Chapter 2

Brett awoke, as always, to the sound of rain and wind outside the lean-to. That was nothing unusual. What was different however was the fact that instead of shivering alone in his sleeping bag, he had a warm body lying atop him. Chrissie's head was snuggled into his chest, her blonde hair cascading over his shoulder. Her right arm was clinging to his upper torso. His own hands were still wrapped protectively around her back, his fingertips against her smooth skin.

He groaned miserably as he remembered the events of the previous night. What had he done? He had violated a sixteen-year-old girl! That was statutory rape. Rape! A week ago he could have been thrown in prison for doing such a thing, and he would have deserved it. Brett, though a cop, had not been a fanatic on the subject of many of the laws that he had enforced. Some of them he had recklessly violated himself. He had been known to drive his car considerably faster than what was legal on a regular basis. He had been known to drink a beer while behind the wheel. He had routinely fudged deductions on his income taxes. He had taken home batteries, flashlights, map books, and several other useful items from the department supply room. But when it came to sex crimes against minors, he had always been a firm believer in the law that declared those under the age of eighteen to be hands-off. It was a good law, designed to protect young girls from people like... well people like himself. And now what had he done? He had slept with Chrissie. Just because the threat that the law represented had been removed he had done something that he believed, that he knew was wrong. What kind of man did that make him? Was he any better than the bikers he had shot?

He opened his eyes slowly, noting that it was just past dawn. The meager light that marked the daylight hours was just starting to show itself, allowing him to see Chrissie's blond head on his chest and the slanted roof of the lean-to above him. Chrissie, feeling him stir a little, opened her own eyes and looked up at him.

"Hi," she said meekly, offering him an embarrassed smile.

"Hi," he returned, finding it difficult to look her in the eye.

"That was the best I've slept since... well... you know."

Brett did not admit to her that it was the best the he had slept as well. He let his arms fall to his side, releasing her from his embrace. "We'd better pull our sleeping bags apart," he said. "Jason will be up soon and I wouldn't want him to see us like this."

She didn't move for a moment. "Brett?" she said, her face troubled. "Are you okay? You're not... mad at me, are you?"

"No," he told her, shaking his head. "I'm not mad at you. I'm mad at myself."

"You don't have to be upset," she told him. "What we did was..."

"Wrong," he interjected. "What we did was wrong and I should have known better. Come on, let's get separated."

Reluctantly she raised herself off of him allowing him a tantalizing and tempting glimpse of her breasts dangling beneath her for a moment. He did his best to ignore the sight and to try not to think about how those breasts had tasted and felt the night before. As he slid out from underneath her, trying to work his way fully into his own sleeping bag, he looked over the top of her, checking on Jason, expecting to see him still snoring away. Jason, a typical fourteen-year-old boy, was always the first to bed at night and the last to rise in the morning. But this time, as luck would have it, he was not. He was leaning on one elbow, looking at the two of them.

Brett froze in place, a jolt of adrenaline surging through his body as he realized that he had been caught. Could this morning possibly get any worse? Would Jason pick up his rifle that he had been so recently taught to use and shoot the man that had raped his sister? That was certainly in the realm of possibilities, wasn't it?

Chrissie, noting Brett's sudden halt in movement, looked over her shoulder to see what he was looking at. She too froze in place, so surprised that it took her a few moments to realize that her breasts were exposed to Jason's eyes. When she did realize this she slowly reached down and pulled the sleeping bag tighter against her chest.

How long did the moment last? Brett was not sure. It seemed an eternity that the three of them all stared at each other. Brett tried to read Jason's face and found it impossible. There was no expression to be read. It was as if he was looking at a baseball card or a pinecone.

"Morning," Jason finally said, his tone strangely normal.

"Uh... good morning," Brett answered slowly. Chrissie said nothing.

"Did you guys sleep good?" he said next. "I know I did. I think I'm starting to get used to sleeping on rocks."

"Really?" Brett asked, feeling a little like he was in the Twilight Zone. What was happening here? Wasn't Jason upset?

