of the blissful aftermath of the climax I’d just experienced with Lara and Jessica.

“That was like the hottest thing I’ve ever seen,” Jessica murmured.

“You liked that?” I asked dreamily.

“Yes. Holy shit. Lara had mentioned you were into rough play, but I didn’t know it was...like that. Wow.”

“If you ever want to try anything like that, let me know,” I said.

“Yeah, Chris is not only very good at it, he’s someone you can really trust to choke you and beat the shit out of you. He’s good at reading me and knowing where the threshold is and going just short of it and that is just amazing,” Lara murmured.

“I...I don’t know if I want that for myself,” Jessica said uncertainly.

“No pressure. Open offer,” I replied.

“For now, I’ll be content to watch. Whether or not I want to be slapped or choked is something I’m not sure about, but I now know for a fact that I really like watching it. And...oh my God, do you think Susan will...is she into that? If she is, can I watch?”

“That’s information Susan will have to decide to share with you or not,” I replied.

“Oh. Right. That’s-yeah, that’s really personal. Makes sense.” She stretched out suddenly, popping her back and neck, and then groaned at the release and settled into a more comfortable position. “Oh my God I forgot how good a hard fuck and a strong orgasm or two could be. I feel just so...good.”

“Yep,” Lara and I said at the same time.

She looked at me, rolling onto her side and grinning. “So, was that ass worth the wait?”

“More than,” I replied. “You have got the most amazing ass.”

“You really do,” Jessica said.

“How do you feel about anal? Because, again, no pressure, I’d really love to fuck you in the ass,” I said to her.

“I’d do it,” she replied. “It’s been awhile, but I’m neutral enough on it. I’d definitely do it for you.”

“Okay then, thanks,” I said.

“You’ve more than earned it.”

We laid there together for a bit longer, just enjoying the bliss and the company, listening to the occasional gust of wind outside.

And I felt fantastically satisfied.

TWELVE

We cleaned ourselves up and then laid back down in bed.

Lara ended up lighting one of the joints we had leftover from New Year’s Eve and offered it to Jessica.

“That’s weed,” she murmured, taking it.

“Yeah, it’s fine if you don’t want any,” Lara replied.

“No, it’s just...been forever,” she said. She took a pull on it and then coughed most of it back out, passing it back to Lara. “Shit! Goddamn. Seriously, I haven’t toked up since I was like twenty five,” she said, coughing a few more times. “Been awhile since I was drunk, too. That was really fun.” She smiled suddenly and reached out, laying a hand on my chest and Lara’s thigh, all of us still naked. “I wanted to thank you for that. Both of you. I haven’t really been in an environment where I felt I could get drunk, let my guard down. But I feel safe here. And that’s...I had forgotten what that was like. So thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” I replied, as did Lara. “At least you’re admitting you were drunk now, not just tipsy.”

She giggled. “Okay, yeah, I was drunk. Not wasted, though! I remember it all, and goddamn did you deliver some good dick. Although I’m still really embarrassed about how much Hannah must have heard…”

“She’s...working through some things,” I said. “She has some...unfortunate ideas about sex.”

“You’ve been talking about sex with her?” Jessica asked.

“Hannah both has no tact, and is extremely persistent. If she wants to know something, she fucking wants to know something. So I decided to drop a little of my own tact. I’m hoping to teach her to stop asking questions and then getting mad at the answers.” I paused. “Hopefully that doesn’t make you angry.”

“No, not really. She could use some more restraint. She used to be much worse, but she still has a ways to go. She has such a temper, like her father.”

“Are you going to sleep with her?” Lara asked after taking another long pull on the weed. We both turned to stare at her. “Oh...shit. That was a stupid question. I’m sorry. Ignore me. I get stupid when I get high.”

“For the record: no, I do not intend to,” I replied. “End of discussion.”

“Right, sorry.”

Jessica frowned and I thought we’d wandered back into uncomfortable territory, but when she spoke up, it wasn’t about her daughter. “Chris...so there’s three other women?”

I chuckled nervously and saw Lara wince.

“Yes. Sort of,” I said.

“Sort of? Sort of in what way?”

I proceeded to fill her in on my more recent history, starting with meeting Delilah and ending with leaving Pine Lake to try and find some sanity.

“Shit,” she said after a moment of silence. “Okay. That’s...a lot. Thank you for telling me.”

“Are you mad?” I asked.

“No, I’m not mad.” She laughed suddenly. “Nervous, if anything. Although I still don’t even know if I’m going to go with you back there...but where else would I go? Ugh, fuck, I don’t want to think about this right now.”

“Don’t,” I said. “Take another toke, lay back, relax. You’ve done your chores for the day, right?”

“Mostly, yeah. I have foraging duty but I figured with Susan and Hannah out there doing it instead…”

“Yeah, that counts,” I replied. “So relax, don’t think.”

I perked up as I heard the back door open, then relaxed when I heard Susan call out that it was them and nothing was wrong.

Still though, I stood and began pulling my clothes back on. “I guess I should go take a look at what they found, see if Hannah still has the wandering bug. She didn’t want to come back here, she says she’s been cooped up for awhile now.”

Jessica sighed. “She had been. Travis wouldn’t let her do anything. I think he wanted her to be like me.”

“Like you?” I asked.

“You know, useless.”

“Why do you say that?” Lara asked. “You aren’t useless, Jessica.”

“You know what I mean. I don’t have much in the way of survival skills. I can barely build a fire, I get lost easily, I’m not very strong, I can’t shoot for shit, I don’t know how to cut up dead deer. The only reason I’ve survived this apocalypse is because of other people.” She looked up at me suddenly. “That’s why I’m so grateful that you’re helping Hannah. She can be better than that. She can learn to take care of herself, to really take care of herself. Unlike me.”

“Jessica,” I said as I finished getting dressed, “you can learn that stuff too. I can teach you. We have books. We have the supplies to practice most of it. You’re not stupid, you clearly don’t lack for work ethic.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Sometimes I feel too old to learn anything new.”

“You’re never too old,” I replied. “I’ve come across too many people who learned shit in their thirties, fifties, seventies.”

“Maybe,” she repeated, then she smirked and leaned forward, laying on her stomach and putting her chin in her hands, resting them on her elbows, posing naked and looked excellent doing it. “Although maybe I’m into the idea of being in your harem. Why don’t you just take care of me and I just…” she smirked more broadly, “take care of you?”

“It’s a nice arrangement,” Lara murmured, taking another drag on the blunt. I glanced at her. She was laying on her back, staring at the ceiling.

Good. God. That woman had such huge, perfect tits. And hips.

“Well I’d be lying if I said I had a problem with that arrangement,” I replied. “Still though, you should have the knowledge. In case of emergency. I’m gonna go check on the others.”

“Okay,” Jessica replied, still grinning at me in that sultry way.

In one way, I had claimed her.

But in another, she had definitely lain claim on me. She could get me to do a lot, and she knew it. Can’t say I hated that fact.

Having someone like Jessica trying to seduce you into doing something, (and actually following through on the seduction, not just making empty promises), was great.

I gave them both kisses and headed out of the bedroom. I found Susan and Hannah in the kitchen, looking over their finds.

“How’d it go?” I asked.

“We saw a deer,” Hannah replied. “Again. I wanted to take a shot but…”

“We can’t afford to waste bullets,” Susan said.

Hannah began to say something, then paused, sniffed. “What’s that smell?”

“Oh, that’s weed,” I replied. “Lara’s having a little.”

“Did my mom?”

“...no.”

“You’re a bad liar,” Hannah said. “Also a bad influence. She’s gotten drunk and fucked around and now she’s getting high-”

“You are weirdly conservative,” I replied.

“I’m not!” Hannah snapped. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“She’s safe, she’s an adult, she wants to relax. I imagine it’s been very tense around your group for the past several, I don’t know, months? Years? You can’t understand the desire to just fucking relax now that there’s a real opportunity?” I asked.

Hannah’s hard expression softened after a few seconds, then she sighed and looked back down at the stuff they’d gathered. “Yeah...okay.”

“I can’t believe I’m the one saying this,” Susan said, “but you honestly need to relax, Hannah. You’re making things way more difficult than they need to be.” She stepped closer, coming to stand next to her. “I actually know what it’s like to have to be on the defensive all the time, either because you’re worried about someone taking advantage of you, or someone talking down to you, or any of the other cruel things people do to each other. I know it can be really hard to take it down a notch or two. Given a long enough time, that just becomes your default. I know it’s only been a few days but...you can trust us here. Chris and Lara and I aren’t going to hurt you, or take advantage of you, or be cruel to you or your mother, or try to make you do anything you don’t want to do. You’ve probably heard it before and it was bullshit before, I know I have, but this is a safe place.”

“She’s right,” I said quietly.

Several long seconds passed, and finally Hannah nodded. “I’m sorry,” she murmured. “It’s just...it’s very, very difficult. I get so fucking pissed off…”

“I know the feeling,” I said.

“So do I,” Susan added.

Hannah let out a sigh and then turned fully to face Susan and I. “Thank you, for everything you’re doing. I know you didn’t have to take us in. I’m beginning to see that my mom came here for a good reason, and I should trust that.” She was quiet for another few seconds, then fixed her gaze on me. “Do you think we could go back out? I’m not ready to be inside again.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “We can go fishing, see if there’s any luck there.”

“I’ll keep watch here,” Susan said.

“Okay, let me finish warming back up, then we go. Thanks,” Hannah said.

I nodded and went off to tell Lara and Jessica what was up.

~

“Chris, how do you do it?” Hannah asked.

“Do what?” I replied.

We were walking towards the lake, preparing to see if we could find any fish.

“Keep your anger in check.”

“Oh. That.” I was silent for a few moments, and before I opened my mouth, I had a sudden flash of the man who had taken Elizabeth hostage back during those first harrowing days of Pine Lake, of his bloody, broken face under my fists. “I don’t always. I almost beat a man to death a few months ago. Because I was angry.”

“Jesus. Why? Like just because you got mad?” she asked uncertainly.

“No. I mean...he took...someone close to me hostage. I lost it. Like ‘seeing red’ lost it. Everyone was really freaked out. So I guess what I’d say is, probably the most important thing you should understand about keeping your anger in check is that it’s never going to go away. It’s always going to be there. Like a chronic condition, you have to keep taking medicine forever to keep it at bay. And that sucks, but it can get better. It won’t always be that bad. Once you start actively trying to push back against it and then get some practice in, it does get easier. Also, getting older has really helped. I used to be so fucking mad when I was in high school. It was better after high school, but still not great. Now it’s better than it’s ever been.”

“That’s what it’s like right now,” Hannah muttered. “You’re right though. It has gotten better. It used to be a lot worse. But shit, I don’t know, I just really lose my shit sometimes…”

“I know. I think something that helps is remembering that whatever’s happening, being enraged won’t help. And it also helps to really anchor guilt in your mind and your memories. All those times you got really mad, and said or did something cruel, and then you felt really, really bad about it afterwards? Remember that. Remember the guilt. Get in the habit of reminding yourself in the moment of rage not to do anything stupid, because you will regret it later. Even if it seems to you right then that you’ll never feel bad about it, you know that you will.”

“Is that why you stopped me? I was...I almost shot him,” Hannah murmured.

“Yes,” I replied. “You would have regretted that. Forever. Yeah he’s a piece of shit, I know. And you’re right, we might have to kill him, but...tell me this, at least. Have you had to kill anyone yet?” I asked.

“No,” she murmured. “I’ve fought three times now, like full-on fighting. But I’ve never shot or stabbed anyone. Never killed anyone.”

“You should avoid it if you can. It’s...it leaves a scar,” I said. She looked at me as we began walking out onto the frozen lake.

“I guess you’d know.”

“Yeah. I do. It sucks. I don’t regret having done it, I regret that it had to be done.”

“So should I kill people or not?” Hannah asked.

I sighed. “That’s a different conversation. But in short: prepare yourself to have to, but keep it as a last resort.”

“Okay, fair enough,” she replied.

We got to the first of the little huts and went inside. I went to the hole in the floor and spent some time breaking through the ice I found there. Once I had that done, I assembled the fishing pole, got it set up, and then plunked the hook and lure in.

“We don’t have any bait,” Hannah said as she sat down on one of the two chairs inside.

“Yeah, we’re just going to have to hope that the lure is enough.” A few minutes went by while we waited for something to happen. I decided maybe it was time to at least try to build up more of a rapport with Hannah, though I had to be honest, it felt like a minefield talking to her. I felt like anything might turn into a fight or get her going.

I used to be like that. Maybe this was karmic payback.

Not that I really believed in that.

“So, Hannah. Tell me about yourself. Your past. I don’t really know much,” I said.

She sighed. “Okay. I grew up in California. I went to a private school from the start. I was in accelerated classes, what they used to call ‘gifted’. It was never really difficult, honestly. I got straight As and it was never hard. I just got shit, and if I didn’t, it wasn’t too hard to figure out. I-” she paused, looked uncomfortable. “I always kind of got a weird impression from my mom.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like she was caught halfway between pride and jealousy. I never asked about it, because even when I was young I could tell that would be a really, really difficult place to be: jealous of your own child. I never got it then, but I think I do now. She doesn’t think she’s very smart. She’s wrong, but...I am smarter than her. I guess that’s arrogant,” she murmured uncomfortably.

“Some people are smarter than others, and recognizing your own abilities isn’t arrogant. Thinking it makes you better does. But smart isn’t everything. It’s important, to be sure, but it’s not everything. Shit, I think I’ve proven that much.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not very smart and I’ve survived this long.”

“What the fuck? You always have something smart to say. To like every question I ask. And you know how to do all this shit, how are you not smart?”

“I have opinions, and I’m more stubborn than I am intelligent, and this stuff honestly isn’t that difficult. It’s not building a computer or designing a program or fixing a car. I mean you saw how simple gutting was. It was more a matter of making yourself do it than figuring out how. Trust me, I’m not that smart. I’ve done stupid things before.”

“Everyone’s done stupid things before,” Hannah replied, rolling her eyes. She opened her mouth, but we both looked over as the line jerked.

“Oh shit,” I said as I started reeling in the line. At first, I thought the fish had gotten away, but then the tip of the pole bent and jerked and wiggled as I kept reeling. Before I knew it, I pulled a flopping, light green-finned fish out of the hole.

“You caught one,” Hannah said.

“That I did,” I replied as I went to get it off of the hook. Before long, I had it in the cooler we’d packed with snow and brought along with us. I passed her the rod. “Your turn.”

~

Our first success was, unfortunately, our only success.

We stuck around for another hour and a half, but didn’t manage to catch a single other fish. It was frustrating, but admittedly, it didn’t dampen my spirits. Even if it frustrated Hannah. It was a good sign. I doubted this was the last fish in the whole lake.

We headed back home and went down into the basement, where I showed Hannah how to gut and clean a fish. Well, to the best of my ability. I wasn’t as good at it simply because I didn’t have nearly as much practice with water creatures as I did with those that hung out on land or in the sky. I figured we’d have more opportunity to practice gutting fish in the near future, as I intended to keep hitting that place up.

After we were done, I came very close to forgoing dinner to go back out into the cold and continue my search for ammo.

But I was tired, and hungry, and I just wanted to be in this place that I had come to think of as, if not my home then at least my home-for-now.

So I stayed in, and as I went through the rest of the night, I found myself becoming down. Like, really down.

I missed Megan. I missed Elizabeth. I missed Delilah.

And the more time went on, the more I missed them. I’d been thinking about them a lot since leaving Pine Lake, but it had definitely dropped off since finding Lara and Susan. I hadn’t forgotten about them, I hadn’t stopped missing them, but certainly the loneliness had become tolerable. In a way, it was reassuring, if a bit starkly.

Life on the road meant that I had eventually learned that when I was missing someone, what was really happening was that I was lonely. I tended to form attachments and then be able to detach from them without too much trouble. Maybe that was cold, but I’d done all I could to ensure that minimal damage was done. Whenever I started new relationships, before meeting Megan and Delilah, that was, I made sure to let the women know that I wasn’t looking for anything serious and I was going to leave within a week or two and if that meant they weren’t willing to be with me, then so be it. Usually they were understanding, sometimes I had huge fights when I tried to leave because they thought they could be the one to ‘change my mind’ and make me stay.

But for the most part, I usually wasn’t missing a person so much as I was lonely and happened to latch onto a certain person. Usually the last one I’d been with. Or one of my favorites. I still thought about Mary a lot.

Right now, though, I could tell it was different.

I wasn’t lonely. I specifically missed Megan, Delilah, and Elizabeth. In a way that I had never truly missed someone before.

So yeah, in a way, it was kind of good. Because it further reaffirmed that whatever happened, I really was serious about them.

In another way, it was also kind of scary. What if I ultimately found that I couldn’t stay with them? That I had to keep moving. Megan would come with me, but not Elizabeth or Delilah. And I had the suspicion that I was starting to get this way about Lara and Susan, and even Jessica. I’d have to face that reality sooner or later. What if I decided that I wanted to stay with them no matter what, tried to settle down, ended up hating it and resenting them and ruining the relationships? They certainly didn’t deserve that.

I was still in a foul mood by the time I was in bed and it was bad enough that I’d decided to smoke a little.

“Chris, what’s wrong?” Susan asked.

I’d already taken turns fucking them and now I sat at the foot of the bed while they lay together beneath the blankets.

“It’s...complicated,” I replied. “Maybe not something you’d be comfortable talking about.”

“Now I’m really curious,” she said. “Come on, dating someone isn’t just sex and fun. You also have to talk about ugly things. I’ve certainly made you put up with enough bullshit so far. It’s only fair if you complain to me, if you want.”

I laughed softly and took another pull. I was a little high by now, off the sex and the weed, but the bad mood persisted, it had just been dulled. “I...miss my other girlfriends,” I admitted.

“Oh,” Susan murmured.

“That’s hardly unexpected, Chris,” Lara said.

“I guess so. I just don’t want you to think I don’t appreciate you.”

“We aren’t them, Chris,” Lara replied. “I know that. You’re going to miss them. If I was with you but away from Susan, I’d still miss Susan and that wouldn’t be anything against you.”

“Yeah,” I murmured.

“She’s right,” Susan said. “However I feel about them, it only makes sense that you miss them...why don’t you tell us more about them? Come on, lay down and tell us.”

I wasn’t sure if that would make me feel worse or better, but I relented. I’d been like that before with my girlfriends, when I was like this: sinking into a sullen misery and refusing their comfort. I could see now that doing that hurt them as much as it hurt me, and committing to a bad mood was just stupid. Nowadays, when this happened, and it was thankfully few and far between, I tried to do something productive instead.

But it was late, time for bed, so the most productive thing I could do was sleep. But I wasn’t tired enough yet, or at least I was too unhappy to sleep.

So I finished off the blunt, tossed what was left in an ashtray on the nightstand, and laid down in between Lara and Susan.

And I told them about Megan, about Delilah, about Elizabeth.

By the end of it, I was glad to find that the dark cloud that had settled over my brain had finally begun to lift.

“Feel better?” Lara asked as we laid together in the dark.

“Yeah. Thank you,” I replied, kissing her, and then kissing Susan.

“You deserve to feel better,” Susan replied.

“So do you,” I said, spooning her as I so often did, because she liked being held more out of the two of them, and Lara liked to curl up against my back, or just be off on her own on her side of the bed. And that was how I fell asleep.

THIRTEEN

It was weird how quickly you could fall into a routine.

And it was weird how useful a routine could be.

When I woke up the next morning, I felt fine. It was almost like going to sleep was a reset button. It worked for a lot of things. Not always, but often. I go to sleep with a headache? I’ll wake up without it. Go sleep feeling down? I’ll wake up feeling at least neutral, if not good. Plus, I could rely on a hard-on and, now, an attractive woman (or two), already naked and horny and ready to be fucked. I pushed Lara onto her back as soon as I woke up and got between those tremendously thick thighs of hers and dove right in.

We fucked like rabbits for about five minutes before she orgasmed and then I pumped a load inside of her.

After that, Susan pushed me onto my back, hopped up, and started vigorously riding my dick before it could go soft. We moaned and shouted and once we were both finished with our orgasms, we began to wash up and get dressed and start the day.

I’d gotten through all the morning chores and started making breakfast when Hannah walked into the kitchen and glared at me.

“What?” I asked.

“You three are so fucking loud in the mornings,” she grumbled.

“Sorry,” I replied.

“No you aren’t.”

“I kind of am,” I said. “Not completely, but...if there was a quieter way to do it…”

“You could just not do it,” she groused, rubbing one eye.

“...it’s complicated.”

She sighed and rolled her eyes. “It’s not complicated, you’re just fucking horny all the time.”

“Not all the time.”

“Whatever.”

Not much later, Susan and Lara joined us, and then Jessica. We did our morning chores and had breakfast. I noticed Hannah seemed more subdued than yesterday, and it seemed more of a physical subdued than an emotional or mental one.

“You want to go back out again today? I’ve got more places to search,” I said as we finished up breakfast.

“Actually, I was wondering if maybe I could trade with someone else. I want to mostly just stay in today. I’m tired and just want to do nothing under blankets, maybe read.”

“Okay. Anyone want to trade, go with me instead?” I asked.

“I’ll do it,” Susan said. “I’ve got firewood duty and honestly we’re pretty good right now, so it should be an easy haul.”

“I’ll take it. Thanks.”

“Yep.”

We finished our breakfast, grabbed our stuff, and then I was out the door with Susan.

~

“You really think we can get away with a non-violent confrontation with her ex?” Susan asked as we walked northwest, across the vast field that contained the lake and a handful of other buildings I wanted to check out.

“Not really,” I replied.

“Then why don’t you just walk over there, kick in the door, and shoot those two assholes in the head?” she asked.

“Because I’m not sure. Maybe we can. I’m not exactly eager to go killing. Are you?”

