The day after: An apocalyptic morning (127 page)

              "I've never done anything like this before," Maggie said weakly, shivering at the look of lust in her young friend's eyes.

              "That's okay," Christine whispered to her. "I have."

              She leaned forward and put her lips against Maggie's inviting sex. She gave no build-up or teasing strokes first. Things had already gone beyond that. She simply started licking her, running her tongue up and down, inhaling the aroma, tasting the tartness of her juices.

              "Ooooh," Maggie squealed as she felt the tongue upon her most sensitive parts. She jumped a little, nearly falling backward into the tub at the sheer pleasure of the sensation. She had been licked several times in her life - mostly by her late husband -but never had she felt anything like this. Never had she dreamed it could feel this good. Christine lapped her up and down and drove her tongue in and out like a small penis. She rubbed against her throbbing clit with her nose. She seemed to revel in the taste and smell of her pussy.

              "Mmmmm," Christine moaned as she captured that clit between her lips and began to suck on it. She couldn't wait to feel Maggie come in her mouth.

              The sucking on her clit drove Maggie wild. She began to gyrate up and down, back and forth, making it difficult for Christine to keep her mouth where it belonged. She grabbed her legs by the thighs and held them tightly to keep her in one place. It was all over in less than a minute from that point. Maggie felt it building in her stomach and then spreading through her entire being. She screamed into the air as she peaked. When Christine finally raised her head out of her crotch she was a panting, sweaty mess.

              "Feel better?" Christine asked, standing up and kissing her lightly on the lips.

              "Yes," Maggie sighed, already starting to feel guilt at what she had just done.

              "Now I need a little relief," she said, kissing her again, touching her breasts again.

              " Christine," she said, "I don't think I can... I mean, I'm not really..."

              "It's okay," Christine told her. "It takes a while to work up to that. I know. Just give me your fingers."

              "What?"

              "Your fingers," she repeated, taking her left hand. "Put them inside of me. I'll do the rest."

              Maggie felt her hand being put down against Christine's dripping sex. The lips were slippery against her fingers.

              "Put them in," Christine moaned, feeling the first touch. "Please?"

              Maggie slid first one and then two fingers into that tightness, again feeling a strange sense of excitement and forbiddeness at the act. She felt her clutching at them.

              "Yes," Christine said, starting to gyrate her hips against them. "Now kiss me."

              "Huh?"

              "Kiss me while I fuck your hand," she said.

              They kissed, their tongues once more intertwining and Christine thrust her body against Maggie's hand, pushing and pulling the digits in and out of her body. She ground her clit against the heel of her palm, pushing hard enough to cause abrasions to her skin from the friction. Soon she was panting into Maggie's mouth as the sensation of relief began to course through her.

              "Did you get some sleep?" Skip asked Jack as he flew more than two thousand feet above Interstate 80 that night. It was just after 10:00 PM and they were five minutes into their flight. "I noticed you left the community center sometime after I sacked out."

              "I uh... had some things to take care of at home," Jack said vaguely. "I got about an hour or so though."

              "Uh huh," Skip said knowingly. He had a pretty good idea what Jack's "things to take care of at home" had been. His young companion had not had a chance to bathe yet and the smell of sexual musk was radiating off of him quite strongly. "It must be nice to be fifteen."

              "Well, you know how it is," he said, a little embarrassed.

              "Oh believe me, I do. I would've had some things to take care of at home as well if I weren't so damn tired. And be sure to thank your wives for that triple strength coffee they made for us. I don't think I would've been able to fly if it wasn't for that."

              "I'll let them know," he said. "Coming up on a left curve, about thirty degrees."

              "Thirty degrees left," Skip repeated. "Banking."

              The flight out to the target area did not take very long. Since he knew the exact location of the enemy formation - or at least within a kilometer or so - Skip did not have to bother with creeping forward at twenty to thirty knots and keeping an eye out for them. Instead, he blasted right along at nearly sixty knots of forward airspeed - about as fast as he dared go under the blind conditions he was flying under - and soon he was over the top of the mudfall the Auburnites were currently negotiating around. His altitude was as high as he dared go without risking icing problems. This served the duel purpose of giving Jack a wider field of view and keeping their engine noise from alerting the enemy if they happened to get too close to them.

              Once at the mudfall they continued on for another mile and a half and then turned to the south. Now Skip slowed his airspeed up to creeping range as he homed in on the enemy camp. Jack kept him advised of the proper route with the FLIR scope. It was not a difficult task for the young man to do. After all of the drop-off and pick-up runs that they had made over the course of the day, he damn near had the landscape memorized.

              "Okay," he told Skip after about five minutes of southward flight, "we're coming up on the area where we last saw them. Slow up a little more and maintain course."

              "Slowing up," Skip said, doing so, "and maintaining heading of 174."

              They continued on for another minute or so before Jack began to spot the glow of warm bodies on his scope. "I'm starting to pick 'em up now," he said. "There's a cluster of them at eleven o'clock, about a mile or so out."

              "Eleven o'clock," Skip repeated. "Should I edge out to the west a little more?"

              "Yeah," Jack said. "Turn about twenty degrees right and slow up some more. I'll find the thickest concentration of them and we'll hit there."

              "Sounds like a plan," Skip told him.

              Jack had him make two passes about a mile to the west of the camped out Auburnites just so he could get a good idea of their layout. Like the previous night, they were mostly bunched together in several tight groups, arranged probably by squads and platoons. There were a few guards walking back and forth on both ends and in the middle of the group. Several of the guards could be seen to be smoking - which made bright flares on the display. Jack reported all of this verbally to Skip as he spotted it and filmed all of it with the videotape installed in the FLIR system.

