Chapter 14

He was being rocked in a cradle, gently, soft and warm, with what felt like a dozen blankets all snugly wrapped around me. It was so soothing, peaceful and restful, that the still exhausted and injured Witchfinder didn’t want to ever wake up, let alone open up his eyes to the unkind and unforgiving world that he had so nearly departed from. But in truth it was far from peaceful where he lay, surrounded by a loud cacophony of unhappy sounds; ladies and young girls all frantically concerned about his health and welfare. No ... further sleep was no longer possible, and with an effort the battered hero mentally braced himself to return to a world filled with pain.

“See,” a calm measured voice pronounced, “I told you that he’d be alright! Now back off and give him some fresh air to breathe, in fact, all of y’all just scoot back off into the passenger cars and help keep those damned panicking refugees under control. Make sure everyone has a gun, ammo, and the willingness to use it ... extremely recklessly, if necessary! Oh, and girls, check all of the floors, sweep them if you can find a broom anywhere around here, and help gather up all of the spent brass ammo casings for reuse later. Waste nothing – they can all be reloaded, and will need to be, when we can get our asses somewhere safe. Now scoot everyone ... no wait, Lorrie, you’d better stay here to help nurse, but everyone else, go fuck off for a while!”

That had to be Tania’s voice, I thought; and it was. With her limited sense of precognition, she was by far the calmest and least excitable of the three former priestesses I’d rescued. If she wasn’t panicking, then the odds were good that we’d have a future. As they left the room, rather slowly and reluctantly, I could make out the rather blurry shapes of the youngsters, the girls I’d just liberated from the great sacrificial pit.

I blinked my eyes and squinted a few more times, trying to focus, but my vision didn’t seem to want to cooperate. In fact, I really couldn’t make out Tania’s lovely face at all. Most of my view was blocked by what seemed to be the eager black muzzles of the two colossal Dire-Wolves, Gog and Magog.

“Lie back down and stay quiet,” Tania ordered us, myself and the wolves, in a tone that brooked absolutely no thoughts of disobedience. “You weren’t nearly far enough away from that blast, when you blew the stadium sky high. Half of the buildings within a mile or more of the explosion were flattened like pancakes, and so were you ... after crashing into the ground. You’re badly concussed, like you’d been blasted by dynamite, and you’re still bleeding from out of everyplace a person can bleed from and still live. We were just barely safe enough, ourselves, here in the train ... but it gave us all one hell of a rocking when the blast hit. We lost all of our windows and most of the doors on the freight cars as well, but we just barely stayed put on the tracks.”

“Where...,” I started to murmur, but she immediately clasped her small hand over my mouth to hush me.

“You’re in the caboose, at the back,” Tania said softly, “which had the only semi-proper bed to be found, and we’re rolling north, slowly, but steadily ... after an extremely delayed departure. The explosion spooked the refugees pretty badly and we damn near never got them all loaded back on the train. Got to the point that we nearly had to threaten to shoot them, just to get the herd moving again. Just as well, since the blast blew open another pair of slave-pens a few blocks further away and most of that mass of pitiful humanity then stampeded our way and joined up with the others. Suddenly, in the midst of that that chaos, we needed to mount a fast emergency rescue party to retrieve you, and the girls ... and those damned wolves too. That ... well it took some doing and altogether we wasted rather more time than I thought we could have afforded! The damned things ... the wolves that is, wouldn’t let us near you or the girls, and were holding guard fast, right where you’d fallen. Finally, by the time the scared girls would let us grab you and take them to safety, the horde, or what’s left of it, decided to start moseying over this way and we had a long and rather nasty running shoot-out all the way back to the train. At last reaching the train safely with you and the girls, we got here at right about the same time as a couple of companies worth of scattered horde soldiers ... while we then discovered to our dismay that this damn train was still switching in cars and still nowhere near ready to leave yet! Seemed like every damned minute more refugees were arriving, and even squashed in like old sardine tins, we couldn’t load on old passenger and box cars fast enough to fit in the stragglers. Then when we finally think we’re all ready to leave, we collected a couple dozen horde grunts that couldn’t surrender to us fast enough, all begging and pleading with us to take them along to freedom too. Fine, and then even more of their buddies turned up wanting the same deal too! Well, at least they all had guns and weren’t using them against us! So, with everyone and their fucking dog now all loaded up, the engineer then suddenly discovers that the track switching out of this station was all set wrong, at least if we wanted our asses to head north. That meant gathering enough folks that could properly shoot to escort the engineer about woo yards or so up the tracks to throw the switch without getting him shot, and meant that the damned train wouldn’t be ready to leave for at least another five minutes, or so we were told. Hell, it ended up being at least ten minutes, if not longer, all while a growing firefight was engaging us from nearly every side by then. They got the track switch thrown alright, but most of their party took a bullet somewhere, and half of them didn’t make it back here.”

