Chapter 17

"Brad, this shit is fuckin' crazy. I can't fuckin' take it anymore," said Private Rodney Lexington, one of the most junior members of the Placer County Militia. He was talking to his best friend, Brad Zachary, also a private and also a junior member. The two men had grown up together in Grass Valley and had been captured together there when the militia took that particular town. They had been assigned to entirely different platoons within the militia at the beginning of the march but the high rate of casualties had forced much reorganization and they were now both assigned to Colby's platoon, though in different squads.

It was just before sunrise on January 20, the seventh night of their march. The two twenty year olds were in the process of dragging one of the latest victims of the ambushing helicopter from Garden Hill away from the main group. The corpse they hauled had once been corporal Staleworth. He had taken three slugs in the stomach and one in the hip during the strafing run, wounding him severely enough so that a fifth bullet, this one to the head, had been required to end his suffering. As had become customary in the last few days on the trail, Staleworth had supplied the lethal bullet himself, using his own handgun. It was perverse but it had somehow evolved as the final test of manhood that wounded men perform the deed themselves. Those that did it were considered heroic; those that did not (therefore forcing a sergeant or a lieutenant to do it for him) were considered pussies.

Both of the young privates dragged Staleworth by an armpit with one arm while holding a flashlight before them with the other. Both had their duty weapons - semi-automatic AK-47s - over their shoulders. They kept their lights trained in front of them, not looking at their package.

"This shit just ain't right," Zachary said as they reached a small area around the back side of a pile of fallen pine trees. "I mean, we don't even bury them. We just leave them here for the fuckin animals to eat."

"And they'll do the same to us," Lexington said solemnly as he let go of the body. "If we get killed out here, they'll do the same to us. They'll give us a fuckin pistol to shoot ourselves with and then drag us off into the trees."

"It ain't right," Zachary repeated.

They both looked at the rapidly stiffening corpse of Staleworth for a moment, seeing the coagulating blood from the exiting .45 caliber bullet on the top of his head. Until the comet neither of them had even seen a dead body before. Now they were surrounded by them and forced to constantly worry that they would be the next.

"I'm not gonna let this shit happen to me," Lexington said quietly. "I'm not gonna end up as some fuckin corpse in the woods because that asshole Barnes wants to score some fresh pussy and his own personal helicopter."

"What do you mean?" Zachary asked.

"I'm gettin' my ass out of here," he said. "Fuck this shit."

Zachary looked at him nervously, trying to read his face in the meager backwash of their flashlights. "What the hell you talking about? Where are you going to go? There ain't nothing but Garden Hill and Auburn left."

Lexington shook his head. "That's where you're wrong," he said. "The militia done took everything in the neighborhood, that's true. But there's more than just this neighborhood. They haven't been past Grass Valley. There's all kinds a little towns north of there. Somewhere, some of them have to still be alive."

"What if there is? What makes you think they'll take you in? And how will you feed yourself long enough to get there?"

"Food ain't a problem," he replied, lowering his voice even further. "I'm a food supply carrier. I have enough to last two men for more than a month if we ration it."

"We?" Zachary said. "You want me to go with you?"

"You pack the ammo," he told him. "And there's safety in numbers."

"I don't know," he said, shaking his head. "What if we don't find nothing? We'll die out there."

"And we'll probably die if we stay," Lexington reminded him. "It's gotten to the point that I think the devil we don't know is better than the one we do. If you wanna get blasted apart on the trail or have your fuckin nuts blown off by one of those mines, than you just stay. Me, I'm going. I'd rather starve to death twenty miles away from here than have to put a pistol to my own head and get eaten by raccoons and rats."

Zachary was not convinced, but he was swaying.

"It's a better fuckin chance than what we got here," Lexington told him. "We've been through some shit, you and I, you know that. Come with me. We'll make it. And if we don't, we'll at least die like men."

He took a breath, lowering his head a little. "How?" he finally said.

