The Retreat Day 01

And now, her "responsible" Uncle Jim had her out in the middle of a miserable Spring storm in the mountains, where exposure was a very real danger.

There's freedom up in the mountains and it's not like anything you've known, unless you've lived there. But there's responsibilities that come with those freedoms. Some are as simple as doing your share of the chores. Some will get you dead if you ignore them, like don't mess with the bears and rattlesnakes, and don't climb into a crevice smaller than you. But if you've got any common sense, it can be a lot of fun. Getting caught in this storm wasn't sensible, common or otherwise, nor was it fun.

* * * * *

Beth and I followed the bank of the river about a quarter of a mile to where I thought we could cross. The water was flowing pretty steadily and the thought "flash flood" crossed my mind. But it was pretty much the only way we were getting to that cabin tonight. So I eased Jesse, my horse, down the bank and into the edge of the water. There may have been only about two feet of depth, maybe less, but that water was pushing hard.

I encouraged Jesse into the river and he took it on himself to get out of the river -- thank God, on the other side. He powered his way up the far bank and I turned to see how Beth was doing. Her horse, Sunny, had dutifully started down the bank and into the water, following Jesse. They were maybe two-thirds of the way across when a brilliant flash of lightning, and an immediate thunderclap that felt like it was right on top of us, spooked Sunny and she reared. Not bad, but enough that Beth lost her seat in the driving wet and slipped down into the river.

I bailed off Jesse and didn't even bother to try to tether him. The one thing I didn't want to have happen was Beth getting dragged down the river. Bless that girl, she'd caught hold of the stirrup and was struggling to pull herself up. I started to wade into the water and felt it pounding against my legs, threatening to knock me down, but somehow I needed to reach Sunny's reins. Beth had to be one smart girl, because she managed to help with that.

With an arm hooked through the stirrup, she took her other hand and slapped Sunny's flank, causing her to surge forward, dragging Beth with her. As soon as I could, I grabbed Sunny's reins and started back up the bank, but I dropped them again as soon as Sunny -- not waiting for Beth -- began powering her way up the bank like Jesse had.

I scrambled back up and retrieved Jesse's reins while I held Sunny's so that Beth could get to her feet and get straightened out. She was muddy, soaked and shaking, bad, but I didn't know if it was the cold rain or the adrenalin rush.

"Can you ride?" I called to her.

She didn't say anything. She just mounted Sunny and I handed her back the reins. She turned for the cabin before I even got mounted. We trotted the remaining ground and finally made it to the barn. I dismounted and handed Beth my reins, pulled a Maglite out of my saddlebags, then went to unlock the barn. I was so cold, my hands were shaking and I had a hell of a time getting the key in the lock. But I finally did and got the door open. Beth dismounted and we walked the horses in, out of the rain.

Being out of the wind helped, but we were both shaking with the cold and the horses weren't happy about it, either. I tethered Jesse to a hitching post and pointed for Beth to do the same. There wasn't going to be any electric light, except for our flashlights, so I found one of the reserve oil lamps, lit it and hung it from a peg on the rafter beam.

"T-t-take off their s-s-saddles and blankets," I stuttered to Beth, "while I get a f-f-fire going in the stove."

She didn't bother trying to answer. She just started taking off our gear and piling it by the door, then taking off the saddles and blankets, and putting them on the saddle racks mounted on the walls. In the meantime, I loaded up the stove from the woodbin and got a fire started. That wood was well dried and blazed up pretty quickly.

"Come on over here and warm up," I told Beth as I warmed my hands over the stove. "I'll get the horses in their stalls and then we can tackle the house. There won't be any electricity initially, so can you build a fire while I try to get the backup generator online?"

"Y-y-y-yes, Uncle Jim," she managed to chatter at me.

"Sweetheart, I'm trying to get you warm and dry as fast as I can," I told her.

"I kn-n-n-ow..." she told me. Then she walked over and instead of hogging the stove like I thought she would, she wrapped her soaking wet arms around my soaking wet body and gave me a wonderful hug. It really did warm me up a bit, although in retrospect, I think for non-thermal reasons. She, on the other hand, was shaking like she was going to come apart.

