Lost in a Legend Ch. 01

I ran my hands back up her body and found a sensitive spot on the back of her long, long neck, at the base of her skull. Her head rocked back, exposing her pale throat made green by the light, and she moaned incoherently. I traced fingers down the hollow of her throat, and back down her front, avoiding the simple pleasure of her heavy breasts.

When my hands reached her hips, her eyes snapped open, flashing with desire and determination. She stopped the circular motion of her hips and began to thrust herself down on my cock. I reached my hands around the curve of her hips to cup her ass as she moved up and down atop me, helping her rise, and letting her sink down my shaft again.

We fucked in earnest for an eye-clouding eternity; she bouncing atop me, mauling her heaving breasts; I clutching her hips and thumbing the hood of her bare clit.

With a growl she threw body down against my own, and began rocking her hips back and forth. She was grinding the base of my cock with her clit, clenching her ass to do the work of moving, and I held on for the ride.

Her breasts crushed against me, her hard nipples tracking trails of sensation across my chest. She was flushed with heat inside and out, and so was I. I throbbed inside her, and on each thrust I felt her pussy squeezing tighter and tighter.

Suddenly her eyes were right in front of mine, blazing with need. Her hands clutched desperately at my hair.

"You have to come," she whimpered, riding my cock and grinding against me at the bottom of each stroke. I felt my orgasm building and knew I was close. "Come with me."

"I'm coming," I hissed back against her ear.

She clawed at my back desperately as she spiraled further towards her climax.

"I need you to come with me," she cried. Her pussy clenched my shaft rhythmically. She was teetering on the knife-edge of a powerful orgasm, trying to hold off, trying to let me join her.

"I will," I husked. My thighs were on fire, and I could feel the flash of pleasure running down the length of my cock. I was an eyeblink away.

"Come with me!"

She threw her head back, shrieking, convulsing. Her nails dug tracks into my shoulders and her pussy clamped down on my cock like a vice. Her hips jerked into my own, crushing against me, and her pussy seemed to get even hotter and wetter.

"Yes!" I bellowed, and clutched her tight against me. I felt my cock pulse and spurt into the depths of her pussy.

Her pussy spasmed again against my hard shaft. I was so sensitive I thought I would pass out from the pleasure, and moaned helplessly. Her whimper joined mine, and we shuddered together, clutching each other. We rocked back and forth, breathing raggedly.

After many minutes, our breathing returned to normal. Our desperate embrace softened, and I stroked her back and her ass possessively. She still gripped me tightly, but drew a shuddering breath and dipped her head to kiss the side of my neck.

I was still half-hard inside her, and I could feel our joined fluids seeping out around my shaft and on to our tangled legs. It felt good. Neither one of us was in any hurry to move.

After five or ten more minutes she shifted her weight, and by silent mutual agreement we untangled ourselves from each other. A little moue from her when my member slipped out of her sheath, and she caressed it lovingly.

It took a little work, but we rolled and scooted onto our sides, facing each other. I draped an arm around her waist, and she stroked my short hair, totally relaxed. I gazed wonderingly at the young woman wrapped against me in the pale green light.

"I don't even know your name," I murmured to her.

Her eyes went very wide and flashed with what I didn't recognize then as nervousness, but her face cleared just as soon as it clouded, and she grinned playfully.

"You can call me Pookie," she told me in a lilting accent.

She leaned into me and we kissed tenderly, deeply. I must have fallen asleep during the kiss, because the feel of her lips and the touch of her tongue was the last thing I remember that night.

I woke up alone, naked and sprawled half way out of the sleeping bag. Well, that figured. A girl might be willing to sneak into a complete stranger's tent for a night of wild monkey sex, but there's no way in hell she'll stick around to be there in the morning. Or afternoon, judging from the amount of light pouring through my tent. Not to mention the number of knots that had worked themselves into my back.

I looked at my watch: thirteen hundred. Christ, I couldn't even remember the last time I'd been asleep until one in the afternoon. Not without being drunk off my ass first, anyway.

Goddamn. What the hell was I thinking last night? Strange foreign girl sneaks into stranger's tent, fucks him senseless, leaves. There was no way that could have been the first time she'd pulled a stunt like that. I'd be lucky if I didn't catch something that would kill me. And over a girl namedPookie?

And to think I used to lecture my guys about thinking with their dicks. I scrubbed my hands through my hair in bemused frustration.

A sudden thought came to me and I dove into the pockets of my MOLLE pack. But no, my wallet was still there. And so was the pretty little Finnish sheath knife. I didn't have anything else valuable with me. Maybe last night was just one of those weird, amazing things that happen to people every now and then.

I searched around for my briefs, but they were still sopping wet from her dry humping last night. Wasn't very much dry about any part of last night, come to think of it. I wished we'd had more time together, so I could have gone down on her. Given how good what was left of her smelled, even the morning after, I was guessing she would have tasted pretty good.

