What Do You Think Happened?
Chapter 13

Copyright© 2006 by Tony Stevens

Erotica Sex Story: Chapter 13 - This story is a little bit offbeat for me. It's intended as an homage to a couple of excellent stories with similar themes published earlier by a couple of the best writers on SOL. Readers will recognize the genre as the story develops, but I don't intend to give it away at the outset. Warning to strokers: This story has some sexual content, but it is limited and slow to develop.

Caution: This Erotica Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa   Consensual   Heterosexual   Slow  

It took us the better part of 48 hours to reach the coastal area northwest of Ft. Myers and to locate, via GPS information radioed from the Scott's boat, our waiting party of refugees. They had encountered no further trouble from their attackers from the city. Ingmar brought our much larger ship alongside the crowded boat Scott had taken from Captiva Island, and we all joined in to hoist the newcomers aboard.

We now were overcrowded aboard our ship, the Apalachicola, but there was plenty of food and water for all, and we could make do until we found an alternative. In accordance with planning we had done on the way south, Ingmar kept going, well away from the coastline and on around the southern tip of Florida. Destination: Ft. Lauderdale.

According to Martin (who knew not much, but more than the rest of us, about Florida), there was an enormous private marina there. He predicted we would be able to find a larger vessel -- one suitable for our now considerably larger party.

Passing Miami, we saw several giant ocean liners -- cruise ships -- in the larger city's harbor. I gestured to Ingmar, pointing one of them out to him, but he just laughed. "That's too much ship for me!" he said. There were plenty of other ships -- much smaller than the liners, but larger than the Apalachicola. But we continued north, perhaps unnecessarily, to Lauderdale.

We were now twenty in number: Eleven men and boys, ranging from 78 years old to 12-year-old Edward and his little brother, a child of four. We had nine women and girls. The eldest, Bridgett in her mid-forties, down to Geneva, 14, and the three little girls, all five years old and under.

We had become a community.

We doubled up and made do, all the way to Lauderdale. There, waiting in pristine perfection for us at Bahia Mar Marina, were yachts to make our mouths water. Even Ingmar and Roald were a bit in awe of these massive ships. "I've never been aboard a private boat that big, much less captained one," Ingmar declared.

"Do what I do," I told him, grinning. "Read the manual."

We had discussed the matter, ad nauseam, all the way from Captiva to Lauderdale. It was near-unanimous among the voting members of our group that, at least for the near term, staying aboard a ship was the best way to assure our collective safety and comfort.

We found an extremely handsome ship with accommodations adequate for, perhaps, thirty people. If our group got much larger than that, Ingmar said, he would consider Roald and himself to be unable competently to handle the piloting of a larger vessel. We'd have to either split up the group into two ships, or find a new way of staying together, on land.

"What about the radio broadcasts?" I asked Ingmar. We had left off broadcasting, since departing from Mobile Bay. Now we wondered whether we might attract another band of attackers -- or maybe even the same ones, from Ft. Myers -- if we started in broadcasting again.

"Let's get out of here," Ingmar said. "I'm nervous, anyway, trying to go up the coast, in the open Atlantic. Let's head back to the Gulf Coast. Maybe to Texas. But, no radio broadcasts, for awhile. We have twenty people. It's time to consolidate our little community. We ought to try to organize ourselves, a little."

We refueled and sailed back around Florida, deliberately always staying out of sight of the Florida coastline. Back in the Gulf, Ingmar consulted his charts and set a course for Corpus Christi, Texas. Winter, eventually, would come. We wanted a warm-weather port, a well-protected harbor, and a city big enough to shop in -- for groceries.

Groceries worried me. For now -- for the next two or three years, even -- food was not a problem. There was an abundance of canned goods and other still-edible foodstuffs in every city and town. Some fresh foods -- corn, for example, and potatoes, and some fruits -- also remained available and edible, although, often, standing crops had been subjected to heavy insect attack.