It was almost absurdly easy to get away. The next morning, twenty minutes into the day's march, just as everyone was starting to worry about when the first hit and run attack would come, Lexington broke formation and trotted over to Stinson.

"I gotta take a shit, sarge," he told him. "I'm gonna lag back for a minute."

Stinson, who, like everyone else was strung out with nervous fatigue, looked at his private in annoyance. "Why the fuck didn't you take one after breakfast like everyone else? Jesus Christ, Lexington."

"I didn't have to go then," he said. "I'll just be a few minutes."

Stinson shook his head. "Hurry the fuck up," he said. "We ain't slowing down for your ass. Be back in formation in ten minutes or I'm gonna cut your lunch rations."

"You got it, sarge," Lexington told him reassuringly. "Thanks."

With that, he trotted off to the side, his weapon held at the ready, his sleeping bag and his fifty-pound pack of rations on his back. He darted into the middle of a group of trees and squatted there, not bothering to pull down his pants, just waiting while his comrades passed on both sides, none of them even noticing his presence so widely were the troops kept spaced.

Stinson's squad was near the rear of the formation that morning. It took less than five minutes before the rest of the group passed by him. He waited another five minutes and then stood up, edging out of his hiding area and looking around. No one else was in view. He was alone.

Moving as quickly as he could, he moved back in the direction from which they had come and then darted into an area of thicker trees near a minor mudfall. He then began to move north, quickly disappearing into the dense forest. He moved from tree to tree, over hills, through thick mud, pushing himself to the limit of his physical limitations. By the time Stinson noticed that he had never returned to his place in the march twenty minutes later, he was nearly a mile away.

He climbed to the top of a large, heavily wooded hill. He and Zachary had managed to meet briefly just after breakfast and had decided upon this location as a rally point. Once atop it he waited nervously for another ten minutes before the sound of wet footsteps and a clanking rifle reached his ears. He trained his rifle out over the approach, vowing that if it were the militia giving pursuit he would go down shooting. It wasn't. A minute later the familiar form of his friend, very out of breath and moving only on reserve energy, appeared.

Zachary had used the same ruse to escape from his squad, which had been marching a little closer in towards the front. Again, this was something that probably would not have been possible had they been in a tight formation such as the one they'd left Auburn in, but Bracken's rules were no less than fifty feet between soldiers at all times. This allowed many gaps to be used and exploited.

The two men shook hands warmly at the top of the ridge.

"No one's behind you?" Lexington asked.

"No," Zachary breathed. "Not as far as I know."

"Good. Let's get moving before there are. I don't think they'll bother looking for us, but the farther away we can get, the better."

He nodded, exhausted from carrying his own sixty pound pack full of ammunition, but determined. They went down the far side of the hill and then began to work their way north.

"Sir," Stinson said as he approached his lieutenant, "can I have a quick word?"

"Sure," Colby said, slowing up a little. "But make it fast. God only knows when those fucks are going to start hitting us and I don't want to be standing next to anyone when they do."

"Well, sir," Stinson said, trying to think if there was a delicate way to put this. There really wasn't. "The fact is that one of my men... well..."

"What?" Colby demanded, in no mood for word games. "One of your men is what?"

"Missing, sir."

"Missing?" he asked. "You mean we missed a KIA from the attacks last night?"

"No, sir," Stinson told him. "He wasn't killed last night. It's Private Lexington. He was marching with us less than thirty minutes ago. He told me he was going to hold back for a minute to take a shit and then catch up. He never did."

Colby scratched his head a little, his muddled brain trying to sort through this. "Thirty minutes ago? Are you sure he didn't accidentally form up with the wrong squad? A lot of the guys are kinda loopy lately."

"I checked the squads immediately around mine, sir," Stinson told him. "He wasn't there. I'm wondering if maybe he... well... kind of ran off."

"Ran off?"

"Deserted, sir," Stinson said. "There hasn't been any gunfire from behind us. I simply can't think of any other reason that he wouldn't have come back. If he fell and injured himself or was attacked, he would've fired off a shot, wouldn't you think?"

