Kiss My Apocalips Ch. 09

She sighed heavily. "Me either. I've never had a big 'O' when a man was inside me."

Now, that surprised me. "No shit? With a talent like you have, you should have quit exotic dancing and become a courtesan to the crown heads of Europe!"

"No. It was the first time. Honest. While I was actually doing it with somebody, I mean. I faked it a few times, but never the real thing." She seemed to think a moment. "I came close once, but I was able to stop myself."

"Alright," Doriana said. "That one bears a little explanation. Why did you stop yourself?"

I felt the girl in my arms shrug. "It was during the last year, up here in the lodge. I wasn't allowed to cum, remember?" She sighed. "In fact, it was with Justin."

It took me a long ten seconds before I was able to connect the dots. "Wait a minute! Justin? You mean Justin Hardcase? The sheriff from Acton?"

I felt her nod against my chest. "Oh, yes. The men who owned this place ... the men who owned ME ... they gave me to several visitors, as well as taking me themselves. But Justin .... Well, I've got to admit, he's a very ... uh ... attentive lover. He's spending the night with both those Sally girls tonight. They're all in the north bunker together. They'll split up and each occupy one bunker apiece during combat; but tonight, they're together. And I'll bet you anything that they'll both agree with me about his ... um ... prowess, if you ask them tomorrow."

"Holy crap!" Doriana exclaimed under her breath.

"Wait a minute," I interjected thoughtfully. "If he's such a great guy in the sack, why did you refuse to sleep with him last night?"

"Aw, Christ, Jacob!" Doriana groaned. "Men! Do you ALL think like that?" She paused, presumably to let me comment, but I had none to give. "She didn't want to sleep with him because she's in love with somebody else!"

"Oh."

We were quiet after that. I should have told her that I loved her, too; but I'd already said that once. And by the time I realized I should have said it anyway, the moment had passed. The wind picked up, and every now and then, we could feel a few droplets blow in through the long opening in the bunker's downhill side. I worried about Doriana because she had unzipped her side to allow Hannah access to our sleeping bag; and I used one hand to shove the blankets in her direction. But after a while, I realized that both girls were asleep, and the only movement either of them would make was to snuggle closer to her neighbor. I very wisely decided not to complain about sleeping on the wet spot, though I did manage to pull the towel into a more strategic position.

Hannah woke me as she tried unsuccessfully to extract herself from our little cocoon. There was only a little dull gray light. I grasped a shoulder and turned her back toward me, then folded her into my arms, where she seemed to purr in contentment. When she lifted her face to mine, I kissed her earnestly, and she returned it in kind.

"I love you," I told her quietly.

She kissed me again. "I know you don't like to think of me in these terms, but I have been changed by the men who brought me here to the mountain. I don't think I will ever be able to break free of my programming, and I don't think I really want to. But you have freed me enough so that I can make my own choice. I choose you, Jacob Jones! I love you and I want you and I belong to you. Whatever your decisions in the future, I am your slave; now and for always. I want to shout it to the mountaintops. I want to tell the whole world! I choose you! I belong to you!"

She crushed me in her earnest arms, then scooted up and out of the sleeping bag. Doriana groaned loudly at the sudden invasion of cold air, and she slid over to take the place of our missing lover, pressing herself into my body, throwing her leg over me, then issuing a single snore before easing into the gentle breathing rhythm of sleep.

"Where are you going?" I asked the rapidly dressing Hannah.

"Time to feed the animals," she said, pulling on a pair of rain boots over her shoes. The final accoutrement was a thick yellow rain slicker. "They don't know about the war." And then she waved to me. And she was gone.

When I heard a golf cart on the gravel path, my watch told me it was nearly seven o'clock. I poked Doriana and we attacked our clothing with gusto, taking only enough time to switch on the little heater again before pulling on underwear, socks pants and various layers; including, this time, one made of Kevlar. Sofia carried in containers of oatmeal that steamed invitingly, along with thermoses of coffee and hot chocolate. Before she drove off to the opposite bunker, she made a point of asking how our evening had gone. Hannah had apparently commented that things seemed 'cozy' during her visit; and based upon the dopey expression she'd worn, Sofia said she was inclined to believe her.

