Chapter 11

Tracey and Buttercup hurriedly jumped up: Tracey pulling on her blouse and checking that she still had her bag with her precious passport inside. One thing was sure, a noise like that did not bode well. Buttercup gathered herself together more quickly than her lover, but nothing could disguise the look of real alarm on her face.

"What the fuck do we do?" asked Tracey. "And where's Sharon?"

"It's best not to worry about her," Buttercup replied, wiping traces of Sharon's vaginal juices from her lips. "We're in real enough trouble ourselves."

"Do you think she's been killed? Oh fuck! What do we do?"

"We try and get as far away as we can."

"What the fuck do you mean?"

Buttercup gazed into Tracey's face and frowned. "This is a war zone. People get killed. We could get killed. We've got to get out of here!"

Tracey nodded, and followed Buttercup as she ran ahead through the thick wood. They heard more explosions in the distance. More roaring jets. And a sound which Tracey identified as gun fire, but not gun fire like in the vids, but uncoordinated spasms of it from unidentifiable directions. Sometimes a short spark, sometimes a loud bang, and sometimes a crackle. Between these sounds were moments of peculiar uneasy quiet, spasmodically broken by fresh and unpredictable noises. Each crack, bang and crackle sent a spasm down on her spine, and despite the heat of the day, she found that she was shivering.

They had no idea where they were running, but they knew it had to be in the shadows of the trees. However, the wood was not large enough for them to avoid coming to its edge after not too long. They had no idea where they were in relation to where they'd come, but in the near distance they could see the smouldering ruins of the factory where they had spent the night. It was clearly not a place to return to. It had collapsed from its previous dilapidation to little more than piles of smoking ruins around which were prostrate naked figures and the silhouettes of other darker figures running around.

"What's going on?" whispered Tracey from behind the thick bush where she and Buttercup were sheltering.

"Soldiers killing each other. Soldiers killing other people. Lots of things."

"It doesn't look very organised," whispered Tracey who'd always imagined warfare to be somehow more like the array of plastic soldiers she'd seen in model shops. Or even like the set pieces she'd seen on some movies. It was difficult in the smoke and the distance to make any sense of anything that was happening. Amongst the dark figures running around were also some jeeps who were dashing about, raising even more dust, associated with cracks of rifle and machine gun fire. One jeep appeared to spin out of control, ploughed over some pale bodies, collided with a wall and almost instantly exploded into a ball of fire.

"Quick!" whispered Buttercup. "This may be our only chance!"

"You what?" replied Tracey in a similarly low voice, but nonetheless took her cue from Buttercup and ran out of the protective shelter of the wood, through the orange and black smoke which was billowing their way and into the field. What about mines? she vocalised to herself, but nonetheless kept running. As they ran, Tracey knew not where, there were more figures to be seen running chaotically in the distance. She could make out that some of them were nude, although their skins were strangely dark and shadowed, but she was sure she caught glimpses of some strange protuberances from just above their legs. Shit! They've got hard-ons! What a fucking waste! She tripped on the ground, catching her knee on a rock, but she ignored the pain, more desperate to keep up with Buttercup, who continued racing onwards ahead of her, than to administer to her pain. Fuck! She was out of shape. You'd've thought all that fucking would have made her a bit fitter, but... Fuck!

She then saw some more shadows around a parked jeep to which they were running. It was almost as much a shock to realise that they were wearing clothes than that they were there at all. She almost felt like pointing this out to Buttercup. If she could ever catch up with her. Look! Normal people! Wearing clothes. All over them, Their crotch as well as their chest. Like back home! After leaving home, she'd almost forgotten that clothes existed. However, Buttercup was running in a quite different direction now, away from these figures, so Tracey followed. And the crackle of gun fire, both frighteningly close and thankfully too far away to hit them, reminded her of the true extremity of their situation.

Then she saw Buttercup had halted in a crater ahead of them, which was still slightly smouldering and in which could be seen some small traces of metal which she guessed was probably shrapnel. Or possibly something else. Puffing and wheezing she caught up with her lover and was about to greet her, to reassure her that she was well, that she hadn't been shot, but was forcibly prevented from this by Buttercup forcibly grabbing her arm and urgently indicating with a finger to the lips that she should be quiet. Tracey concurred with a foolish smile, and lay beside Buttercup in the rocky recesses of the crater.

She then became gradually aware why she should be so quiet. Ahead of them was a group of about five fully clothed soldiers, with helmets on their heads, bags and belts hanging from their khaki uniforms and massive boots which noisily crunched on the dry earth. They were carrying in their arms some very formidable machine guns which occasionally they mopped the ground with in a rapid succession of automatic gunfire. They had come across the naked figure of another man who was crawling on his front on the ground, still with an erect penis from below him. Tracey could now make out that this figure although naked was somehow covered in splodges of dark brown and green over his tanned body. The soldiers moved towards him, with their guns pointed towards him but not firing.