“And, frankly,” she added, “if it wasn’t for Lorrie, still up there on the station roof, plinking off the leaders and eager-beavers one by one, until the last minute when the train was finally ready, they could have overrun us in half that time ... or sooner. We gave every refugee that could stand a rifle, and that helped, just by the sheer weight of wild, inaccurate fire that helped to keep most of the enemy from just charging right into us, like they ought to have done. Someone found a light machine gun some dead horde guy had been toting and I found one of the deserters that said he knew how to use the blasted thing. So, with the damn bastards shooting at us, we climbed up on the roof of the caboose, kept our asses down flat, and he kept the trigger pressed spitting lead until the barrel got too hot to even touch anymore while I feed the beast two full boxes of ammo. While we sprayed down everything behind us that was moving, that gave Lorrie the last minute chance to haul her skinny ass down from the roof to the now moving train, and we climbed down and joined her at about the last second. She still got hit twice by small arms fire, nothing serious, running that last gauntlet while out in the open to the caboose. She’s fine. Don’t give me that shocked look ... they’re both just flesh wounds really, no bones hit or internal organs mangled, two simple through and through hits on the fleshy parts of her arm and thigh, nothing hit a bone. Messy, but clean. You know her gift ... she didn’t even know she was wounded until we noticed the bleeding after we hauled her up to safety, the dumb masochistic slut!”

“Hey, bitch! I’m standing right here! Speaking of which,” Lorrie quickly enquired, “just how much pain or discomfort are you in right now? You got hit very hard by the concussive force of the blast and that didn’t do your insides any good, but worse, you then had a very rough landing right on your left shoulder, which is almost certainly broken in at least three places. We also think you have a couple of broken ribs too, and probably your left hip and femur are fractured as well, but I can’t be sure yet. No spinal injuries, thankfully, from what we can tell, but when I touch you I’m just overloaded with pain coming from everywhere and I can’t focus enough for sensing any of the finer details! Your skull, thanks to your hard-headed stubbornness, seems alright, but you’ve probably got a doozy of a concussion, so try to stay awake and talking, if you can. You need a healer, a real proper one ... but none of us have that sort of ability. Young Lilly might have some future aptitude for this, assuming we can find anyone that can properly train her, but this isn’t the time or the place for that. We need to get you to your friend Jodi, the healing witchfinder you’ve told us about, up north somewhere ... and now we’re heading that way ... but far too slowly. Now, how is the pain? Grunt once for bad or twice for not so bad.”

I thought about grunting twice, but decided that just one grunt was painful enough. Moving air in and out of my chest hurt and trying to talk just made it even worse. Besides, I had a vague idea of what sort of temporary treatment she had in mind.

“That’s what we thought,” Tania announced with a giggle, “so, for a while at least, I’ll leave you to my sister’s tender ministrations. Gog! Magog! Lie down, damnit and get your wet bloody noses out of his face. Lie down! Those murderous monsters just won’t leave you or the girls alone! Damned useful, though, in a last ditch fight. Right at the end, they mangled up a full squad of horde troops that nearly caught up to us as we left the station, chasing down Lorrie’s skinny buggerable ass ... and no one’s got time to wash the beasts down right now. Speaking of which, your crazed Dire-Badger is all covered in blood from nose to tail to, but fuck-all of it is hers. At least she had the sense to get the fuck out of everyone’s way ... I think she’s up in the freight car just ahead of us, along with her kits.”

The massive wolves did settle down, eventually and grudgingly with a slight low growl, leaving Lorrie with just enough space now to step over them and then mount her legs and hips very gently over my pelvis, as she lowered the layers of blankets and hiked up her short dress over her hips. I was already naked, it seemed, under the blankets and already the sight of her naked loins began to excite me. Gently and with considerable caution, she grasped my penis and stroked it briefly, stimulating it just enough so that it swelled up enough to allow her to glide it carefully in, and allow me to penetrate her.

“Don’t move a muscle and let me do all of the work,” she said with a smile as she kept as much of her direct body weight off of my abdomen as she could and she mostly just let her tight vaginal muscles undulate, compress and relax in increasingly more frequent cycles. At first my left hip complained, and I could feel it shift under her slight weight in a manner that I’m certain that nature never intended, but true to Tania’s gift as she touched me, the pain began to fade nearly at once as she used her very minimal healing skills to concentrate on fusing the hip bones properly back in place.

