Chapter 1

“No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

Life can sometimes be profoundly unfair. Case in point, I was just mere moments from plunging balls-deep inside of the very lovely Becky from IT, who had long auburn hair all the way down to her luscious heart-shaped ass. I had been lusting over her for months ... and now thought I’d now wrangled her at long last, right when my cell-phone began to vibrate. I ignored it, naturally, as my mouth was otherwise quite busily occupied eating out smooth shaved crotch until she was just on the verge of coming. She was getting her reward ... and damned if I wasn’t going to finish the job as fast as possible so I could then get mine. But sadly, it just wasn’t going to happen.

Becky grunted out a quick, rather distracted, grunting moan of frustration right then as her own cell ringer chimed off, entirely ruining the mood for everyone. She didn’t get her release, and already the glare of annoyance she gave me while answering her call spoke volumes that she was putting the blame on me, rather than her boss calling. That’s a woman for you!

“Ok ... I’ll be there in five minutes,” she chirped, with obvious annoyance and hung up. She hopped down from the desk in the storage room where her bare ass had been seated and nicely spread, and then she turned on the flashlight mode on her phone just long enough to locate her skimpy thong panties that had been hastily thrown down onto the floor and stuffed them into her purse.

“My two o’clock session trainee arrived early, so we’ll have to try this again sometime later, Josh” she admitted, giving me a less than intimate peck on the cheek, as she smoothed out her blouse and mid-thigh length leather skirt, and gave my exposed cock an amused final squeeze as she scooted hastily out of the storage room with as much dignity as she could muster. That left me alone, with my pants still down around my ankles praying that no one had heard Becky’s cell phone ringing out in what was usually an unoccupied floor, now used exclusively for long term records storage. Getting caught with your pud pulled out on company time, if not quite in-hand, wasn’t going to make for a happy experience when explaining that sort of situation to HR, if anyone opened the door right now to check on the sound. So, I pulled my pants up and got my belt fastened quick, and scuttled out myself while I thought I could at least claim some degree of innocence, if not an intact dignity.

The 7^th floor of our office building (a fairly large national health & life insurance company) had been vacant for the better part of a year now. Some Executive VP genius in marketing had promoted the notion of expanding our direct sales department a few years back, and ultimately about two hundred (mostly) young ladies were once parked here in tiny half-height cubicles making direct sales calls. Far from being a money earner, that enterprise had cost the company a small fortune and this fiasco had nuked our annual profit-sharing check that Christmas. A new President of Operations pulled the plug on that money pit, hard, and the call center was outsourced (cheap) overseas and the menagerie of lovely, toothsome young gals all received pink slips. Then, all of the empty cube partitions were dismantled and stacked up high against the walls, with the managerial desks and all of the PC hardware stored away here into a pair of large storage rooms. Now, in theory, no one ever ‘officially’ used this floor for anything since, which meant ‘unofficially’ this was the place for the serfs to hang out if you were wanting just five minutes of peace and quiet out of the eyes and ears of management. Also, very unofficially, this was also the place to go if a young guy or gal wanted a modicum of privacy for just snogging, or even a quickie. With the company workforce being composed of about 80% females, and mostly of the young and apparently unattached variety (regardless of their actual official marital status once off-work), these two storage rooms probably saw more frequent action than most hot-sheet motels. You’d be astonished at how quickly wedding rings could be slipped off and pictures of hubby and the kids moved into a drawer the moment a cute guy wandering into their departments, alone, unprotected, and ripe for ravishment. Some of the so-called married gals in our company were getting more action here at work in a single week than I usually got in a full calendar year!

We petty corporate wage slaves figured out pretty quickly we could flag these two large storage rooms at either end of this floor as ‘in use’ if someone would move a potted plant from the window sill and set it out in front of the doors. When you were done with happy-time, you then moved the plant back to the sill. I’d guess those two plants had more frequent travel miles than most airline flight crews! An IT co-worker of mine took a highly accurate statistical survey (involving hidden external motion-sensing cameras a few months ago and calculated at least one room was ‘in use’ for about 57% of each and every office day. After normal work hours and during lunchtime, that utilization percentage increased to over 95%. I believe it. The part I was more surprised about was that nearly a third of the couples pictured captured going into the storerooms were same-sex female couples. Makes me wish (almost) that my coworker had also installed internal night-vision cameras, inside as well. A four-to-one female to male worker ratio really gave the gals that swung that way a very target-rich environment!

In my almost two and a half years of working here, this was actually my very first time that I’d been there myself with the expectation of having any actual sex. I’d kissed nearly a dozen gals up here and squeezed a boob or two, and almost gotten a blow-job once, but nothing had ever gone past light foreplay until now ... and now I was going to have the worst case of blue-balls I’d experienced in my entire life! Once earlier, a gal had just barely started oral on me when we were interrupted by another amorous couple too horny and distracted to remember the protocols about bursting in on us. That startled the gal enough that she never wanted to try it there again ... and this also just coincidentally happened to remind her that she was married, and her wedding ring had suddenly appeared the next time I tried chatting with her. That cooled my ardor for her considerably. If she’ll cheat on him with you, then she’ll also likely cheat on you with someone else later.