              "So what do you think?" Skip asked after the second pass. "You ready to wake them up a little?"

              Jack sighed, having a sudden attack of nerves now that the time had come. He fought it down, successfully for the most part. "I'm ready."

              "Lead me in."

              Jack had him circle way around, almost out over the canyon itself, and then double back from the south, so that he was flying over the mudfall itself. He then had him reduce altitude to less than eight hundred feet above the surface of the mud. When they were directly across from the largest concentration of sleeping bagged glows on the display, he had him turn back to the west and hover.

              "Come off target ninety degrees to the left," Jack directed him as he put a magazine into the mounted M-16 and jacked the first round into the chamber. "Climb up another two hundred feet or so and maintain a due south heading. There's no obstacles higher than that between here and the canyon."

              "Gotcha," Skip said, watching his instruments carefully. "I'm ready when you are."

              "Okay," Jack said, gripping the weapon and adjusting it on its mount. "Start the firing run."

              As the helicopter moved forward at twenty knots, Jack watched his display. The rows of sleeping men didn't stir, nor did the team of guards beyond them seem to raise any sort of alarm. He watched them get bigger and bigger on the display as they grew closer.

              "Almost there," he said slowly. "Almost there... in range!"

              He opened fire, watching the tracers arc out on the display. The first burst slammed into the sleeping soldiers almost perfectly in the middle of their group. He began to rake his fire back and forth across them. He knew he was scoring hits upon them but, as had happened with the first daylight attack, their reactions were pitifully slow. His clip was completely empty and Skip was turning off target before any of the sleeping figures that had not been hit started to get up. A few shots came their way from the guards on duty but they were not even close to being on target.

              "Yes!" Jack said triumphantly, actually pumping his fist in excitement. "Good run. No wasted rounds at all. That was almost too fucking easy!"

              "Good job," Skip said, elated, imagining the confusion and fear that had just been sewn down below. He flew out to the south and was soon clear of the area.

              "How about a follow-up run from the south?" Jack asked.

              "Set it up," Skip told him. "We have three more clips don't we?"

              To say that the attack had created confusion below was the equivalent of saying that World War II had been a minor skirmish. Screams and curses filled the air as men leapt to their feet and pulled up their weapons, looking for the unseen enemy that had struck them without warning out of the darkness. Several groups imagined that they saw something off to the east and opened fire, sending hails of bullets out into the empty sky. Flashlights came on all up and down the ranks as men peered into the forest and up into the sky, trying to figure out just what the hell had happened.

              The attack had only lasted six or seven seconds and while almost everyone had heard the chatter of an automatic weapon firing, only those immediately near the impacting rounds had actually seen anything. What they had seen was a haunting vision of red tracers slamming down around them from above. Before they'd had a chance to even bring their weapons to bear, the mysterious attacker was gone.

              "Everybody, form up!" Bracken screamed, not bothering to use his radio. "Defensive positions! Now!" He himself did not see the attack occur. He had been sound asleep, resting after this trying day, when the screams and the sounds of distant gunfire had awakened him.

              "Turn those fucking lights off!" Stu ordered those around him. Unlike Bracken, he had been close enough to see the attack and he had a pretty good idea of what had happened. "You're giving them a Goddamn reference point!"

              Everyone scrambled around in the darkness, trying to find some sort of cover or concealment, many of them running into each other blindly. One young private, who had no idea what was going on except that they had been attacked again, heard the noise of another soldier - one of the guards - running through the trees in front of him. Acting on instinct he raised his semi-automatic AK-47 and began to fire, killing his companion. This triggered return fire from another group of Auburnites that had taken cover in the woods, one of whom had an automatic weapon. The young private was blasted with more than ten rounds.

              "Goddammit, cease fire!" Stu yelled at the top of his lungs as he saw nightmare flashes of their own soldiers shooting each other in the flashbulb-like strobe effect of the muzzleflashes. "You're shooting at each other, you fucking idiots!"

              It was a good three or four minutes before everyone calmed down enough to stay in one place and allow some semblance of order to return to the group. Bracken and Stu found each other and Stu was finally able to explain what had happened.

              "They hit us from the air with the helicopter," he said. "They must have an automatic weapon mounted on it."

              "Are you sure?" Bracken demanded.

              "I fuckin' saw it!" Stu told him. "Those tracers came from the west and from the air. They have a Goddamn gunship that they're hitting us with!"

              "How?" Bracken demanded. "How the hell do they know where we're at?"

              "It's a highway patrol helicopter," Stu said, feeling stupid for not realizing this before. "I bet it's got an infrared camera on it and that's what they're using to home in on us. Jesus, we need to take that chopper out! They're killing us with that fucking thing."

              And killing was not an exaggeration. A check of the area where the rounds had impacted - it wasn't hard to find since screams of pain were emanating from it - revealed four soldiers dead in their sleeping bags and three more wounded. Two of the wounded were serious enough that they would have to be put out of their misery.

              Just as everyone's heart rate began to return to normal, just as everyone started to stir around and regroup, the next attack came. From the south of them the stream of tracers came blasting in, mowing through the people that were standing near the front. More screams filled the air and every last person instinctively dove to the ground. This time more than three hundred people returned fire at the flashing weapon from which the tracers had originated but by the time the first round was fired back, the tracers had stopped and the helicopter was once again invisible.