Chapter 22

“Thanks for the shower, guys. I feel a lot cleaner. So ... you guys are a traveling caravan of refugees seeking a place called Haven out west, is that right?” Susie wondered openly now.

“Exactly ... and we’re all also lovers ... everyone fourteen years of age and above is intimate with everyone else of that age range. And we have a condition ... where if you have sex with any of us ... you’ll become insatiable ... hypersexual, if you will. We’re more than willing to add you to our circle, just know what you’re getting into here, okay?” Kirk warned Susie upfront now.

“Sounds good to me. I was waiting for marriage for a good while, but now it’s clear that could have led to dying a virgin. No thanks to missing out on life, is there? So, yeah ... if you ... and I did it, you’d be taking my cherry. Well, two of them, anyway. Anal and vaginal. I didn’t manage to stay ... entirely pure, if you know what I mean,” Susie confessed as she dropped her towel and pulled Kirk in for a steamy kiss.

“You’ve been very lonely, haven’t you?” Kirk said, just before gunshots rang out.

Both of them rushed out of the tour bus, Susie still naked, to see a small party of men in khaki uniforms move toward them in a hurry. Nobody knew what they wanted, at least until the group started shouting “Cunts!” and rushing even harder at them. When they closed the distance, it was more obvious that this was some kind of militia and they were up to no good.

“Damn, I hoped that they wouldn’t come back!” Susie fussed.

“What do you mean?” Joey now interjected.

“Well, when I told you this was a ghost town, yes. However, in what’s left of the city of Erie, my cousin, Randy Schmidt, has appointed himself Sheriff of Erie County after using the confusion to stage some kind of coup. He shot any surviving top officials of the previous city and county administrations and organized anyone who didn’t flee or resist him into a rump city-state. It’s got possibly a quarter of its old population, mind you, but that’s the only town for miles around. It has maybe twenty to thirty thousand people in it now, you see.

“Randy’s already radioed me repeatedly to try to get me to join him, but I’ve refused. I guess that he meant business, you know. He might call himself ‘Sheriff,’ but he’s basically a petty tyrant or warlord. And he wants me to be his virgin bride. Evidently, he’s not taking no for an answer. I thought that I was hidden well enough, but it seems not so much. I’m really not good at blending in, you know. I should have dyed my hair,” Susie admitted, feeling awful that her brand spanking new companions were now dragged into her personal drama.

“Yeah, he sounds like a real prick, doesn’t he?” Simon grimaced.

“Exactly,” Susie replied while opening fire on the posse.

“There’s a n... !” one of the deputies started to shout something very racist before a flaming sword ended his life.

Standing there, among the deputies and cutting them down, was a large, black man in golden armor, wielding the aforementioned fiery blade. He cut a nice, healthy swathe through the ranks of this small band of raiders with said weapon, slicing through them like a scythe or sickle into wheatfields. This being Pennsylvania, that was a very fitting analogy, of course. He had large wings on his back, leaving no doubt that he was an angel of some kind or another.

“I am the angel Lavelle, and you can be sure that I have not come in peace!” the angel bellowed as he slaughtered the rest of the invaders, “Hear, then, the words of my prophecy, my command to each of you herein. Behold, the Prophet of God, the man Charles Tremaine. He is the chosen Prophet among you. He is the one handpicked by the Almighty, just as Susie has been named as one of his wives as well as wife to Mike Hawkins and sister-wife to Justine Tremaine. Even so, all of you are to bed each other, to please each other, and to love each other. Every one of you aged fourteen years of age and upwards shall be lovers to everyone else.”