"Yep," he said, nodding. "Would you guys mind turning around so I can get dressed? I gotta pee."

"Uh... sure," replied Brett.

"Yeah... okay," echoed Chrissie. Both of them dutifully rolled over to the other side, hastily moving as far apart as they could in the process. Brett had a sudden worry that this was how Jason was going to kill him; by having him turn his back to him. He listened for the clacking of a gun being picked up. It didn't come, only the sound of Jason's clothes jingling.

"Man," Jason told them as he dressed, "I really hate putting these wet clothes on in the morning. Talk about cold."

Neither Brett nor Chrissie had any sort of answer to offer him. It took him the better part of five minutes to get fully dressed.

"Okay, I'm done," he said.

They both turned to look at him again. He was carefully threading his belt through the pistol holster, positioning it neatly on his right hip at exactly the angle that Brett always did. He gave it a pat and then picked up his rifle. "I'll set out the cans from dinner last night so they can fill," he said as he wormed his way out the side. "We're starting to get low on water in the canteens again."

"Uh... sure. Good idea," Brett told him, staring after him as he disappeared in the rain. He then turned to Chrissie. "Did that just happen?"

"That was kind of weird, wasn't it?" she agreed. "I mean, we were totally busted. There's no way he didn't see us."

"It was like he didn't even care," Brett said, shaking his head in wonder.

Chrissie shrugged a little. "Well," she suggested, after a moment's thought on the matter, "maybe he doesn't."

"What?"

"Well, think about it. Why should he care? I'm his older sister, not his girlfriend or his daughter or anything. My dad or my mom probably wouldn't have liked finding us very much, but Jason is younger than I am."

Brett rubbed his temples a little, massaging at a tension headache. "Too much to think about right now," he mumbled, sitting up and grabbing for his own clothes.

"Brett," Chrissie said softly, putting her hand on his bare shoulder.

He looked over at her, knowing what she was going to say, desperately wanting to avoid it.

"What about us?" she asked. "Don't you think we should talk about it?"

"There's nothing to talk about," he said firmly. "I shouldn't have done that. I took advantage of you last night and it was wrong."

"I don't feel like you took advantage of me," she said. "I wanted it as much as you did."

"That's beside the point."

"No it's not!" she insisted. "Don't you like me, Brett?"

"Yes, Chrissie," he sighed. "I like you a lot. I like you too much. You're a very beautiful, very smart girl and I am very attracted to you. That's what the problem is. You're too young to be having sex with a thirty-five year old man."

"Says who?" she asked him.

"Says me! What I did goes against everything I believe in."

"Everything you believe in is gone now," she said quietly. "You told us that yourself. It's a completely different world now with completely different rules. We could die at any time. Isn't it more likely that we're going to be dead in a month than that we're still alive?"

"Chrissie," he said, "I hardly think..."

"Isn't it?" she interrupted forcefully.

"Yes," he admitted. "I suppose it is."

"Then why shouldn't we enjoy a little affection while we're still alive?" she asked him. "Who is it harming? It's not harming me. No one is going to come and put you in jail for it. Why shouldn't we do it?"

"Why shouldn't we go and kill people who have food if we need it?" he countered. "Why shouldn't I have raped you at gunpoint the other day instead of protecting you? We can't just go changing our morality because there's no one to enforce it anymore. Don't you see that? That's what those bikers are doing. They are what happens when people just start doing whatever they feel like doing."

"You're not like those bikers Brett," she told him, almost angrily. "You're nothing like them. And having sex with me when I wanted it and you wanted it is not the same as raping someone and killing their parents. Can't you see that?"

"It's not the same," he said, "but it's a step in that direction. Don't you see?"

She had no answer for him. Before they could continue the discussion any further, they heard the sound of Jason returning. "Why don't you turn around so I can get dressed?" he asked. "I want to try and put some miles behind us today."

With a disappointed look she rolled over to the other side, turning her back to him.