I had an idle fantasy of meeting her again at another campground and going for an encore performance, but even while I was thinking about it I knew it was a pointless idea. A girl like that wouldn't be interested in having the same guy twice. I sighed, and maybe it was sentimental, but I folded the shorts up and tucked them in a separate pouch, next to the tourist map and one of those indestructible clear plastic compasses.

I pulled on a fresh pair of briefs and my jeans, and rolled out of my tent to find a spot to take a piss. I noticed with absent interest that I was the last one left in the campsite.

Break-down didn't take long all that. I was used to it by now. I chuckled when I looked at my MOLLE pack. There I was with a sixty pound pack, and it seemed to me like I was packing light. That's as much as everyday ordinary bunker gear for a Fireman, and on training humps I was used to lugging around another forty or fifty pounds of weapons and ammo on top of a full ruck. Sixty pounds might sound like a lot, but it's really only a little more than a quarter of my body weight. On humps and field exercises, I made my platoon carry a full seventy two hour pack along with anything else the mission demanded or they felt like carrying, and I hadn't seen any reason to change just because I was on leave. And besides, sometimes it's darned convenient to have everything but the kitchen sink strapped to your back.

I was shaved and ready to go inside twenty minutes, and then all that was left was getting rid of the garbage. I glanced around for the bear-proof garbage bins that are everywhere on the trails, and I was impressed. Chalk another one up to typical German orderliness, the campsite was so clean you could hardly tell anyone had been there at all. I could barely even tell where the tents had been.

...Which was odd, come to think of it.

I took another look. Icouldn'ttell where the tents had been. I couldn't even see evidence of foot traffic on the grass. The only sign of life at all was a young ram that must have jumped his fence, grazing on a rocky outcrop about a hundred yards away and down the hill a bit from the camp site.

Except, I couldn't find the fence he had jumped.

Scowling, still holding the MRE bag full of the trash I'd gone through last night, I jogged through the campground to look down the steep hill I'd checked out the night before. The hill was still there, but the stone fences and neatly divided pastures weren't. Neither was the town. All that was left was a field of wildflowers pushing up through a rolling bed of thick clover, all the way down the hillside.

I got a really awful feeling in my stomach and I let the garbage bag slip from my fingers.

The landscape was right, but the people were gone. I turned around to look back at the forest. The trail was gone, too, and the forest pushed in further. It seemed bigger, somehow, than it had the day before. Darker too, and less friendly.

I turned back and stared down at the hill, thinking fiercely. Place is the same, town's gone, people are gone, forest is bigger –what could have happened?

I didn't know.

Now what? Look for people. People were still around, they had to be. The ram said so. He had short hair, and it was only late March. That sheep had beenshorn. So there were people. Find out what happened. I had three days of supplies, easy. I could go places. Find people. Get answers. Go home. What if I couldn't?

I didn't know.

I felt lost, which was much worse than simplybeinglost. Thoughts swept through my head; speculations, fears, what-ifs, and I had no way to sort through them. I stared so hard at nothing that my eyes burned.

Eventually I took a deep breath and blew it out, and worked the kinks out of my neck. I turned to walk back to my ruck. But believe it or not, the moment I turned around, all those worries were abruptly thelastthing on my mind. Because standing over my pack, over everything I had in the wholeworldso far as I knew, was a wolf.

Oh, Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore. There's only like two dozen of these things in the whole damn country, and they sure don't live in Baden-Württemberg.

It was huge. Bigger than a mastiff, but all lean muscle and hard sinew. It was at least as tall as my waist, and I'm six two. I swear to God the damn thing was straight out of the Ice Age. It had a high, arching back, and long, slender legs that changed color down their length, so that with every step they all but disappeared before they touched the ground. Yellow eyes glowed out at me from under deep brows.

I stood stock still, not even breathing while adrenaline set my heart pounding blood through my ears. I was suddenly, painfully aware of the sheath-knife I hadjusttied and duct-taped to the ladder straps on the left shoulder strap of my ruck. The wolf was all but sitting on the damn thing by now.

With the knife, I would have had a fighting chance, no matter how huge the wolf was. Without it, I was as good as dead if that thing decided to attack.

Those were the facts, and they were inescapable. But facts be damned. The wolf's presence near my things, nearme, made me suddenly, irrationally, furiously angry. And I would be damned if I was about to roll over and show my belly to an overgrown furball.

The wolf was staring at me, soft-stepping through grass and knee-high weeds without moving a so much as a leaf. It was calmly flanking me, as if it thought I wouldn't be able to do anything about it. I've heard it said that a wolf's gaze is one of its most deadly weapons. Prey animals get trapped by the spell of a predator's stare and can't free themselves to look away to run.

"Don't fuck with me, wolf," I whispered.

When the Army sends me to training, the Air Force hosts us down at Goodfellow AFB in Oklahoma. Every service gets sent there because the facility is so good, but it doesn't really matter, because we're all firefighters there. I work for the Army, so that makes me a soldier, but I think of myself as a firefighter. So do most other 21 Mikes I know, the good ones anyway, and so do the guys from the Air Force. The Marines think of themselves as Marines. They're different like that.

