by Misty Vixen
I remember reading these articles during the first half of 2036, before it actually happened, about how America, China, Brazil, and Russia were launching coordinated satellites. I think that, more than anything, was what caught my eye. On the surface, it was some kind of telecommunications project, but something seemed off about it to some of the journalists. I honestly can’t remember the details now, and it wasn’t like I really understood them then, but it was something about the pattern of the satellites and the types of satellites not being for communications. They were apparently labeled ‘experimental’, which was usually enough to fool people.
Oh, it don’t look like the regular ones? That’s because it’s experimental.
The theory I had settled on was that the powers that be finally realized just how mightily fucked we were, as a species, after we’d trashed the climate for decades and decades, and had gone looking for a magic bullet to fix it all.
Only the magic bullet had misfired.
Somehow, they’d fucked up the weather or atmosphere or whatever, with their network of satellites, and this was the result.
But I was willing to admit I could be totally fucking wrong.
Could be fucking aliens for all I knew.
I focused up as we got closer to the house. I hadn’t seen any telltales of local activity, but it was a lot harder to tell for sure in isolated places like this. No movement in the windows, at least. I hated just walking up in plain view. If someone was in there with a rifle or even a pistol, if they were a decent shot, they could pick us off easy as hell. That was life nowadays, though. You gambled. I’d gotten good about reading the odds ahead of time, but it was still easy to be wrong. The best you could do was hope you got out alive if you were wrong.
The house was a simple, single-story thing, its windows intact, front door shut, made of wood with very faded pale green siding. It had no front porch, just two steps leading up to the front door, though I got an impression of some little garden areas off to the left and the right of the steps, and there was no doubt a driveway and maybe even a little path from it to the door underneath all this snow. We got to the front door.
“Back, to the right,” I said quietly, motioning to them.
Megan and Delilah did as I instructed. I already had my pistol out. It was the nine millimeter I’d recovered from my last fun excursions, a nice, sleek, black thing that held fifteen shots and was in pretty good condition. My forty-five was in my backpack for safekeeping, and our hunting rifle was hung over my shoulder.
Each of the women had a pistol and ammo, as well, and we all had a knife.
I knocked on the door. “Is anyone in there?” I asked. “My name is Chris and my friends and I are looking for lodging for the night.”
I kept my voice calm and clear. No sense trying to hide how many of us there were: if there were people in there, they’d have seen us from a long ways off by now.
Listening and waiting, I heard nothing at all. Just the wind.
I always hated this part.
I tried again. “Look, if you want us to go away, all you have to do is say so. We’ll leave. But we’re willing to trade.”
Still nothing at all. Either no one was in there, or they were hiding. Either laying in wait, or too afraid to answer the door, hoping I’d just go away.
I tried one more time. “All right, I’m going to come inside in a moment, last chance to tell me to fuck off.”
Nothing.
I sighed, shifted back to the women, and looked at the windows. No tiny movements, no telltales of someone peeking at me through the closed curtains.
“Stay here,” I said, “I’m going to take a quick walk around. Get up against the house, not in sight of the windows or the door.”
They both told me they had it and got into position. I took a few moments to make a quick jaunt around the house. Couldn’t find any signs of anything having been there for awhile. No footprints, no handprints on the walls around the back door I found or the windows. No signs that anyone had been gathering firewood, although again, it could be hard to tell. Even on a regular day, the snow tended to erase a lot if there was even a bit of wind. But I made it back around to the front of the little house without any notion anyone was inside.
“All right, here we go,” I said.
I’d already tried the back door and found it locked. Now I tried the front and grunted unhappily when I found it was locked, too. We took a minute to hunt around for a spare key, but if it was here, it was buried in the snow, and it was definitely getting darker and colder. I wasn’t going to piss away anymore time looking for it.
Time was a very valuable asset nowadays, and it got away from you faster than you realized when the cold or the dark was on approach.
I kicked the door in.
It took three hits and my leg hurt after, but it got the job done and the door was still pretty much in its frame after I was done. I brought my pistol, half-expecting someone to be on the other side, but all that awaited me was a dim living room. I didn’t get a feeling anyone was there, but I did my due diligence, carefully making my way inside, checking the sides. A kitchen sat off to the right and a door ahead of me, across the living room, led into what looked like a little hallway area. I waved the women inside and motioned for them to stay put, then got to searching the house. For now, I just wanted to see if we were actually alone.
Ten minutes passed and I wound up back at the start, satisfied.
Nothing there but a pair of bedrooms, a bathroom, and a laundry room, as well as a few closets, all empty and mostly cleaned out, too. Which made me wonder why the place was locked up. Maybe whoever owned it, or at least whoever had a key, had been living here for awhile, and had only just recently decided to pick up and go, for whatever reason locking it behind them. But I didn’t sense any danger.
“All right,” I said, looking around the living room, my eyes zeroed in on the dark fireplace, “first thing is getting a fire going. Megan, you take care of that. Delilah, why don’t you start prepping for dinner? I’m going to take another walk outside while there’s still light, double-check that we’re really secure and see if I can’t find some firewood.”
