by James Axler
Meet me at the spring. Don’t let anyone see you leave.
Tully
Jak refolded the evidence and stuffed it into his pocket while glancing around to see if anyone was watching him. The nearest people were all busy either with their meal or working on the very messy business of dismembering bug carcasses. It was child’s play for him to slip out of camp and head over to the spring.
The area there had been reshaped by the previous day’s flood. Instead of a small trickle through the rocks, both the streambed and surrounding area were now submerged under several feet of water, creating a small pond. When he reached it, Jak looked around, shading his eyes against the setting sun until he spotted Tully on the far side of the water. Casting one last scan around to make sure he hadn’t been followed, he loped around the large pool of water until he stood right in front of her. “Hey.”
Wearing her best dress—the one she had worn to the feast the first night Jak and the others had come to town—Tully stared up at him with a wide grin. “Hey. Got my note, I see.”
“Yeah. Ain’t you supposed be chopping bugs?” Jak asked with a grin.
Tully smiled back. “I may have convinced Tamar to take my shift on the skinning line, saying if she didn’t that her daddy might find out who’s been skimming shine from the distillery.” She patted the blanket next to her. “Sit down.”
“Sure.” As he did, Jak caught a whiff of himself and wrinkled his nose. “Gotta warn—I kinda stink.”
She laughed at that, not unkindly. “I thought you might, which is why I suggested that we, I mean, you, ah...” She looked away, color flaming on her cheeks. “Damn it, I thought this would be easier.”
“What?” Jak asked as he crossed his legs under himself.
“I just wanted to see you without anyone else around. And now that you’re here, I can’t think or talk straight or anything. I just...wanna stare at you forever...” She broke her gaze and looked at the ground. “You must think I’m the biggest jackaninny.”
“I think you’re great!” Jak replied. “Way you handle windrider and shoot blaster. And you speak mind, not care what others think. Never met girl like you before.”
And that was the simple truth of it. Jak had loved Christina, his wife and mother of his child, with all his heart. He had known other girls, bold and full of life, but none of them were quite like the spitfire looking back at him.
Tully stared at him for a long minute before replying. “You mean that?”
Suddenly afraid that he might say something foolish if he opened his mouth again, Jak just nodded.
Tully licked her lips, then nodded once, as if deciding something. “Let’s go for a swim.”
Jak glanced at the water, then back at her to see her already slipping out of her dress. “Uh, okay.”
Shucking his dusty, sweaty clothes, too, he followed her as she dashed into the water. Fed by the small stream, the clear water came up to their necks, allowing them to swim around with ease yet still walk on the bottom if they wished. Jak ducked his head and came up with a splash, slicking his white hair back so he looked like a large, pale, white otter.
Tully laughed again as she paddled over to where he was standing. “Don’t you look handsome.”
Jak frowned at that. “I know I ain’t pretty—”
She put a finger against his lips. “What are you talking about? You’re the best-lookin’ guy I know.”
Jak blinked and rubbed a hand across his face. “Uh, need get your eyes checked. Lots guys in your—” he waved a hand over toward the rest of the collective “—group look better’n me.”
Tully shook her head as she swam closer to him. “Not to me they don’t. They’re all the same—boring farmers or traders or mechanics, the same old thing every day. But you—you’re different, you talk different, you look different.”
She stood right next to Jak, her bare breasts brushing against his skinny chest. Her touch was positively galvanizing on him. She reached out with a dripping wet hand and caressed his scarred cheek. “You’ve done things none of them could ever dream of doing, or ever will do, Jak Lauren. And that makes you more special than all of them put together.”
Jak had no idea how to reply to that, but he did know what he wanted to do more than anything in the world right now.... He leaned forward and kissed her, tentatively at first, then more passionately as she moved closer to him and wrapped an arm around his neck. Her mouth opened to his, and their tongues met with increasing urgency. He brought up his hand under the water to cup her breast, making her moan at the touch.