“No, not really,” she muttered. “Sorry, I guess I shouldn’t exactly be asking shit like that. I’m just worried about them doing the same thing to us.”

“They probably won’t risk shooting Jessica or Hannah,” I replied.

“Hmm. Good point. Still though, if they take you out of the picture…”

“Most men are all talk, in my experience. Though I’m leaning more towards the ‘they might actually do something stupid’ end of the spectrum,” I replied.

“And it’d be stupid to attack you?”

“Yes. It would.”

“Any particular reason?”

“I’m an excellent shot, I’m always armed, and I won’t hesitate to kill them because I’ve had to do it before. My threats aren’t empty.”

“Jessica and Hannah might have problems with it if you kill him,” Susan murmured.

“I know. That’s a risk I’ll have to take. I’ve let them go. Twice now. Once apiece. They won’t be so lucky next time they come knocking with a gun,” I replied.

“I won’t be mad, if it comes to it.”

“I appreciate that, although...just remember that emotions aren’t rational and even putting that aside, they’re in a weird place. They won’t be wrong if they’re really pissed at me for killing that asshole because he forced my hand.” Up ahead, I could see the place we were going to investigate. “Regardless, we’ll deal with it when and if we have to.”

“Fair enough.”

There was a cabin I had noticed several times while walking through this area. A sad, lonely little wooden structure nestled right up against the treeline making up the western edge of the huge open space the lake was in and everything else seemed to be centered around. I doubted it held anything good, but it was on the list of places I needed to check. As we got closer to it, I glanced to my left, and felt my heart skip a beat as I saw a break in the trees and just barely caught sight of the area where Jessica and Hannah used to live.

I didn’t see any people, but it was a clear line of sight.

Honestly, this big field was a massive liability. It would be far, far too easy to just stand among the trees and shoot me in the head or the chest or anywhere really. Of course, you had to be a good shot for that.

Maybe I was lucky and neither Thomas nor Travis were good shots.

We got to the cabin and I saw it was in pretty poor condition. A few broken windows, and the door was kicked in. I had Susan wait while I checked around and then inside for any hidden threats. You had to do it every time. It was just the policy. All it took was one lapse for someone, or something, to get the jump on you. Were the chances good that someone was hiding in there with a gun? No. Not really.

But you never knew who might be around.

Like ninety nine percent of places I came across, though, this was vacant, and so Susan and I went inside and started poking around. This place really seemed like something that had been built independently, and not well.

While we worked, I noticed Susan seemed a little uncomfortable.

Finally, I found out why.

“So...Chris,” she said after almost twenty minutes of silent searching.

“Yeah?”

“Lara told me you found some lube.”

“Yeah.”

“And you fucked her in the ass.”

“I did.”

“And that you liked it.”

“Are you going somewhere with this?” I asked, looking over at her.

She was blushing fiercely, not looking at me. “I...like anal,” she murmured.

“Seriously?” I replied.

“Yes,” she said sharply.

“Do you like it rough?” I asked. She didn’t respond. “Susan, if the answer’s yes then I think that’s fucking awesome.”

“The answer is yes,” she said.

“Oh fuck. I’ve been fucking dreaming about this,” I replied. “Why were you so reluctant to tell me?”

“It’s embarrassing. Like the choking thing. You have to remember, I’m not like Lara. I’m not absurdly attractive and super sexually confident. This is all still awkward and embarrassing and sometimes humiliating to me.”

“Why don’t you at least attempt to be excited about it?”

Now she looked at me. “What, just act excited about the fact that I want you fuck me really hard in the ass?”

“Yeah. Why not? Ask me to.”

“We both already know-”

“Ask me to, Susan. Pretend to be confident about it. Seriously, I’m not joking. Put that smile on your face, the one Lara always uses when she’s talking about something sexual. You know the one I’m talking about. Act a little demure, ask me.”

She stared at me like I might be making fun of her, but she couldn’t be sure, and then she sighed a sort of ‘what the fuck why not?’ sigh. She smiled. It was a small smile, but it actually struck a decent balance between confident and submissive, much like Lara (and Delilah) always managed. She clasped her hands together in front of her, then she tucked her chin down and looked up at me, and spent a few seconds chewing on her lower lip.

“Will you fuck me in the ass tonight?” she asked quietly.

I walked over to her and ran a fingertip across her throat. She was wearing her choker collar again. She shivered violently.

“Ask the right way, Susan,” I replied.

“Master, will you fuck me hard in the ass tonight?”

I briefly cupped her throat in my grasp and she gasped softly. “Yes, I will,” I said, and let go of her.

“Th-thank you,” she managed.

I went back to my search. “Well, how was that?”

“It felt…”

“Come on, don’t hesitate. Just tell me. There’s no one here but you and me. No one will ever know this conversation took place but us, and you trust me.”

“It felt good,” she said, just a little petulantly, like she was mad I had a point.

“See? Look, I’m not saying it’s like a switch you can flip, but you can be sexually confident around me and Lara and clearly around Jessica and just let it feel good.”

“Okay, okay, point taken,” she said. Then she crossed her arms and her stance changed a little. “So you made me do that, now it’s your turn.”

“My turn to what, because I don’t do submissive,” I replied.

“No, not that. But I want a straight answer to a question.”

“Shoot.”

“Are you fucking Hannah?”

I sighed. “No.”

“For real? Because she’s obviously extremely attractive, and you two have been spending a ton of time together…”

“Are you jealous?” I asked.

“No! I’m not!” Susan snapped. I looked at her for several seconds and she sighed and uncrossed her arms, going back to her own search. “Maybe just a little, but that’s not why I’m asking. I’m honestly curious.”

“In all truth: no, there’s nothing happening between us. We haven’t fucked. We haven’t kissed. We haven’t had any contact of any kind. She’s made it very clear she’s not into me and besides, I’m kind of banging her mom.”

Susan laughed. “Yeah, that’s a good point. Although…”

“Although what.”

“Okay, I could be way off-base here, but some of the times that I was very clear about the fact that I wasn’t into a guy...was to cover up the fact that I was actually really into him. Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of times where I was very clear about that because I wanted him to just fuck off. But I don’t think she wants you to fuck off. I think she might be crushing on you and she doesn’t know how to handle that.”

“All the more reason not to complicate matters,” I replied.

“So you’re going to tell me, with a straight face, that if she came onto you, you would turn her down flat? You wouldn’t hit that?”

I didn’t say anything, instead suddenly thinking what Hannah might look like naked and sweaty, her short red hair wild, her face flushed, with her on her back, her legs spread open, taking my cock into her no doubt fantastically tight pussy, perky tits bouncing…

“Chris? Look at me.”

I looked at her. She stared at me.

“I plead the fifth,” I replied finally.

“Oh my God, you’d totally fuck her, wouldn’t you!?”

“Can you blame me?” I shot back. “Besides, as we’ve discussed, it’s more likely that she’s not into me, and it won’t come up even if she is, because the fact that I’m regularly fucking Jessica, let alone two other women, would probably deter her.”

Susan seemed to mull over that for a few seconds, then sighed. “You’re probably right.”

After another fifteen minutes of poking through the remains of the obviously ransacked cabin, we came up with a whole lot of nothing. No secret compartments, no removable floorboards, nothing behind or beneath what remained of the furniture. Just a sad, picked-over cabin two and a half years into Armageddon.

I made the proper notation on my map and then we started making our way northeast.

“So now what?” Susan asked.

“There’s another building up ahead, it’s in a slight depression we can’t quite see from here. I noticed and marked it earlier. Not sure what it is. Decently-sized, but it didn’t really look like a house, exactly.”

“I guess we’ll find out.”

I nodded and we walked on. I was trying not to worry as we walked through the snow, among the desolate, frozen landscape. But honestly, with every building that I crossed off the list and we didn’t find ammunition in, I got more concerned. Bullets were hard to make and, simply due to the fact that people used them with each passing day, they grew harder still to find. I’d come across a couple of places that were still making them in my travels, but unless it was an obviously professional place, with obvious professionals in it, it was a risky business.

Then again, it wasn’t that hard to pretend you were a professional.

And you didn’t want to buy bullets from someone who didn’t know how to make them. Misfires were bad in a number of ways.

We got up the little rise in the land and caught sight of the building.

It was a simple log structure, long enough to contain several rooms, just a single story. It looked unoccupied, two chimneys, neither venting smoke. There were several windows and a few of them were broken. The light was good enough that I could see in through most of them, and I saw nothing but empty rooms, a bit of furniture, what appeared to be a dresser in one room, a desk in another. Bedrooms, maybe?

Some kind of lodging or motel?

It seemed sort of out of the way for that but maybe not. Honestly, it got harder to visualize what the landscapes may have looked like before the snowfall.

I listened to the wind gusting occasionally, to our boots crunching in the snow, our breathing. There was nothing else. I looked around. Farther to the north, another pair of structures and the abandoned train I’d already visited.

“Think we’ll get lucky?” Susan asked as we approached the building.

“Only one way to find out,” I replied.

We made the final approach and then completed a slow circuit of the outside. In the distance, to the north, I saw the low, dark gray shapes of a few wolves prowling around. I pointed it out to Susan, who tensed up.

“Think they’ll come our way?” she asked.

“Probably not, but we should keep an eye on it regardless,” I replied.

There was nothing waiting for us outside. I got my gun out as we got up to the front door. It was closed. I tried the knob, found it unlocked. Susan waited out of the way while I pushed the door open. It creaked with an awful loudness that echoed through the interior, but I was committed and I pushed it open.

“Anyone here?” I called out, waited, heard nothing.

I went inside and Susan followed me in, then waited at the door, watching it. We’d come into a basic entry room. To the left and right were closed doors, the way ahead had never held a door, leading into a hallway with several more doors.

I checked to the left first, finding a bathroom area, complete with a pair of shower cubicles. The right led me to a living room area that had been mostly emptied out. All that remained was one old, old, cigarette-burned, coffee-stained couch that leaned at an awkward angle, a scattering of ashes and kindling and broken glass, and a fireplace. No one here, so I moved on, going into the hallway and checking the first door on my left.

It led to a totally empty room. The next one led to a room with a metal bed frame and a dresser that had all its drawers pulled out.

So...bedrooms then.

Was this a motel, maybe for hunters? I don’t know, something about it felt off, like it wasn’t necessarily for the regular population. The rest of the rooms showed little more. Another dresser, the desk I’d seen earlier, with an uncomfortable metal chair and all of its drawers pulled out, a ripped-up mattress.

The final door at the back of the hall led to an area the breadth of the building that was split down the middle by a counter. It was divided between what I’m guessing had been a dining area and what was a kitchen.

After checking it out and finding no threats, I went back to get Susan and begin our search of this place in earnest.

I had a good feeling about it, for some reason.

FOURTEEN

“Think I know what this place was,” I said as I spied something on the kitchen floor.

We’d been at it for over an hour already, starting at the front and working our slow, meticulous way back.

We hadn’t found anything and I was becoming even more disheartened.

“Yeah?” Susan replied from the dining area.

“Got a half piece of paper here that mentions something about the park rangers. I noticed what looked to be a ranger’s station north of here, one of those two buildings we saw. I think this was their lodging.”

“That would make sense...and I just found something, too.”

“Oh yeah.”

I heard her grunt with effort. “Yeah!” she said at the end of it. “Come look.”

I left the kitchen, suddenly eager. I found her crouched in the corner, paused to look at her tight little ass in those jeans she was wearing, felt a flash of intense lust roll through me as I imagined not just fucking her in the ass but fucking her hard in the ass, and then moved to join her. She’d found a false section of floor.

“You wanna grab it? I don’t feel like reaching in there,” she murmured, making room for me.

“Yeah,” I replied. I almost teased her about it but something I’d learned from my time with Megan was that maybe I should rein in the teasing a bit when it comes to someone like Susan. “Not a problem...let’s see what we got here,” I added as I reached in and grabbed a backpack that I could just make out in the light coming in through the windows around me. I got a grip on the handle and hauled it up and out. It felt kind of heavy.

Good sign.

I peered back in as I set it down, then pulled out my lighter and flicked it on, leaning down closer to see if I had missed anything else. But the hidey-hole looked empty. I pushed it shut, put away the lighter, and unzipped the backpack.

It looked like it had been there for awhile.

“This is exciting,” Susan murmured as she crouched beside me.

“Hell yes,” I agreed, and pulled the pack open.

I saw cans of food. That was pretty common in these hidden caches of supplies that people hid and tucked away in this post-apocalyptic wasteland. But there was something way, way more interesting in there among the cans and other items. I reached in and pulled it out first, getting excited, maybe prematurely.

“Are those-”

“Bullets,” I muttered, pulling out a small plastic case. There weren’t many, I only counted six, but they looked right to fit the rifle.

I’d brought it along with us, like I always did, and popped open the case. Pulling one of the shiny shells out, I confirmed that it was exactly what we were looking for.

“Fuck me,” I whispered as I shrugged the rifle off my shoulder and brought it to bear, then started feeding shells in.

“I would if there was a single comfortable location in this building,” Susan muttered as she dug into the backpack.

I laughed. “I’ve really awoken your sexdrive, huh?”

“Dear lord yes. I have been sexually inactive for a really long time, Chris. And I have never been with someone like you. I don’t know if it’s just lust talking or if you and I fit really well together but shit, when we have sex, it’s just goddamned amazing. I never thought I could have such good sex with someone so much bigger than me. But it just works with you. It works so well.” She laughed suddenly. “I’m sure your ego is big enough without you telling me you are the best fucking lay of my life. Although...shit, Lara is...ooh, she’s something else. That mouth of hers…”

“Oh, I know,” I replied. “I really know.” I glanced at her as I finished shoving all the shells in. “How’s it going between you two?”

“Good,” she answered. Then she hesitated, then a look of unease passed across her features.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she replied.

“Come on, tell me.”

“I…” She turned away and looked up suddenly, blinking rapidly. What people did in a last-ditch effort to keep from crying. I finished with the reload and slipped the rifle back on my shoulder as I stood, waiting. “I’m okay,” she said, standing up. “Honestly, nothing’s wrong. That’s what scares me. I’ve had to put up with a lot of stupid shit in my life and I’m just...sometimes, I’m so scared of losing her. Of losing...you. God, I’m sorry. This is-I know we’re dating and getting close, but it still feels so...you are going be around, right? You’re going to just...leave, are you?”

“Christ, no,” I replied. And then I hugged her. “Susan, whatever happens, even if I suddenly have a change of heart, which is absurdly unlikely, I’ll tell you.” She squeezed me tightly. “If I decide to break up with you, I can at least promise that I will tell you to your face.” We held each other for a bit, then she stepped back from me, looked up at me. I put my hands on her shoulders, stared into her eyes. “Do you believe me?”

“Yeah,” she said. She hadn’t started crying, though she wiped a few errant tears away and sniffed. “Yeah, I believe you.”

“Good,” I said, then I kissed her forehead. I laughed suddenly.

“What?” she asked.

“It’s just...it wasn’t that long ago that you were screaming at me to fuck off. When I asked you for sex that first time.”

Now she laughed. “Yeah. I was...I meant what I said, at the time. I was so mad at you. I mean, I can see now that I was just being paranoid, obviously, and I still find it hard to believe you or Lara find me attractive. But I’m getting there.” She paused, growing more serious. “Thank you...for being patient with me. You didn’t have to do that.”

“No,” I replied, “I wanted to. And you were worth it. I’m really happy with what we have going on right now.”

“Still scared about introducing us to your girlfriends back home?” she asked.

“Yes,” I admitted. “Well, just one of them.”

“I have to admit, I’m growing increasingly interested in meeting this Megan. If she’s got you this intimidated…”

“I’m not intimidated,” I muttered.

She laughed. “You are! Oh my God.”

“I’m not intimidated,” I repeated. “She’s just...she is intimidating. Like you. Don’t let that confuse you though.”

“Don’t worry, I know where we stand. I’m just glad you listen to me. And take me seriously. Most guys I run into don’t. I’ve got it double bad: I’m a woman and I’m little.” She rolled her eyes. “I have to admit, as much as I appreciate you, it still pisses me off knowing that I’ll be safer now just because you’re with me. Not because you know what you’re doing, but because guys will simply be less willing to do stuff against me because I’m already ‘taken’ by another man. But whatever, the world is what it is, even now. I appreciate what you do for me. For us. For Jessica too, now. And Hannah. You’re really giving, you know that?”

“I’m not that giving,” I replied as I dropped back into a crouch and started looking through the backpack. “I am getting something in return for it.”

“Lots of pussy and head, and now anal,” Susan said, crouching with me. “Lucky boy.”

“Very,” I agreed.

There were about a dozen cans of food in there, some matches, (always useful), some medical supplies, though like the last discovery nothing significant, a few other mildly useful things. I put it all back, zipped it up, and passed it to Susan. Her own pack was just big enough and empty enough to shove the smaller pack into.

“This was a really good find,” Susan murmured as we stood back up and started heading back outside.

“Extremely,” I replied. “God, do I feel better about things now. We need more, even in the short run, but this was good.”

“You want to keep searching?”

“No. I want to go home and celebrate by fucking you in the ass,” I replied.

She smiled and blushed. “Well okay then.”

~

I had to stay focused while we were out there, but once we got closer to home, Susan and I started getting handsy.

It was really nice, this part of the relationship. The beginning. Those first few weeks or, if you were lucky, months when you were high off each other.

And right now I was high off of Susan.

And it wasn’t just ‘beginning of the relationship’ fun. There was something about her, some way in which her chemistry mixed really well with my chemistry. Maybe it was just because she was submissive, or maybe it was because she was tough, or fuck, maybe it was just the fact that she was a goth chick.

We got inside and I pushed her up against the wall as soon as we got beyond the door and started making out with her. She moaned and shoved her tongue in my mouth. I started pulling at her clothes, got her pack off where it dropped heavily to the floor, got her coat off, pulled her shirt and undershirt up, going for her tits.

“Chris…” she whispered as I pulled the sports bra she was wearing up and freeing her perky little tits. “Let’s get to the bedroom first, please.”

“Shut up,” I replied, staring at her tits.

“Oh my.”

We both looked over and saw Jessica standing at the end of the hallway, staring at us, excitement written all over her beautiful face.

“What’s going-oh gross, come on, guys,” Hannah said as she poked her head into the hallway from the living room.

Susan covered herself, blushing fiercely. “Sorry,” she mumbled.

“None of you are sorry about this stuff,” Hannah replied, blushing as well now and rolling her eyes. She sighed. “It’s going to get loud now, isn’t it?”

“Yep,” I replied. “Sorr-”

“No you’re not!” she called as she walked away.

“She’s right, I’m not,” I said, and swept Susan off her feet.

“Oh! Chris!” she cried. “Fuck, you scare me when you do this!”

“In a bad way?” I asked as I started carrying her down the hallway.

“...no.”

“Thought so.”

“Can I watch?” Jessica asked quietly as we approached.

“Yep,” I replied. She made room as I came in through the door. Lara was already in the room, lying on the bed, an excited grin on her face. I tossed Susan across the room and onto the bed, and she let out a shriek of surprise as I did.

“Chris!” she cried as she bounced.

“Shut up and take your clothes off,” I replied, pushing the door closed.

“What are you two up to?” Lara asked.

“I’m going to destroy Susan’s ass,” I replied.

“Oh my-really?”

“Yes,” Susan said as she started getting out of her clothes. I was interested and glad to note that she said it a little more defiantly than defensively.

“You two, sit down, shut up, and watch,” I said as I began stripping.

“Yes, sir,” they both replied, Lara getting off the bed and joining Jessica. By now, we’d brought up a few chairs from the basement for this exact reason. I was living with a bunch of perverts. And I was one myself.

I frowned as I got down to my boxers and looked at Susan. Maybe it was time to try out something I’d also found in the basement. Something I’d been saving for a special occasion. Now seemed the time.

Walking over to the dresser, I pulled open my own drawer and extracted the roll of duct tape.

“Oh wow,” Lara murmured as she saw it in my hands. “You’ve had that?! Why didn’t you tell me!? Can we use it?”

“Yes, now shut up before I come over there.”

The smile she gave me made me think she wanted to really test that, but one glance at Susan reminded her it was Susan’s turn, not hers.

“You’re gonna duct tape my mout-mmm, mmph,” she said, cutting off as I tore off a strip of tape and slapped it over her mouth.

“So that you’re not too loud,” I said. “And Susan, if it’s too much, our safe...action, is going to be you snapping your fingers. Can you snap?” I’d run into people before who couldn’t do some things. Some couldn’t snap their fingers, some couldn’t whistle, hell some couldn’t wink. She raised one hand and snapped her fingers. “Good. Do that if it gets to be too much. Otherwise, just lay there and take it like the little fucking slut you are.”

I slapped her suddenly and she cried out. “Finish getting naked!”

She mumbled something behind the tape and quickly moved to do as she was told. While she did that, I finished stripping, found the lube, then walked over to Jessica and Lara.

“Lube me up,” I said, handing the tube to Jessica.

“Yes, master,” she replied quietly, squeezing some into her hand and then massaging it onto my erection. I shivered at her touch, feeling that hot lust and desire hit me so hard that I near gave up on Susan in that moment and went after the redheaded, middle-aged MILF instead. But it didn’t take much to drag me back to Susan. Just one glance in her direction showed me all I needed to see. She was completely naked, her trim, petite, pale body bare and completely revealed to me. She was on her hands and knees, posing, staring at me with that tape over her mouth. Maybe I’m fucked up, probably I am, but I thought that was hot.

No idea why.

“All right, that’s enough,” I said. Jessica looked disappointed as she let go of my cock. “Don’t worry, you’ll get your turn later.”