The town of Foresthill had once occupied about two square miles of real estate alongside of a simple two-lane road that ran from Auburn up into the high Sierra. It had once had a thriving population of six hundred, a mix of blue-collar types that worked in the nearby lumber mill and wealthy yuppies who commuted sixty miles to Sacramento to work. But that had been before the comet. Now, three quarters of the business section and half of the old residential section had been washed away by mudslides moving down the mountain. After wiping out the main part of Foresthill the mud had continued downward, eventually burying the Todd Valley section - where the majority of the yuppies had lived in tract houses on subdivided land - more than thirty feet deep. Now all that was left were a few crumbling old farmhouses, a bait shop, a useless gas station, and a church. The population had been reduced to a mere 83 people who were taking shelter in the church and living off of the canned foods that they had managed to scavenge together.

Most of these survivors were women and very small children. Since the comet had struck during the late morning hours on a workday, the majority of the men had been at work and the majority of the school-age kids had been in school. Those that had been at jobs in Sacramento had suffered the fate that everyone else in the valley had. Those that had been at the mill, which was virtually the only employer in town, had been trapped in the building when it had collapsed in the earthquake and then buried for all time when the first of the mudslides had swept through an hour later. Those that had been in school had been thirty miles away in Auburn, since Foresthill did not have a school of its own, and their fates were unknown.

Still, a few men were in the group. Some had taken the day off on that fateful morning. A few had worked somewhere in town that hadn't been touched; such as the gas station or the bait shop. The pastor of the church was among them, his place of employment spared; miraculously he liked to think. And of course there was more than one that had been simply "between jobs", as they would have put it. In all, of the 83 surviving residents of Foresthill, there were 49 women, 20 young children, and 14 men.

That was before the convicts came to town.

They were twenty-seven strong, including six women, and they had been camped on the outskirts of the town for two days, performing a careful reconnaissance of the area through binoculars and rifles scopes that had been taken from the El Dorado Sheriff's Department. They had noted that everyone in Foresthill seemed to be staying in the church, a sturdy wooden building near the center of the remaining township. The security measures that the townspeople employed were a joke but the leader of the convicts, a man named Stuart Covington, who had, once upon a long time ago, been a United States Marine Corps infantryman, thought it best to be sure of what they were dealing with before they moved in. It was discovered that the Foresthill residents posted guards armed with rifles and pistols on the outside of the church - always men - but that they did not send out patrols of the surrounding area. Nor did they have anybody posted in a high place to keep an eye out on the approaches. It was a rare event indeed for anyone to leave the church at all.

"What do you think Stu?" asked Mark Wisington, Stu's former cellmate in the EDCCC and his unofficial second in command of the motley group.

Stu, who was staring at the church building through binoculars, answered without taking them from his eyes. "It should be pretty easy," he said. "Take down the guards out front and pin the rest of them inside. I wanna capture the women if we can get them to come out peacefully, but if they won't, we'll have to shoot some of those tear gas rounds in."

"If we play it right," Mark opined, "they'll come out."

"Exactly." He lowered the binoculars and edged backwards a little. "We'll move on them in one hour. You take half of the group around the back, I'll take the other half from here. My group should be able to close to within fifty yards or so before we're spotted if we use that gas station building for cover. You'll be able to get even closer if you use the trees. Keep low and keep your guys quiet."

"What about our bitches?"

"We'll have Turbo hang back and keep an eye on them. They won't be any trouble."

Mark nodded, putting his own set of glasses to his eyes and taking a quick look. The guard out front was about forty years old. He was dressed in a black rain slicker and was smoking a cigarette. He had an old bolt-action rifle slung over his back. He was not even walking around. He was seated in a damn chair. "I hope they still have some of those cigarettes when we take them," Mark said wistfully.

"Yeah," Stu agreed. "The one fuckin thing we didn't think to grab when we blew town."

"Still no M-16s spotted with the guards?"