I got the horses in their stalls, put down hay and grain and manually pumped water for them, then went back to collect Beth. With saddlebags and bedrolls slung over our shoulders, we headed out into the deluge. Deluge is not an exaggeration. In the time we'd been in the barn, the rain and wind had picked up and it was now coming down in torrents. It was damned near raining horizontally.

Beth held my light while I got the door to the mudroom open and we stepped in. The mudroom was a long, narrow room that led to the laundry and kitchen. It was intended as a place to strip off muddy boots and clothes before heading into the rest of the cabin. I suppose I should stop calling it a cabin and start calling it a lodge, since that's mostly what it was, but some old habits die hard. I pumped up some water by hand so we could clean off our boots and we headed for the living room.

Actually, I suppose Great Room would be a better description these days, since what Mom and Dad intended it for was a big Commons room where everybody could gather and socialize. It had the big Heatilator fireplace, high ceiling and picture window vista of the mountains when it wasn't boarded up from the Winter. My Priority One right then was to get a huge fire going and get warmed up. Priority Two was going to be electricity.

Beth started putting tinder and smaller pieces of wood together in the fireplace and getting them lit while I pulled half a dozen split logs from the woodbin and gave them to her.

"You know the routine," I told her. "As it builds, feed these on. All of them. We're going to need the heat if I can't get the juice flowing."

"I'll bet you're pretty good at getting juice flowing," she commented under her breath, but I caught it anyway. I figured she must have meant it differently than I heard it, but at least she wasn't chattering with the cold. We were both going to catch pneumonia if we didn't get out of those wet clothes soon, but I needed to get the electricity on. So telling her to keep building the fire, I went back out to the mudroom.

The access to the generator was right out the back door and to the left. Dad had built the generator its own little shed, totally disconnected from the house because of noxious fumes. All the wiring, though, went back into a distribution panel in the house, in the same vestibule with the ladderwell to the electric well head. With the juice running, the electric well pump would keep the cistern filled and a secondary pump provided pressure to the water heater and the toilets and such. Without it, our only water would be hand-pumped and our only hot water would be heated in a fireplace or on a wood stove. I opened the door, stepped out into the nasty weather and got into the generator shed as fast as I could.

The generator was basically a diesel engine attached to a huge alternator. The theory was, open the fuel line from the tank (mounted at one end), wait a minute, turn the key to "Start" like you would a car, let it run a couple of minutes to warm up, then use the control panel to connect it to the house circuits. It only powered certain critical systems and heat and water were two of them. I opened the fuel line, waited the requisite time, flipped the key to "Start" and met the Jesus Factor.

The Jesus Factor, as explained by some aerospace tech friends of mine, is when you've designed and built the best missile possible, with backup systems and redundant backup systems, and you've thoroughly bench-tested each and every component to perfection and assembled it all with no parts left over, and you put the bird on the pad and push the button, and the bird don't fly -- then you've met the Jesus Factor... where everybody is standing around, going "Oh, Jesus!"

In my case, the engine turned over -- but wouldn't start. And I spent a good fifteen minutes going through every troubleshooting procedure I'd been taught about that generator, and still nothing. I finally had to give up before Beth found an Uncle Jim Popsicle in the morning.

I went back in to warm up and found that Beth had a really nice fire going. I went to one of the bedrooms and pulled a couple of blankets off the beds, walked back out and tossed her one.

"I hope you're not shy," I told her, "because we need to get out of these cold, wet clothes and the generator's fucked up. We're doing it the primitive way tonight."

"Oooh, doing it primitive," she smiled softly then stood up, walked to the closest bathroom and came back looking confused. "No towels?" she asked.

"Most everything is coming up with Eddie," I explained. "We've got some bed linens here that we leave on the mattresses over the winter, but that's about it. If you're lucky, some of your clothes survived the rain and the dunking in the river." Then she absolutely blew my mind.

"Okay," she said and dragged her saddlebags and bedroll over in front of the fire. That wasn't the mind-blowing part. She stripped. Bare. Naked. While my eyes popped out and I started to drool. Or at least, I figure that's what it must've looked like. She squatted down, turning to warm herself in front of the roaring fire, and went through her stuff. After everything made of cloth landed in the same pile, she looked up at me.