It might have been five minutes, it might have been an hour later when she finally broke free. Taking his hand, she began pulling him toward the shore. “Come on—I got a surprise for you.”
“More than what we been doin’?” Jak asked, his head spinning with a combination of desire and, he realized, a dangerous swell of real feelings for this girl.
“Yup.” She led him to the blanket and pushed him down on it, making sure he was lying on his back. She straddled him, the V of her sex peeking enticingly out from between her legs, then leaned back and grabbed a quart mason jar, this one full of golden liquid that gleamed in the fading sunlight.
“What that?”
“We don’t just make shine all the time,” she said. “A while back, we got hold of a huge mess of honey, enough that we tried making some mead, or honey wine.”
“Yeah? Had before,” Jak said.
“Not like this, you haven’t.” She cracked the jar and took a healthy swallow into her mouth, then swooped down to kiss him. When she parted her lips, the sweet, fiery liquor flooded into his mouth along with her tongue. Jak gulped it down and rose up to meet her, kissing her mouth and face, then moving down to her neck and onto her pert breasts, the nipples swelling under his tongue as she clasped his head to her chest while gasping with pleasure.
“Wait—wait a sec...” She leaned back and poured a stream of mead over her breasts, the sticky liquid cascading down over her brown neck and white skin to pool on Jak’s chest. “Have a taste of that—”
She shuddered as Jak bent to the valley between her breasts again, lapping at her wine-slick skin and moving out from there. She writhed on him, turning his already swollen cock into hard iron.
Even through all of this, Jak had enough presence of mind to pull back for a moment. “Look, you know this can’t— I mean, I’m not—”
Before he could continue, she fell on him, covering his mouth with kisses. “Shh...just be quiet. I know this is what it is, and I’m fine with that. It’s just...before I have to choose to spend the rest of my life with one of the men in the collective, I want to be with someone who makes me feel alive. I want to be with you, Jak Lauren, right here, right now. Don’t you worry about whatever comes afterward, okay?”
And she began moving her hips on him again, and any other protest Jak might have thought of was swept away by the magnificent young woman above him and what she was doing with him.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
As night fell over the encampment, Jak rejoined J.B., Krysty, Doc, Ricky and the others on the front line.
“There you are, Jak,” J.B. greeted him as he unslung his carbine and settled in next to the older man underneath one of the wagons. “Must have crashed pretty hard. Thought I was going to have to send Ricky to wake you up.”
“No! Mean wasn’t necessary.” Jak peered out into the gathering darkness at the plains. “All ready?”
“As ready as it’s going to be. Everyone worked like crazy to get it all done. Now we just got to wait and see if they come to call.”
Jak nodded while casting an eye skyward. “Least not raining tonight. Small favor.”
“Right.” Krysty regarded him for a moment. “You all right, Jak? You seem a bit...distracted, is all.”
Jak tu
rned to her, ruby-red eyes wide in the twilight. “No. Good day die, if comes to that.”
“Dark night, Jak, way to keep it light,” J.B. said. “Plan doesn’t call for anyone dying tonight if we can help it. Let’s just hunker down and keep our eyes open for them, okay?”
The plan was sketchier—and riskier—than their previous ones. After a long discussion, J.B. and Krysty had convinced the collective to pull in all their guards to try to lure their enemy into the camp to capture them once and for all. They figured if they could subdue enough of their adversaries, it might give them an advantage when they went for the base.
Untold to the others, Krysty and J.B. planned to let at least one go in order to follow him or her back to wherever the base was. They’d parked the truck away from the main area but could get to it quickly enough to follow anyone spotted leaving. Once they pinpointed the location, they could return and figure out exactly what to do about it. Now all they had to do was wait for the parasite people to come in and try to take away more of the collective.
To that end, they’d left the wagons scattered around haphazardly, as if the collective had given up hope. Any evidence of the bugs had also been hidden, as no one wanted to give away their surprise to the enemy.