The tablet gave us a ten-minute countdown to another video conference call, and I set up the chairs in their previous position, while Doriana deflated the air mattress and folded all the bedding, putting everything away in their original boxes, out of the way of any prospective action. We took our places and sipped our hot beverages as we waited the final minute before the call, and when the video filled the screen, it seemed like "business as usual" for our forces.

"Before we get going on this call," Wanda said almost immediately, "let me just say that it appears to me that the sheriff and his military ... um ... friends appear to be ... bonding well." Indeed, the two Sallys were sitting very close to the man in the middle of the video frame.

"Bonding," commented the Sally on the right. "Good word. Yes. We've been bonding."

"Several times, in fact," said the Sally on the left, in the exact same tone of voice.

"TMI!" Sofia interjected.

"Enough dis!" Dmitri barked. "Time for bonding later! Our opposing force is here!"

I turned and looked outside at the steady drizzle and light rain. Despite the precip, the visibility was pretty good, and I could easily make out the individual trees in the tree line, only fifty yards away. It's important to understand my descriptions when I refer to distances in the remainder of this and the next chapters. Yes, the trees were fifty yards away; but that is not only a horizontal measurement. The grassy ground ran significantly downhill. Also, those individual trees I mentioned, Douglas fir, grand fir, cedar, western larch and others, grew to more than a hundred fifty feet tall, and some were so large in diameter that two grown men might stand on opposite sides and not be able to touch fingertips. From our vantage point, a bird could fly in a level path toward the tree line and land in the lower branches, which began about halfway up the trunks. Trees this size could provide more-than-adequate cover for ground assault fighters.

"Where are they on the mountain?" I asked.

"Not yet started climbing," Dmitri answered. "Dey have troubles setting up base camps. Dey obviously wanted two camps, but dey find out dat only way to get to other side of mountain is to drive thirty, forty miles of dirt roads. I tink maybe dey eventually just settle on one big camp on south side. We now have big advantage we did not have before. Juanita, you explain."

The woman was wearing camo uniform pants and a drab green tee shirt. She put an arm around Sadie, who was sitting next to her. "This little lady stayed up all night figuring this one out; but I've got to hand it to her, this is a massive game-changer! Explain it to them, doctor."

"In words we can understand," Wanda urged.

"I've hacked into Hyphen's signals," Sadie explained. "Took me long enough to find them! There were two of them, hiding in the 'S' and 'X' bands. I can't input any data, but I can see, copy and share the data HE is receiving! And there's no way for him to know that! We're a ghost-observer! But it tells us ... everything!"

There was a long moment of silence. "Uh ... What data?" I asked, trying desperately to share her enthusiasm, but not quite achieving it.

"His biometrics!" Sadie answered earnestly. "His bio-scans are fed into quantum extrapolation AI-driven logarithmic arrays that ...."

"ENGLISH!" Wanda interjected.

"He has a scan of every single life form on and around this mountain!" Sadie said loudly. She tapped a few keys on a computer keyboard, then switched to the back camera on the tablet they were using so that we could see a display on the wall of their conference room. I saw a topographical map of the mountain, pale green elevation lines making wavering rings; and there were literally thousands of multi-colored dots everywhere in the picture. "Birds," Sadie said. We heard a key tap and all the red dots, by far the prominent color, disappeared. "Small mammals," she said. Tap. The green dots vanished. "Primary large mammals." The blue dots were gone. The only thing left were three small groups of mostly yellow dots. "And humans."

A computer cursor lazily circled the thirteen tiny yellow dots in the center of the display. "This is us. Each dot is one of us. Right now. Real-time. This group to the south is Hyphen's main force. From the way the dots have been interacting, I believe that this dot is Hyphen himself. I've designated it in purple. This group over here travelled away from the main group, we believe in order to launch coordinated attacks from different directions; but they obviously encountered some sort of obstacle, and now, they're returning to rejoin the chief group. I've had an AI run an analysis of which dots represent military lieutenants, or the attack leaders. There are six of them. Those are the orange dots."

"How many?" I asked. "What's their count?"

She seemed to hesitate on that one. "I've been having some trouble with an exact count for some reason. But my best guess is twenty-eight. The computer confirms that."