My pain didn’t quite transform itself entirely into pleasure, but by the time I ejaculated inside of her I felt no discomfort whatsoever, just a happy almost numb tingling all over instead. My concussed brain also felt a size or two smaller and some, but not all, of the headache passed. That was better ... much better.

“That should last you for another day or so, perhaps until we can get you safely home,” she laughed as she kissed me and allowed her dress to again fall back down past her waist.

By ‘home’, we hoped to reach at least Gypsum; that besieged town had been the northern terminus of the restored rail line – but we never made it there. In fact, I never actually ever laid eyes on that ruined town, or even Ft. Salina either, ever again.

Now at ease and no longer in absolute physical agony, I tired to stay awake, or at least reasonably alert, but instead I slumped back to sleep nearly immediately ... but this happy state didn’t last for long.

When I awoke next, unfortunately all too briefly after I’d dozed off, I didn’t need to hear the sound of gunshots, quite a cacophony of them, to realize that we were back in trouble once more. I could feel the train still moving forward, but the rattle of the carriages and rolling ker-klunk of the rusty wheels sounded like they were rolling much slower now. Either our pursuit had caught up with us somehow, or we had reached the main frontlines, where the majority of the horde’s army was. I could hear old rusty brakes loudly squealing and the shuddering of the caboose nearly ceased as the train continued to slow down even more until it at last lurched to a final complete stop on the tracks.

Our escape via train was now over ... and this couldn’t be good.

I forced both eyelids as fully open as they would manage and look a long squint about the small room inside the caboose, but wasn’t much comforted much by what I saw. The three women were each by a small window, firing out with their rifles, helping with their exceptionally accurate fire to keep the attacking horde somewhat at bay, at least here at the rear of our train. There seemed to be plenty of return fire, but little of it was apparently either accurate enough or fired close enough to us for their lead bullets to penetrate the relatively thin steel of the old caboose. Mostly. Old pre-disaster military grade ‘jacketed’ bullets were extremely scarce and valued, even for the horde, and most ammunition fired, by friend and foe alike, used modern-molded pure lead bullets. Nasty enough against bare flesh, where the soft lead of the bullets tended to significantly mushroom inside the wound, but far less effective against an armored target, even the rusty sides of old steel railway carriages and boxcars.

“How bad are things?” I croaked out, as I tried to shift myself in my small bed to try sitting up a bit higher.

“Bad enough,” Amie grunted from above me, as she fired off the last round from her old M-1 rifle out the rear facing window above my bed, and the clip ejected with a dull ping sound to the floor, where Gog or Magog then picked up the empty clip in their teeth and waited to give it back to her. She then fumbled about in her belt pack for fresh rounds to reload as the dogs helpfully handed her in turn the dozen or more spent, empty clips that they had gathered from each of the shooters, assisting them in turn. Damn smart dogs!

“Not good at all, actually,” Tania added, firing off in short succession four quickly aimed shots until she too needed to drop from her right side window perch to also hastily reload her own empty M-1 clips, also collected from the floor by the hounds. “Just as you fell back asleep, we passed into the main horde army lines just on the north side of Newton, oh about half an hour ago, and then we started regularly taking a bit of fire since then, but the train could keep going. Then, starting about ten minutes ago, we started running into some hastily built barricades thrown across the tracks, but small enough that if kept moving slowly, we could just push them all aside and keep going. But since we’re stopped now, I guess that means either our engineer up front has stopped another bullet, or there’s an even bigger obstacle blocking us now that we can’t just bash our way through.” Her reloading complete, she slapped in a fresh magazine and worked the bolt to load the first round with a toothy grin.

“I think this means we’re now pretty much stopped for good,” Tania grinned, and then added for extra explanation, “but we’re sent your useless slag of an ex-wife up front to get us some kind of word about what’s stopping us from moving, so it’s no great loss if she stops a bullet ... but I have to admit that she’s gotten much better at eating cunt, so perhaps slutty Lorrie over there might miss her some, especially on cold nights. At least for now, our passengers up ahead of us are laying down some decent rain of lead on those bastards, and their aim is starting to improve a bit even. So, I think we’re all fine, for a while anyway. We’re still loaded with plenty of ammo, in every car ahead of us, or so I’ve heard, so the horde won’t likely overrun us just yet.” Since she was the precog, I decided that there was no point in worrying about the situation just yet.