I walked over to Susan and got onto the bed behind her. She seemed ready and eager to get going with this whole thing and I had to admit, I was too. I started working my way into her tight, pale ass. She let out a series of muffled moans and shouts over the next few minutes as I got in there. Susan was probably the most petite woman I’d ever taken to bed, and as I shared this experience with her, it really struck home again just how much of a size difference there was between us. It wasn’t just that I had a full foot on her, (I’d confirmed that at one point with her), but that she was built so slim and I was so bulky with muscle by comparison.

I imagined that had to look interesting.

And I had to admit there was something to the more typical pairing like this, there was something quite satisfying on some deeper, more primal level about tossing a petite chick around, or holding her down and fucking wrecking her.

At some point I fully intended to try out some of those more absurd sex positions I’d seen so often in porn like this, the ones where I just full on picked her up and fucked the shit out of her. For now, I’d settled for pounding her roughly in this position.

The pleasure was already building as I worked my way carefully into her. I know she wanted to be destroyed, but I didn’t want to do any actual lasting damage. Once I was in though, I tightened my grip on her nice, firm hips, readjusted myself slightly, then started hammering away at her ass. She let out a muffled scream as I sank my entire rock-hard length into her again and again, and the pleasure started consuming me alive.

It was absolutely phenomenal.

Her ass was so tight I could barely fit, and the reactions I was getting out of her. Feeling her shudder and writhe, seeing her twist and shake, and listening to her shriek behind that duct tape, hanging her head, stretching out and grasping at the pillows in blind reaction to what I was doing to her. It was all heightening the effect of the sex, enhancing it.

“You like that, bitch?!” I snapped at her. “Huh!? You little fucktoy, you like that?!”

Susan moaned loudly and pushed herself against me.

I slapped her ass hard and she let out a muffled cry. The ecstasy hit me in waves as I became increasingly lost in the encounter, everything else seeming to drop away from my awareness. I kept fucking Susan’s insanely tight ass, driving my whole length into her repeatedly, spearing her deep and hard, making her shriek and scream.

After several more minutes of this I felt her suddenly go rigid, then begin to squirm and thrash violently as she let out long, long cries of bliss.

I felt a hot spray hit my balls and inner thighs.

She was coming, coming hard.

Goddamn, she did like rough anal.

I did too, because I was getting close. Really close. Honestly, I was surprised I’d managed to hold my load for as long as I had because her ass felt incredible. Lara had been fantastic, but Susan just felt on another level.

It was time to finish. I grabbed her more tightly and hammered faster at her sweet ass, making her shriek louder.

“That’s it, you little bitch!” I screamed at her. “Take it! Take it like a fucking slut!”

She screamed something in reply but even if she didn’t have tape over her mouth I would’ve missed it because that was when I busted.

I goddamn erupted inside of her, my own orgasm like a supernova going off inside of me. Blinding and deafening and overpowering. It was like being washed away by a hot tsunami of mindless ecstasy. It burned into me, radiating out from my center, from my cock as it kicked and twitched and spasmed inside of Susan’s crazy tight ass.

I pumped her full of my seed in fast, hard contractions, vaguely aware of the fact that she was no doubt going to complain at me about it, but I couldn’t have stopped even if I wanted to. I dumped my load into her fantastic ass and lost myself in that timeless bliss.

And then, finally, I came back to myself, dizzy and panting and sweating, my softening cock still in her ass.

Slowly, I extracted myself and the second I was out and let go of her she fell forward. Reaching up, she pulled off the tape.

“Ow,” she said, panting.

“You doing okay? How was it?”

“Ow,” she repeated.

“Hey, you literally asked for it,” I replied.

“I know. But oh my God. That was a bit much. Fuck. Thank you, though.” She groaned and curled up on her side. “I think I’m good on anal for awhile. Oh boy.”

I looked at Jessica and Lara. “Why don’t you two go get lunch started and I can give Susan some aftercare?”

“Okay,” Jessica murmured, both of them getting up. “I’m so horny now, though.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you tonight,” I promised.

They headed out of the room and I laid down beside Susan, looking at her. She looked wrecked, though in a good way. Her hair wild, face sweaty and flushed, eyes a little glazed. I gently got an arm around her and she shifted, laying against me, letting me hold her.

“You’re great in bed,” I murmured, running my fingertips along her back.

She shivered and moaned quietly at my touch. “You’re just being nice,” she murmured.

“No, I mean it. I know you think you aren’t but you are. And that’s not even that big a deal. It doesn’t define you, but just know: you are good in bed. I don’t want you going around thinking you’re ugly or you suck at sex. You’re hot and a great fuck. Get used to it.”

She laughed. “I’m trying.”

“I know, and I appreciate that.” I paused. “Someday, if you want, I’d like you to write something for me.”

“Really?” she murmured.

“Yeah. You said you’re a writer. I want to read something of yours.”

“I haven’t written in so long...but I would like that.” She pushed herself up and looked down at me with an appraising stare. “You’re a really good boyfriend. Honestly, the more time we spend together, the more I see why you’ve got three other girls waiting for you.”

I laughed. “I’m glad you think so.”

“I mean it.”

“I know. And you’re a good girlfriend. Now let’s wash up.”

“All right. You made a huge fucking mess,” she complained.

FIFTEEN

I kind of hid out the rest of the day.

All the activity was catching up to me and I needed a day off. On top of that, actually finally finding the bullets had lifted a big burden. Even if it was only temporary, I felt like I’d earned a day off. And I felt more comfortable being around the house with all the women just in case something did actually happen.

Mostly, though, I hid out because I felt kind of guilty.

When we went out for lunch, I could tell Hannah was annoyed with me. More than usual. So I spent most of the day laying in bed, reading, taking care of a few chores, and mostly just trying to let my tired body rest and heal.

I still had a lot of bruises and wounds.

So it was a nice, long day that I ended by drinking just enough booze to get buzzed, fucking Jessica, and then passing out.

~

“Hannah.”

“What?”

I hesitated. She was still mad. For a few seconds, all I could hear was our boots in the snow as we marched towards the lake.

It was the next morning and although there had been some coaxing involved, I’d convinced Hannah to go with me up to the fishing huts for a morning session after chores and breakfast. I still felt bad about all the grief I was apparently causing her and I’d been trying to figure out the best way to confront that.

“I really am sorry about how irritating I am with...the others. When we have sex. I’ve been trying to handle it in a more quiet way or when you’re out, it’s just...not all of us have methods of stress relief more powerful than getting laid, and life out here is really stressful-”

“Yeah aren’t you all so lucky to have that option available to you,” she snapped. “Everyone else is getting laid and I’m fucking not.”

“I’m sorry,” I murmured.

She sighed. “Well, at least I know it’s not because I’m unattractive. I’ve met so many people who have that problem, or, I guess, more accurately: think they have that problem. I swear to fucking God I’ve met so many people who think they’re ugly but they’re really not. Like not even close. But I’m not...mad at you. I mean, I am, but it’s not fair. Something my mom started really grilling me on was not taking out my anger on other people, and when to recognize the difference between me being angry for a justified reason and me just being pissed at a situation that’s no one’s fault. This isn’t really anyone’s fault. It just...is.”

“Yeah.” I hesitated, almost didn’t say anything, then pushed on anyway. “Look, um...I don’t know if it’s the right call to make, but if it would help, I’d be willing to, uh…”

“Are you seriously trying to have sex with me right now?” she asked.

“No! I’m not trying to, I’m offering!” I replied, looking away from her.

“I...Chris, look at me,” she said.

“I’d rather not,” I muttered, looking off to the left, towards the treeline. She came to a halt. I sighed and did so as well.

“Look at me.” I looked at her. I thought she might want to throw a punch my way but instead she was grinning. “You’re blushing! I don’t think I’ve ever seen you embarrassed like this. I didn’t think you could fucking get embarrassed like this!”

“Thanks for rubbing it in,” I replied.

“I’m sorry, you’re right.” She sighed, crossed her arms, and stared up at the blue sky for a few seconds. Then she looked back down at me. “I appreciate it. I guess I do believe you, that you aren’t just trying to fuck me.”

I shrugged. “I’m good at it, it would be safe. I wouldn’t hurt you, I don’t have any STDs, I can’t get you pregnant.”

“I know, I just...it’s too weird, Chris. With you and my mom-it’s too weird.”

“Okay, I understand. I won’t bring it up again.”

“Thank you. I’ll try to be...less frustrated about my lack of sex in the future.”

We began to start walking again, but something suddenly bugged me. I looked back over to the left, near the abandoned cabin Susan and I had searched fruitlessly yesterday.

“You see something?” Susan asked.

I ran what I’d seen the first time back through my head. “Maybe...I think I saw something...but I can’t be sure,” I murmured, staring hard.

She looked with me and we kept watch as we slowly kept walking forward. Ultimately, there didn’t seem to be anything, and we gave up and kept going.

Something occurred to me as we hit the frozen lake. “Are you into women?”

“What? I don’t know...not really. Maybe a little? I don’t think so...oh, you’re asking because maybe one of the others could help...eh, I mean, same problem.”

“Oh...yeah,” I said. Then regretted it, because although it was obvious to anyone with eyes that Lara and Jessica were fucking, Hannah was probably unsure of Jessica and Susan. Although the truth of the matter was, they hadn’t actually done anything yet.

But they were going to. That much seemed obvious at this point.

Oh well, it wasn’t like we could really keep secrets in that house as it was. And in a way, it was relieving: Hannah was off the table. I’d told the others and myself that often enough, but there’d always been that doubt and, I mean, to be honest, I did really want to fuck her.

Pretty badly, actually.

The more I got to know her, the more attractive she became. Obviously she was extremely physically attractive, but her drive and her intensity and her need for independence...it was all really goddamned hot.

But I needed to put the brakes on that. It would be tough, though admittedly not as tough as if I was getting no sex at all. Regardless, I intended to keep my word: I wouldn’t bring it up again. In a way, it was kind of nice, like clearing the air.

I noticed Hannah seemed amused as we approached the huts.

“You know, that has to be the most direct and polite way I’ve ever had a guy ask for sex. Offer sex, whatever. And accept rejection,” she said.

“I’ve had practice at this point,” I replied.

“With asking for it? I believe that. With rejection? I have a harder time with that.”

“I’ve been rejected. Definitely more so before the snow, though...here, let’s try the second hut today. See if we get any more luck there,” I said as we approached them.

We moved past the first hut and into the second. Hannah set down the cooler we’d packed with snow and brought along to hopefully put more fish into. We’d had the other fish for dinner, though it went into a stew and there wasn’t a whole lot of it. But it had been nice. Jessica had put it together and she was quite the cook. It made enough sense, given her background. I chipped away at the ice in the hole in the floor until it opened up, then started fishing. While the chilly minutes began passing by, I found myself thinking of what Lara had said.

About my ‘harem’.

I still felt weird about using that word. It had connotations, or at least I thought it did. Regardless, it was more the idea than the word, I think. Certainly there were arrangements like that, guys who had some kind of talent or good location or stockpile of resources, something they had that women wanted and were willing to submit sexually to get. I was always uncomfortable with that arrangement. It was exploitative.

Then again, certainly there were people who might say the same thing about me.

I tried to keep a watch on relationship dynamics, not only tried not to have any deal resembling ‘fuck me or I’ll leave you here to die’, but also to keep an eye out for the more subtle form of exploitation. The one just under the surface, where it only seemed like there was a choice. I tried to convey as genuinely as possible that there was actually a choice, and that I wasn’t pulling that mafia-style threat where you’re saying one thing but you obviously mean another. So far, I think I had done a good job of not taking advantage of anyone.

But I could never be sure if the women I’d fucked along the way had actually all been okay with that sex, or if any of them had felt like, regardless of the words we’d exchanged, they’d had to put out. Because Hannah was right: rejecting someone sexually could be a real gamble. It was a miserable situation.

I guess the only real comfort I had was the knowledge that I hadn’t gotten any of them pregnant, I hadn’t given any of them an STD, and I’d done my best to get them all off and have great sex with them.

But my relationships were different now.

Although I was less sure about my relationship with Delilah (I got the impression we were long-term serious friends with benefits, same basically for Elizabeth), I was clearly in a serious relationship with Megan, and now with Susan and Lara. And it seemed to be heading that way with Jessica. She seemed pretty into me.

This was all getting complicated, and although it was a good problem to have, I was actually quite nervous about going back to Pine Lake and facing that reality of introducing these three new women I’d picked up in a highly sexual and romantic way. I suppose that was probably the thing that had kept me from a real relationship for so long: consequences. I wanted to pretty much be able to just do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. Well, as much as I conceivably could in the midst of a snowy apocalypse.

Tying myself to a person made that harder.

I trusted Megan that she was serious about being able to handle sharing me, but I didn’t know if she might be lying to herself.

I guess we’d all get to find out when I got back there.

“Oh shit! I got something!” Hannah said at the same second the tip of the pole bent. I watched as she reeled it in and then we had our second fish.

“Nice,” I said as she pulled it out of the water and we studied it.

We got it off the hook and into the cooler, then went back to fishing. Over the next hour, I told her a few stories I had, a few memories from the road. Usually editing out the times where I’d been hooked up with one woman or another.

We managed to catch three more fish between the two of us.

“I think we should call it a day up here. I want to take you hunting now,” I said, getting up and stretching my legs.

“Really? Shit, finally. I’m a good shot,” she replied.

“I guess we’ll find out-”

I’d started walking out of the hut to take a look around and see if anything or anyone had snuck up on us while we’d been fishing, and as soon as I did step out, a bullet shrieked by. It came within inches of my face.

I screamed and threw myself back into the hut, right into Hannah, and she shouted in surprise as well, both of us falling into a heap on the floor. That saved us from another two bullets that punched holes in the wall barely a foot above where we lay.

“Holy shit! What the fuck!?” she cried.

“Quiet!” I snapped.

Another bullet punched through the wall, a little lower, and then nothing for several seconds.

“What the fuck is happening?” Hannah whispered harshly.

“Someone’s trying to kill us. Or me. The shots are coming from the west, from that forest I was looking at earlier. Shit, I knew I fucking saw something.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Gimme a second,” I replied.

I grabbed the rifle from off my shoulder and held onto it, like it might give me a good idea. For several long, long seconds, I laid there on the floor with Hannah in the cold, thinking furiously. I needed to get out of this somehow. We both did. Okay, okay, what could I do? I had to admit, it was harder to think under pressure like this.

Obviously, I’d need to use the rifle. We had ammo and I was a great shot, though Hannah claimed to be one, too. But how? Obviously they were dialed in on us. The second I leaned out to take a potshot, I’d almost certainly get my head blown off. Yeah they’d missed that first time, but maybe that was just bad luck on their part or good luck on mine. I couldn’t necessarily count on that happening again.

Maybe we could wait them out. Almost certainly they were going to have to come here and check for corpses and supplies. I had a good idea of who was doing it, but I couldn’t be sure. But that was still a big risk…

“Chris?”

“I’m thinking!”

We needed a distraction. Ultimately, we had to face the fact that regardless of what we chose to do, unless we chose to lay in wait, one of us would have to lean out, acquire a target, and shoot. God, what a fucking nightmare.

“Hannah, I need to know if you’re bullshitting me or not: are you actually a good shot?” I asked as an idea came to me.

“Yes, I am,” she replied. I liked the confidence in her voice, but this was serious.

“Proven?”

“Yes. I’ve shot guns before. I’m good at it.”

“Bet my life on it good?” I asked.

She hesitated, but only for a second. “Yes.”

“Okay then. I’ve got an idea. In short: I distract them by running, you lean out and shoot them. Can you do that?”

“I can do it, Chris,” she replied.

I sighed. I had genuinely hoped that she wouldn’t have to kill someone so soon, but this was our present reality.

And I didn’t want to ask her to risk her life by being the bait, that was my responsibility.

“I’m putting my life in your hands,” I said, handing her the rifle.

“I can do it,” she repeated firmly.

I nodded. We took a moment to check the rifle over, making sure it would fire when it was supposed to, and then I carefully got up and peered through one of the holes made by the bullets fired. Hannah joined me, looking through a second hole.

“There,” she said after several seconds of silence passed while I cringed in anticipation of another shot shrieking through the wood.

“Where?” I asked.

“North.”

I was looking towards the south, so I shifted my gaze and just barely spotted a figure standing among the trees.

“Shit,” I muttered.

“Think it’s Thomas or my dad?”

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“I know what you said earlier, but if it comes down to it, I can do it.”

“I guess we’ll find out. This is the plan: I’m going to throw the cooler out there to buy myself some time. Then I’ll sprint for the next hut. While I’m doing that, you lean out, get the target, shoot them. Put them down if you can, they mean to kill us. Though be careful not to go wasting rounds. Only take a shot if you’re sure. We’ve got six bullets.”

“Understood,” she replied.

I got carefully to my feet. My backpack was already off, so I didn’t have to worry about that. I snagged the cooler, got up to the door. Took a few breaths. Man, this was going to suck. But hey, if I had to die now, well…

It was probably the best time of my life to go out so far, it had been a really nice past several months, all things considered.

“Ready?” I asked as I heard Hannah get into position behind me.

“I’m ready,” she said.

“Okay. I’m going.”

“Go.”

I tossed the cooler and then took off sprinting. Apparently, my initial instinct was correct, because the second that cooler cleared the door, it was shot. I booked it, running for the next fishing hut, which seemed miles away. My greatest lament in that second as I ran my ass off was that the shooter was to my right, and not behind or ahead of me. It was easier to zigzag erratically to fuck up their aim. Which gave me an idea that should have occurred to me sooner.

I skidded to a halt and it saved my life. A good or even decent shooter knew to aim where a target was going to be, and a target moving at a consistent speed and heading was almost as easy to hit as a stationary one.

Consequently, when I skidded a halt, it threw off this asshole’s aim and the bullet scorched by just in front of me. I started running again, but then I heard another gunshot, this one much closer. “Hannah!?” I called, still running.

“I got him!” she called back.

I skidded to a halt, panting, and turned back around. I caught the barest hint of movement across the way, in the forest over there, and then it was gone. Looking over, I saw Hannah in a shooter’s stance, gun still aimed.

“Who was it?” I asked, walking back towards her. “Can you still see them?”

“I don’t know, and no,” she replied. “I lost track of them. Fuck!”

“But you got them?” I asked.

“Yeah, I definitely got them. They were wearing a ski-mask,” she replied, still staring through the scope.

I tracked down the cooler and crouched by it. It wasn’t wrecked, though there was a big hole through both sides of it now and a few cracks had appeared around the entrance wound. I shoved snow back into it, then put all the fish that had fallen out inside, sealed it, stood, and began heading back towards Hannah.

“You’re sure you hit them?” I asked.

“Yes! I’m sure. Then they ran off.”

“Which direction?”

“I think south...I think it was Thomas.”

“But you can’t be sure?”

“No. But I think it was.” Finally, she lowered the rifle, then passed it back to me. “Told you I was a good shot.”

“That you did,” I replied, taking it and studying through the scope for myself. I saw nothing but trees.

“Now what?” she asked.

I sighed softly. “Now we go home.”

“Seriously? You almost got killed and you want to just go home?”

“Yes. It’s too dangerous to go over there right now and investigate. Even if they are wounded they might take the chance to wait and shoot us if we get closer. If they’re hit, like you said, blood will draw wolves or other things. I need to think about my next move, because this is going to demand some kind of response. I just...need to think,” I replied.

“Fine,” she said.

“Take the cooler, I’ll need to be ready with the rifle, just in case,” I said.

“Okay.”

She took it and we gathered our stuff from inside the hut, then began to head home.

This situation was almost certainly coming to a head.

SIXTEEN

By the time I got home, I knew that something was going to have to be done.

I wanted to talk with the others about it, see if maybe there was something I was missing, but I didn’t think so. And honestly, I was pretty pissed. When someone takes shots at me, I get like that. We kept a careful watch as we headed home, and the long, long walk among the open, frozen plains was the worst. I felt exposed the whole way and every foot seemed like a mile. Although I was ninety percent sure that it had been Thomas, I was ten percent unsure. Which meant that I thought it was possible that Hannah was going to be safe, (although that was debatable, he had to know she was in there with me, right?), but I could be wrong.

Either wrong in that he might be willing to risk Hannah’s life to get at me, or that maybe, and this seemed unlikely but not impossible, they’d decided to just kill all of us.

Or, and this fell into the ten percent category, I was completely missing reality and in fact it was some totally unrelated person, or persons, trying to kill us for our stuff.

It had been known to happen.

Either way, the risk that Travis and Thomas, or even just Thomas acting on his own, had decided to escalate to the point of making an attempt on my life was simply too high now, so I felt a confrontation was necessary.

I had really hoped it wouldn’t come to this.

We got back home and I stepped inside. “House meeting!” I called. “Someone just tried to kill me!”

“What?!” Susan yelled from either the living room or the kitchen. “Are you okay!?”

I heard her footsteps rapidly getting closer, and heard Jessica and Lara moving elsewhere in the house. As I shut and locked the door behind Hannah once she was in, Susan appeared. “I’m fine,” I replied. “Put the cooler in the kitchen, then meet with us in the dining room,” I said to Hannah.

“On it,” she replied, disappearing into the living room to get to the kitchen.

“What happened?” Jessica asked, appearing at the head of the hallway with Lara.

“Come here and I’ll tell you.”

A moment later, all five of us were gathered in the dining room around the table. I sat down to take a break. All that shit had been a hell of a hit. I ran them through the gist of what had gone down up by the frozen lake.

“You’re sure it was Thomas?” Jessica asked after a moment.

“No,” Hannah replied. “Not sure, but close enough. I personally think it was him. Whoever it was was big, pretty tall, wearing a ski-mask. And I know I shot them. I think it was a shoulder shot, but I saw blood come out.”

“Which means we’ve got a surefire way of telling whether or not it was Travis or Thomas, or anyone in that group,” I said.