I believed everything she was saying, but I sensed there were some of us that questioned this knowledge. "Please excuse me for a moment," I told the group. "I'm going to take a little walk to the end of the bunker. Be right back." And I stood up and walked briskly to the eastern end of the bunker and back.

When I returned, as I expected, Sadie had enlarged the map to include only the south side of the mountaintop. Doriana pointed to one of the little yellow dots. "That's you," she said softly.

"Holly shit!" Mr. G, the teacher, said in awe. "It's true! This is an actual, real-time model of every single player's current position!"

"Keep in mind," Sadie told everyone, "that we can only see what they are already seeing! We simply have THEIR information."

"But they don't know that we know!" I said aloud, voicing an inner thought. "That has got to be good for something!"

"Exactly what I was tinking," Dmitri chimed in. "We set many traps for dem before dey finally figure it out! Dey just tink lucky coincidences. Yes? In meantime, Jacob and Doriana: You launch your drones and drop those paper pieces. Yes?"

"Give us half an hour," I told them. "I have a couple more ideas. I'll let you know before we send them off. Does anyone know what the wind conditions are?"

"Out of the west at ten miles per hour," the professor told us.

"Got it," I said. "Anything else? When do we want to chat again?"

"Another SITREP in one hour," Dmitri told us. And the screen went dark.

"What's a SITREP?" Doriana asked, getting up and hugging me before I could move off toward the door.

"Just offhand, I'd say 'Situation Report,'" I answered, returning her affection and following it up with a kiss. Then I picked up the tablet and ran our video conversation back in the memory files until I had that map Sadie had shown us. I pointed. "Any idea how we can drop here?" I pointed again. "And here?"

"Why not directly over them?"

"The wind will blow everything away. It would land over here somewhere."

She nodded. "That makes sense. Sure. We can do that."

"I'm going to work up some sort of protection to keep our payload dry until we deploy it," I told her. And we split up and got to work.

Right on schedule, half an hour later, after warning everyone that our mission was about to begin, the drones launched. The only monitor we had for them was video, and the cameras showed us next to nothing in the rain, mist and drizzle. All we could do was wait. I had wrapped the three payloads in very sheer plastic; the kind that used to be used when shoppers bagged loose produce from a grocery store, or to wrap up your clothes in a dry-cleaning place; though they finally outlawed those bags a few years ago. When the drones returned, the bags were trailing along underneath them, but all the paper fliers were gone. We could only hope the mission had been successful.

Our hourly "SITREPS" gave way to conferences every other hour, thanks to our new source of information. All of us used a designated tablet, mounted on a charger, to show us real-time info concerning our enemies below. If you had enough patience, you could watch them moving around. There had been quite a bit of movement about the time of our drone mission, and we hoped that had been an indication that there had been a success in our first covert military "op." But it was early afternoon before we saw any op of theirs. It was duly noted in the one o'clock video conference.

Two yellow dots and one orange one had begun climbing directly up the steep slope of the mountain on the south side, marching from the encampment, past the driveway, and straight toward the southern bunker where Doriana and I were. In forty-five minutes, they'd made it about halfway.

"First RECON of our position," Dmitri said calmly. "Surprised it took dis long. When weather clear, I'm sure dey launch drones."

"Sadie and I are preparing a little surprise for them when they do," Juanita chimed in.

"Do we know who they are?" one of the Sallys asked.

"We gots video cameras dat see dem, but images blurry in rain. Dey all dressed in combat gear with helmets. At least one move like ... um ... dey make me tink dat ... she is woman. Maybe two. Can't tell more den dat. You two in south bunker, keep watch. If dey shoot, I shoot. If dey engage you, you can engage dem. Hokey Dokey?"

"Okie dokie," I responded.

Doriana and I watched as the dots moved ever closer on the monitor, straight uphill, straight toward us. After crossing the driveway at the base of the mountain, they wouldn't be encountering it again, unless they altered their current vector to their right, toward the main gate of the compound. That was to OUR left, as we looked downhill toward where we knew they were. This was it. First contact with our foe, though there was every indication that they'd stop short, in the cover of the trees, and simply observe. The two of us split up, taking up positions near the forward-most automatic gun emplacements. Both of those guns hummed to life and shifted, aiming at the same point in the trees that we knew our adversaries were.