But all the supermarket foods, plentiful as they now were, would become unsafe to eat at some point in the not-so-distant future. A day would come when we would have to find a way to grow our own food. There were twenty of us, but our sixteen more-or-less adult members had, to date at least, demonstrated the possession of very few survival skills. Our Canadian fishermen were the big exception. Ingmar and Roald had given us the ability to get around by sea, and to stay together in a defensible environment.

How long could that go on? We needed more people, and we needed people with more skills. If we wanted to live ashore and find a way to produce significant amounts of electric power, we'd need some pretty sophisticated engineering help. It would also be nice to have carpenters, plumbers, electricians, pilots, farmers. To date, outside of our fishermen/sailors, we had people with mostly obsolete (or at least, temporarily irrelevant) skill sets. And we had no doctor. We didn't even have an individual with extensive nursing skills.

Living aboard ship, we all more-or-less conceded, was only a temporary expedient. We brainstormed it, both in small groups and in lengthy, pretty-much chaotic bull sessions involving, at one time or another, most of the adults in the group. Most of the answers we gave each other, in response to our long list of questions, were of the "I'm not really certain" variety.

We weren't entirely without useful skills. It was, perhaps, an oblique tribute to America's (and Canada's?) gun culture that almost all of the adult males and two of the women had at least some limited experience with, and reasonable proficiency in handling, small firearms. We had only two pistols, but there were many rifles, including some automatic weapons, and an enormous stockpile of ammunition.

While we were at sea, Raymond Pryor, an active-duty army vet, instructed the group on the handling and firing of small arms. Unfortunately, decent targets were rare, so determining just how well our trainees were learning to fire their weapons was somewhat problematical.

At least, some of their initial tendency to treat the rifles like live snakes was being conditioned away. Under Pryor's tutelage, we all learned how to assemble and disassemble the weapons, to clean them, and to lock and load. Whether we could hit anything we aimed at would have to wait to be determined at another time.

The Louisiana contingent, Raymond and Elbert, also had some rudimentary carpentry skills that one day might become highly useful. But there were no farmers among us. No engineers. No motor mechanics. Not even so much as a skilled general handyman. We still needed a bigger, and more versatile, community. We all agreed about these basics. We sometimes disagreed about how to solve our problems. We couldn't just put a "help wanted" ad in the paper.


After arriving in Corpus Christi Bay, we did a thorough search of the city and all the urban areas surrounding the Bay, looking for survivors who had, perhaps, already set up housekeeping. We found nobody: Only the usual assortment of scattered dead. We discussed the possibility of moving into a large apartment building -- one where, conceivably, we might be able to establish a modest power grid dedicated to the needs of our building alone. But occupied multifamily dwellings were all full of corpses, and removing the dead -- hundreds of dead -- was not the only action necessary to render a building livable again.

We discussed finding newly constructed buildings that hadn't yet been occupied at the time The Virus had struck. It was a possibility. And office buildings -- some of them quite large and accommodating -- were frequently empty or near-empty and could have served as adequate and expandable shelters.

In the final analysis, we stayed with the ship. For one thing, it seemed more easily defensible. We'd taken up a position in the Bay comparable to our old moat-like defensive position in Mobile Bay. Mobile had only been -- what? Ten or twelve days ago? It seemed like another lifetime already.

Our tentative decision, arrived at in a reasonably calm and organized meeting of all the adults (plus Geneva, who, despite her youth, had been welcomed into the ranks of the voting members), was that, barring trouble, we would stay in Corpus Christi Bay for the entire winter, and we would resume the radio broadcasts, soliciting newcomers to join our group.

Our ship was, Ingmar had insisted, the biggest seagoing vessel he would dare try to navigate as captain. We had room, with some crowding, for another dozen passengers. Our foraging had continued. One of the principal duties we all had was to assure that the ship was always fully fueled and provisioned, ready for departure on very short notice. We also located and appropriated new RVs, with generators attached, equipped them for travel, and stored them away, duplicating our abandoned Mobile land resources.

 
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