“Provided Hannah did, for sure, hit the shooter,” Susan said. Hannah looked at her. “I’m not trying to call you a liar or anything, but I just want to be sure there’s room for error. If we take a look and find them clear of gunshot wounds, and you did miss…”

“I understand,” Hannah replied, “but I’m positive I hit him. I saw blood through the scope.”

“Okay then.”

“So what do we do?” Jessica asked anxiously.

“Confront them,” I replied. “Logically, either they’re now willing to murder me, and apparently risk your or Hannah’s life in the process, or maybe they hired someone to do it, or it was some random asshole taking a shot at me. But the bottom line is this: it’s too good of a chance that they just tried to kill me to let it go. I was willing to let it go before this, not now.”

“What if we just...left? Went back to your home?” Lara suggested.

“It’s tempting,” I admitted, “but I’d rather not have to be looking over my shoulder the whole way. It’d be a huge risk.”

“You sure you aren’t just mad someone tried to kill you?” Susan asked.

“You’d blame me if I was?” I replied.

“No, not at all.”

“I’m fucking mad someone tried to kill him and, by extension, me,” Hannah replied.

“I’m pissed, yeah, but I think this makes the most sense. If you think I’m wrong and have a better idea, tell me now,” I said, looking around.

Hannah and Susan said nothing. Lara looked like she wanted to say something, but couldn’t think of anything.

I looked at Jessica, who seemed the most worried.

“I...don’t know,” she muttered finally. “This is...a lot.”

“I know. And I’m sorry.”

She looked at me, then she looked at Hannah, and as she did, something seemed to change in her. In her expression, in her stance. She seemed to harden, get angrier, straighten up. She let out a bitter little sigh. “You’re right, though,” she said finally. “We have to face this. I have to face this. I’ve been hoping that we could just walk away from this, but I think I’ve known that it won’t go that way. That Travis and Thomas are going to force a confrontation. And we should deal with it right now, before it gets anymore out of hand.”

“Yeah, and while we’ve got an advantage,” I replied.

“How do we have an advantage?” Susan asked.

“If they did just take a shot at us, they probably aren’t going to expect us to come marching up to their front door.”

“And that’s what we’re going to do?” Hannah asked.

“Yes. Only question is, who’s going? I need someone, at least, for backup.”

“I’m going,” Jessica said, and there was a surprising steel in her voice, a firmness that hadn’t been there before. No, that was wrong. When she’d told Travis to leave, and when she’d been talking with Hannah during their more serious conversations, it was there. Maybe just not this pronounced those other times.

“Are you sure?” I asked uncertainly.

“Yes. Whatever happens, I need to face this.”

“I’m going,” Hannah said.

“Hannah-” Jessica began, but Hannah cut her off.

“If you have a need and a right to face this head on, then so do I. You can’t tell me otherwise,” she snapped.

Jessica stared at her, then sighed. “I guess you’re right.”

“I’m going,” Susan said. “I’m not letting you do this without me.”

I looked at Lara. “Can you handle holding it down here by yourself?”

“Yeah, I’ll need a gun, but yeah,” she replied. “I can handle it.”

“All right. Jessica, Susan, you’re carrying backpacks. I’ll get them packed with basic survival and extra medical supplies. Hannah, you get the rifle. I’m taking the pistol. I’ll leave you the nine millimeter, Lara.”

“Thanks,” she murmured.

“Do whatever you need to do to get ready, sooner we do this, the better,” I said.

They all nodded and split up. I took Hannah’s backpack from her and then walked back into the bedroom. There, I quickly checked over the stuff packed inside, took out the fishing gear and set it aside for the moment, then added in some extra medical supplies. Just in case I ended up getting shot, or stabbed, or whatever. Or one of the others did.

Stuff could go really sideways in unpredictable ways.

I triple-checked the bags, and then I triple-checked the guns.

All three of them.

I liked to cover my bases. Over there might go off without a hitch, but what if something happened here at home?

Unlikely, but not impossible.

Once I was sure all three weapons were functional, I stepped back out of the bedroom. Hannah and Susan were waiting for me.

“Here,” I said, passing Hannah the rifle.

I walked back in and grabbed the smaller pack. “And here’s yours.”

“Wish we had more guns,” Susan muttered as she pulled the pack on.

“I sincerely share that wish,” I muttered as I went back one more time and picked up the other pack and the nine millimeter. My gun was already holstered on one hip, my hunting knife sheathed on my other hip. With these two items in hand, I walked out into the hallway as Susan and Hannah made room for me and walked down into the living room, where I found Jessica and Lara talking quietly together.

“Jessica,” I said, passing her the larger pack, not that there was that much difference between the two. She accepted it and pulled it on. I gave Lara the handgun. “It has twenty shots.”

“Hopefully I won’t have to use any of them,” she murmured as she accepted it.

“Hopefully,” I agreed. “Hannah, how many shots in that rifle?” I asked.

“Five,” she replied, and more quickly than I expected her to. She was paying attention, so that was a big plus.

“Right. I’ve still got eight shots left in this thing. Something to pay attention to if the shooting starts for whatever reason. Lara, lock this place up after we go. Don’t open the door unless you hear my knock: three fast, two slow. Everyone remember that, in case any of you have to come back here without me. Now...let’s do this.”

~

“I feel sick to my stomach,” Jessica muttered as we walked through the trees.

“I know, just keep focused,” I replied.

“I will.”

I’d had her tell me everything she could about the place she used to call home, revitalizing my memory of what she and Hannah had already shared. I thought I was about as prepared to go into this as I was going to be.

And I was about as prepared to have to murder someone, possibly two people, as I was going to be. My own stomach was churning but I kept a calm, if tense, posture. I didn’t fully like that there was a part of me that was looking forward to this. Thomas had probably tried to kill me, threatened me for sure, and Travis had as well. Part of me wanted to put them down for that. I told myself that it might still be possible to walk away from this all without a fight to death, but...I don’t know. I was believing that less and less as time went on.

I found myself remembering Elizabeth’s ex-husband. He’d literally laid in wait for us and tried to straight up murder us.

We came out of the trees and into the clearing that held the buildings. There was a three story one, to the north, maybe about two hundred feet directly south of it was a simple cabin, and in between them, more towards us, was a somewhat larger building.

“You’re sure no one will be in the other two buildings?” I asked.

“Fairly sure, we never used them,” Jessica replied.

“All right.”

Much as I hated to admit it, I was counting on the fact that I had Jessica and Hannah with me to either still their hands or, at the very least, make Travis nervous about opening fire. I didn’t like the idea of using them like that, but the place was pretty hard to approach unseen. There was a treeline about twenty yards north of the northernmost building, but that would only make a decent place to shoot from. And I wasn’t looking to just take them out indiscriminately.

All of this was within a perimeter made up by a waist-high wooden fence that was broken in several places. We walked through one of the broken parts behind the central building, as I was hoping to keep us in cover for as long as possible, and finally came around the building and marched right up to the front door.

I didn’t have my pistol out, but I did have it unlatched.

“That’s close enough,” I said, “keep your distance. Don’t do anything stupid.”

“We’ll let you take the lead,” Jessica replied.

I banged on the door. It opened up pretty quickly, so they must’ve been waiting. It was Travis. He was holding a pistol and staring at me.

“You motherfucker,” he growled.

I resisted the suddenly strong urge to tell him that he was exactly right, I was a motherfucker currently, given all Jessica and I had been up to.

“Where’s Thomas?” I asked.

Confusion broke through his anger and it stayed his hand for a moment. He wasn’t pointing the pistol at me, at least. He looked over my shoulder, saw the others. “Why?” he snapped.

“Someone took a shot at me. Several, actually. I’m almost certain it was him. If it was him, or if it was you, then that means you tried to kill me, and if that’s true, then it means we obviously can’t coexist here. I won’t be able to allow you to stay here,” I replied.

“You fucking arrogant piece of shit,” Travis snapped.

“Where’s Thomas?” I asked.

“Right here,” came a voice from deeper within. Glancing behind Travis, over his shoulder, I saw a pretty good-sized room and some stairs near the wall at the back. I thought I saw movement on those stairs, one of the other people living here, but Thomas was walking right for us. As he stepped up behind Travis, I saw immediately that there was blood under the shirt he was wearing. Blood on the right shoulder, and the bulge of a bandage there.

“You tried to kill me,” I said.

“I can finish it right now if you want,” he replied, staring hard at me.

“You came very close to killing Hannah,” I said.

“You what!?” Travis snapped, looking back at him.

“I didn’t know she was there,” Thomas replied.

“You knew someone was in there with me, you just didn’t give a shit,” I replied. “And the fact that you did, in fact, try to murder me means we need to come to some sort of conclusion right here, right now.”

“Fine,” Thomas replied, putting a hand on Travis’s shoulder and moving him out of the way. “Then let’s finish it. You and me.”

Great.

“Stay out of this,” I said as I backed up. “All right, come on. I don’t want to kill you, but I will.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” he replied.

Overconfident prick.

Good thing, but...man, he was taller than me. And built. I guess it came down to how good he was at fighting and who luck favored. Travis seemed content to watch, not that I trusted him not to interfere if things looked like they weren’t going his way.

I put my fists up and he put his up.

And the fight began.

He faked me out twice with a pair of quick jabs. And just before I went for one of my own, he threw a punch that actually connected with my cheek. I fell back a step, ducked the next one, and socked him in the eye.

He was fast, but so was I.

We started stomping back and forth across the snow, slowly circling each other, throwing more punches in the cold, cold air. It had been awhile since I’d actually been in a fistfight. I was tempted to just knock him over, pull out my gun, and shoot him in the head to be done with it, because he meant to kill me, which meant I needed to kill him. Something kept me from that, though. I’m not entirely sure what, but probably pride.

Maybe that was stupid.

Probably it was.

I’m sure pride had killed a lot of people over the past few years.

As we danced around, mostly dodging each other, I started to notice something: he was grimacing slightly during certain movements. His shoulder. I didn’t think the bullet had gone straight through, he still had a lot of mobility in that arm, but clearly he’d been grazed by it at the very least. That was going to help me.

I landed two quick shots in his gut, but before I could really enjoy that he socked me in the jaw and sent me stumbling. Stars washed across my vision but, as I’d found out the hard way earlier in my life: I didn’t have a glass jaw at least. I recovered and punched him in the nose, then jabbed him hard in the kidneys.

He grunted harshly and it seemed to occur to him abruptly that he needed to finish this fight soon. He caught me hard in the eye and I saw stars again. As I was recovering he gut-punched me twice. He went for my throat abruptly and I punched him hard right in his wounded shoulder. Thomas screamed and his pain then seemed to fuel his rage, because that was when his hand suddenly went to his back. I just had time to register that he was about to cheat before he tackled me and I ended up on the ground with a knife in my face.

“Chris!”

In a fight to the death, is there cheating?

I had a grip on his wrist and was pushing up with all my strength. He was pushing down, trying the plunging the knife into my eye, and he was slowly getting closer. I didn’t expect help from anyone else. Hannah had the rifle, and she was a good shot, but I doubted she’d risk shooting me. And Travis would probably stop anyone from interfering directly.

No, I had to deal with this here and now.

Panic was screaming through my brain in that moment, especially when the knife dropped another half-inch. I dug deep and shoved up with everything I had left.

It was enough.

Thomas winced as his shoulder took a hit from the strain and lost some of his traction. I pushed the advantage and shoved his fists, both wrapped around the knife handle, back up into his face. He screamed as he hit himself in the face and I heard something crack. Probably his nose. I threw him off of me and grabbed my own knife and, in one quick motion, did exactly the thing he’d been trying to do to me.

I drove the knife right into his eye.

He had a chance to scream, once. It was a quick, loud scream that cut off abruptly. He jerked once and then went slack.

I looked up as I heard movement.

“You son of a bitch!” Travis screamed, raising his pistol.

He wasn’t as fast as he thought he was, and as tired and in pain as I was, I still had adrenaline pumping through my body like live electricity.

I drew my pistol, snap-aimed, and fired off a shot directly into his forehead.

He fell straight onto his back and I heard someone shriek inside the house.

I stayed like that, on my knees, aiming the pistol into the house, waiting for something else to go wrong. I heard nothing, saw nothing, no movement.

In fact, nobody else was moving either.

A cold wind blew across all of us frozen there like that.

And then, quietly, Susan asked, “Now what?”

SEVENTEEN

I wanted to just sit down, even there in the snow.

My face was hurting. My back. My head.

I just hurt. It had been too long since I’d been in an honest-to-God fight and it was showing. Plus, I felt a little in shock over the fact that I’d had to add two more names to the list of people I’d fucking murdered. I knew that was not only a possible but likely outcome when I’d marched over here, but knowing you might have to kill someone and actually doing it were two totally different things. Finally, some part of me that was no doubt my internal engine, the thing that kept me going when nothing else would, the thing that had let me survive across months and miles in this godforsaken wintery wasteland, made me get up.

I stood and started walking slowly towards the front door.

“Chris…”

I paused and looked back. Jessica, Hannah, and Susan all stood in a little group a dozen steps back, each with a different expression on their face. Hannah looked angry. Susan looked concerned. Jessica looked distant, in shock.

“We have to deal with the others, first,” I said.

“Are you going to kill them?” Jessica asked quietly.

“Not unless they provoke me. Come on, get inside,” I said. I walked forward and paused, stopping and staring down at Travis’s dead body. With a sigh, I reached down, grabbed one ankle, (unwilling to let go of my gun since I knew there were other potentially dangerous people around), and dragged him out into the snow near Thomas’s own corpse. I kept expecting Hannah or Jessica to say something to me about what had just happened or me dragging the corpse out, but nobody said anything as I cleared the way and we walked into the building. A quick look around immediately showed me the rest of the residents.

Or who were supposed to be the rest of them, for all I knew, there could be more.

Two attractive young blondes and a middle-aged guy with slumped shoulders and thinning hair stood on the stairs, all of them pale in the face, wearing that deer-in-the-headlights look that people sometimes got during situations like...well, this.

“Okay,” I said, aiming up at them, “down here. Nice and easy. Hands where I can see them.”

“Please don’t kill us,” one of the blonde women said.

“I don’t intend to if you don’t make me,” I replied, resisting the urge to yell at them. It was getting harder to think through the headache I now had. “Just get down here.”

They stood frozen for another few seconds, and I thought I was going to have to raise my voice, to get them moving, and finally they came. The three of them walked down the stairs, moving cautiously and slowly, while my own three people came into the building behind me. I waited until the others stood before me.

“What are we going to do with you?” I muttered.

“Please, don’t kill me, we’ll do whatever you want,” one of the women said. I remembered Jessica hating on them earlier at some point, talking about how they both look almost like assembly-line attractive college-aged blondes, and honestly she was right. They looked a lot like each other. I sighed softly, I wanted to be done with this.

“Jessica? Hannah? What do you think?” I asked.

“You fucking stood by and watched this happen,” Hannah said, her voice low with anger. She stepped up next to me, staring at them. “He treated me and mom like shit for weeks, for months! And you never fucking said anything! You fucking laughed at me!”

“I didn’t!”

“Shut up!”

“Hannah,” I said.

She let out a frustrated, disgusted sigh. “I just want them gone, I don’t care how.” With that, she turned and walked away.

Jessica stepped up next to me, and the two women seemed to melt under her intense gaze. “Did you fuck my ex-husband?” she asked, her voice flat.

“I’d tell her the truth, if I were you,” I said.

It was funny, though, because one of them had the truth written all over her face. Her look of fear intensified and she began shaking her head.

Jessica stepped closer to her. “Did you, Marla? Did you fuck him?”

“I-”

“Tell me!”

“Yes!” she said, and burst into tears. “I’m sorry!”

“When?” Jessica pressed. “When!?”

“Last month! That’s when we started!”

Jessica stared at her for a long moment, then turned away, facing me. She looked...miserable. Angry, guilty, bitter.

“Just get them out of here,” she muttered, stalking away.

Susan came to stand next to me.

“All right,” I said, still eager to just fucking get this over with, “this is how it’s gonna work. I’m going to supervise the three of you and let you pack a reasonable amount of supplies. Jessica told me there’s a settlement a few days’ walk from here, that you passed it on the way in. You can go there. Or somewhere else. Really, I don’t give a shit where you go so long as it’s away from here. I don’t want to ever see any of you three again. If I do…” I raised the pistol and aimed it at them. One of the girls gave a half-hearted shriek.

It was kind of low, and I honestly wouldn’t blow them away upon first sight if I saw them again, but I wanted them gone.

“Understand?”

All three of them nodded vigorously. I think they wanted to be gone, too.

Fine by me.

I spent half an hour with them, Susan with me, Jessica and Hannah elsewhere. We watched them pack their backpacks with clothes, medicine, and food, and an assortment of other stuff. I felt like I’d given them a fair shake.

“Can we have a gun?” the man asked after they’d packed up. It was the first thing he’d said.

“No,” I replied simply.

I expected him to argue, or plead, or something, but he just nodded once. After that, Susan and I marched the three of them outside, into the cold, past the two corpses. It was still relatively early in the day, and the skies were clear, so I figured they had a decent chance of getting somewhere.

“Remember, don’t come back,” I said flatly.

None of them said anything as they walked away, heading south. Susan and I stood there and watched them until they were gone, out of sight among another collection of trees. I sighed heavily and turned back to look at the lodge. My eyes caught on the two corpses, on the blood in the snow. I looked to the left, where a big collection of windows made up most of the wall, letting in on a dining area. Jessica and Hannah were sitting at the table, not talking, just staring off into nothing. I groaned as another wave of pain hit me.

“Are you okay? Your lip was bleeding,” Susan said.

“I’ll be fine,” I grunted. “Just need to sit down for a bit.”

“More than a bit,” she said. “Come on, let’s get back inside. Your eyebrow is bleeding, too.”

“I know,” I muttered, I could feel it, but I went.

We walked back inside, closing the door, and moved over to sit at the table with Jessica and Hannah. For several long moments, nobody said anything as Susan pulled out the medical supplies and began to gently clean the blood off my face.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Jessica replied quietly.

“All right. We should talk about what we’re going to do next, though-ah!” I winced as Susan put something particularly stinging and painful on my eyebrow.

“Sorry,” she muttered.

Jessica and Hannah finally looked over at me and something in their expressions changed. Maybe seeing my bruised and bloodied face anchored them back to reality a little bit.

Hannah cleared her throat. “I think we should live in here.”

“Are you serious?” Jessica replied. “After everything that’s happened here?”

“What happened here sucked, but this place is undisputedly a better place to live, mom,” Hannah replied. “I want my own space, my own bed. I can have that again here. We can have some actual fucking room.”

Jessica sighed softly and looked around the large room surrounding us, as though considering it.

“I don’t know…” she murmured.

“Susan?” I asked.

“I’m game,” she replied, still focusing on my face. “I’m not exactly in love with our current house and this place seems nice enough, but I’m also willing to stay if it’s going to be torture for Jessica to live here.”

“It wouldn’t be torture,” she muttered. “Just...I don’t know.” She shook her head suddenly. “Whatever. Fuck it. We should live here. There’s no reason not to.”

“Jessica-” I began, but she shook her head again, more forcefully.

“We should live here,” she repeated firmly.

I wasn’t willing to push her further on anything at this point, not after I’d just murdered her ex-husband in front of her, so I just nodded, which made Susan sigh in frustration.

“Sorry,” I murmured.

“It’s fine, I’m almost done. God, you took a beating,” she muttered.

After she said that, I saw a look of guilt pass across Jessica’s face. No doubt she felt bad for dragging us into this whole affair, but I’d offered, and I didn’t regret offering. Susan finished with my face and sat back.

“Okay, you look good...well, as good as you’re gonna for awhile,” she said.

“Gee, thanks.”

“You know what I mean. What comes next?”

I sighed and drummed my fingers on the tabletop a few times. Jessica and Hannah seemed both willing to live here and to leave me in charge for the moment.

“Go back home,” I said, taking off my pistol and giving it to her. “Update Lara on the situation, ask her if she’s okay with moving here. If she is, start packing. Jessica, Hannah, and I will stay here and search the place over. I want to get a feel for the place, for what kind of supplies we’re working with. Once I’m done with that, I’ll come back and get you and we three can bring the most pertinent supplies back here.”

“All right,” she said, standing. I got up with her and we walked over to the front door. As I did, something abruptly occurred to me, something that proved I was definitely not on my game right now: pistols. Travis had been armed, Thomas might have been. I began looking around as we approached the door, and finally tracked down Travis’s pistol actually still clutched in his hand outside. I sighed and started breaking the grip.

“Oh, right,” Susan murmured.

“We need to get our shit together,” I said, grunting with effort. I finally got the pistol free and checked it out. It looked to be in good condition. I pulled the magazine out and looked it over. It took nine millimeters, lucky break there, I guess. And it was still mostly full: nine bullets out of a twelve-shot magazine. Even luckier break.

“Here, trade me back,” I said, handing her the pistol. She could handle it better than the thirty-eight I’d given her. We traded and she looked over the pistol, then tucked it away. “Be careful.”

“I will...and, uh, good luck,” she murmured.

I nodded, taking her meaning. I was about to be alone for probably at least an hour, maybe two, with two women whom I had murdered someone they were both very close to. And I’d done it right in front of them.

As clear-cut as we’d all like it to be, sometimes it wasn’t. Often it wasn’t.

I watched Susan go until she was gone, then turned and looked back at the lodge. I looked at the two corpses I’d made.

With a soft sigh, I walked towards them.

They were where I’d begin my search.

~

We spent the next hour and a half going over the lodge.

It was a big place, clearly meant for luxury, a place for maybe middle-class or upper-middle-class families to vacation in during the winter or the summer, depending. Right inside the front door was a massive room that took up a decent portion of the whole building. Dining area to the left, living room to the right. There was a big L of a couch set up with a coffee table and an entertainment center that must’ve once held a TV and now held not much of anything. A stairway along the back wall of the room led up to the second story and the doors I found in that wall led to a large kitchen area, a closet, and a bathroom.