I’d been without a serious girlfriend for nearly a year now and my pipes were beginning to feel seriously clogged up!

Becky was new, just having joined the company a few months ago as an IT Applications Support trainer, and I’d lusted after her since I first laid eyes upon her and I had pursued her relentlessly, but politely. She ‘sort-of’ had a boyfriend she was seeing outside of work, she claimed, so she considered a dinner date with me would be cheating on him ... but not a quick fuck while at work in a storage closet, she now had decided ... and she wanted it this afternoon. Nope, that wouldn’t really count as cheating on him, she must have thought. Now I have my own share of ethical guidelines and more than a few scruples about hitting on other guy’s gals ... but since she didn’t have a wedding or engagement ring on her finger, that (barely) passed my go/no-go test, when she suggested suddenly today that we take a brief break together ‘up on seven’. So, there we were ... so close, but now our orbital paths had just missed, and for good, it turned out.

As of now, our secret was safe though; I didn’t see anyone else on the entire floor when I left the storage room and I decided to take five minutes in the men’s room to check myself in the mirror, comb my hair and attend to any discrepancies, like my fly being still unzipped. A smart catch, I thought, as I pulled out my own cell phone to check on my own incoming call that I’d ignored earlier. I didn’t recognize the sender and the message noted that the senders name and number was blocked. At just a glance, I thought it was junk spam from some scammer but as I read the screen more carefully, I suddenly felt a chill down my spine ... and my still rock-hard prick now trapped back in my pants suddenly took a fright and became flaccid nearly instantly. That did prevent a near-certain accident ‘ouchie’ as I violently zipped up my fly.

Robbie, Get to S.A. ASAP! Going to Mars, now - Gab will explain.

ALAS, BABYLON (TiNaD)

JHD

Wow ... Was this for real? It had to be...

For starters, nobody – no one, ever called me Robbie (my middle name), except for my older brother Joe. Technically, he’s my half-brother, but that’s a different story. His JHD initials, which he always used in full in his normal text messages to me confirmed it, especially with the front & rear lines. That was a family ‘urgent’ code if seen in a message. Joe was also an Air Force Colonel (full bird) and a licensed medical doctor with a disturbing level above and beyond plain Top Secret security clearances and compartmentalizations who made a practice of keeping his eyes and ears as open as they would go. If he had needed to send out a secret ‘End of the World’ warning to family, he certainly wouldn’t have used his official or phone, or even his personal cell phone. Gab was also his personal shorthand for his wife Gabriela (she hated and never used Gabbie, ever).

Their house was in south San Antonio, just outside of the Loop and almost closer to the strawberry heaven of Poteet than the former Brooks AFB (now City-Base) where he works. He’s the current boss of a medical research detachment left behind when the USAF moved the Aerospace Medical Research Center facilities and staff to Wright-Patterson in Ohio over a decade ago. Brooks is mostly civi-edu facilities now, but I think there’s at least one deep subterranean research lab left down there that does ‘burn before reading’ levels of classified black budget lab stuff that no one, especially over-achieving big brother, would ever talk about. It’s complicated and confusing; officially his orders have him assigned to Lackland AFB (Wilford Hall Medical Center), but he’s TDY (temp assigned duty) off to everywhere else but home, three out of every four weeks every month. Gabriela could probably explain some of this stuff ... but she won’t either. The queen bee and reigning terror of the Lackland AFB Officer’s Club would probably chew off her own tongue before ever repeating a military secret, even to family ... and especially me.

Alas, Babylon was an obvious EOTW code, named after the deservingly famous Pat Frank 1959 Sci-Fi novel about the post-apocalypse. Nope, no chance that I wouldn’t have made that connection all on my own ... but Joe had read and loved that book too, many, many years ago, and we had long agreed this would be our personal ‘Shit Hits the Fan’ code. Just to mix things up, I’d arranged to use ‘Earth Abides’ as my own personal SHTF code, while I was in the Rangers. That book featured a most unlikely hero – a geologist! TiNaD was another personal confirmation touch that was very typical Joe – This is Not a Drill! An advisory warning I’d heard from him, repeatedly over the years for at least half of my life, for me to get my head out of my ass and pay attention.

Now, ‘Going to Mars’ dialed up the knob on the whole meaning of this short text up to an eleven. Nope, this wasn’t quite a visit up into outer space. Joe and Gabriela’s 1600 acre Colorado ranch was a couple of states away, miles from the nearest civilization, right in a mountain lake valley near the edge of a vast national forest. They’d bought the place on Lake Marston about two years ago, thus this place became ‘going to Mars’.