They both said ‘okay’ and because the mood struck me, (it felt good to be inside after a long, hard day of walking), I grabbed Delilah and gave her a long kiss on the mouth. She responded with enthusiasm and tongue.
When I was done, she stepped back, grinning, and I began to head outside.
“Hey, what the fuck, where’s mine?” Megan asked, sounding genuinely annoyed.
I grabbed her and kissed her too, and she kissed me back hard.
I let her let go me, and when she did, she looked at me with a small but satisfied smirk, then went over to the fireplace, where she shrugged out of her pack and dropped into a crouch while swinging it smoothly around in front of her.
Heading outside, I thought of Megan.
I still wasn’t completely sure where I stood with her. I knew that she liked me, she was sexually attracted to me, and that she trusted me. You’d think that would mean I knew exactly where I stood with her, or at least had a decent idea, but Megan was…
A little difficult.
Not that I blamed her. She’d had a rough life, before and after Armageddon, and her paranoia was hard-earned. As well as her prickly demeanor. While I knew I could grab Delilah and kiss her without a problem, (at least unless she told me otherwise), I didn’t know if it might piss Megan off all of a sudden. I think some of our friction was coming from the fact that we were both used to being in charge of the relationship, so to speak.
I didn’t mind sharing control, but I think she did.
So I tried not to push any of her buttons...you know, for the most part. I had to admit, there was a certain satisfaction in fucking with her. Not like for real, but just some teasing, play fighting. The problem was it was a bit harder to tell where the line was, so even then I tried to tread carefully. I thought that with time, we’d get better at reading
each other. I think it was still a foreign concept to her that I could be teasing her and not be actually trying to hurt her. She’d encountered too many shitheads and bullies in her life.
How long were we going to be together?
Shit, I had no idea. I didn’t want her gone, I actually loved her company, but with the way the world was going, I knew she might decide to pack up and leave tomorrow. Although I didn’t think that would happen.
I did my more careful survey of the exterior, still didn’t find any signs of people or wildlife, (though anything could be hiding in the collection of trees maybe a mile and a half distant that I could no longer see in the failing light), and snagged a few pieces of wood at the back out of a bin meant to hold firewood.
Back inside, Megan had gotten a fire going and they were both sorting through our food. I was carrying most of it, (actually, I was carrying probably three quarters of everything we owned between us, both because I had the biggest pack and I was the strongest thanks to my sheer size), and so I set my pack down by them and began to head deeper into the house.
“What do you want?” Megan asked.
“I think that rabbit meat’s on the way out. Fry it up with something, whatever you two want,” I replied. I wasn’t a picky eater and I thought it would make them happier to decide. Megan wasn’t a picky eater either, or at least professed not to be, but I knew Delilah had her tastes. So while they figured that out, I went around and checked all the windows, making damn sure they were not just closed but locked.
Then, after double-checking the back door, I shut the front as best I could and stuck a chair up under the knob.
Someone could get in, sure, but they’d have to make a lot of noise doing it.
Then I rejoined the ladies in my life and helped them make dinner.
It was a slow, pleasant experience. I helped cut up the meat and tossed it into the pot Megan was carrying in her pack while Delilah got two cans of beef stew opened up. It would make a good dinner. Once it was all in the pot and mixed up, (and I’d made sure the rabbit meat hadn’t gone over), we set it in front of the fireplace and then sat down and started going through our packs. This was a part of the routine now: inventory check.
It paid to get not only a mental reinforcement of our supplies, but a visual one as well.
When we’d left Hazel’s place, she’d given us a fair share of all the shit we’d recovered from Tanner’s house. I had been happy enough to leave the excess runoff with her. She was a good woman, and I didn’t just think so because she’d left me fuck her in any hole that I wanted. Consequently, I thought we had a decent spread in terms of supplies, but even a decent spread would only last so long for three people.
Especially considering I was the only one here with a large backpack. Megan’s was medium-sized and Delilah’s was small. This was to be our sixth meal on the road and I was sort of straddling the line between rationing and enjoying ourselves. You couldn’t just get by on the bare minimum all the time because eventually you started asking yourself: what the fuck am I even living for? It sounded dumb, but when you actually lived it for months on end, it became harder to answer that question sometimes.
I set two plastic bottles of water by the fire as well, not too close, but close enough that they’d warm, then I began sorting out the supplies. Right now, we had cans and we had plastic containers of wolf meat and that was it. Fourteen cans in total. Some tuna, some soup, some fruits, some vegetables. A decent blend of foods, but at present, if we found nothing else, I figured we had about four more days of food between us, if we rationed a little. If we rationed a lot, we could stretch this out to a week, maybe eight days.
But that was pushing it, and we had to keep our strength up.