I reached up with my left forefinger and tapped the side of the left earpiece, activating the "transmit" function of the ICS system that Sadie had built for us. It would keep letting anyone on the system hear me until I tapped it again. "We're ready," I said. "Do you see them yet?"

"We see them on our cameras," Juanita answered. "But still not clearly enough for individual identification. They're right at the edge of the trees. Stay alert."

Please bear with me here. Things happened so fast, and they were so completely unexpected, that I need to set the scene exactly, or this might not make any sense at all to you. Doriana and I were about a fifty feet apart, huddled in the bunker, looking out toward the spot we knew the enemy was. I was holding one of the XM7's, the automatic military rifles that our new friends had brought along with them. The mode selector was set to "Safe," but I had practiced a bit, and my thumb was resting on that lever, ready to click it to "Semi-Auto" at a moment's notice. The mist was blowing into our eyes from the west, from our right. The tablet let us know that they were right at the tree line, right at the edge of the space of tall grass. That open space between us fell steeply downhill toward the trees. We saw nothing for the longest time. And then, the grass moved, obviously disturbed by the people we knew were there.

If you are unfamiliar, I should tell you that the sound of a barking basset hound is like no other dog. It isn't a howl, though they can do that, if they believe the situation warrants. It's more of a bray, actually. A long, sort of melancholy sound, combined with a noise that's intended to alert everybody in a neighborhood to ... something. And I'm sure it's especially heard by those neighbors would much rather not be alerted. Well, that was the sound. That was the noise that filled the late afternoon gloom. The grass stopped moving. Doriana and I both shifted our attention sharply toward our left. Little Rocko, after a few unsuccessful attempts, squeezed under the main gate; and, with ears flying up and down and back behind him, he tore off at a truly impressive speed, directly toward whatever had made that tall grass move.

"Rocko!" Doriana screamed. And suddenly, she was gone.

"Doriana!" I shouted. And then, I stopped. Where the hell had she gone? The doorway was between us. In order to exit the bunker, she would have to run toward me. But she hadn't. Unless .... "Oh, shit!" I shouted, forgetting that my ICS was still activated. And I sprinted toward her end of the bunker.

She had already pulled the bottom lever of the steel outer door, and as I came within view, she jerked the top lever up, and the door opened. "Doriana! NO!" I cried. But she was already out. Already gone. Out the FRONT of the bunker!

"Rocko!" Doriana screamed again. As I got there, I could only look in stunned disbelief at her shapely rear as she sprinted, full-tilt, downhill, directly toward the enemy.

"Doriana!" I hollered. And, without any thought at all for the situation in general, I dove head-first through the gaping hole in our defenses.

"What de fuck happening?" Dmitri shouted.

I hit, ducked and rolled, coming upright again in a feat of athletic prowess that I wished, momentarily, someone had been around to witness. But then, unable to stop my forward momentum, which was increasing very rapidly on the steep slope in front of me, I tumbled again. And again. Finally, I was able to dig my heels into the sodden, grassy soil and stop my wild plunge into the unknown.

"Jacob! What's going on?" Juanita barked in my ear.

"I can't explain!" I replied, starting down the embankment again. "Get someone to the south bunker ASAP! The steel front door is open!"

"What de fuck?!" Dmitri repeated.

"The south bunker is unmanned!" I said, realizing I was speaking too loudly. "Get somebody to the south bunker!"

"Rocko!" Doriana screeched again.

The dog gave another of those distinctive barks. Then there was a shot. And there was one of those sickening sounds that everybody's probably heard sometime in their lives. A sort of "IKE!" sound. The sound that a dog makes when it's been hurt.

"Rocko!"

I was running down a too-steep hill. You know what it's like. Just a little too much speed, and you're entirely out of control. I was on that bitter edge. But suddenly, I was just there! I dug I my heels into the sloppy ground, tried desperately not to tumble head-first into another unorthodox somersault, and somehow found myself standing upright, looking down at the confusing scene before me.

There were two women on their knees, both hunched over ... something ... that was on the ground between them. The one with her back toward me was obviously Doriana. The other was in uniform. Another uniformed woman was facing me, with an assault rifle that looked exactly like mine aimed at the center of my chest.