I’d visited there once, last summer, hoping for a week of hiking, fishing and happily playing rockhound in the hills and streams. Instead, Joe had taught me the basics of driving small and midsized Caterpillar backhoe movers, skid steer and track movers and also wheel loaders. Fun, but not what I’d had in mind for a vacation! I spent the week moving and leveling several acres of the ranch for installing the first of several planned greenhouses, and also brute-forcing out hundreds of old pine and spruce stumps (not to mention the endless trees that needed to be turned into either sawn wood planks or the endless growing piles of firewood). When I threated mutiny, on day five after never once getting the opportunity to cast any baited hooks into the lake or pan the nearby streams for gold, my malingering butt was reassigned to ‘light duty’, digging 5’ deep oversized post holes for the planting a couple of hundred fruit and nut trees later that fall by the resident ranch manager. Some vacation!

Joe and Gab loved that sort of ‘hand’s on’, fingernails broken and dirty, style of ranch operations out there in the back-ass of beyond, but for me, I’d have preferred a more restful week detoxing from society, mostly alone with Mother Nature, communing with her via a rod & reel, a gold mining pan, or swinging a rock hammer. They had turned a similar piece of property on the edge of the Hill Country that they’d bought ten years ago into a survivalist showpiece, a heaven for any disaster preparedness situation, with every high-tech ‘off the grid’ gadget available (or in beta testing) on the market. Mars was their next intended serious upgrade project, but still very much an incomplete work in progress.

Sending ‘Alas, Babylon’ was bad; it was not anything that Joe would ever joke about or invoke lightly. My brother does have a sense of humor, but it’s subtle and is usually of a very dry indirect sort. His wife Gab on the other hand has no detectable sense of humor at all, about anything. The odds of this warning being false or a bit overstated weren’t worth debating, so I tried to reply back to the blocked phone that my brother had used and couldn’t connect. So, unable to think of any better alternative, I dialed up Gabriela’s cell phone and it answered on the first ring.

“Are you on the way here?” She snapped. Granted, she never had much, if any, use for me, but usually she’s a tiny bit politer on the rare times we’ve talked over the years.

“Almost,” I admitted, “just leaving work right now. Joe only just now texted me ... I assume that was Joe?” Gabriela audibly sighed, like she was dealing with an obstreperous toddler, which in her mind I probably was.

“It was ... now get your ass here because you’re going to Mars tonight. And DON’T call this cell number or the house number ever again. Don’t use your own cell phone either, anymore, if you can help it. Stop somewhere and get the stupidest pay-as-you-go phone you can find. Nothing with a GPS chip in it or anything remotely ‘smart’. If you can’t find one, I’m sure we’ve got a few here somewhere in a box. I’ll go look for one, now break all of the speeding laws on I-10 if you have to ... just get here ASAP! You’re the one now holding everything up!”

Gabriela hung up with another quite audible huffing sound and since I had no one else worth calling, friend or foe, to warn about the immanent end of the world as we know it, I took two deep breaths and then popped out the battery and the SIMM chip from my android phone. It was the next to most recently released model and it hadn’t been cheap, even used, so it hurt me a bit to throw it down on the hard tile floor repeatedly and stomp on it until it was an assort of random small electronic pieces. I dropped the pieces, just in case, into various different garbage cans on the 4^th floor, where the HR and Accounting departments were and put the SIMM card into a burn barrel for company confidential document disposal.

Any visit to corporate HR is a waste of time and oxygen. The saying goes, those that can’t do, teach ... and those too stupid to teach go to HR. I don’t fundamentally agree with this, as I’ve known numerous outstanding teachers and I’ve done more than my own share of OJT instruction to the less knowledgeable – but the mean girls and all of the intellectual culls of the earth do tend to gravitate to Human Resources ... or sometimes Sales and Marketing.

I knocked once on the HR Manager’s office door once and let myself in without waiting for a reply. She was alone, not in a meeting, and probably getting caught up with an important Solitaire card gaming session on her computer, or else online gambling, again. Our IT department has some expensive software that can track (unknown to upper management) every IP address and web site that every single computer in our building has visited. Lots of porn sites, naturally, but on-line gambling did run a close second.

“Ruby,” I interjected hastily before she could complain about my lack of respect to her (pointless – since no one, except senior management, had the least amount of respect for her), “I’ve just had an emergency phone call from my brother in San Antonio. A severe family problem that I have to go help attend to now. Just hand me a blank emergency vacation form and I’ll sign it and go. I don’t entirely know the facts of the situation yet, but I’ll be gone, out of town, the rest of this week for certain, and likely all of next week as well. I have plenty of FlexTime in my pool, at least three weeks of it ... maybe almost four weeks right now, and since I can only carry over two weeks into the next fiscal year, according to the new policy memo you sent out last month, I’m going to need to take at least that much now off of the books in the next three months, so this is as good of a time now as any to start using it.”