“J.B., weird,” Jak said.
“You can say I look like whatever you want, but I’m looking forward to bashing some skulls with these,” J.B. said. “Sure you don’t want to try a pair of forearm gauntlets?”
Jak shook his head. “Just get in way.”
“Suit yourself.”
“Fuckers stink, too.”
“Yeah, that was one thing we couldn’t get rid of in time.” J.B. glanced down at the segmented gray-green armor plates covering his chest. “Sure are bastard strong, though.”
The chitinous armor they’d spent the rest of the day removing from the bug bodies was amazing. When worn over a couple of pairs of shirts, it absorbed full impacts from a club with little discomfort to the wearer. The forearm gauntlets J.B. referred to were two smaller pieces from a leg that were shaped to cover an arm from the wrist to the elbow, and secured with leather thongs. Again, with a thickly padded shirt or two underneath, it had blocked a club to the forearm with no injury. Apart from the sickly sour smell the armor gave off, it was performing better than J.B. could have hoped for. There was only one last test for it—in true combat.
“Too bad you couldn’t have figured out the helmets in time,” Krysty said. She had gone with gauntlets and nothing else, concerned that the chest plates might slow her down, as well. Also, there was the issue of fitting them comfortably over her chest, to be honest, and instead she’d opted to make sure as many of the scavvies were protected rather than trying to fit her properly.
“Yeah, but it was too complicated,” J.B. replied. “Besides, even if we did make them work, I didn’t want them relying on them too much—too hard to tell if they would have done the job. We should be okay—”
He was interrupted by a nudge from Jak. “Movement, ’bout a hundred fifty yards out.”
“Okay...let me know when you’ve got confirmation.” As he said that, J.B. reached up and knocked on the underside of the wagon. He was answered by a single thud from a person inside. “Everyone get ready.”
The silent seconds stretched into a minute, then another one. “Okay...looks like you right, J.B. Large party ’bout a hundred yards out. Seven, eight, nine people so far.”
“Looks like they’re doing exactly what I figured,” J.B. whispered. “We’ll wait for them to get to the target wagon, then spring the trap.” They’d positioned scavvies in two overturned or damaged wagons near the targeted one, so when the kidnappers came, they could be swarmed from two or three directions at once.
The next few minutes were spent in an agony of waiting. The invaders were still cautious, still taking their time approaching the site. Jak flexed his fingers, itching to get out there and clobber some heads. Even with the...exercise he’d gotten earlier that afternoon, he found himself raring to get back into the action, wanting to take out these bastards before they hurt Tully or anyone else here once and for all.
He shook his head, trying to banish his memories of her and him together at the spring. It wasn’t easy, however. Even while keeping an eye on the infiltrators, his mind kept filling with pictures of her glorious, nude body above him as they—
“Jak, where are they?”
Jolted back to reality, he refocused to see the advance scouts just reaching the wagon. “At outer wagon. They split up, three-person teams going to each one.”
“Dark night! Well, that can’t be helped. Least we figured that’d happen. Outer groups are going to be on their own until we can reinforce them. All right, everyone, this is it.” J.B. reached up and thumped the wagon bottom twice. Two soft thuds answered him. “Let’s do it.”
Jak crawled out from under the wagon, rose to his feet and began creeping up on the three-person group clustered around the wagon about fifteen yards away. For all their caution on the approach, the kidnappers were fairly lax on their security detail as they cleared the interior. The one posted as the exterior guard was looking the other way and failed to see Jak using the wagon as cover as he ran at him.
When he was a couple of yards away, the albino leaped into the air, leading with his right foot. The flying kick slammed into the guard’s face as he was turning, apparently alerted by some sort of sound Jak had made. It didn’t help him, though. The shot crushed his cheekbone and dislocated his jaw. The impact also sent him staggering away from the wagon to fall to the ground. It didn’t, however, knock him out. The man rolled over, got back to his feet and started coming after Jak, his swelling jaw hanging grotesquely to one side.