"Now let's not start jumping to conclusions," Colby said, although what Stinson was saying made perfect sense given the current climate. "Maybe he's..."

"Sir," said Sergeant Standish from third squad as he came trotting up behind them. "Can I have a quick word with you?"

Colby looked at him, annoyed. "Can it wait for a minute? I'm already dealing with something here."

"Not really, sir," Standish said. "You see, one of my men seems to have wandered off."

Five minutes later the march had been halted and the two sergeants and their lieutenant were talking with Bracken. Bracken questioned them thoroughly and, upon discovering that the two men had disappeared independently of each other by using the exact same excuse convinced everyone that desertion was what they were dealing with.

"Shall we try to find them?" Colby asked. "They should be hanged as an example to the other men."

"They should be," Bracken said, "but I don't think there's any point in looking for them. They could be miles away by now in any direction."

"So we just let them go?" Stinson asked.

"There's nothing else to do," Bracken told him. "Let's get everyone moving again. I want to put some miles behind us. In the meantime, keep this quiet. I don't want to give the other men any ideas."

Had he not been so tired he probably would have realized the futility of this. Already the word had been passed both up and down the ranks.

They lost seven more men to ambush attacks during the course of that day; a little less than what had been average. Though fatigue had slowed them down in almost every other action, getting their asses down on the ground when the bullets started coming in was not one of them. Many times the people in the vicinity of the attack were able to spot the flashes of the rifles shots and hit the dirt even before the initial shots could take them out. As a result the average number fell a little each day, with this day being the lowest yet.

At night too they had found a way to decrease the amount of people killed and wounded by the strafing attacks. Though they could not eliminate them entirely, they had found that by setting up their camp against the base of hills, they could at least cut in half the potential directions from which those attacks came, therefore making them more predictable. This served two purposes. One, it saved time when the guards returned fire. Instead of having to search 360 degrees of surrounding area to spot where the attack was coming from, they only had to search 180 to 220 degrees. This factor led directly to the second advantage - that the helicopter had to fire from further back to avoid being hit, thus decreasing the accuracy of the fire. At night the Garden Hill helicopter was lucky if it could hit one person per firing run, thus cutting the average men hit to around six or eight per night. That was still a considerable rate of attrition, but it was not nearly as bad as the first few days had been.

But still, the threat and the reality of random, unpredictable death was undeniably there as the militia made camp on this night. They did not know that Brett and Jason had stood down the helicopter at 4:00 PM that afternoon for a maintenance regime and to get some much needed rest for themselves. The militia only knew that they enjoyed an unheard of ten-hour period without being attacked in any way, shape, or form. Though nobody got much rest because of the anticipation of attack, the tracers did not roll in for the first time until just after 2:00 AM. There were only two follow-up attacks after this. In all, only four men were killed and one slightly wounded in the hours between sunset and sunrise.

But in the morning, as they pulled themselves out of their sleeping bags and came off guard detail to face a new day, it was discovered that three more men were missing nonetheless, they, their weapons, and their packs all vanished, there whereabouts unknown. With them had gone more ammunition, another of the precious automatic weapons, and nearly seventy pounds of rations.

It had been five days since the uprising that had placed Auburn in the hands of Jessica and the rest of the women and still the town was a flurry of activity. Jessica had appointed Madeline - who had the most military training and experience - as the commander of the Auburn defense forces and her titular second-in-command. Although Madeline had no real power to make town decisions (Jessica had seen to that), she had almost complete autonomy when it came to raising, training, and equipping those women who would be responsible for firing the guns at the returning militia when that happened.

Luckily Barnes and company had already taken care of the most basic part of the defenses: the fixed bunkers and trenches from which the battle would be fought. At every one of the major access points to the town was an impressive array of sandbagged trenches atop of hills, many of which were protected by barbed wire mazes. These defenses had been constructed with the purpose of repelling a group at least as large as the militia itself. Would they think it ironic when those very defenses, those very emplacements, those very guns, were used to chop them up? Perhaps. Or perhaps they would be too busy dying to notice.