"Nope. Just those old hunting rifles. I don't think they even have that many of those. Some fuckin frontier town this turned out to be. It would seem that if our friend is still on the loose somewhere, he isn't here. I never thought he would be once I saw their security. A man smart enough to take out four of our guys and walk away without a scratch would be a little smarter than this."

"I hope we find him someday," Mark said, lowering his glasses again. "I really hope we do. I got a little payback I'd like to give him for Joker."

"Be careful what you wish for," Stu told him. "You just might get it. But for what its worth, I hope we find him too. He's dangerous. A man like that will be able to organize others. Organization is our enemy."

"It's a small world now. We'll find him eventually. And when we do, I wanna kill him slow."

Stu said nothing in reply to this. He had his own thoughts and feelings on the subject of their friend, the man who had ambushed four of their number while they'd been making a raid and had deprived them of both weapons and needed supplies. He did not hate the man. He feared and respected him. If he ever had the chance he would take him out as quickly as possible from as far away as possible.

"I'm gonna gather up my group and start filling them in on the plan," Mark said after a moment. "We'll be ready to move when you give the word."

"Right," Stu answered. "We're gonna party hard tonight."

Right on schedule, the two groups, divided into ten apiece, made their move. Most of them carried M-16s - they had scored sixteen of the weapons from the EDCCC originally but had lost three to their friend - and those that didn't carried scoped rifles or shotguns. They managed to box in the church building and close with it before the guards in the front and back spotted them. When they were spotted, the reaction by the guards was simply to stand and stare. No alarm was raised, no warning shots were offered. This sealed the fate of the townspeople.

Stu took the honor of firing the first shot. He sighted on the front guard from forty yards and squeezed off a single round, striking him in the chest. The guard crumpled to the ground and Stu waved his men forward. From the back of the building Mark, who was much closer to his guard, took him out with a pistol shot to the head. This group did not have to move forward. They were already optimally positioned to cover the rear.

Stu's group spread out and found cover across the street from the church, their weapons trained on the doors and windows. When a man stuck his head out the front door to see what the shooting had been about he promptly had a bullet put through it by an M-16 round. The man dropped in a heap and that was when the screaming began inside; a chorus of feminine wails intermixed with the cries of children.

The battle did not last very long at all. From the top window of the church, two muzzleflashes erupted as two of the townspeople tried, ineffectively, to drive away their invaders. A brief but intense barrage of automatic weapons fire at the window answered this attempt at defense. The glass exploded, tinkling to the ground below, and a series of holes appeared in the wooden frame of the building. No more shots were fired from that window. At the back of the church three women and one man tried to rush out the back door and flee. They were cut down by hail of bullets before they even cleared the doorway. At the front, a young woman carrying a baby in her hands tried the same thing. She and her child were similarly gunned down, their bodies thumping to the mud.

There were no more attempts to escape the church after this. Stu knew that the townspeople had realized that they could neither drive their tormentors away nor escape from them. They would now be setting up to defend against an attempted breach of the building itself. Even as dumb as these people had proven themselves to be they were probably smart enough to have trained every weapon they had on one of the two doors that allowed entry. They would methodically pick off each person as they came through if a frontal assault was attempted. Stu had no intention of wasting either his men or his ammunition that way.

"Inside the church!" he yelled loudly, his voice carrying across the rainy street and through the windows. "We are a heavily armed militia group and we have your church completely surrounded by armed men! You cannot escape us! We did not have any wish to harm you. We are just here to take your supplies! Drop your weapons, come out peacefully, and surrender your goods to us and we will leave you in peace! If you do not come out, we will fire tear gas into the building and kill you as you exit! You have one minute to comply with this! One minute!"

There was no answer from inside at first. It was only when Stu began to loudly count down from thirty seconds that someone spoke. A hesitant voice yelled out: "How do we know that you won't kill us?"

"You don't!" Stu yelled back. "But you know that we will kill you if you don't do as we say! You have twenty seconds left! If we don't start seeing people coming out with their hands in the air by that time, the tear gas goes in! If the tear gas goes in, we will not accept surrenders and you will all die! Nineteen... eighteen... seventeen..."