“Damn fuckers not want stay down!” Jak snarled as he stepped forward to meet his opponent. He heard a grunt and sounds of a struggle from the wagon, along with shouts and curses from the other wagons where the kidnappers were encountering heavier than expected resistance.
Jak didn’t know if the guy he was taking on was part of the collective or not, but at this point he also didn’t care. His main objective was to incapacitate the man without causing too much permanent damage so he could go help the others. With that in mind, as soon as his opponent got in range, Jak squatted and lashed out with his left foot, attempting to sweep the guy off his feet.
Once again, he was thwarted by the man’s speed and preternatural agility. He leaped forward, avoiding Jak’s leg sweep completely and coming down on top of him. Jak threw himself out of the way, barely avoiding the man’s knee as it hit the dirt where he’d been just a moment ago. Jak leaped back up, knuckles stiffened as he brought his fist down in a ram’s-head punch to the back of the man’s neck. He’d pulled it enough to avoid killing the man, but the blow should have put him out like a light.
The shot staggered him, but the man still didn’t go down. Gritting his teeth, Jak brought his fist down again, this time making his enemy collapse into the dirt and lie there, unmoving. Looking up, Jak saw J.B. taking on two of the invaders. As he stepped over his unconscious foe to help, he felt a hand grab his ankle. Without looking back, Jak whipped the heel of his free foot into the man’s face. The hand slackened, and he pulled his foot free and ran toward the three fighting men.
As he approached, Jak had to admit that the bug armor seemed to be doing a pretty good job. J.B. brought his forearm down on one guy’s head, clobbering him hard, and sending him stumbling away. The other man came after him with the butt of his blaster raised to knock the Armorer out, but he got an arm up to block the weapon, taking the blow on his arm with no difficulty.
Jak came up behind the blaster wielder as he raised his Beretta again and jumped up to grab it from his hand. At the same time, he brought his legs up around the man’s neck in a scissors hold and fell back to the ground, snapping the man down onto the ground with him.
The man reached up with both hands and levered Jak’s legs off his head. The albino pulled away before he could keep his grip on them, kicking back and somersaulting to his feet. No sooner had he raised his head than he saw the man charging toward him, swinging a fist toward his face.
Jak met it with the butt of the blaster, feeling the guy’s knuckles crack under the impact. He shoved the man’s hand down and stepped inside his range, bringing up the weapon again and smashing it into the man’s face, snapping his head back. He felt the man’s remaining good hand scrabbling at his jacket, and kept hammering the man’s face, pulping his nose and fracturing at least one bone in his forehead and another in his cheek. But still his opponent stayed upright.
Jak slipped free of his other hand, seeing blood spray from where the man had cut himself on the metal shards sewn into his jacket, and ducked under his armpit to come up behind him. Before the guy could turn, Jak jumped up and planted his feet on the adversary’s hips. Then he snaked one arm around his man’s throat and squeezed, using his biceps and forearm to compress both sides of the neck—and the carotid artery and jugular veins found there, cutting off the blood flow to and from the brain.
The man reached back to try to dislodge him but couldn’t get enough leverage. He then fell backward, trying to crush Jak, but he maintained his stranglehold despite taking the guy’s full weight on his hips. His opponent tried to get up to body slam him again, but was already too weak to rise. Jak kept the hold going until the man collapsed on top of him. He gave it another three count to ensure the guy would stay down, then shoved him off.
Jak got up gingerly, testing his hips to make sure he hadn’t strained or dislocated anything. He looked around to see bug-armored scavvies everywhere holding their own as they fought off their attackers. While it usually took two of the collective to take on one kidnapper, they were still beating back this latest assault.
J.B. was standing over his assailant, who was also now prone on the ground. Spotting Jak nearby, he waved him over. “Come on—we’re not done yet!”