Upstairs on the second story were three bedrooms and a bathroom, each with their own closet. And a final set of stairs led up to a master bedroom that had its own master bathroom. This, I realized, must be where Jessica and Travis had stayed.

I doubted she’d want to stay in here, and it seemed like a nice place for me and Lara and Susan to stake our own claim. It was a nice bedroom. Two big dressers, a table with three chairs around it beside a large window that looked out over the forest, a king-sized bed, a pair of bookshelves built into the wall, (mostly empty).

Once I was confident that there wasn’t anyone hiding out anywhere, I started at the top and began working my way down.

Right away, I could tell there was not as much gear and supplies as I’d hoped there would be. Secreted away up in the master bedroom, I found a magazine of ammo for the pistol, which I pocketed, and a dozen shells that would match my rifle, which I also immediately pocketed. I know at some point I must have asked Jessica and Hannah about their armament, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember. All I knew was that there’d be at minimum two pistols and a rifle. I had one of the pistols. Now I needed to find the rest.

There was also a bottle of some kind of gin that was only a little drained, a sealed plastic container of hand-rolled cigarettes, and a bottle with a dozen or so sleeping pills inside. Besides that, I just found some jewelry and about a grand in cash, which made me laugh. Some people just couldn’t let go of the idea that these pieces of paper were going to be worth something again. Maybe it was nostalgia.

I did have to admit that there used to be something particularly satisfying about handling a crisp new twenty or fifty.

I found a handful of useful items among the bedrooms and the bathroom on the second story. It was there I finally stopped and popped several painkillers, because my head and face were fucking killing me. Everything was, at this point.

Downstairs was where I found the rest of the relevant supplies. The rifle, for one. It was discarded on the couch. When I opened it up and checked it out, I found three more shells and that it took the same ammunition as our own rifle, and it was a newer model. I practiced aiming with it a few times and found it to be more satisfying to hold, better balanced. And the scope was better too. Damn, I had been lucky I hadn’t gotten nailed. Either that or Travis wasn’t quite as good a shot as he appeared. Either way: mine now.

I managed to track down Thomas’s pistol. It was a silver ten-shot twenty-two that was fully loaded, though I found no spare ammo.

We weren’t swimming in bullets, but I now felt a lot better about our armament situation.

At the end of the search, we all ended up in the kitchen looking over the food stores. I was not impressed.

“This is it? Seriously?” I muttered. There was meat in the freezer, maybe enough wolf and deer to feed all five of us for a day, perhaps two if we were careful and mixed it with something else. There were half a dozen cans of fruits and vegetables, a few pouches of sockeye salmon, and some handpicked potatoes, tomatoes, and pea pods.

“Thomas was the only one among us who could hunt,” Jessica said.

“No, I could hunt, no one would let me,” Hannah muttered.

“Yeah. Travis wouldn’t let me or Hannah or either of the girls go out and hunt, and the other guy wasn’t any good at it, and Travis wouldn’t do it himself. So it was Thomas’s responsibility.”

“You know I gave that motherfucker a wolf when I first ran into him?” I asked.

“Really?” Hannah asked.

“Yeah. I was over this way, hunting for something, and got attacked by a wolf. I killed it, drew his attention. That was the first time we ever met. He asked me for it. I decided it would do to try for peace, so I gave it to him,” I said.

“Figures,” Hannah replied.

“Well, it’s not terrible, I guess. Regardless, it’ll do. Here,” I said, turning and giving Hannah the twenty-two. “Hold onto this for now. And you can hold onto the rifle. I’ve got a new one now. We can finally start hunting together.”

“Okay, good,” she murmured. Her anger seemed to be fading. She looked and sounded distracted. And tired.

“All right, listen, uh...will you two be good here on your own? I need to go get the stuff from the house and Susan and Lara.”

“We’ll be fine,” Jessica replied, and Hannah nodded.

“Okay. Just...keep watch, all right? Seriously. I don’t know if they might come back or someone else might show up while I’m gone.” That seemed to break through a little and they paid more attention. I was honestly reluctant to just leave them here, but at the same time, work needed to be done, Susan and Lara were expecting me, and I also had the notion that they would need some time to talk to each other about what had just happened.

“We’ll keep watch,” Hannah promised. “Just don’t be too long, okay?”

“I’ll try,” I replied.

I finished gathering my things and then lingered for a few seconds, looking at them in the kitchen, wanting to say something, anything, because I felt pretty bad. Obviously they felt bad. But what could I say?

In the end, I just left.

EIGHTEEN

My bitter mood only grew more so as I walked back home.

I made sure to pay attention as I hit the trees and marched on, trying to get there quickly, but damn I felt like an asshole. I really hoped this hadn’t fucked things up between me and Jessica and Hannah, and I was prepared to accept it if it did, but fuck. Maybe there had been another way out of that, but, and I don’t know if I’d ever admit this to anyone else, there was a part of me that thought I’d made the right choice.

Because both of those guys struck me as assholes who’d just go on to do shitty things. Both of them reminded me a lot of Tanner, and the shithead running the kidnapping ring...I didn’t even remember his name anymore.

Maybe I was saving huge amounts of pain and suffering.

Then again, maybe they’d turn things around and go on do amazing things. Unlikely, but not impossible.

Ultimately, it didn’t matter.

It was done. They were dead.

Couldn’t take that back.

And even if I was justified in what I had done, now and in the potential future, even if I’d done everything right…

Jessica and/or Hannah might still hate me.

You could control what you did, but you couldn’t really control how you felt.

They might agree with me on a logical level, but hate me regardless.

There was nothing to be done about it. Right now, they probably didn’t even know how they felt about everything that had happened. They’d need time to process.

Maybe we all did.

I arrived back at the house without running into any problems, nothing but pain anyway. I was taking a few days off after this, I fucking needed it.

Well...maybe a few days of light duty.

There was always more to do.

I almost forgot to do the knock, did it, and then opened up the door. I found Susan and Lara waiting for me in the hallway, looking anxious.

“Don’t worry, we’re still good,” I said.

“Chris, your face,” Lara replied softly as she walked towards me.

“I fell down some stairs,” I said, then laughed, then groaned. “Fuck, my lip. And my eye. And my...everything else.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you tonight really good,” Lara said, hugging me.

“I’m looking forward to it. Although goddamn do I feel like shit emotionally, too.”

“How’s Jessica handling it? And Hannah?”

“I’m not sure,” I replied. “Good news is: we’ve got some more food, more guns and ammo, also found some more booze and some sleeping pills.”

“Great combo,” Susan murmured.

“How are we with packing?” I asked.

“Almost done,” Lara replied. “So this place is nice? It’s got a big bed we can fuck in?”

I laughed, and that made me feel a little better. “That’s your biggest concern? And yes, there’s a great king-size. We’ll have our own master bedroom on the third story.”

“Oh hell yes,” she whispered.

“Lara,” Susan said as she walked up to us, “try to be a little more tactful. Two people just died. And Chris had to kill them.”

“I know,” she murmured, “I’m sorry. I’m just...trying to lighten the mood.”

“I understand,” I replied. “I’m...I’ll be okay. Although shit, I need to sit down for a bit. My head’s killing me.”

A look came across Lara’s face as I said that and she smirked suddenly. “I can help with that, come here,” she replied, taking me into the living room.

“You’re gonna fuck him, aren’t you?” Susan asked.

“Maybe,” Lara replied.

Susan sighed. “I’ll finish packing while you act slutty as hell.”

“I think Chris likes it when I act like this, and I think you like it, too,” Lara replied as she sat me down on the sofa and then got down on her knees in front of me.

“No argument here,” I replied, settling back and watching her work.

“Exactly,” she murmured, unzipping my pants and pulling my cock out. Honestly, I thought I’d have trouble getting it up with how shitty I was feeling, but apparently not. Especially not after Lara got topless and those fucking huge tits of hers came out. She leaned in and started licking, dragging her tongue all over my dick and getting me harder than steel within seconds. Lara laughed as she got that reaction and then brought her breasts up, pressed them together with my cock in between, and started sliding them up and down.

Fuck, to feel those huge, soft, hot tits sliding up and down my dick…

“Don’t worry, Chris, you’ll have me to take care of you from now on,” she murmured.

“I am very appreciative of that,” I replied, enraptured by watching her as she worked.

She went back to using her mouth, taking my dick into it and bobbing her head rapidly. The pleasure burned into me as she coated my cock in saliva, looking fantastically sexy doing so, and then abruptly she stopped and stood up.

“What are you doing?” I murmured.

“Moving onto the next part,” she replied as she pulled her pants down.

“Oh. Shit. Okay.”

“Yeah, I thought you’d like the part where I take my pants off,” she replied with a self-satisfied smile.

She stood there for a moment, naked now, and let me admire her. And I really had to. Those fucking thighs of hers. And her hips!

Seriously, Lara had the kind of body that started wars.

I wasn’t even sure what that meant but I felt it applied to her.

She was to fucking die for.

And she knew it.

Lara turned around and showed off that perfectly shaped, fantastically thick ass of hers. She reached behind her, gripped my knees, and set my legs apart a bit further. Keeping one hand on one of my knees, she reached back with her other and gripped my cock, then lowered that fat ass into my lap, taking me into her wet, wet pussy.

“Aw...fuck!” I groaned as I slid into her.

She was fucking slippery wet and oh so hot.

“Was that a good or a bad sound!?” Susan called from elsewhere in the house.

“So good!” I yelled back, then groaned again.

Lara didn’t say anything as she finished taking me all the way in, just laid her hand back on her other knee to balance herself, then started fucking me, nice and smooth.

And it was fucking heaven.

Paradise. Perfection. Bliss.

I lost myself in that sweet raw pussy, staring down in something like awe at her huge ass and my cock disappearing inside of her over and over again.

“I’m gonna come soon,” I groaned after about two minutes of this.

“Fine by me, that’s exactly what I’m going for,” she replied. “You’ve been working hard as hell, you earned giving me a creampie.”

“Oh my God you are so amazing,” I groaned.

She laughed, then moaned, pushing me deeper into her.

Lara soon started going faster, her hips and thighs working overtime as she lifted herself up again and again, and the pleasure buzzed through me, slamming me in waves each time she shoved me back inside of herself, and then…

“Ah fuck!”

I came inside of her, a jet of my seed bursting out of me as my cock kicked hard, and then another spurt out, and another, my dick twitching violently and rapidly inside of her as she pushed herself down as hard as she could into my lap, taking my full length into her and letting me pump her full. The rapturous ecstasy rolled through and for however long it lasted, I forgot everything. There was just her and the orgasm and her perfect, perfect pussy.

When I was finished, she slowly got up off of me, holding a rag over her crotch. I didn’t even see where she’d gotten it from.

“Thank you,” I managed, leaning back against the couch, panting. “Goddamn that felt good.”

“You’re welcome,” she replied, looking very pleased with herself as I put my dick back in my pants.

Lara pulled her clothes back on after cleaning herself up and I just sat there and luxuriated, bathing in the bliss of post-orgasmic pleasure and a hot fire crackling nearby. After everything I’d been through, it felt not just nice, but necessary.

Eventually, though, I made myself get up and start gathering my belongings.

~

I hung around the house for another hour or so, picking it over and packing up as much of our stuff as I could. I was reluctant to leave anything behind, even for a few hours, but that was how we had to play it. As it was, I managed to get all our food and medical supplies divvied up between the three of us. After packing up a handful of other items, the three of us left the house and started making our way back to our new home.

“I’m not really sure how to actually handle something like...whatever this is,” Lara said.

“Jessica said she doesn’t want to talk about it. Any of it. I think Hannah feels the same way. So just...don’t talk about it. But be there for them if they come to you, give them space if they need it. Hopefully they’ll get it sorted out,” I replied.

“Whatever happens...I want you to know I still feel the same way about you,” Susan said.

“So do I,” Lara agreed. “Susan told me what happened and it sounded like there really wasn’t another way out of the situation.”

“Thanks,” I replied. “That does mean a lot.”

And it did. In that moment, it startled, perhaps even worried me how close I’d become to Susan and Lara.

I’d never had what I felt was a particularly good handle on relationships even before the apocalypse. The pseudo-relationships that I often found myself in following it seemed to serve me well enough. There was sex, there was intimacy, there was comfort. I rarely fought with my girlfriends or friends with benefits. But there was a security in knowing I could just walk away. I still felt like if it really, truly came down to it, I could walk away from Susan and Lara, and Megan and Delilah and Elizabeth, too…

Or maybe I was fooling myself. Maybe I’d find that I could no longer do it, even if it was in my best interest.

People talked about the power of love, and I’d seen that power. I’d seen people destroy their lives to stay with someone they loved, and it was absolutely the wrong choice. Maybe they didn’t have a choice. Or maybe they just didn’t feel like they had a choice.

Was there a difference?

If the illusion was strong enough, did it become reality?

In another way though, realizing how close I was to these two, to Megan, even to Delilah and Elizabeth, and now Jessica, it was comforting in a way I’d never really felt before meeting Megan and Delilah.

Was it worth it? Worth the risk?

I guess that was a question as old as time, and one that everyone had to find out for themselves.

“I just realized something…” Susan said as we approached the lodge again.

“What?” I replied.

“What did you do with the bodies? Or have you done anything?”

“I dragged them over to the middle building and locked them up in there. It’s cold enough that they won’t rot and secure enough that wolves or birds won’t get to them,” I replied. “I still don’t know what Jessica or Hannah might want to do with them and I don’t want to ask. Shit, I think they don’t know what they want to do yet.”

“Smart,” Lara murmured. “Out of the way, but not gone.”

“I have my moments,” I replied, not that I considered that particularly smart but at this point I’d take the compliment.

We went back inside and I led them upstairs to the third floor after checking in with Jessica and Hannah to make sure they were all right. They were in one of the second story bedrooms, talking to each other about something that seemed important, and we left them to it.

“Oh wow, this is amazing,” Lara said, walking to the window and looking down at the forest to the north. “I mean seriously, this is beautiful. And this bed…” She walked over to it, falling onto her back and spreading her arms out. “We’re going to fuck so much in this bed.”

“That is all you think about,” Susan muttered from her position at one of the dressers. She was filling up a drawer with her clothes.

“Not all,” Lara replied. “I believe you and I think about it the same amount, I’m just honest about it. Prude.”

“I am not a prude, you’re just a slut,” Susan said, rolling her eyes.

“I sure am now,” Lara murmured, looking at me as I walked to the window.

“No complaints here,” I said.

“You’re both sluts. You especially, Chris.”

“So I don’t get it: are you insulting us or not?”

She sighed. “No, for the record, I’m not. Just teasing. Lara’s right, I’m just as horny as you two. Well...maybe Lara. I don’t know if anyone is as horny as you, Chris.”

“I’m not, like, hypersexual or anything,” I said.

“I think you’re definitely on the upper end of the sexdrive spectrum,” Lara said. “You’d kind of have to be to keep up with...how many women now?”

“Several,” I murmured, looking back out the window.

“No wait, tell me. How many?” she pressed.

“Yeah, I’m curious too.”

I sighed. “There’s you two, and Jessica. Megan, Delilah, and Elizabeth back home. Delilah’s girlfriend. And two others in town that I sleep with from time to time,” I replied, looking at them.

“So six on the reg, three on the occasional? Goddamn, Chris,” Susan said.

“Yeah, that’s actually a lot.”

“You complaining?” I asked.

“No, I’m complimenting,” she said.

“Good. We’ll break the bed in tonight,” I replied, turning back to the window. After a moment, I walked over to the other dresser in the room and pulled open one of the empty drawers, then began putting my own clothes I’d brought over away.

~

The rest of the day passed in a bit of a pained blur.

There was a lot to do and not enough time to do it.

I was still the one in charge, so it was my responsibility. Much as I wanted to just pack it in for the day, I didn’t. After putting away all my crap I’d brought over, I walked back with Susan and Lara to the house and grabbed more stuff. It took another three trips overall, but we managed to snag pretty much everything of value that wasn’t furniture. We grabbed all the clothes, all the blankets, all the books, (that was pretty much the entire third trip, though I wasn’t sure what we were gonna do with them when we left for Pine Lake), silverware and plates and cups and bowls, pretty much everything that might be useful.

Then I spent an hour hunting through the other two buildings, though it felt like a waste of time. Mainly I just wanted to make sure we were safe, but it looked like Hannah was right: the places were already cleared out.

From there, I spent the rest of the daylight gathering firewood, since either they were at a low-tide moment in their own supply cycle, or they’d just been lazy about it. When daylight ran out, I felt like I’d probably gathered enough and went back inside. I found everyone on the first floor. Jessica and Lara were preparing dinner, and Hannah and Susan were waiting in the dining room, talking quietly. The mood was still tense and I kept expecting something bad to happen. One or both of Jessica or Hannah to start yelling at me, or tell me I was wrong for what I’d done, something. Except it didn’t happen.

Dinner went by smoothly, if quietly, enough. It was clear Jessica and Hannah were still processing. I tried to picture what it would be like to be in either of their shoes, but anything I came up with just felt like a sketch of a shadow compared to what it was probably like.

When dinner was done and cleaned up, I spent some time walking around the first floor, checking out all the windows I found, all the doors, any way into the building. It was dark by then, and I wanted to make sure we were secure. I found most of them locked already, and locked the ones that weren’t. It was a bit of a pain to open an unlocked window from the outside, especially in the cold and quietly, but not impossible. I didn’t want to take any chances. I also made a note to get blankets up over more of the windows in the near future. There was a large fireplace at the back of the living room, and from the way it was designed, it would provide warm for just about the whole building, but certainly a better job could be done keeping the heat in and the cold out. But that was all work for tomorrow, and I was dead tired by that point.

After making sure we were secure, and that the fire was going to go for the whole night, I headed upstairs. Hannah and Jessica each took a room on the second story, closing their doors after saying goodnight.

My bruised and battered body quite enjoyed the attention both Susan and Lara lavished on it. They ended up really thanking me for all my efforts recently. They first did so in what had already become the usual way: by fucking me senseless. In this case we stripped naked and they took turns sucking me off and then riding me until I’d shot my load into both of them, each time grabbing their hips and pulling them down hard against me as I thrust up into them, filling them both up. After that, though, they both washed me down and then gave me a full-body massage that brought me right up to the edge of sleep.

By the time they were finished and the three of us were curled up together beneath the blankets in the darkness that was almost absolute, broken only by a single candle flickering nearby and a bit of moonlight coming in through the windows, I was already drifting off to sleep.

NINETEEN

Two days passed after that.

They were equal parts relaxing and uncomfortable.

They were relaxing because I did indeed take it easy. Not just because I’d had my face punched in or because I still had bruises across my body that were gradually fading, but because everything seemed to be catching up with me once again and I was just fucking tired. I went to bed early and slept in. I expected Hannah to come and shout at me to take her hunting, since I’d promised that now that we had some more bullets and a second rifle, but she didn’t. And that was where the uncomfortable part came in: Jessica and Hannah largely seemed to avoid me. Though I noticed they seemed to be avoiding Susan and Lara, too.

So I busied myself while the dice rolled and we all waited to see what they’d come down on. I think they were waiting to see exactly how they felt once all the most immediate of their emotions settled down.

I gathered some firewood. Once I went walking with Lara into the woods to the north to hunt for fruits and vegetables. I helped make a few meals. I searched the buildings for supplies. That was what I did most. I found a handful of mildly useful items hidden away in the other two buildings, and a few more useful things tucked away in the larger one we all now called home. During the first night, I ended up getting high.

Not crazy ‘I can’t even think’ high, but enough to take the edge off and really relax.

I was considering it the second night after dinner, as the day was drawing to a close, but that was when Jessica finally sought me out.

I was sitting at the dining table. Ostensibly I was there to read, but really I was staring at the big, huge windows that made up one wall of the dining area. They were beautiful, to be sure, gave a great view of the area beyond, but they were also a huge weakness. Someone could smash one and walk right through without a problem. Or a bear or something else…

Sensing movement elsewhere in the area, I turned around and found myself looking at Jessica. She was approaching me, wearing a soft white robe she’d found somewhere.

“Hello, Chris,” she said quietly, “can we talk?”

“Yeah,” I replied immediately, setting aside the book I’d stopped really paying attention to some minutes ago and turning towards her. “Definitely.”

She sat down in the chair next to me and for a few moments didn’t speak. I didn’t either, just feeling my guts start to twist and my heart hammer in my chest. I’d really come to like Jessica, and I thought there was a very real possibility that she would now be telling me something along the lines that although I was right in what I did, and she liked me as a person, she couldn’t stand to be around the man who’d shot her husband of twenty years and the father of her child in the fucking face. It was the moment of truth.

“I’ve been trying to handle...everything that’s happened. It’s really shaken me up. And I’ve been talking with Hannah about it a lot. I’m not-you know, I’m not over it. It’s going to take awhile, I think. But something Hannah really got me to see was how dependent I’d become on Travis for...everything. I mean, I knew that I was. In some ways I’ve always been dependent and I was so young when we met that our relationship...I was not just allowed but encouraged to just keep relying on him for everything, to let him make decisions. And, twenty years together or not, married or not, that obviously colored my perception of him and our relationship.”

She sighed and hugged herself suddenly. “It’s going to take awhile to figure out, if I even can. Honestly, if possible, I’m going to just drop my past and move forward. The only good thing about my past is Hannah. Other than her, I now have nothing left, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I can be someone else, or just...who I want to be...which brings us to you and me.”

I felt myself tense. She must have seen that and the small look of surprise that came onto her face suddenly clued me into the fact that she was just as deep into her own concerns as I was.

“I’m not breaking up with you, Chris, if that’s what you’re worried about,” she said.

“I just don’t want you to hate me,” I replied. Blurted out, really.