"Have you got any clothesline or something, Uncle Jim?" she asked. At least, I think that's what she said. "Everything -- and I mean everything -- is soaked. I need to hang this stuff up to dry." She stood up and I swear, cold, wet, tired or not, I damn near came in my pants. She was gorgeous.

This is mostly conjecture from observation, but I'd guess she had to be around 5'6", somewhere between 115-120 lbs. (and that's only because of her tits), probably a 36-24-34 or close and a C-cup, strawberry blonde hair to the middle of her back when it wasn't darker because it was soaking wet, with ice blue eyes and shaved. And in the firelight, her skin was perfect, her curves were perfect, her smile was perfect... you get the idea.

"And why are you still dressed?" she went on while I stood there like an idiot. "There's plenty of room over here by the fire to go through your stuff."

"The reason for the blankets..." I told her, as I started stripping off my wet clothes.

"Is to protect my modesty," she finished for me. "Don't sweat it. Mom told me you actually changed my diapers up here a few times. I figure you're used to my body."

"Don't bet on it," I muttered. "And besides," I added, "you look a lot different now, believe me."

She smiled and ran her hands over her waist and hips, patted her butt a couple of times and used her hands to jiggle her tits. "You like how I look?" she asked and I almost believed she was as ingenuous as she sounded. Almost.

Please, God, I prayed inside my head, strike me dead before the hormones take over...

"Jeez, you look pretty good for an old man," she told me as I slipped out of my briefs.

Too late. She was staring at my naked body with very evident interest, and I started to get hard.

God, you're not listening, I chastised Him. Banish these evil thoughts... really...

"Oh!" Beth suddenly corrected herself. "I didn't mean 'old man' like you're old or anything... I mean, it's just you're what? Around my Mom's age? And that probably isn't too shabby..."

The 'that' she was referring to was my erection, which not only didn't have the good sense to go down, it kept growing.

"Listen, Squirt," I told her, trying to clear my thoughts, "your mother is only 44 and that's not old by anybody's standards. She was pretty young when she married Tom. And I'm only 50, and I don't consider that anywhere near over-the-hill, even to a freshly minted eighteen-year-old." Thinking about her mother wasn't helping my hard-on problem any. Sherry was attractive and friendly and very liberal. So had Tom been. I had some really nice memories that kept crowding in. I needed a distraction.

"Oh, I'd agree," she told me with a grin. "You can't be over-the-hill. Or at least, probably not -- not with that bad boy." This was not helping.

"What do you mean 'probably'?" I asked as I squatted down to start assessing the damage to my stuff, and incidentally hiding the erection.

"Oh!..." That seemed to bring her up short. "Um... later?" she offered.

"Okay, later," I gave her the out. "There's heavy cord in the kitchen junk drawer. Light one of the oil lamps when you're in there and leave it set on low when you leave."

"Not a problem, Uncle Jim!" she told me with that bright smile, and turned to walk out of the room with that amazing body undulating its way away from me.

I don't have a problem with my sex life. My wife and I do fine with each other and we occasionally do fine with other friends, which is nobody's business but ours. But to paraphrase a popular ball cap, I'm married -- not dead. And I was rapidly developing an obsession with my niece. The bitch was, she seemed to be fueling it. Probably my imagination, but that's what it seemed like.

* * * * *

"Eddie's going to be worried about us," I pointed out to Beth. "Based on how fast and hard that storm hit, it'll be all over the news. We need to let him know we're okay. We also probably need a repair crew up here for the bridge as well as the power."

We were sitting on the king-sized mattress from the master bedroom, placed in front of the fire, with us semi-wrapped in blankets and contemplating what to do about food for the next few days.

I say 'semi-' because Beth kept letting her blanket slip. I had mine over my lap for a reason, and the reason kept exposing herself to me. I was becoming convinced it was intentional.

I'd tried to drag out a couple of twin bed mattresses, but Beth wouldn't let me.

"I don't feel like falling into the cracks," she told me, which didn't exactly make sense to me, but having been trained by my wife and daughter, I didn't argue. We just wrestled the big mattress out to the living room and rounded up a bunch of sheets and blankets and pillows to make a nest.