On this rainy, dreary morning, while Jessica pulled herself out of bed at 9:00 AM and made a mad dash to her private bathroom, the sound of gunfire could be heard coming from the training ground out beyond the high school. It was the popping of M-16s and AK-47s mostly. Usually it was the single pops of semi-automatic fire that went with basic aiming and shooting practice but every once in a while there would be the extended bursts as the women practiced on full automatic. It was Maddie's intent to qualify as many of the women as possible in the time that she had left (which was estimated to be about three to four weeks). From her best shooters and leaders, she would then construct a chain of command by choosing lieutenants and sergeants to lead the corporals and privates.

"Oh God," Jessica moaned as she dropped to her knees in her bathroom and put her head into the toilet of water. She retched several times, sweat breaking out on her brow, but nothing more than a little bit of bile came up. She coughed and choked for a moment and then, almost as fast as it had hit her, the nausea was gone, leaving her a little shaky but otherwise all right.

She rubbed her stomach a few times and then stood up, wiping her forehead with her forearm. Her stomach had been very unstable lately, ever since she'd taken the first overt steps towards the rebellion that was now over and done with. She would be going about her business as usual and then suddenly, from out of nowhere, the nausea would hit, sometimes with enough suddenness that she was unable to get to the nearest bathroom or garbage can in time. She had attributed these bouts to nervousness as her plan approached the zero hour, but now that the plan had been successfully carried out, why was she still having it? It didn't make sense. Barnes was dead, his blackened but still recognizable skull hanging on a spike outside the main entrance to the high school. He wasn't a worry. The other men were firmly under control, used as slave labor during the day and locked securely up in storage rooms under guard at night. They weren't a worry either. Nor were her worries about acquiring and maintaining power in town. That had certainly come to pass with unbelievable ease. If there was one thing Jessica knew how to do, it was take charge of and lead groups of women.

So what was the problem? Why was she still having crippling fits of nervous nausea?

As she poured a bucket of water down into the toilet to flush it she figured that it was the upcoming battle with the militia that had her worried. That must be it, she told herself. She did not stop to think that there had been one other time in her life that she had felt like this: a time three years before the comet.

Jessica had taken over both Barnes' office in the principal's office and his bedroom in the former vice-principal's office (although she had changed the bed). She brushed her teeth with water from the sink and then stepped out to the doorway where Alice, her personal assistant, stood by with a gun strapped to her waist.

"Good morning, ma'am," Alice addressed her, not actually saluting but certainly coming to attention. "How was your night?"

"Very good, Alice," she told her. "Who do you have on cleaning detail today?"

"Pillows and Staleworth," she said. "They're working on the downstairs right now. The rest of the men are out chopping firewood or hauling propane or diesel fuel over."

"Good," Jessica said with a smile. "I want to be sure to keep this building heated and lighted. I'm sick of sleeping in the damn cold. And it's nice to have a damn computer working again."

Alice nodded, not pointing out of course that Jessica was the only one in town now that had the luxury of a propane fired furnace and electric lights. She didn't feel a lot of resentment about this. After all, Jessica was their leader, the woman who had led them to this point, and didn't leaders deserve special privileges?

"Have Pillows come in here right away and clean up my quarters," Jessica said. "And have that other asshole, who was it?"

"Staleworth, Ma'am," she said.

"Right, have him run a hot bath for me in the bathing room. I'll be down there in ten minutes and I expect it to be ready when I get there."

"Right away," Alice said, picking up her portable radio. She said a few words into it and Jessica's orders were carried out.