“Oh Chris, I don’t hate you. At all. I...I thought I might. For the first few hours after it happened. For the first night, I was wrestling with some things. But when I woke up the next morning, I realized that the only person I hated was him for...for a lot of things that I’m still sorting out, but I don’t hate you. I’m not mad at you. It was him or you, that much was obvious, and I recognize that you were justified in what you did. So no, I’m not-I don’t hate you. My point is this: whatever way forward I take, even just practically speaking, I want you to be involved. I need time to figure it out, but I may find that I...kind of like being dependent. But I’d rather that be a choice than a necessity. And I feel like I could trust you to be with me while also giving me the time to figure it out, figure out how I want to live my life.

“We’ll have to talk about it more, but I’ve talked with Hannah about it and, basically, what I’m saying is: if you still want us to go with you to this place, this town you live in, we’ll do it. Also…” She hesitated and then leaned closer, putting a hand on my leg. Her robe fell open a little, and I got a decent look at her excellent rack. “I still really would like to continue our relationship...in all its aspects, Chris.”

“I’d like that, too,” I murmured.

It was amazing how fast I could go from basically any feeling, good or bad, to horny in no time flat.

Jessica smiled, but then lost it quickly. “I have to admit, I’m nervous.”

“What about?” I asked.

“We’re having fun now but...a decade and a half is a big age difference, Chris. God, you’re twenty six and I’m forty. I mean, that’s certainly fun, lots of fun, but...I’m not going to be hot forever,” she murmured.

I sighed and stood up suddenly, picking her up and then setting her ass down on the table. “First of all,” I said quietly, untying the loosely knotted robe and opening it up, “no one’s going to be hot forever.”

“Chris!” she whispered as I revealed her naked body. “We’re out in the open!”

“Quiet,” I replied, cupping her breasts. She gasped and a shudder ran through her and she closed her eyes, tilting her head back, leaning her chest forward. Almost like she was giving herself to me in automatic reaction to my touch. “Second of all,” I continued, “I have seen sixty year olds that I would definitely bang, and you are a woman who is obviously going to be hot for a long time. Seriously, keep working out and you’ll be hot for decades more...or don’t. I obviously like thicker girls, too,” I murmured, continuing to grope her.

She laughed softly, then gasped as a finger went over one of her perfect pink nipples. “I can finally gain a little weight and not have to worry?” she murmured.

“You wouldn’t have to worry at all, I don’t care. But you’re missing the most important thing, Jessica.”

She opened her eyes. “What’s that?”

“I’m not in this just because you’ve got a fit body and perfect tits. I actually like you. A lot. For more than just your body and the sex.”

“You really mean that,” she murmured, staring into my eyes.

“I really mean that,” I replied. Then I kissed her. She moaned and kissed me back, one hand falling to my crotch as her tongue slid into my mouth.

“But the sex really helps, I bet,” she murmured, grinning, her lips brushing mine as she spoke.

“It really helps,” I agreed, unzipping my pants and pushing her legs open, then pulling her a little closer as my cock came out.

“Right here?!” she whispered, looking around.

“Right here, you little slut,” I replied, pushing her down onto her back and stepping closer to her. She started to say something but then moaned quietly as I rubbed the head of my cock between the wet, wet lips of her pussy. “If you want me to stop just say so.”

She opened her mouth, then closed it. Then she said, “Don’t take too long.”

“I think I can manage that,” I replied.

I’d been wanting to stick it back inside of her for two very long days now and I was not going to last now that I was getting back into this hot, mature MILF pussy.

I slid into her and she gasped and clamped down her mouth, moaning as I pushed deeper. I let out a harsh breath as the pleasure hit me like a wave.

“Oh, Jessica,” I moaned, kissing her as I wrapped my arms around her and started driving into her, finding her incredibly, wonderfully wet.

She moaned in response, pressing her soft, hot, fit body against me as we fucked.

It didn’t last long, just like Jessica requested. Part of that was because yeah, it felt good. So fucking good. But a bigger part of that was the renewed and intense emotional intimacy that blossomed from our reconnection, from her acceptance of me. And from her desire to be with me for clearly a long, long time, even in spite of the fact that there were obviously other women deeply involved with me. Like she said, it would take time to sort out, but for now there was just us and sex and a desire to be connected.

When I came, it was like a burst of light, and it overpowered me. I grunted, holding her against me as she wrapped her legs around me. I thrust deeper into her, making her moan as she accepted my load, kissing me deeply.

It was intense and blissful and perfect.

When I finished, we stayed like that, hugging together, her on the table, me standing, both of us panting, foreheads resting together. After a bit, I shifted and put my head on her shoulder. She put hers on mine. After a second, I felt her stiffen, heard her gasp.

“Lara!” she whispered harshly.

I pulled out of her and she immediately covered herself with the robe. I turned and saw Lara standing on the stairs, smirking as she stared at us.

“What?” she asked. “I thought it was a free show.”

“You pervert! Ugh!” Jessica growled, holding her robe over her crotch to keep from leaking everywhere as she stood.

“I’m sorry, but you are the one who let him fuck you right there in the dining room,” Lara replied.

“I know it’s just-whatever! I’m just embarrassed,” she muttered, and when I looked back at her, I saw she was blushing deeply.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should’ve taken you to your room.”

“No, it’s fine. I don’t actually care, I was just surprised.” Her irritation fell away and she let out a little laugh. “I guess I’d do the same thing. Really, I was terrified for a split second that you were Hannah. The only reason I even let this happen was because I know she’s asleep for the night.”

I yawned. “I should sleep, too. I’ve got to get back to real work tomorrow.”

“I did hear Hannah talk about prodding you into taking her hunting, so yeah,” Jessica replied. We started heading up towards Lara.

“How is she handling all the...you know, fallout from this mess?” I asked.

“Better than I am,” she replied. “Honestly, I think she was waiting for me to sort it out and talk to you. And now I’ve done that.”

“So you two are...we’re all okay now?” Lara asked cautiously as we all came up onto the second floor.

“You didn’t overhear that part?” Jessica asked.

Lara laughed awkwardly. “No. I didn’t hear any of the conversation. I just happened to come down when you two started fucking.”

Jessica laughed. “We’re fine. I’ll be okay.” She paused as we came to stand in front of one of the bedroom doors. Hers, I guessed. “There’s two things, though. Two favors I want to ask.”

“Ask away,” I replied.

“First...I’ve decided what I want to do with the body. Of my ex-husband. And Thomas, I guess. I want to burn them. Can you help with that? I’ll do it myself if I have to, but I’d really appreciate the help.”

“I’ll help,” I replied.

“Thank you. Second thing is...will you sleep in my bed with me tonight? Just the two of us?” She looked at Lara. “I don’t want to steal him from you, just…”

“No, I get it. And Susan might be annoyed but she’ll understand.”

“I’ll do it,” I replied.

“Thank you. I really appreciate it.” She smiled suddenly. “I can show you how much I appreciate it, actually.”

“I think it’s my turn to show you at this point. I might be a few orgasms ahead of you and it’s time to even that out,” I replied.

“Well okay then,” she said.

“Let me say goodnight to Susan and Lara.”

“I’ll be waiting,” Jessica replied, and walked into her room.

I started following Lara upstairs.

~

Last night had been great, but this morning was kind of miserable.

At least this time there was a good reason for it to be miserable: we were performing a funeral. I expected to have more mixed feelings as I dragged two stiff corpses out and into a field about two hundred feet southeast of the resort lodge we were staying in, but I honestly didn’t. They’d tried to kill me, they’d treated Jessica and Hannah like pieces of property, Travis having done it for probably the entire time he’d known them.

I knew guys like that. Entitled shitheads who thought everything of themselves and nothing of everyone else.

By the time I’d gotten them set up in a little snow pit, which was basically a bedding of kindling that they were put on and then a little wall of snow built up around the edges to help keep the fire contained, I felt little more than what I felt for just about everyone I’d killed: regret that it had been necessary, but not much regret over actually having done it.

After breakfast and morning chores, we all finally stood around that makeshift grave site, staring at the two bodies. Jessica had asked Lara and Susan and I to be there for the actual ‘burial’, such as it was, and now we all stood, solemn and silent.

“Anything you want to say, Hannah?” Jessica asked.

She sighed bitterly. “He was a shit father but I guess it sure could’ve been a lot worse.” She stopped speaking abruptly. A cold wind blew. Then she said, “I’m glad he’s finally gone. That’s it. That’s all I have to say.”

Jessica was still staring at the two bodies.

I waited for her to say something, but all she finally said was: “Do it.”

That was my cue. I lit the fire and it took right away. Stepping back, I watched the flames begin consuming the pair of corpses. I stood next to Jessica, waiting still for her to speak, to say something, but she didn’t. Not after one minute, nor two, nor five. As the bodies continued burning, Lara and Susan eventually gave their condolences to Hannah and Jessica, and then went back inside. Hannah was the next to leave after lingering for another thirty seconds or so.

Finally, she walked over to us.

“I’m going inside to prepare for hunting lessons,” she said.

“I’ll be there,” I promised.

She walked off, leaving Jessica and I alone with only the occasional gusting wind and the crackling of a slowly dying fire.

I wanted to ask Jessica if she was all right. She was still staring at the fire, unmoving. Maybe she needed some time alone.

I started to turn away, but she reached out and grabbed my hand.

“Don’t go yet, please,” she murmured.

“Okay,” I replied, stepping closer to her. I wrapped an arm tentatively around her because although we’d made peace yesterday, I still wasn’t sure of her emotional state. This had to be a really fucking tough thing to bear.

She leaned into me and I hugged her closer.

“I was thinking,” she murmured, “about what we spoke about last night. It might change in the future, but what I said about being dependent on another person...I think that’s just who I am. And honestly I don’t hate it. I hate being alone. I hate having to endure things by myself. I was thinking that it’s what kept me in my shitty marriage for so long, and it was, but then I realized that it’s not all bad, being that way. It depends entirely on the person who you depend on. If you depend on a shitty person, you’ll be alone even when you aren’t.”

She turned suddenly and hugged me tightly, pressing her head against my chest, looking away from the funeral fire. “I’m scared to tell you this, because I know what a large commitment it can be, but I have to tell you regardless. I don’t give a shit how it sounds: I want to be dependent on you. Wherever you go, I want to follow. I’ll help you however I can. I want to be with you and around you. Whatever form that takes.”

She stopped hugging me suddenly and looked up at me, staring hard at me, her face tensing, as though awaiting some backlash.

I had to admit, I was a little surprised, even given what we’d talked about last night.

This was a bit more intense than I had expected, but it was an intense time.

“Sounds like you want to marry me,” I said, then regretted it, though I wasn’t sure why. I had meant to say something else but this was…

Well, like I said, intense.

She chewed on her lower lip, not breaking eye contact. “I guess it does sound like that,” she whispered. “But there’s something I need to tell you now, before you respond. Something I should have realized sooner in my life, something I should have acted on sooner. And it is this: as much as I want to depend on you, as much as I want to be with you...if it ever comes down to a question of you or Hannah, I will always choose Hannah.”

“I understand,” I replied, and she looked relieved. I kissed her forehead. “She’s your daughter, of course you would choose her over me. Over anyone. And I can at least say that I would never do anything to hurt her or you, or try to separate the two of you.”

“I know,” she said, smiling, “why do you think I’ve chosen you?”

I was silent for another few minutes. This was not what I was expecting.

Finally, I decided to get the most obvious problem out of the way. “So here’s what I have to say. There’s already other women in my life that I’m pretty deeply connected to, and that’s not going to change. I’m also probably going to keep having casual sex with women I come across…” I paused, reconsidered that. “Okay, that’s a lie: I’m definitely going to keep doing that. And, as unfair as I know it is, I’m not comfortable sharing with other guys. Like at all. So if you’re seriously going through with this, then it’s just me.”

“And other girls? You don’t seem to have a problem with your girlfriends fucking each other…” she said.

“I don’t,” I replied. “You and Lara clearly have a thing going.”

“Yes we do…” she murmured. “Well, I appreciate the honesty. I’m surprised and glad that you’re so up front about this fact. Honestly it’s just fucking refreshing to be able to straight up discuss this stuff instead of trying to dance around it or just hope it never comes up.” She paused. “Can our entire relationship be like that?”

“Yes,” I replied. “If you’ve got something to say to me, say it. I’ll try to be the same with you.”

“That sounds so appealing after having to bullshit and tiptoe around things for twenty years...okay, okay. So. No other guys. I’m fine with that. Having actually been with you, I think you’re enough dick to keep me happy in that regard. I’m actually pretty excited to explore with women more. It’s been so invigorating with Lara. Well, with both of you but in totally different ways. Hmm. So is this going to be a problem when we get back to the other women?” she asked.

“I hope not,” I replied. “Whatever happens, I’ll handle it. I’m pretty sure we’ll all be okay.”

“Okay, good. I’ll leave that to you.” She glanced back at the dying fire for a long moment, and then slowly, deliberately turned away from it. “I’m done with this. Can we go inside now?”

“Yeah,” I replied.

I was comfortable enough leaving the fire to its own accords. It would die off pretty quickly and soon would be buried by the snow and the winds.

Jessica spoke up again as we started walking back to the lodge. “Also, I want to kind of put you at ease. As much as I’m admitting that I want to be dependent on you, I do want to say that I’m not going to be super-clingy all the time. I actually want to start investing more in myself. I’ve thought a lot about what you’ve said, about what Susan and Lara have told me, about what Hannah’s doing, and you’re all right: I could learn new shit. And I want to. Your earlier point, that I should know this stuff even if I’m going to be largely relying on you and the others...you’re right. And it’s stupid of me not to have learned sooner.”

“It isn’t stupid, you were actively being repressed,” I replied.

“I know, but I could’ve done more…” she sighed. “No, I’m not going down that road. I’m done with the past, I’m done with him, I’m just going forward. If I’ve learned anything from you and Hannah and Lara, it’s that I can and need to make decisions. And I’m doing that. So...will you teach me this stuff?” She smirked suddenly. “I’ll make it worth your while. I know how much you’d love to fuck me up the ass…”

“I will teach you whatever you want,” I replied immediately, and she laughed.

“Good. It’s good to know I can entice you so easily.”

“Women are my weakness.”

“Obviously.”

We walked inside grinning and touching each other. Hannah was waiting for us. She sighed when she saw us kiss.

“Stop hitting on my mom and take me hunting,” she complained.

“All right,” I replied. I leaned in and whispered in Jessica’s ear: “I’ll be by later to collect on that ass-fucking.”

She let out a small gasp and blushed, and I heard Hannah half-growl, half-sigh in frustration.

“All right, all right, I’m going,” I said, and started getting ready.

TWENTY

We grabbed our rifles, checked them over, made sure the others knew what we were doing and where we were going, and then struck off north.

I wanted to see what was in these woods. What I had seen during my couple of excursions into them so far was at least mildly encouraging. For the first few moments, as we broke through the treeline and started hunting for signs of life, neither of us spoke. I thought there might be snow somewhere on the horizon at this point, if only because the past few days had been pretty clear and I felt like that couldn’t last.

For now, though, the skies were clear and the cold was tolerable.

I could tell something was bugging Hannah and had an idea of what it was, just not necessarily the context. Obviously it was related to her dad, unless I was just totally off-base and it was something unrelated.

Maybe it was my relationship with her mom still.

After about ten minutes of silence and no luck finding anything alive, she finally broke the peace. “Am I, like, a psychopath or something?” she asked.

“What?” I asked, startled by the question.

“I’m glad that you killed him,” she murmured, her voice low, like she was afraid someone would overhear her. “I’m glad he’s dead. I was kind of sad the first day, but I’m not anymore. Not even a little. Does that make me a terrible person?”

“You want, like, a broad answer? Or just my opinion? Because I don’t have a broad answer,” I replied.

She sighed softly. “I guess that makes sense,” she muttered. “It’s not like there’s a manual that has a list of bullet points under something like ‘Doing These Things Makes You Bad’. I guess I want your opinion.”

“My opinion is...no. I don’t think you are. I think everyone is different, and everyone processes things differently. I remember reading an article once about soldiers who’d been in combat situations, seen bad shit, survived, got back home, and when they did, they felt guilty because they didn’t have any kind of PTSD, while others had it. It made them wonder if they were sociopaths or something was wrong with them.”

“What did the article say about them? About why they didn’t have it?” Hannah asked.

“Like I said: everyone’s different. Just because you aren’t traumatized by something doesn’t mean you’re fucked up or emotionless. I mean, you clearly aren’t emotionless. Maybe it’s just a sign of mental stability? One of the biggest problems with being human is that your logic and your emotions rarely connect. You logically understand that you should feel one way about a situation, but your emotions end up feeling a different way. But sometimes they do connect, and sometimes people are just more pragmatic about things. You hated your dad, sounds like you had right to, now he’s dead and you don’t have to deal with him any longer. Just because someone you knew closely is dead doesn’t automatically mean you should be miserable.”

“Hmm.”

“Okay, let me ask you this: would you rather be all fucked up over it?”

“No. I’d rather be this. I just worry about what it says about me. I mean, I saw you shoot my dad in the face and I’m pretty much cool with that.”

I considered it. “Well, not to freak you out or anything, but it could be a delayed reaction. Like you still aren’t sure how you feel about it. Maybe you’ll end up feeling differently in a week, or a month?”

“Maybe…” She didn’t sound convinced.

“Look at it this way, Hannah: I don’t think you’re a bad person, I doubt anyone else here would think so either. Though I think your mom has the right idea: bury the past, move on. Don’t dwell on it if you can manage,” I replied.

“I can manage that,” she said. “Honestly, I like this. I like what’s going on here. I know I’ve been a bitch since we met, and I’m sorry about it, but I do like you and Susan and Lara. I like living with you. I feel so much...better. I feel more free. I feel like I can go do things on my own, and the only real restrictions that are being placed on me are logical ones. I always got the impression that anytime my mom tried to stop me from doing something, it was, at worst, out of fear for my safety. My dad just wanted me to shut up and exist out of his hair. Keep living, but quietly and out of sight. And I don’t feel like that’s what’s happening anymore.”

“It definitely isn’t,” I replied. “We all want you to learn and be happy.”

She was quiet for a few moments as we kept walking through the woods. “I don’t know how to feel about that,” she murmured finally. “It’s like...I’ve been looking for something my whole life, wanting something for as long as I can remember, and now I have it and I don’t know what to actually do with it.”

“Give it time,” I replied. “You don’t need to figure everything out right away. I know your instincts are probably to hurry up, go faster, but just...go at the pace that makes the most sense. While you can, I mean. Because you won’t always get that luxury. Sometimes you’ll have to go at a pace that is absolutely brutal and punishing to survive.”

“I’m ready,” she almost growled. “I may have been cooped up and practically bound and gagged, but I haven’t done nothing. I’ve kept in shape and practiced what I could and read anything I could find. Now that I’ve got you, I’m going to exploit you and your training as much as I can.” She paused. “That didn’t sound right.”

I laughed. “No, I get it...wait, look. There.”

We froze. In the distance, a little to the left and ahead of us, there was movement. We slowly drew our rifles and took aim.

“I see it,” she whispered softly, staring through her scope.

I saw it, too. A deer, tentatively moving through the forest, looking for food no doubt. This was a perfect opportunity to really test her abilities. The shot she’d made on Thomas could’ve been a fluke, though I didn’t think so. This would be a difficult shot, with all the trees. It was probably a good fifty yards away now.

“You know what to do?” I murmured.

“Yeah,” she said. “Just tell me when.”

“Whenever you’re ready.”

I barely finished the sentence before she squeezed the trigger. I watched the deer drop into a heap as the bullet took it in the back of the head.

“Well shit,” I muttered.

“Still gonna ask whether or not I’m a good shot?” she asked.

“Don’t get too cocky,” I replied.

She scoffed as she slung the rifle and started walking towards her kill. “Really? You’re gonna tell me that?”

I followed after her. “I’m not cocky.”

“You are a little,” she replied. “But I guess you’ve earned it. From what I’ve pieced together of your adventures over the past few years, you have to be pretty skilled. Unless you’re just straight-up bullshitting us all. Though the more time we spend together, the less likely that seems.”

“Once we get back to Pine Lake, I’ll have a lot more proof,” I said. “They like me around there and they aren’t quiet about it.”

“You don’t sound happy about that.”

“I am. I mean...it’s complicated. Having people rely on you…”

“Oh. Yeah, I can see how that’d be a bit uncomfortable.”

We came up to the deer and looked down at it. “That was a great shot,” I murmured. I looked around for a moment, didn’t see anything else in the immediate vicinity. “All right,” I said, crouching and gathering it up, “let’s get this back home and you can practice gutting again.”

She sighed. “Yay.”

~

Hannah did a pretty decent job, even better than last time.

We brought the deer back and ended up setting up the gutting area in the middle building, using a fairly sturdy table in what once served as its dining room. After we’d gotten through that whole process, Hannah and I headed back out, hoping to get more. We made our way north again, trekking through the woods, hunting for deer or rabbits or even wolves. I remembered the ones we’d seen hanging out to the north while we were searching the ranger’s lodging and wondered where they’d ended up.

As we kept trekking north, something occurred to me, and it wasn’t the first time it had occurred to me over the past several days. It was bugging me and I knew that I was going to have to face it sooner or later.

Problem was, I wasn’t sure how Hannah was going to react to it.

And she was in a good mood that I didn’t necessarily want to spoil, but maybe I should approach her with it when she was in a good mood instead of a bad mood.

We ended up walking all the way through to the other side of the woods without seeing anything else to shoot and came to stand at the forest’s edge. We now had a decent view of three buildings, one of which we’d already visited: the ranger’s lodging building. A bit farther to the north were two other structures, the nearest one being a house that I was pretty sure had smoke coming out the chimney, and what definitely looked like a small church. If I had the layout of the region in my head correct, then I knew that farther to the northeast of the church was the building that almost certainly was a ranger’s station.