"All right," the voice finally yelled back. "Stop counting! We're coming out!"

"Men first! And keep those hands in the air!" Stu reminded them. "Leave your weapons inside! Do not try to run once you get out here or you will be shot!"

One by one, the men emerged, hands in the air exactly as Stu had ordered. They were led by the pastor of the church who was, amazingly enough, dressed in his traditional black suit. In all there were eleven adult males, ranging in age from late teens to late sixties. One of them was wounded, suffering from a bullet in the shoulder, undoubtedly taken during the barrage of gunfire at the upper window.

"Lie down, face first in the mud over there!" Stu commanded. "Keep your hands out in front of you!"

They did as they were told, none of them trying any cute moves. Stu and the rest of them relaxed somewhat once the men were secured.

"Now the rest of you!" Stu yelled. "One by one, hands in the air, no weapons! Do it now!"

They came out slowly, docilely, marching through the doorway and out onto the muddy lawn. The women, like the men, were of a wide variety of ages, everything from late teens to geriatrics. The largest age group however, was early to late twenties. Some led small, crying children by the hands, whispering encouraging words to them. Others carried smaller children in their arms, holding them tightly.

"Oh yeah," the man next to Stu said as they watched. "Look at all that pussy! We're gonna have a good time tonight!"

"Shut the fuck up," Stu said mildly, his eyes never leaving the group, keeping a constant lookout for the slightest sign of danger.

Once everyone was out of the church, Stu directed the women to sit down on the ground, separate from where the men were lying. They all complied, most of them hugging children to them. The moment they were all seated, Stu gave a hand signal to his group and they suddenly shifted their position, moving to the left, out of the line of fire from the front of the church. They all kneeled down once again, finding cover behind new objects.

"Mark!" Stu yelled loudly. "They're out and under control! Move in and secure the building!"

"Moving!" came the faint reply from the other side.

It took about two minutes before Mark and his group emerged through the front door. "Secure," he told Stu. "And they have a buttload of goodies in there. Canned food, dry food, cigarettes, beer, even hard liquor. It's a motherfuckin' gold mine!"

"We'll go through it later," Stu said, standing and waving his men to do the same. He began to walk towards the two groups of captives, relaxing now that they no longer presented a danger. "Good job everyone. That was by the fuckin' book." He looked over the smaller bunch, the men. "Who's in charge?" he asked.

"I guess you could say that I am," the pastor announced, looking him in the eye defiantly. "Just take what you want and leave us in peace."

"You bet, padre," Stu answered. "But in the meantime, I'd just like to say that you made that way too easy for us. If you would've had a decent defense set up here, we never woulda fucked with you."

The pastor said nothing and Stu did not push the issue.

"Where are those twist-ties at?" Stu asked his group at large.

"Right here, Stu," Harley, a former methamphetamine brewer, announced, holding up a bag of heavy duty zip-ties that they had found in the EDCCC storage room. The cops used them for securing people's arms during mass arrests.

"Okay," Stu said. "Let's get a detail formed. Harley, Zipper, Billy, Joe, and Spanky, move the men over to the gas station one by one. Keep a close eye on 'em and waste 'em if they try anything funny. Do them just like we told you earlier; hands and feet."

One by one the men were led over to the gas station building under heavy guard. Once inside the former convenience store portion of the station, they were laid down on their stomachs and directed to place their hands behind their backs and their feet against their butts. A zip-tie was then used to bind all four extremities together, making it impossible for the person to move. It took about ten minutes before all eleven were safely hobbled and stored.

Once this was accomplished, the group of bikers gathered before the women and children. They held a quiet discussion among themselves as they looked their captives over, gesturing and pointing a lot, laughing to themselves, but talking too softly for the women to hear. Eventually an accord was reached among them. Stu, Mark, and two others stepped forward and began pointing at various members of the group.

"All those we just pointed out," Stu said, "I want you to stand up. Leave your children if you've got them with the other women."

There was hesitation until Stu fired a shot over their heads. "I mean fucking now!" he screamed menacingly.