Our clothes were hanging up to dry in the functional equivalent of a spider web stretched all over the living room. Once mine were dry, I needed to go take care of the horses for the night, among other things. But in the meantime, here we sat.

As far as the food went, we could subsist on the MRE's Eddie had given us for a couple of days, but in actuality, until we got power we were going to have to cook on a wood stove or in the fireplace. We had just decided to rummage through the cans we'd brought along and check the pantry for leftovers from last year, when the question of how long the storm was going to last came up, and with it, the need to get hold of Eddie.

"If you don't mind a possible bit of aerobic exercise," I told her, "we can radio the Sheriff and have him pass it along. Or tell Eddie to contact us at a given time."

"Radio?" she asked, obviously confused.

"Yeah... CB radio, a bit modified. It's in that side table next to the fireplace."

"The side table?" she iterated.

"Yep. Normally runs off wall power, but it can run off battery. Since the power just went out, the backup battery is probably still charged. If not, we have an old military surplus hand-crank generator. The generator is in the storage closet off the master bedroom. Want me to get it out?"

"Sure..." she drawled, looking at me lasciviously. Or maybe I was just hoping that's what it was.

So I stood up and tried to walk out with the blanket strategically draped over me.

A blanket is not a towel. A blanket is orders of magnitude bigger. And heavier. And much more unwieldy. I gave up. I dropped the blanket and walked out with my tent pole sticking out in front of me, feigning sophistication. That lasted about as long as it took Beth to wolf-whistle.

I paused to look at her.

"Are you trying to seduce me?" I asked her.

"Just teasing, Uncle Jim," she told me with that impish smile. "I like it that you like me enough to react like that. It's a compliment."

"Reacting like this isn't because I like you," I told her. "Which I do. A lot. It's because I lust you. And that could be a problem." I turned and headed on out to retrieve the hand-cranked generator.

When I got back, Beth was bending over the radio, having pulled it out and set it on top of the table, and was carefully examining it. The fact that bent over, her bright pink labia were exposed stopped me in the doorway. I put the generator in front of me before I walked in.

She looked over her shoulder as I approached and smiled.

"Very funny," she said. "You don't have to pretend to be modest, Uncle Jim. Just cuz I'm curious, though, what modifications?"

"Normal CB is limited to 4 watts output," I explained. "Dad had a somewhat illegal additional amplifier put on it to boost it to 400 watts. He figured he'd be able to reach town no matter what the weather conditions. Which right now may very well pay off. We'll just use Channel 9 and try to reach the Sheriff's Department and tell them about the downed line. And we'll have them tell Eddie what's happened and that we're okay. I think they'll be okay with that."

I set down the generator. "So how's the battery?"

"Not connected to the charging unit, if that's what you're asking," she told me, holding up the disconnected cable. "And the meter is way down into the yellow, almost to red. I'm guessing it isn't charged much."

"Okay, then, your job is to sit with this between your legs and pretend you're at the gym, doing one of those 'crank the bicycle with your hands' exercises. There's a needle and a gauge and all you have to do is turn it fast enough to keep the needle in the middle of the gauge."

"So you want me to stroke something between my legs," she teased me.

"Yep." I figured I'd play along. Then I decided to be merciful. "Once you've cranked it enough, you've actually charged the battery and a little green light will come on. When it does, you can stop cranking. We'll have about thirty minutes of talk time off the battery and God knows how much listening time in standby. That should be enough to tell them what we need. If not, we crank-charge the battery again."

Beth moved from in front of the radio to the couch and pulled the generator to her, intentionally spreading her legs wide and giving me an amazing pussy shot while I hooked the generator to the CB's battery unit. Then she started cranking the thing and I got mesmerized by her breasts swinging from side to side as she did.

"Aren't you supposed to be calling somebody?" she asked, and I realized I'd been staring.

"Yep," I told her with a slightly embarrassed smile, "But I can wait until the battery's charged."

She just smiled and went back to swinging her tits in rhythm to her cranking. Eventually the light went green and the battery was fully charged.

I thumbed the mike and tried to raise the Sheriff's office, or anybody else listening on the standard emergency channel. The surprised response I got from the Sheriff's dispatcher was worth it.