Prior to the uprising there had been no baths in Auburn. The men, when they bothered at all, had used the shower attachments in the locker rooms which had been set up to be powered by electric pumps run from the generator. The women had been forced, for the most part, to sponge bath themselves with cold water from collected rain barrels. That had been one of the first things to change. Now the bathing area of the Auburn high school was in the female locker room. As in Garden Hill, a large marble bathtub had been moved in from one of the nicer of the abandoned houses and placed with its drain directly over the shower drain. Unlike in Garden Hill the water was heated with propane instead of firewood, but the principle was the same. The town was under the impression that this innovation was Jessica's idea. She felt no need to correct this notion since it was unlikely that Paul would ever contradict her when he showed up here after the militia captured him.

As she entered the room Staleworth, the former sergeant, was just finishing the task of adding the hot water. Bubbles covered the surface of the water and steam rose lazily into the air. The smell was of rose blossoms. Cindy Mahoney and Laura Jones, two of the women who had been assigned to interior guard detail, were standing close by, keeping their eyes on Staleworth's every move. To say that the women were nervous about having men walking around free after their recent ordeal was a vast understatement. Both women were armed with semi-automatic rifles that they kept their hands on at all time.

"How's the water, asshole?" Jessica asked him, stepping close. She was still wearing her pajamas and had an armful of clothing in her hand. She set the clothing down on a shelf near the tub.

"It's fine, ma'am," he replied, responding to her just as he had been taught to respond to any woman in town now. To not do so was to risk having a rifle butt up the side of his head. To fail to do so twice was to have it swung into his testicles.

She reached over, taking no particular precautions to stay away from him, and dipped her hand in. It was steaming hot, nearly hot enough to bar entry. Just the way she liked it. "Very good," she said, starting to undo the buttons on her top. She turned to the two women. "Leave us."

They looked at her as if she were mad. "I beg your pardon, Ma'am," Cindy said, "but I don't think that's a really good..."

"Don't worry," Jessica said. "Put yourselves right outside the door. If there's trouble, I'll let you know."

"But..."

"Leave us," she said, more firmly this time.

They gave her one last look and then reluctantly did as she asked. They walked to the door and stepped out of it, shutting it behind them. Staleworth and Jessica were now alone.

She looked at the male who she had personally chosen to be a member of the interior staff. He was tall and very good looking, had been a personal trainer at one of the local gyms before the comet. His hair was blonde, his features Nordic. His arms and chest bulged with muscle. He looked back at her nervously, not knowing what to expect but thinking very uneasily of what had happened to Barnes.

Jessica continued unbuttoning her top, letting it drop to the ground, wincing a little as the material grazed across her nipples, which had been ultra sensitive lately. She then pushed her bottoms down, leaving her standing only in a pair of cotton panties. She dropped these as well, revealing her sex. Her pubic hair, which Stinson had insisted she kept shaved, was just starting to grow back and was now a fine fuzz of black hairs. She sat on the edge of the tub.

Staleworth cast his eyes away from her as she undressed, not because he found her unattractive - she was still quite appealing to look at - but because he was deathly afraid of offending her.

"Look at me," she told him.

Trembling a little, he did. Her legs were spread and he could see that she did not seem to be in a state of particular arousal. Her nipples were flaccid against her breasts and her vagina was closed, the lips not the least bit swollen or wet looking.

"You used to rape Cathy, Lorene, and Nancy, didn't you?" Jessica asked, her fingers dropping down to her sex and beginning to idly play there, the tips stroking up and down her dry lips.

Staleworth swallowed a little. "They were... uh... my wives before..."

"You raped them," Jessica said, raising her voice a little. "They were not your wives. They were assigned to you by a lottery or traded to you by the other assholes in this town. They never consented to sex from you, you simply took it because your... species held the power. Isn't that right?"

"Well... I suppose that's one way of looking at it," he finally stammered. Was it only a short week ago when he could have had this woman hanged for talking to him like this?

"They tell me that you were quite the ass man," Jessica said, continuing to play with her vagina as she talked. Now the lips were starting to moisten a little. "Stinson, that fuck, was like that as well. He liked to put his cock up my ass. A lot of you were like that."

Staleworth had no answer for her. It seemed safer somehow not to talk.