Slowly the chosen females stood. There were eleven of them in all and the reason for their selection was glaring obvious. They were the youngest and most attractive of the group. They began to shudder in fear as they realized what was in store for them.

"Harley, Zipper," Stu ordered, "get 'em in the church. Have 'em sit down and keep 'em under guard. Hands off of them for now."

"Right," Harley grinned, looking lewdly at the raid's bounty, his cock already erect in anticipation of what was soon to come. "You heard the man," he yelled at the women. "Get your asses moving. Into the church, right now."

Slowly, miserably they marched off to the doorway, the guards flanking them. Several children began to wail as they saw their mothers taken away.

"Shut those fuckin' kids up!" Stu barked at the remaining women.

They did their best to comply with this command but it was futile. One of the great truths of life is that children will cry when upset and there's not a thing that can be done about it. Stu, realizing this, did not repeat the order. Instead, he ordered his men to start moving the remaining women and the children over to the gas station to be with the men. "Secure 'em the same way," he said.

"The kids too?" someone asked.

"The kids too," he confirmed.

It took the better part of a half an hour to accomplish. Not all of the women went as docilely as the men had, particularly when they felt the children were being mishandled. One of them, an early-thirties babe that had missed the cut of those led into the church by virtue of the fact that she looked like a truck-driver, slapped Mark across the face when he grabbed her four-year-old son roughly by the arm.

"You don't need to be so rough!" she said defiantly, standing her ground. "They're just kids!"

That was the last thing she ever said. Stu stepped forward a moment later and bashed her squarely in the face with the butt of his rifle. She fell, choking and gagging on her own blood, to the ground. Two more strikes to the forehead quieted her. There was no more rebellion after that.

Once they were all securely tied and bound inside the church, Stu, who was smoking a cigarette that Harley had brought out to him, turned to Mark. "You know what to do now."

Mark looked at his leader doubtfully. He was looking forward to the night's festivities as much as anyone but he was not at all enthusiastic about his next task. "Are you sure we hafta do it that way?" he asked. "Why can't we just shoot them?"

"We don't have enough fuckin' ammo to be wastin' it like that," Stu replied, giving his underling a seething glare. "Do you have a problem doin' it the way I told you?"

Mark cowered under Stu's gaze. "No, Stu," he said. "No problem at all. It's just a pain in the ass to find the supplies."

"It's a tough job, Markie," Stu said, continuing to glare. "That's why I picked you for it. Now get it done. While you're doing that, I'm gonna take a look around and figure out where to post some guards. If the supplies are as good as you say then we'll stay here for a little while and rest up. And once the job's done, it's party-time."

"Right," Mark said, taking a glance at the gas station building. "Party time."

He found a five-gallon bucket near the outside of the church. It's sparkling cleanliness in a world in which everything was now covered with mud told Mark that it was what the townspeople had been using to collect their drinking water in. He picked it up and began looking for the next item he would need. Less than a minute of searching led him to a twenty-five foot garden hose that was still attached to the useless faucet outside the church. Using his folding knife, he cut off a six-foot length of it and slung it over his shoulder.

Just outside the gas station itself was a Chevy pick-up truck mired to the axles in mud. It would probably still be there when archeologists uncovered this town ten thousand years or so in the future. Mark pried open its gas cap with his knife and then inserted the hose down into the tank. With a few sucks on the other end of the hose, amber gas began to flow. He let it pour into the bucket until it was about three-quarters full.

After taking a few deep breaths and bracing himself for what he had to do next, he picked up the bucket, carrying it carefully to avoid spilling any, and carried it inside the gas station store. Lying on the floor, most of them crying or yelling or praying, were 69 men, women, and children, all hog-tied with plastic straps. When he began to pour the gasoline on them, their cries turned to screams of panic. They begged him not to do what he was about to do. They pleaded with him. They cursed at him. Many of them began to vomit uncontrollably. One of them, a child, began to convulse. He tried his best to ignore them.