A place I wanted to check out.

I also wanted to check the church.

“Now what?” Hannah asked.

“Let’s investigate that church,” I replied. “Might be something tucked away.”

“What about the house? There’s gotta be people in there.”

“We’ll keep our distance. Although it’s always a dice roll, I’d say they probably aren’t hostile. But we’ve got rifles and good senses,” I replied. “Unless you feel otherwise?”

“No, I want to see what’s in the church, too. And if I remember right, isn’t there another building beyond it?”

“Yeah,” I replied, again glad that she was paying attention. “I want to see it, too. I think it’s a ranger’s station and there’s often supplies in those.”

“I’m game,” she said.

“Then let’s do it.”

We set off, making our way through the snow. Although the land was a bit hilly, and if worse came to worse we would probably be able to drop down out of sight behind a rise in the landscape, I was still nervous. If someone wanted to take a shot at us from that house, good chance they’d hit us. Although the lighting was right so that if someone was looking at me through the window, I could tell. We kept our distance from the house, staying maybe a football field’s length away. Neither of us spoke as we continued along, walking on, basically making a big semi-circle around the house to get at the church farther to the north.

It stood on a slight rise in the land itself, and it looked abandoned at a glance.

Neither of us said anything as we walked through the snow, keeping a careful eye on the house. It didn’t take long for me to detect slight movement in one of the second story windows. I tensed, preparing myself for the worst while pointing it out quietly to Hannah. We kept going, trying not to give any obvious sign that we’d seen the person watching us. The tense seconds ticked on. Nothing happened, they didn’t move.

Finally, we walked out of sight of that window, moving in our broad semi-circle around to the side of the house, and sure enough, I saw the same slight movement in one of the windows there, too. Still, they merely observed. Which I was fine with.

I’d observe, too.

We managed to make it to the church without anything happening.

“Guess they don’t want to fuck with us,” Hannah said.

“Guess not,” I agreed. “Let’s see what’s up.”

We made a quick circle around the outside of the church. It wasn’t a very large building and seemed pretty simple, made of old stone, heavily weathered, probably decades and decades old. We didn’t find anything dangerous around the outside, but as we got around back we had a clear view of the ranger’s station, and there were definitely some wolves lurking around the exterior there. We stopped and stared at them for a moment.

“Should we shoot them?” Hannah asked.

“Good rule of thumb: if you can, avoid trouble. We could probably take them, but when it comes to wolves, it gets risky. Even at this distance. They are fast. So no, not right now. We’ll reassess once we’re finished in there,” I replied.

“Okay.”

The front doors were slightly open and the wind whistled into the building as we approached. I had my pistol out by this point and as I put my hand on the door, Hannah pulled her own out. I stepped closer before opening it and put my ear to the crack in the doors, waiting and listening. I’d been tipped off to a lot just by doing this.

I had just about decided that there probably wasn’t anyone in there when I heard something shift inside. Hannah heard it too, tensing beside me.

“Careful,” I whispered. “Might just be someone hiding.”

She nodded tightly. I pushed the door open and was glad to find that it didn’t shriek with rusty hinges like half the doors I came across nowadays. Sunlight fell into a simple entryway. I waited to see if anything would happen. When nothing did, I took a step in and looked quickly around to see if anyone was hiding in the most immediate spots. No one behind the door. To my left was a single door that probably led to a bathroom, and to my right were a pair of booths. Confessional booths, I realized after a second.

Perfect places to hide.

Ahead was the rest of the church, with twin rows of pews leading up to a small stage supporting only a simple wooden pulpit.

“Is anyone in here?” I called as Hannah stepped up to the doorway behind me, her shadow shifting across the floor at my feet. “I’m not looking for problems.”

I waited and heard nothing. Great.

“Here,” I said, pointing at my immediate right, “stand guard.”

“On it,” she replied.

I checked out the door to the left, finding indeed a bathroom, and a sorry one at that. Just a sink and a toilet and nothing else. It was empty, with no sign that anyone had been there for awhile. From there, I moved onto the next and most obvious hiding place, the confessionals. I shifted carefully over to them, pulled back the curtain on the first one without standing directly in front of it, preparing myself for the worst.

Nothing inside.

Swallowing, trying to relieve the tension, I repeated the action with the second one.

It, too, was empty.

“What the hell?” I whispered.

There didn’t seem to be any obvious other place to hide. There was no door at the back wall, though maybe someone could be hiding among the pews-

I heard the sound again, more clearly this time, in the room with us. We both reacted to it, twitching to the left, where it had come from. I caught movement, too. Then I relaxed as I saw what it actually was.

A few of the windows along either side of the building had curtains hanging from them on simple metal poles. One of the poles along the left side had come loose, hanging at an awkward angle, and as the wind blew in through the door, it caught the curtain still hanging from it and tapped the pole against the windowsill.

“Fuck,” Hannah whispered as we pieced that together.

“Still need to finish checking,” I replied. “Never let your guard down until you’re sure, and even then, don’t let your guard down completely.”

“Makes sense,” she murmured.

“You take left, I’ll take right.”

She nodded and we split up. We carefully checked the pews, as someone could be crouching there, and found no one waiting for us. With that out of the way, we got to work actually searching the place properly.

“So, Chris, what’s bugging you?” Hannah asked as we worked.

“What?”

“You seem pensive.”

“I mean we just had a false alarm.”

“No, before that. In the forest, on the way here. You weren’t like that during the first time we went out and found the deer, but then after you got quiet and awkward.”

“Oh.”

“So something is bugging you?”

“Yeah.”

“What is it?”

I thought about that for a moment, then decided to just press onward. “All right, so, there’s something about me that you should probably know now instead of just blindly walk into later. It doesn’t really affect you, but you clearly have...ideas, strong ideas, about relationships. And given the fact that we’ll be going back to Pine Lake at some point in the near future, you’re obviously going to find out about it. So I was figuring out how to tell you.”

“Okay, now you’re freaking me out. What the fuck are you into back at Pine Lake?” she asked.

“Nothing bad,” I replied. “Just...I have...other girlfriends. Back there. Waiting for me.”

“Seriously? You have more girlfriends? Christ, does my mother know? Does Susan? Lara?”

“Yes, they all know,” I replied.

Now we were staring at each other from across the chilly church. I waited. She seemed like she was trying to figure out how to react to this knowledge.

“Whatever,” she said finally, turning away. “I guess it shouldn’t surprise me. Also,” she emphasized, turning back around suddenly and fixing me with her intense stare, “for the record, Chris, I’m not a fucking prude or close-minded asshole or anything. I do know about open relationships, and polyamory, and shit like that. And I don’t have anything against it.”

“If you say so,” I murmured, turning back to my work.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean!?” she demanded.

“Nothing,” I replied.

“No! Look at me! Don’t fucking shrug me off!” she snapped.

I sighed and turned to look at her. She glared at me for a few seconds, then seemed to realize that she was probably getting more pissed than was reasonable. Then again, maybe I was being an asshole, it was hard to tell with her.

“Sorry,” she murmured. “But I fucking hate that passive-aggressive bullshit. Just...tell me. You obviously think I’m lying. To you or to myself.”

“It’s just that-with how consistently poorly you’ve reacted to me and anything resembling a relationship related to me, it’s a little hard to believe that you’re open-minded about polyamory, Hannah,” I replied.

“Fine,” she said, crossing her arms. “I was weirded out by the fact that my mother was involved. It’s still weird, okay?”

“So if we’d met completely independently of Jessica, if I was never involved with her and you and I met blindly, you’d be totally cool with what Susan and Lara and I are doing?”

“I...yeah,” she mumbled, “I’d be fine.”

“Wow, that was genuinely a bad lie,” I said.

“I’m not lying!” she snapped. “I’m just-you know what, nevermind. Just forget it.”

“This is why I wanted to warn you now,” I said. “Just...please don’t treat them poorly. They’re good people and they don’t deserve to be treated like shit.”

“I won’t! I don’t treat Susan or Lara bad.” She paused. “Right?”

“I guess ‘bad’ isn’t the word I’d use,” I replied.

“What do you mean!?”

“I don’t know. You always seem short with them. Though at this point I think none of us can tell if it’s because of our relationship, because of what you’ve gone through and are going through, or if it’s just because that’s who you are and you’re just short with everyone.”

“Great, I’m a fucking bitch who everyone hates,” she snapped, turning back away from me.

“I didn’t say that!” I sighed heavily. “You aren’t making this easy, Hannah. Just...Susan and Lara like you just fine. I obviously do or I wouldn’t be bothering with this conversation. I guess my point is, just, you know, take it down a notch.”

She was silent for several long moments. “Fine,” she murmured. “I’m sorry for being difficult. I’m not going to be mean to your girlfriends back home. I just want...to be happy.”

“I know,” I replied. “I understand. I’ll do my best to accommodate you. Let’s finish searching this place.”

“Okay.”

That seemed to be as close to a ceasefire as we were going to get.

TWENTY-ONE

Although we only managed to find some loose matches and an old, dented can of green beans hidden away beneath one of the pews, I didn’t feel too bad as we headed out of the church. I thought my conversation with Hannah had gone probably as well as could be realistically expected, although I still wasn’t too sure of the actual root of her irritation with me and my relationships. I didn’t think it was the fact that one of the women I was regularly banging was her mom, although surely that was some of it.

I stepped around the corner of the church to take a peek at the ranger’s station and see if the situation had improved or even just remained static.

My good mood quickly began to seep away as I saw that it had, in fact, grown worse. There were now over half a dozen wolves prowling around the exterior of the building.

“Shit,” Hannah whispered as she stepped up beside me.

“Let’s come back tomorrow,” I murmured. They hadn’t noticed us and that was fine by me.

“You don’t think we could take them?”

“I’d rather not risk it if I don’t have to,” I replied.

“All right.” She sounded disappointed and I wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad thing. You had to be eager to tackle difficult problems if you wanted to not just survive but thrive, but you also had to know when something was a problem to tackle and something was a problem to be avoided. Life was about weighing things, usually your chances of success or failure against how desperate you currently were.

And currently we were not desperate.

So we left the church and started making our way back home.

This time as we passed the occupied house, however, something happened.

I was keeping an eye on it, so I noticed right away when the front door opened up. A man leaned carefully out from behind the door frame, exposing just his head.

“Uh, hello! Excuse me!” he called. He was either uncomfortable or in pain. Or both. I could tell that right away.

“Yeah?!” I called back, slowing to a halt. We were closer this time, just within comfortable shouting distance.

“I need some help!”

I checked the windows carefully but didn’t see anything. He could be hiding a rifle or a pistol. Or someone else could be in the woods with a rifle, lining us up for a shot.

“With what?!” I called back.

“My wife is sick and I need medicine!” he said.

The desperation in his voice sure sounded real enough, but some people could act.

“What do you think?” I asked Hannah.

“Is it a trap?” she replied.

“Hard to tell. It doesn’t feel like it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t. If they wanted to kill us, they probably would have by now. Then again, maybe they don’t have a rifle and need us to come closer. Or maybe they want to capture us for God knows what. But I don’t think so.”

“Why?”

“Instinct,” I replied with a shrug. “He just seems legit. I want to hear him out, if his wife really is that sick and needs medicine, we should help.”

“He does sound pretty desperate,” she muttered. “Okay, I’m in if you are.”

“All right, we’re coming closer!”

“...okay!” he called back with obvious hesitation. If he was legit, he’d be measuring whether or not we were going to fuck him over as well.

Of course, if he was smart he’d know that and try to use it to his advantage.

Again, always weighing.

“Nice and easy, don’t draw your gun unless you absolutely have to,” I said.

“Got it,” she replied.

We marched closer and I kept looking for signs of a trap. Movement in the windows, other people lurking in any nearby tree collections or even laying down among the snow. Little things gave people away, tiny movements or the glint of the sun off of something glass or metal. Their breath fogging on the air.

I didn’t see any of that, and the closer I got to this guy, the more I was convinced he was in some kind of pain.

So his wife was sick and something was wrong with him, too.

We got up to the edge of the front porch and stopped. He hadn’t moved, watching us the whole way up. Finally, he stepped about halfway into the doorway, exposing more of himself. He was about average height and weight, dark hair, tan skin, though it was paler than I’d expect. And not the kind of pale that came from lack of sun, more the kind of pale that came from blood loss or trauma.

“I’m Chris, this is Hannah. What exactly is the situation?” I asked.

“Alec,” he replied. “My wife, Kayla, has been sick the past few days. She needs antibiotics.”

“Oh, well we’ve got those. Not on us, but we can go get them,” I replied.

“Are they extra strength? I’ve been giving her the regular stuff and it isn’t helping,” he asked anxiously.

I thought about it, then shook my head. I was almost positive we had nothing but basic antibiotics. “No.”

“Shit…” He grimaced and glanced off to his left, almost reflexively, before quickly returning his attention to us. “There’s a ranger’s station not far from here, you might have seen it when you went to the church.”

“I saw it. I also saw a lot of wolves around it,” I replied.

He nodded. “Yes. I’ve been all over, trying to find them. I was positive there might be some in the ranger’s station, so that was where I went early this morning. Before I could really start looking, those wolves attacked me.” Now he stepped fully out into the doorway. I tensed, a small part of me expecting him to reveal a pistol or a shotgun, but he didn’t. My instincts were right: there was blood on his jeans and the telltale bulge around his thigh of a lot of bandaging. His hand on that side was bandaged as well, and still bloody.

“I’m sorry,” Hannah murmured.

“I’ll probably be fine. But I can’t go back there, and-” He paused as, deeper in the house, there came the sound of a racking cough. He tensed. “Please. I’ll give you whatever you want. I-I can’t lose her. Please,” he whispered, and there were tears in his eyes.

At this point, I was pretty sure this what it appear to be: a man with no options begging for his wife’s life.

And at this point, I was willing to take the risk. The risk that it might be a trap, and the risk that would come from the wolves even if it wasn’t.

“I’ll go to the ranger’s station and see if I can find any extra-strength antibiotics for you,” I replied.

“Thank you,” he replied, sounding as grateful as he was exhausted. “What do you want?”

“We’ll work that out later. I guess bullets if you’ve got any to spare, but I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I replied.

“Thank you,” he repeated.

I nodded and turned away as he closed the door. Hannah and I walked a little bit away from his house, back towards the church.

“Maybe you should go back to the house,” I murmured, staring at the church, considering the situation.

“What?! No fucking way! I’m not leaving you here to do this by yourself,” Hannah replied immediately.

I sighed, considering my options. If I went back now to update the others on my plan, not only would it be probably an extra hour of agony for that woman, but I was sure that at least one of the others would demand to go with me. Probably Susan. Or Jessica might demand that Hannah stay behind. And Hannah had a point: I probably couldn’t do this on my own. While I trusted Susan and she clearly had some skills, I thought this might be out of her depth. That thing with the mountain lion had been mostly luck.

No, I was going to have to do this here and now and hope for the best.

“Okay,” I said, “come on. We’ll tackle them together. But first, check over your rifle, make sure its loaded and ready.”

I did the same as she nodded and we took a moment, standing there in the snow, checking over our primary weapons. Then we did the same thing for our pistols. She still had her twenty-two, me my thirty-eight. A few minutes later, we were off, marching back the way we’d come. My pulse was picking back up and my guts started to churn. I had seen over half a dozen wolves prowling around that place and I fucking hated fighting wolves. It was going to be nice to have backup, but it could still go sideways in a hurry.

This might be a really stupid fucking decision, but unfortunately, that was another thing I’d learned living out here.

Sometimes you just made calls and hoped for the best.

And ever since I’d truly dedicated myself to helping people, this was a call I was going to be making more often than not.

I was already putting together a plan, admittedly a rough one, as we got up to the church.

“All right,” I murmured as I crept towards the corner, where I’d be able to get a look at the ranger’s station again, “I think we can take most of them from this distance if we’re fast and good. I want you to be ready-” I stopped as I looked around the corner.

“What? What’s wrong?” Hannah asked.

“They’re gone,” I muttered, looking around more carefully. There was a lot of open space ahead, behind, and to the right of the ranger’s station, on our side. But to the left, trees. More forest. Good place to hide.

“Great,” she said, joining me.

I raised my rifle and looked through my scope, hunting among the trees for signs of life, but I didn’t see anything.

“Shit,” I muttered.

“Now what?” Hannah asked.

I thought about it for a bit as I kept hunting. Ultimately, I still saw nothing. I lowered my rifle, frowning, staring hard at the forest and the station.

“Stay here,” I said finally. “I’m going to go on ahead.”

“Chris-” she began to argue, but I cut her off.

“I want you to cover me,” I said. “If they show up while I’m heading there, I can run back towards you and you can start taking them out, maybe scare them off. If I get there and they don’t show up, I’ll wave and you come over and I’ll cover you. Then we search the place. Maybe, if we’re very lucky, we can get in and out before they come back.”

She was silent for a long moment, staring at me, probably looking for holes in my plan. Finally, she just sighed and nodded. “Okay, I’ll cover you.”

I took a few deep breaths, let them out slowly. Felt the cold air burn my lungs more deeply, more intensely. Things seemed to sharpen just a little as I focused on the structure ahead of me. It was about four hundred feet away. A bit of a walk. From here I could make out some details. It was a two-story building, several of the large windows were broken out, and the front door was either missing or pushed open so far I couldn’t see it. I still saw nothing moving among the trees, or anywhere else for that matter.

Finally, I started walking at a brisk pace, switching to my pistol.

I was about as ready as I was going to be to do this. That was something I think a lot of people didn’t realize about shitty things that you didn’t want to do: you probably weren’t ever going to be full-on ready to do it. Or, at least, you weren’t going to feel full on ready to do it. You just had to put yourself in the best mindset you could and then just fucking do it. While I certainly liked enough aspects of my life now, most of them I just tolerated or endured. This was definitely highest on the list of ‘shit I didn’t feel like doing’.

But it was now irrevocably tied to the life that I had chosen to live, a life of helping other people in need.

And that guy and his wife seemed pretty in need.

I cleared my head as I kept on walking, focusing on nothing but the little slice of land that currently surrounded me.

Hearing it, seeing it, feeling it.

Adrenaline pumped through my veins as I marched on, snow crunching under my boots, wind tugging at my clothes.

I managed to hit the parking lot of the ranger’s station (distinguishable only by an almost imperceptible change in the quality of the snow beneath my boots) without seeing anything. I got up to the front door and peered inside, didn’t see anything in there either. I carefully scoped the situation out and finally waved Hannah over.

She slung her rifle and began jogging over.

I kept watch while she came towards me. It was also possible that they might try to hit us from that direction. That was the thing about wolves, in my experience they were smarter than people gave them credit for or even really realized. Not like operating tools smart, but they definitely could lay traps or use basic tactics. I genuinely didn’t know if that was something that had always been there, or something that was developing thanks to this snowy apocalypse. The new ice age had crept into every aspect of the world, it seemed.

Changed everything on some subtle level.

Again, nothing happened in the span of time it took for Hannah to make it over to me. She joined me, breathing a little heavily, and I was suddenly hit by the thought of her breathing heavily just like that while I fucked her hard and fast.

She was in excellent shape and I bet she’d be great in bed-

I shook my head slightly and turned back to the building.

“You okay?” Hannah asked.

“Fine,” I replied. “Let’s get inside.”

We were working against a countdown that I couldn’t see. I was already frustrated that we almost certainly weren’t going to be able to give this place the thorough search it deserved. I headed inside and found that the door was in fact missing. Not just absent from its proper place, but nowhere to be seen. Great. There was a big hole in the building that anything could come in through and we had no practical way to patch it up in an emergency.

The area we’d come into was a big, chaotic mess. There was snow scattered across the floor from the vacant door and broken windows, and the typical kind of refuse you tended to see from places that had been ransacked before: splintered wooden remains, trash, ash, broken glass. Blood, too. Some of it was older, some of it was more recent.

Alec was lucky to have survived that mess.

We would be too.

“Now what?” Hannah asked. “Should one of us stand watch?”

I shook my head. “No, I’d rather double up on our searching power and get a move on. Start down here, shout if you see anything. I’m going upstairs.”

“Got it,” she replied.

I looked around as I headed for the set of stairs at the back. There was a counter dividing the room in half ahead of me. Maybe this had been more than a ranger’s station, although I guess I wasn’t entirely sure what ranger’s stations were for beyond being the place where park rangers gathered and did their duties. There were a few metal chairs and a metal table left, two doors along the back wall, and a small kitchenette area in the far right corner, at the bottom of the stairs I was making my way towards. I got to them and started heading up.

The wooden stairs creaked loudly as I made my way up. I didn’t think there was anyone up there, but I could definitely be wrong.

I got up to the top of the stairs without anyone suddenly appearing at the top and blowing me away. It let onto a little landing with just a single open doorway. Stepping through, I found myself in a hallway with a few doors. I started checking them out, opening them quickly and sticking my head in to see if we were in danger or if any of these rooms might be a likely candidate for holding these antibiotics that Alec was needing.

First room was empty. Second room looked like it might once have been an office. Third room had clearly been a storage closet.

Fourth room…

It was locked. And not just locked, but the door looked pretty sturdy too. I saw signs that people had tried to bust in at least once, apparently without any success.

Well, maybe I’d get lucky.

If there were going to be antibiotics, they’d probably be in here.

I stepped back and then gave the door a hard kick. It rattled in its frame, but otherwise didn’t budge an inch.

“Shit,” I muttered, and then I tried again.

I tried once more and then lost my balance and fell on my ass.

“Motherfucker!” I snapped.

“Chris?! Are you okay?!” Hannah called from downstairs.

“Fine!” I replied, getting back to my feet. “I found a locked door, look for a key!”

“Okay!”