"Come over here," Jessica told him, spreading her legs a little wider. Her fingers began to pick up speed between her legs. Her nipples finally started to harden. She was not the least bit attracted to Staleworth in a physical sense, but the thought of what she was going to have him do, what she was going to do to him, of the power that she held over him, was starting to turn her on greatly.

Staleworth slowly walked over to her, stopping, as directed, three feet before where she was splayed out obscenely on the edge of the tub.

"Take off you clothes," she said. "All of them."

Staleworth nodded and then began to remove the shirt, jeans, and T-shirt he wore. His body was very impressive to behold but Jessica didn't waste much time looking at it. And despite his fear at what was to come, at the bizarre circumstances that he found himself in, his cock had hardened. Jessica saw this when he dropped his underwear.

"You will do exactly what I say without question," Jessica told him. "If you do not, or if you try any sort of violent move with me, I will scream and those two armed women outside the door will be in here within a second. They will drag you off and by nightfall you will meet the same fate as your glorious commander did. Do you understand?"

"Yes, ma'am," he said, looking at her a little more hungrily now. After all, if Jessica wanted him to fuck her, that wasn't the worst duty in town, was it?

But Jessica didn't want him to fuck her. "Kneel down between my legs and lick my ass," she said.

He looked at her, his mouth opening to give protest.

"Not a word," she said, glaring at him. "Just do it. You like asses so much, it shouldn't be much of a problem for you, should it?"

"No, ma'am," he said, feeling his gorge wanting to rise a little. He could plainly see that her ass was not terribly clean. Nevertheless, he sank to his knees before her, his face between her spread legs. Her lips were very swollen and wet now, exuding the powerful odor of feminine arousal.

"Get to it," she told him, spreading her legs a little further, until they were as wide as she could make them. "And make sure it's sparkling clean."

He began to lick, plunging his tongue up and down through the crack of her ass, over and under her anus. The erection he'd had wilted as he felt the surprisingly unfeminine roughness of that area of her body.

Jessica, on the other hand, felt true pleasure at his work, enjoying it on a physical level as well as a degradation level. "Yes," she told him, her hand grabbing a handful of his hair and jerking it roughly. "That's a good asshole, make it nice and clean."

He licked up and down until it was clean and slick with his saliva. But she wasn't done with him yet.

"Now stick your tongue in it," she told him. "As far as it will go. Clean the inside too."

He was able to get his tongue surprisingly far up into the orifice thanks to the regular reaming of it that she'd received from Stinson and several of his friends. While he licked and probed at her she put her fingers back to her pussy, playing with her clit. Soon she was crying out in orgasm, the first she'd had in a very long time.

"Now get up," she told him once the last of the spasms eased off.

He brought his wet and dirty face out of her crotch and stood before her once more. He was panting a little and still struggling with his gorge. The taste of her shit was in his mouth!

"Just stand there," Jessica said, sliding backwards into the blessedly hot water of the tub. "I'm not done with you yet."

She luxuriated in the warmth of the bath, feeling the bubbles caress her skin, feeling the heat draw away the aching in her muscles and the soreness of her breasts. While Staleworth stood there before her, she used a sponge to cleanse her legs, her breasts, her arms. At some point, while he was watching her do this, the revulsion of what he had just done gave way a little to arousal as he watched her glistening skin. He began to stiffen once more.

Jessica had been waiting for this, had deliberately encouraged it. Wordlessly, she reached for his crotch and grabbed him by the testicles. She squeezed as hard as she could, grinding them together and sending immense pain shooting through Staleworth's body. He squealed and dropped to the floor, vomit spraying from his mouth.

No sooner had the scream come out of his mouth then the door slammed open hard enough to nearly rip it off of its hinges. Cindy and Laura bursting through it, their weapons ready for action.

"It's all right," Jessica told them before they had a chance to get more than three feet into the room. "Staleworth just had himself a little accident. Go back out."

"Are you sure?" Cindy asked, seeing the naked, curled up Staleworth on the floor, writhing around.