And then they surrounded him. Tracey waited in anticipation for more machine gun fire, which would kill off the already wounded figure, but instead she was astonished to see one of the soldiers pull down his trousers while two others held the figure to the ground. What the fuck! And then, covered by the cocked guns of the remaining two soldiers, and despite the wounded soldier's struggles and cries she could make out that the trouserless soldier was bobbing his arse up and down on the back of the wounded soldier. She squeezed Buttercup's hand. Although she'd often seen buggery while in Throb, it had never been as obviously non-consensual as this. Nor was this first encounter the last of the wounded soldier's suffering, as each soldier took it in turns to fuck the enemy soldier, while taking turns in standing guard and holding him down. And then finally, after an agony of waiting and the horror of the violence, the soldiers finished, buttoned up their baggy khaki trousers and with a rapid burst of gunfire extinguished what little was left of the wounded soldier's misery.

And then they moved on, joking and clearly refreshed, plodding through the dry dead field, leaving the remains of the upturned carcass in several pieces scattered over the rocks and earth, relieved of both his rifle and his life. Even Buttercup found it difficult to disguise her disgust.

"We've got to carry on running," she whispered to Tracey. "Our only hope is to make it to the border. And then, I have no idea what'll happen to us. But we can't stay here. When we see more soldiers, just fall to the ground and pretend to be dead."

"Why?"

"They're less likely to kill us. Or even rape us. If they think we're already dead."

This was advice which Buttercup and Tracey adhered to on several occasions as they hastened over the dry fields, hoping that the dark figures in the distance wouldn't be concerned to come and confirm that they were dead. Or even to make definitely certain that they were. However, as they ran on, the groups of dark figures they saw, and watched from the relative safety of earth and dry dust level seemed rather more anxious on their own safety than on anything else: irrespective of whether they were naked and fully priapic or well-dressed and well-armed. Only the jeeps and the occasional rumbling tanks seemed to cross the landscape with apparent impunity, leaving behind them a trail of magazine cartridges and a loud cacophony of potential destruction. If this was a battlefield, mused Tracey, it was a fairly disorganised one. Perhaps, she reflected, on some higher level, observed by helicopter or satellite, there'd seem to be some pattern to it, but from ground level it seemed uncoordinated and random. Soldiers seemed to be wandering in all directions. There appeared to be no concept of enemy lines.

But there was no doubt from the occasional gun fire, the distant explosions, the carnage of abandoned machinery, that a war was being fought. This was brought to them suddenly, when there was another series of explosions somewhere in the distance which Tracey observed to be truly earth-shaking. How much fire-power had been used to produce such explosions? she mused, as a stream of smoke sped across the sky from the tail of some four or five jet planes, whose supersonic booms were barely audible over the echo of the explosions their payload had caused.

The true nature of war became even more obvious when the landscape ahead of them revealed itself as scattered with very many corpses of mostly naked khaki figures interspersed very occasionally by that of a fully clothed one. Tracey held Buttercup's hand as much for the need of comfort as for the pleasure of her physical touch. The figures were all ahead of them and spread across the landscape towards their right and just as much to their left.

"Do we have to walk through them?" she asked timidly.

Buttercup pointed ahead at a line of wire and fence no more than half a mile away. "That's where we want to go. And unless we also want to get killed, we've got no choice. It's either ahead or back!"

Tracey nodded. But fuck! This was not going to be easy. Despite the urgency of their situation they walked, rather than ran, through the lines of dead soldiers, unable to take their gaze off the horror of what they were soon surrounded by. Bodies were scattered as they had died, and some as they had been left after further gunfire. They lay on their side, on their back, and some on the front. And even dead, many of them were still sporting the gross erections which they'd had at the moment of death. Not all bodies were in any sense intact. Some bodies were shattered and scattered over several yards. In some cases, the head was blown into a bloody mess of red, grey and brown, while their bodies, even with their hard-ons lay as reminders of where the heads had once been. On one occasion, Tracey's sandled foot trod on a hand and wrist totally detached from the body several yards away to which it had once been attached.

As she walked, numbed by the horror of it all, she felt a stirring within her chest and throat. And then, without the warning she'd associated with vomiting after a night of heavy drinking, she heaved and a stream of liquid gruel pushed itself from deep inside her starving frame, coughed into the air and onto her blouse and breasts. She collapsed as her chest continued its convulsions, but soon nothing came out from her mostly empty stomach, although her body was willing that there should be more. After several moments of retching, she stood up and continued to follow Buttercup through the lines of corpses, a dribble of liquid vomit still emerging from the corner of her mouth, and her eyes stinging from the tears the effort had cost her.