I began my own hunt up here for a key. It was unlikely that it’d be anywhere around, because if it was, then someone should’ve found it by now and used it to unlock that door. But that was how taking chances worked: if you took the chance, you might win, you might lose, if you didn’t, you’d definitely lose. So I searched. I hunted through the other three rooms up here, pulling out my lighter and checking all the little spaces and potential places a key might’ve fallen into. Or been hidden in. Five cold minutes dragged by. Then then.

Then fifteen. Still nothing.

Down below, I heard Hannah doing her own search. Every now and then I’d hear her let out a sharp curse and had to keep from laughing. Honestly, I did feel for her. I remembered what it was like, how it felt to be pissed off all the time. Get irritated and annoyed over every little thing that went wrong. And the knowledge that you were overreacting, that it was fucking stupid to get pissed over such small things, didn’t help.

That just made it worse. Just made you angrier.

And then you’d get angrier for being angrier.

Although I had to wonder, was it honestly pure chance that I kept running into angry women? Then again, at this point, I’d run into more submissive women than I had angry women. As I did about most things, I concluded that it didn’t really mean anything, because the world was just random chaos following some rules and statistical trajectories.

I’d pissed away twenty damn minutes searching through the three rooms upstairs and hadn’t yet found what I was looking for.

I was in the empty room, just about done, when I saw something.

Something looked a little off on the windowsill of the only window in the room. I walked over to it and looked more closely at the sill.

“Holy shit,” I muttered as I leaned in and caught sight of what it was.

There was a dull bronze key stuck in a crack where the left side of the sill met the bottom. I teased it out with a bit of effort, then quickly began making my way back to the locked door. It was moments like this that I kind of lived for nowadays. Maybe that was stupid but hey, you took excitement and enthusiasm where you could find it. I wanted to see what was behind that damned door. Could be nothing, could be something.

Could be anything, really.

Getting back to the door, I slid it into the keyhole and turned.

The door unlocked.

TWENTY-TWO

“Hey, Hannah! I got it!” I called.

“Coming!” she called back, and I heard her hurry up the steps.

I waited until she had actually joined me before I twisted the knob the rest of the way and pushed the door open.

“Whoa, this place looks pretty untouched,” she muttered.

And she was right. This was obviously a storeroom of some kind, one that had held some of their more important equipment. Although it quickly became clear that someone had ransacked it at some point given the fact that a gun locker at the back of the room was open and empty, there was still some stuff in it.

I saw a metal box with a plus symbol on it mounted on the wall to my left, in between two of the big shelves built onto the wall. As I stepped in and looked around, I glanced behind the door we’d opened.

“Shit,” I muttered as my eyes fell on a long-frozen corpse.

“What-fuck!” Hannah snapped, jumping back as she saw it as well. “Goddamnit!”

“It’s okay, he’s dead,” I muttered as I studied the corpse.

She growled. “I know. I just-fuck. Scared the shit out of me.”

I couldn’t tell for sure, but I wondered if the guy might have worked here. He was huddled up, arms clutched over his stomach, wearing a coat, some jeans, and some hiking boots. He’d obviously been here for a long, long time. Probably a couple of years. There was frozen blood on his arms. He’d been shot or maybe stabbed in his stomach, gotten himself in here, and bled out. Maybe people had been coming after him.

Jesus, what a lonely, fucking miserable way to die.

Turning away from him, I saw a toolbox on the shelf and stepped up to it. The medical box was locked up with a padlock and the key I had was obviously too big for it.

“What are you doing?” Hannah asked, still staring uncomfortably at the corpse.

“Getting into this box,” I muttered, hunting for bolt cutters. Didn’t find any, but I did manage to find a hammer. “Okay, I’m bashing this thing open.”

“All right.”

I took a few swings at it, managed to break the little padlock off on the third try. It landed on the floor with a light metallic sound. Eager and hopeful, I pulled open the medicine box. Sure enough, inside was a little trove of medical treasure. I shrugged out of my backpack, set it on one of the nearby shelves, opened it up, and started storing what I found inside.

“See if you can find anything else useful,” I said. “Check that locker. Might be some leftover bullets or something.”

Hannah got to it.

Most of what I found was stuff we already had, but could always use more of. Bandages. Antiseptic spray. Burn cream. A pair of thermometers. Painkillers. Snake bite kit. (Well, probably wouldn’t need that.)

And a bottle of extra-strength antibiotics.

I made sure to secure that firmly within the pack, finished tossing the stuff inside, and turned to Hannah. “Anything?” I asked.

“No,” she replied.

“Okay, let’s go.”

“Wait, shouldn’t we keep looking?”

“No,” I replied, stepping back out into the hallway and motioning for her to follow. “We’ve got what we came for, we should stop pressing our luck and get the hell out of here. We can come back later.”

“All right,” she muttered reluctantly as she joined me.

Once she was clear of the door, I shut and locked it, then pocketed the key. “It’ll be here for us when we get back.”

We headed back downstairs and I found myself feeling good. Really fucking good. What we were doing here could be the difference between someone living and someone dying. If the situation really was as it appeared, then I couldn’t even fucking imagine what it would be like to lose your wife. I’d have to come check on them after a day or two to see how they were both doing, because he was at risk for an infection as well.

This is what I was thinking as we walked up to the front door.

And as we stepped outside, back into the cold and brilliant winter sunshine, all of my good mood disappeared in a snap.

Like a soap bubble popping out of existence.

“Chris…” Hannah whispered, and it was the first time I’d heard real terror in her voice.

“Back inside,” I murmured, hand dropping to my pistol.

The wolves were back, and they had apparently brought friends. All in all, with a sweep of my gaze, I took in nine of the bastards. Some of them were thin and a little sickly looking, but some were big and powerful and dangerous.

They were to the right, and had clearly come out of those woods. The three nearest lowered their heads and began growling deep in their throats. The rest of them began splitting up and advancing on us. Shit. Shit.

This wasn’t going to end with anything but a fight, I could tell that right away.

The biggest of them was one of the closest, and I found myself hoping that if I managed to kill him, it would cause the others to scatter. I had one chance to launch an attack of my own before they launched theirs.

Once Hannah was behind me, with over half a dozen wolves advancing on me now, most of them growling menacingly, I drew my pistol and snapped off two shots. And it was a good thing, too. I missed the first shot, but the second was goddamned dead on. It punched into the top of the largest wolf’s skull and burst its head, spraying blood and brains all over the snow. It dropped like a rock. The other wolves jumped in surprise, but none of them fled. Not one. Shit. Okay, this might actually be a pretty bad situation.

“Get ready!” I snapped, and fired again.

Another good shot, the thirty-eight caliber round eviscerating a second wolf’s head and killing it instantly as the others began sprinting dead towards me. I cursed and fired once more, missed. Jesus, there was over half my goddamned bullets!

Just three left now. And seven wolves.

I fell back as fast as I could, hastily holstering my pistol and snatching my rifle and bringing it into play.

I just barely managed to get it up and aim as two of the wolves appeared in the open doorway, dashing through. I could use my pistol up close way more effectively than my rifle, and ‘up close’ was soon going to be non-optional, so I wanted to use the rifle while I still could. I fired and heard Hannah open fire at the same time.

My hands remained steady and the shot was a good one. I put a round into one of them that took the top of its skull off. I saw Hannah’s rounds hit the second one as I readjusted and fired a second time as yet another one came into my field of view.

Maybe we could actually deal with this. This was the hope that burst into my mind as I put down a second wolf and caught sight of the second of the initial pair go down under Hannah’s twenty-two fire. Five. That was five of them dead now, leaving four still alive. Provided none others had joined in the fray, hiding out of sight-

As I was lining up for my next shot, I heard a growl and movement to my immediate left. I snapped the rifle over towards the sound and fired reflexively as I saw a wolf leaping in through a broken window, deftly avoiding the shards of glass still in the edges of the window and coming right for me with teeth bared and wide eyes.

I missed and it crashed right into me. I heard Hannah scream my name and more snarling as my rifle flew from my hands and then I was completely occupied with this big fucking wolf trying to kill the shit out of me. I managed to get my hands wrapped around its throat and that just barely kept it from ripping my own throat out. It snarled and snapped its jaws together right in front of my face, missing me by a scant inch.

Its breath was awful and I could smell blood and rot on it as its saliva flew everywhere. With a burst of effort I threw the thing off of me. Kicking it hard, I tore my pistol free of the holster while it was recovering and fired two shots into it. Both took it in the chest and blew holes in its ribcage, splattering the wall behind it with blood. It didn’t die right away, but it was down for the count. Right as I began to gather my thoughts another wolf leaped in through the window, over its fallen comrade, and I fired off my last shot.

Managed to get a headshot, but now I was out of fucking bullets.

“Chris!” Hannah shrieked.

I dropped my gun as I staggered to my feet, my hand already going for the hunting knife on my belt. Three. There were three left, given that I’d just killed two of them. I looked at Hannah, taking everything in at a glance. She had managed to kill one more of them, and the remaining two (as far as I knew), were coming at her as she hit the counter and then began to climb up onto it. The second she turned her back the nearest one leaped at her.

“Hannah move!” I screamed as I leaped into action, barreling across the space between us and straight up fucking tackling the wolf as it tried to take a bite out of the back of her neck. She shrieked as I accidentally knocked her away while I smashed into the wolf. I wrestled it to the floor, felt it thrashing and flailing, but it was one of the smaller, weaker ones. I still had my fist wrapped around my knife, so I brought it up as I got off of the wolf, then drove the tip of it into the thing’s head. It pierced its brain and killed it fast, the furred beast going limp as the life left its body. I heard Hannah scream again and once more forced myself to my feet.

The final wolf was crawling up onto the counter. Hannah was on the other side now, backing away. I made for the wolf and it turned on me in a flash, leaping at me and then crashing into me. I screamed, driving the blade into its chest as we went to the floor. The wolf howled and thrashed. I began screaming as I braced its throat with my left forearm and started stabbing it over and over, trying to keep it from taking an eye or tearing my throat out or ripping into my skin as it tried biting me. It howled and snarled but I could feel it weakening.

When it was weak enough I threw it off and finished it with a quick stab to the head.

Shaking badly with adrenaline and terror and rage, feeling some liquid running down my face, what I took for sweat or maybe wolf saliva, I got back to my feet once more. I almost fell over, I was so fucking amped up. I looked around for more wolves, but it looked like we’d run out. I turned towards Hannah, who was staring at me with wide eyes from behind the counter.

“You okay?” I managed, grimacing as I tasted something foul. I spat. Tasted like blood. Maybe I’d bitten my cheek or got some in my mouth.

“Chris, there’s blood all over your face,” she whispered.

“What?” I reached up and ran a hand across my face. It came back bloody and for a second I felt a jolt of terror that I was hurt badly and just didn’t realize it. For a few seconds I just stared at it, then finally it came to me what had most likely happened.

That wolf must’ve coughed up a lot of blood as I was stabbing the hell out of it.

“I’m fine,” I managed, reaching into my pocket and pulling out a cloth. I ran it over my face several times, getting the blood and sweat and saliva off. “Are you okay, Hannah?”

“I...yeah,” she managed. “I’m okay.”

I finished wiping my face off and looked down at myself. Fuck. I’d gotten blood all down the front of my coat, my pants. Great.

Honestly though, I was glad to just be alive.

I took a moment to assess Hannah, to make sure she was really okay, and besides looking a bit shell-shocked, she seemed fine. That was a natural reaction. I sat down heavily on the counter dividing the room and then, after a moment, laid down on my back, groaning as I did. I needed a minute to get my wind back.

That was a lot.

A hell of a lot.

Hannah came closer to me.

“Chris, I’m sorry,” she said. I looked over at her. “I’m really sorry.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I-I panicked,” she replied. “God, I just panicked. I fired off every bullet. I managed to kill a few of them but I definitely lost it and I just...fuck.”

“Hannah,” I said, sitting back up and hanging my feet over on her side of the room, “that’s not exactly an unreasonable response. There were nine of the fucking things.”

“You didn’t panic,” she muttered.

“I did a little. And I’ve had a shitload of practice with stuff like this. It takes time.”

She took a shaky breath and then looked at her hands. “Fuck, I can’t stop shaking.”

“It’ll be okay,” I said. “Hannah, look at me.” She looked back up at me. “We’re both okay. We made it through. Okay?”

“Yeah,” she replied quietly. “We made it.”

“You want a hug?” I asked.

She stared at me for a minute, then just nodded. I got up to my feet and slowly wrapped her in my arms. She hugged me back, tentatively at first, then more solidly, squeezing me. I hugged her back, holding her. We stood there for a long moment before she let go of me. When she stepped away, she looked annoyed.

“What now?” I asked.

“I was just thinking...both my mom and Lara have said specifically that they really love hugging you because they feel so safe in your arms. I thought it was stupid bullshit but...ugh.”

“You feel safe in my arms, huh?” I asked.

“Don’t fucking push it,” she replied. “Plus, you got blood on me.”

I laughed. “Feeling better?”

She sighed. “Yeah. I’m feeling better.” She looked out over the interior of the building beyond the counter, where several wolf corpses lay. And a lot of blood. “God, that was nuts!”

“Sometimes it is,” I replied. “Let’s get our breath back and then we’ll grab two of these wolves and go to see Alec.”

“Why the wolves?” she asked.

“His wife is sick and he’s badly injured. If they don’t have any food stockpiled, then they’re kind of fucked. They need to keep their strength up. Even if they do have food, it’ll be a decent offer of peace. And there’s seven other wolves for us.”

“Oh...all right,” she said.

We both ended up sitting down with our backs to the counter, staring at the dead wolves and the open front door, just waiting.

~

“Holy shit, what happened?” Alec asked as he opened the door and saw us standing there. Me covered in blood, both of us carrying wolves. I’d grabbed the largest one, the one I’d killed first, and Hannah had grabbed one of the lighter ones.

“Lots of wolves,” I replied. “They’re dead now.”

“I-wow. I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I wasn’t sure if they’d still be there…”

“It’s okay,” I replied, setting the big wolf down on his porch as Hannah set her own burden down as well. I shrugged out of my pack, opened it up, and started digging around inside. “I got what you wanted. Found some extra-strength antibiotics.”

“Oh my God, thank you so much,” Alec replied immediately.

“We also brought these wolves for you.”

“Why?” he asked, suddenly hesitant. I didn’t blame him. People were always looking to fuck you over, take advantage, or just shake you down.

“Olive branch,” I replied. “And I’m not an asshole. I don’t know your food situation, but you’re wounded and your wife is sick. You aren’t going to be hunting or searching for food anytime soon. And there were nine of the things. We killed them all, so it’s not like we’re going to be hurting for food.” I finally found the antibiotics and offered them.

“I...all right. Sorry. I’ve run into a lot of assholes out here,” he said, taking the bottle. “Thank you so much for this. Um, come in, we can talk about payment.”

“Okay,” I replied, pulling my pack back on. We followed him inside, taking a seat on the couch as he shut the door behind us and then hobbled off hurriedly to help his wife.

“What if he doesn’t have anything we want?” Hannah asked.

“Then we leave,” I replied.

“That easily?”

“Yes. Since you’re still learning from me, here’s another lesson: the phrase ‘sometimes a good deed is its own reward’ isn’t bullshit.”

She sighed. “I’m not some greedy bitch looking to squeeze everyone for their last can of food, I’m just-”

“I know,” I said. “And those are good instincts. You do have to stick up for yourself, know when to push, know when to demand, because a lot of people will walk all over you if you let them. But you also should know when to give, when to let go.”

“All right, fair enough...sorry, I’m still kind of freaked out.”

“I know. It’s fine,” I replied.

After several minutes, Alec returned. He was holding something dark and metallic in one of his hands. He walked over and set it on the coffee table in front of us. “Thank you again so much. I’m praying that these will work. Um...you said earlier you wanted bullets. I’ve been holding onto these nine millimeters for months now. We don’t have any guns that take it and it’s a full twenty-round magazine. Will that work?” he asked.

“That’s actually perfect,” I replied, thinking of the twenty-shot nine that I had back at home. I’d given it to Susan but now I was going to have to take it for myself, and having even a single spare magazine would be just excellent.

Now Hannah knew precisely how fast a fully loaded pistol could empty out.

“I don’t really know how to thank you. You risked your lives for us…”

“It’s really okay,” I replied, pocketing the magazine and standing up. “We live a little ways to the south but we aren’t going to be here for much longer, as we’re moving on. If you want, I could come back up tomorrow. Honestly, I’d like to know if the two of you are going to be okay, but also maybe we could trade some things?”

“I would be very open to that,” he replied.

“Okay then. I’ll be back up with a friend or two tomorrow. Good luck.”

“Thank you again.”

We shook hands and then Hannah and I left, feeling pretty good.

EPILOGUE

“You sure you’re down for this?” I asked.

“Chris, you really earned this,” Jessica replied as she massaged my cock with lube.

“Well okay then,” I replied, putting my hands behind my head and laying back.

It had been a long, long fucking day. After leaving Alec’s place, we’d gone back and grabbed another pair of wolves, then hauled them all the way back home to the lodge. There, we updated the others on what had happened, then Jessica ended up coming out with us, since she was the strongest between her, Lara, and Susan, and we made another two trips to and from the ranger’s station, bringing back the wolf corpses.

After lunch and a short break, Hannah and I had spent several long hours skinning and gutting. She’d gotten a hell of a lot of practice in today.

After that, I’d washed up, eaten dinner, then wound the house down for the night and gone right upstairs to my fucking giant bed.

Because I was done for the day.

Jessica, Lara, and Susan had followed not much later and Jessica had offered to ride my cock with her thick mature ass.

She was, it seemed, quite the fan of what she called my ‘heroics’.

I was surprised. Honestly, I thought she’d be pissed that I’d nearly gotten her daughter killed, but apparently what she took from the situation was that I’d saved her life.

“There,” Jessica said, finishing up.

I watched, my lust overriding my lethargy and my soreness, as she mounted me reverse-cowgirl. I had a particular love of that position, although I realized that I probably had a particular love of every fucking position a woman fucked me in.

Reverse-cowgirl was really fucking hot though, and it felt pretty great.

“Help me out, Lara,” Jessica said as she settled into place, showing me that big, well-maintained, pale ass of hers.

“Gladly,” Lara replied.

She and Susan were sitting on either side of me, watching this whole display intently. Jessica had gone to sleep an hour ago in her room and I hoped she was out enough not to get woken up by the sex that was about to happen.

Lara grabbed my cock and helped guide it into Jessica’s ass.

“Oh wow,” she gasped, “that’s...oh you’re so big.”

“It’s a lot to take in,” Susan murmured.

“I have no idea how you took it in the ass so hard from him, God I...uhn!” she moaned as she worked my cock deeper.

“Don’t hurt yourself,” I said.

“I’m not. I kinda like it, just...I’ll get there,” she replied.

“I’m a freak,” Susan murmured, “I don’t know why it works so well for me. I like it a lot.”

“I like watching you like it,” Lara said with a sultry grin. Susan just blushed and smiled.

“Fuck, this is good,” I groaned as Jessica kept going.

There was something better than a fit, redheaded MILF working your cock up her ass raw, but I was having a really hard time thinking of what it was. Watching my cock disappear into her ass while the pleasure started rolling over me in waves was a study in paradise. I just laid back and let her fuck me, going and going until she’d worked it all the way up there, taking all my inches into her. She moaned loudly as she began getting into a good rhythm.

“Oh yeah, that’s-whew, that’s good. Okay, I’m starting to remember why I used to masturbate up my ass,” she murmured as she fucked me.

“That’s pretty hot,” I said.

“Yes,” Lara agreed. She reached out and ran her hand across Jessica’s bare ass.

“You really need to do this for me, too,” I said to Lara. “Not that I don’t appreciate this, Jessica, because I really do. You are such a fucking MILF.”

“Thank you,” she replied quietly, clearly focusing on the sex.

I let her work, the pleasure building in me, becoming a hot, rapturous ecstasy, pushing me towards a climax. I held on for several long minutes of pleasure as Jessica fucked herself up the ass with my cock, relishing how goddamned tight and hot she was, how good she felt. How good she looked from this angle, moving against me, pushing her ass into my lap again and again. How good her voice sounded as she moaned in deep pleasure…

“Ah, Jessica!” I cried, grabbing her hips and pulling her ass against me as I started coming. She cried out as I began pumping her sweet mature ass full of my seed, draining my nuts into her as blinding bliss overwhelmed me.

I released her when I was finished, falling slack against the bed panting, dazed and out of it from the intense orgasm.

Jessica began to clean herself up and after a moment I joined her.

“Can I sleep in here tonight?” she asked.

“You are always welcome to sleep in here,” Lara replied.

“Yeah, just don’t always take him from us,” Susan murmured.

“I’ll fuck you in the morning, I promise. I’m just...too tired tonight,” I replied with a yawn.

“I know, I know,” Susan replied.

“I’ll take care of you,” Lara said, running a finger up Susan’s bare leg.

“Wait, before I pass out, there is one thing I want to be sure on,” I said. I’d already discussed this earlier with Hannah and she was good with it. “I intend to start heading back to Pine Lake at some point within the next week, as the timeline I agreed to is just about up. All three of you are completely onboard with this?” I asked.

“I’d follow you anywhere,” Jessica replied as she finished cleaning up and sat down next to me, putting a hand on my leg.

“I’m totally onboard with this,” Lara said.

“Same,” Susan agreed. “It sounds like a nice place.”

“It’s seen better days, but yeah, it is. Okay then.” I yawned again and gave each of them a kiss, then climbed under the blankets.

As Lara and Susan began to kiss, I found myself deeply relieved.

At some point, I feel like I’d solved my problem. The one that had driven me out here, away from Pine Lake, away from Megan, Delilah, and Elizabeth.

I don’t know if I’d ever be totally free of this wanderlust and desire for adventure, but I did know that I wanted them, and the women here with me now, than I wanted it.

A WARM PLACE 6 WILL BE OUT IN JUNE!

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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