While the food cooked, I checked over the rest of our supplies. It was a decent supply, but there was a certain reality to traveling in a winter wasteland. You could only bring so much with you, and you had to spend some of it every single day to stay alive. Ideally, you would find either more supplies out in the wastelands or you’d run into someone who was willing to trade, but that wasn’t always the case. You could have dry spells. Like what we’d been having the past two days. There was hardly anything in the vehicles we passed, and there were barely any buildings within walking distance of the highway.
“Delilah,” I said as I finished the check and stood, “help me search this place.”
“Yep,” she replied, getting up as well.
“I’ll make sure our stuff doesn’t burn,” Megan said.
“Thank you.”
We got to it, each of us starting at the same place but then heading in opposite directions. Both Delilah and myself had a good eye for hidden caches or out-of-the-way supplies, though she was better at it than I was. We’d settled on basically each of us doing a complete search simultaneously, but from opposite sides. Like starting at the bottom of a circle and working your way along one side while your friend worked their way along the other, eventually you’d pass over each other, keep going, and meet back where you started, and you’d get to cover half of the other person’s work. It wasn’t entirely perfect, but I think it was the most efficient use of time.
This search didn’t last long, as the house wasn’t very big. We used what light was remaining and, when we had to, our lighters to hunt around. I was still holding out hope for a flashlight at some point, or one of those electric lanterns.
As I suspected, the house was well-positioned to be visited by damn near anyone traveling along the highway. Although we hadn’t seen a single soul so far, it had been two years now, and the place was almost picked clean. Again, I wondered if someone had lived here through it all and finally up and left at some point, locking it behind them relatively recently, but it was just one of those things I was never going to actually know.
We managed to find some clothes that would be decent trading, a sewing kit to add to the one we already had, and a lonely can of shredded beef.
Delilah and I rejoined Megan by the fireplace and ate dinner.
“So, threesome tonight?” I asked. “The bed looked big and in good condition.”
“Yes,” Delilah replied immediately. She was always down for a threesome.
Megan laughed softly. “You two are always so fucking horny.”
“And you aren’t?” I replied.
“No, I am, I just am better about not giving into it all the fucking time.”
“You don’t really have to not give in now,” Delilah said. “I know what you mean, honestly. But we all trust each other, we’ve all fucked each other, it’s safe. Why not just fuck all the time?”
“No argument from me,” I said.
Megan rolled her eyes, but then shrugged. “Yeah, I mean, I don’t really have a good argument myself. I don’t even want to argue. It’s just...leftovers, I guess. Society’s bullshit about how bad you should feel if you sleep around or frequently.” She grinned suddenly and looked at me. “Would it be a problem if we got drunk?”
“No,” I replied, interested that she was bothering to ask. I think by now Megan had, to a certain degree, deferred to me as leader of the group. The question struck me more as one of practicality than of permission.
She wanted to know if I had a good reason for her not to get shitfaced.
I didn’t, honestly.
Plus, I’d learned she was a lot sluttier when she was drunk.
“Good,” she said, and began digging in her pack.
THREE
Dinner was good, and watching Megan and Delilah relax, actually relax, as they started drinking from the bottle of wine, was nice.
Not just because I’d noticed that women, especially these two women, tended to get wilder when drunk, but because it was good to see them happy.
There were way fewer reasons to be happy nowadays.
I didn’t drink myself. Didn’t like the taste and didn’t much care for the feeling of being drunk. But I did take to being stoned, and we had a pair hand-rolled blunts leftover from
my last adventure. I was tempted to light one up and take a few puffs, but I didn’t. Right now, I didn’t have enough of a reason to, and I was certain that at some point in the future, I’d have more of a reason to, and it’d be better to have more then than less. Be it a bad mood, wicked nightmares, pain, or anxiety, I had learned to ration that shit.
I was lucky to even have the weed.
While we waited for our meal to digest, I washed the pot out and then packed it with snow gathered from outside the back door and set it to boil by the fireplace. Then I got behind Megan and began massaging her shoulders.
“Oh my fucking God,” she moaned as I worked my thumbs into her shoulders and back. “That’s just...ah...holy shit. Fuck, you have really strong hands.”
“I do,” I agreed.
“Why are you doing this?” she murmured, hanging her head, losing herself in it.
“I like you,” I replied.
She laughed softly. “That’s enough, huh?”
“It’s not like I’m trying to get into your pants. You already let me in.”
She laughed again. “Yeah.”
My relationship with Megan was...interesting. Delilah had been happy enough to offer up her body in exchange for protection. Not exactly an uncommon deal nowadays for me. And given that I had a sweet little implant in my cock that was basically perfect protection from pregnancy, and STDs for the most part, I all too happy to sleep with any woman who came my way. Honestly, so far, I don’t think I’d turned anyone down.
Even though, in one or two cases...I really should’ve.
But with Megan, it was different. She had been absolutely adamant that we were getting into bed as equals, not as part of a deal, and that she wasn’t submitting to me somehow. Which was fine, and I could even understand it. I wondered how many guys had tried to turn any relationship into a power play with her. Women with tough personalities tended to bring that out, often in the worst way, in a lot of dudes.