I'm not a predator. I don't act like one, I don't think like one –not really, not like Marines do. But I'm sure ashellnot prey. I guess that makes me a watchdog. And we have a pretty good track record of standing up to wolves.

"Yeah, you can take me," I growled, a little louder now, "and you know you can, but I'll hurt youbadbefore I go down. I'll put out your goddamn eyes, just watch me. And that'll make me the last meal you ever eat, won't it? So you'd better fucking hope it's worth it."

The wolf cocked its head and looked at me funny. I kept staring.

The wolf made an enormous, indifferent yawn and licked its lips. I guess it was telling me what it thought of me. Then it promptly dipped its head, snatched up the shoulder straps of my MOLLE pack and sprang off towards the woods carrying everything I owned.

"Hey!" I shouted at it. I was so shocked and so angry that I started sprinting after the wolf without even thinking of the consequences.

The wolf stopped and looked back at me, my ruck dangling from its jaws. For a second I thought I had startled it and it would drop the pack and run off. But no, it loped twenty yards further into the forest and stopped again. And then it looked back at me. And wagged its goddamn tail.

I don't believe this shit.

The message was clear, though. I was obviously supposed to follow. If I did, I'd be lost. And with no way to find my way back to the clearing I woke up in, I might never get home. On the other hand, that wolf had my knife, tent, food, clothes, matches, flashlight and my Gideon pocket Bible. And I was pissed as hell.

You're damn right I followed.

Once it was sure I knew the game, he set a punishing pace. Even as big as it was, my ruck must have weighed close to half what the wolf did, but he didn't even seem to notice for all I could tell. Anyone who owns a dog knows that given the opportunity, they'll gleefully run your ass into the ground. Try chasing a wolf sometime. God, and I thought fartlek runs were bad.

Forty five minutes later, I was a wreck. Snot was running down my nose, my spit was turning to froth in the corners of my mouth and my heart was pounding so hard I could visibly notice the world changing color with every beat. My jeans were soaked through, my briefs were riding up my butt, my tee shirt was sopping wet, and I had stripped off the flannel long-sleeve and turned it into a belt forty minutes ago.

God. A heart attack would be a relief.

"Over thirty and over the hill," my ass. Half my twenty two year-olds wouldn't have had the chops for that run. Of course, the ones thatwouldhave made it... wouldn't have looked the way I did afterwards. Youthsucks.

The wolf had stopped at the military crest of one last ridge that overlooked a whitewater river. The whole region was folded up and down like and oriental fan with either a torrent or small river snaking back and forth between the hills, and of course the wolf would want to run up one side and down the other of every blessed one of them.

He –running behind him I couldn't help but notice he was very much ahe– trotted over and diffidently dropped my ruck beside me. In between gasping for breath I noticed that the shoulder straps of my ruck were not that much worse for wear. I expected "chew toy"; I wound up with "fang marks." Fang marks are cool. I can live with fang marks.

He stared at me expectantly.

Artfully chewed shoulder strap or not, I gave him my best "fuck off and die" glare. It's pretty good, too. I practice it on Lieutenants.

He made a sound halfway between a huff, a cough and a swallowed snarl, and made an expression that was definitely disgusted. The wolf spun on his hind legs and bounded over the ridge, leaving me alone.

What the fuck, over?

As my breathing slowed, the blood stopped pounding so loudly in my ears and I started to notice the very distinct sounds of a fight. It had been there the whole time as background noise, just like the sound of the rapids nearby, but I had either tuned it or missed it completely with the blood rushing through my ears. Even after I heard it I didn't really pay attention until I heard the first scream.

I've never been in real combat. After fourteen years in uniform and almost ten of them in wartime, that's a hell of an accomplishment, really. I've been deployed, obviously, everyone has; so I've been shot at and mortared and rocketed and watched IEDs blow up, but that's not the same. Those things aren't personal. They're just "war," sort of a dangerous thing that happens around you in the environment, like a thunderstorm or a tornado. But I have heard that scream before.

Ft. Knox, Kentucky. I watched a welding torch explode when a garage workshop burned down in a house fire. I was a twenty year old specialist, and my Corporal, a guy named Lance Bass believe it or not, had gone back inside to rescue a trapped dog. The beagle made it out, but Cpl. Bass wasn't fast enough. The resulting oxyfuel fireball was enough to light him up like a torch, but not enough to kill him outright. He screamed the scream of a man who had felt the agony of death without finding its release.

You don't get to ignore screams like that.

I swore under my breath, hauled my ass off the ground and threw my ruck over my shoulders. Groaning every second of the way, I airborne-shuffled my way to the top of the ridge. There was a conveniently placed tree up there, so I more or less collapsed against it to take stock of the situation.

I looked down, and found myself inside the goddamn Lord of the Rings.