When the Lights Went Out

NOTE: Fair warning - you will have to read through a long stretch of story development getting to the sex. If you feel you need to get right to the meat of things, this story may not be for you.

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Megan watched the entrance to the shelter carefully for over 3 hours, watching for signs of life, waiting to see if anyone returned, making sure it was safe to explore. She hadn't stayed alive over the last 3 years by being impetuous. As her father always told her, slow and steady won the race.

While watching for inhabitants in the bunker, she let her mind wander back to when the lights and power just died; the lights went out, computers failed to work even on emergency backup power, and appliances had been destroyed as the power system overloaded and then crashed. When the family went out to start up the families SUV, it refused to start.

She still wasn't sure what caused the power loss to happen, her father had said something about EMP, Electro Magnetic Pulse, or something like that. Megan and her family, led by her father, left the City of Indianapolis where they had lived all her life. Her dad told the family that the cities would become death traps. But it was out on the road where her mom and dad met their demise.

Ever since the lights went out, every day had been a battle to survive. Over the years, Megan had stooped so low as to dine on rats, mice, woodworms, and a host of other less than desirable food items. The secret to rats and mice was to cook them well done to kill off the diseases they carried.

One of the best treats was when she discovered a log with carpenter ants. She thought they tasted like star burst fruit chews. The nest had been huge and she feasted on the larger than normal ants for days.

Early on, some her staples had been tree bark, cat tail roots, and earthworms. Unfortunately, over the first year, the cat tail roots had been picked over pretty badly.

Megan remembered back to the early days when someone might shoot you over a can of peas. Megan hated canned peas, she would starve before she ate them. She remembered coming across a stash of can goods out behind an old farm house and she chowed down on the beets, corn, green beans, and especially the canned hominy. In addition, the farm family had squirreled away cans of fruit: peaches, pears, cherry filling, and fruit cocktail. Megan ate everything but the canned peas over the course of three weeks.

She had been on the verge of starvation when she stumbled upon the freshly dug up earth. On a hunch, she dug down to see why someone had been digging in the middle of the brush. She fully expected to find a body, but found the food instead. That's when Megan decided to look for caches where ever she traveled.

Initially, after the lights went off, people started dying off in droves as the city people's supplies of food dwindled almost overnight. Her dad said something about stores having only 3 days' worth of food and 'stuff' available due to a just in time delivery system. Only due to the looting, the food in the stores only lasted hours, not days. The majority of city dwellers that remained in their urban homes died off within the first 6 months.

Initially, people started to hunt, but soon, cows, chickens, pigs, horses, and finally wildlife were hunted to near extinction. The animals left learned to lay low or die. The only place where people and animals continued to thrive was low population areas like Montana, Wyoming, and Alaska. High population states like California, Texas and New York were the first to die off. Los Angeles and New York City were particularly gruesome as the food ran out.

Rural inhabitants fared much better; until the roving bands of armed gangs started roaming the country sides, stripping away any food left, killing anybody or anything in their path. To protect themselves, people started to ban together, forming small fiefdoms, where the meanest, toughest, most ruthless people lorded over their surfs. Only then could the gangs be fought and driven away.

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After sitting and watching for 6 hours give or take, her only way to tell time was the sun. Megan figured it was safe to make her move. She was going to go in and see if there was anything left inside of any use. She figured that it probably had already been overrun by a gang and plundered, but they normally left something behind that would be useful. After exploring the main bunker, she would stay in the area for a week or so looking for hidden hoards of food and supplies.

Megan left her 30/30 and her heavy backpack in the brush a good 100 yards from the concrete entrance to the hidden shelter. The rifle had saved her ass a number of occasions and she actually used it to shoot a deer the previous fall. Their population was starting to recover after the great hunt. One of the things she thanked heaven for was her dad teaching her how to shoot.

Megan stealthily approached the entrance to the shelter. This one had been one of the best she had seen. She only discovered its entrance by almost falling into it. That would have been a deadly mistake if the den would have been inhabited. Usually, if the survivors were still alive, they came out shooting if invaded by an unknown person or persons.

The bunker was well concealed and located in a place with access to the basics: A food growing area; a creek for water; and a large forest for firewood. This part of Southern Missouri had been loaded with survivalist types, who liked to keep their survival rations and equipment in hidden caches out and away from their shelters. Judging by the air vents she had scoped out while waiting to see if someone was still was still occupying it, she knew that this underground shelter must be huge.

There was evidence of a garden from the previous growing season. It was March and just about time for it to be planted again, given the southern Missouri growing season. Megan had drifted into the area because it seemed to be relatively free of fiefdoms and gangs. It was kind of like a large Sherwood Forest. But, mostly, it was the food caches that kept her in the area.

The cold season really sucked, without an accumulation of food one could easily starve. Fortunately, during the last fall, she hazarded upon a huge cache about 30 miles north of her current location. After moving the supplies a good 5 miles away from the discovery point, in a direction she picked at random, she built a shelter to winter over in. She still had half the contents of the cache squirreled away, available to fall back on if her summer foraging didn't fare so well.

Megan had ghosted up to the entrance and stopped again so she could cautiously listen for sounds of other living entities. What she heard was absolutely nothing. The absence of noise had her spooked. Normally, the woods chittered away both day and night. Quiet was a sign that something was in the area, something that scared the native fauna into silence. The only sound she could hear was a gentle breeze in the branches of the trees that were just starting to bud out with their spring leaves.

Megan attributed the silence to her presence. She thought she had been as quiet as a mole in its hole, but she knew that even a snap of a twig could shut down the normal cacophony that was standard inside a forest. She couldn't remember breaking a single branch, but she had been concentrating on the shelter, it might have gone unnoticed as she concentrated on the target.

Megan quietly slipped down the cement stairs, going lower and lower underground. One of the more unusual aspects of this particular shelter was it was built in an area that deep enough soil to bury it completely at ground level. This area of the Ozarks was notorious for having bed rock within a foot or two of the surface and most survival shelters were built at least halfway out of the ground, looking more like mounds.

The girl noticed that the door to the shelter looked to be used recently, the hinges weren't rusted up like many of the bolt holes she explored in the past. This made her really nervous. The garden, the hinges, the clear pathway leading from the entrance all told her that this place had been occupied within the last year. The dead silence was the only indicator telling her that the shelter was unoccupied.

Megan pushed and the door easily swung open. She thanked her luck stars that it was well lubricated and didn't squeak, announcing her like a herald in a royal court. The dark haired girl was all about stealth; she credited silence and obscurity as keeping her alive since losing her family.

Megan took a silent deep breath and stepped quickly and quietly into the interior of the bunker. She was surprised by the ambient light inside, it was just enough where she could make out the form of the bolt holes contents. To her amazement, there was a lot of stuff within several steps from where she was standing. She took another step forward so she could start to explore the underground space, and to see if she what treasures she could uncover. Maybe there might even be a bow saw!

Just as she was going to take yet another step forward, she heard a loud click in her right ear, and about jumped out of her skin when a man's voice said, "FREEZE! You move an inch and I'm going to paint the wall with your brains!" As careful as Megan had been, she hadn't been careful enough.

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She glanced to the right without turning her head more than an inch or two, she could barely make out the silhouette of a man in her peripheral vision. Indeed, it looked like he was holding a handgun to her head. The man asked, demanded, her name, "Who are you!"

Megan squeaked out, "I'm Megan Riordan." She heard the man relax hearing her young voice. That might be the last mistake the man made. Megan had a large hunting knife she knew how to use, and she had a Judge; a large 44 colt revolver that she had used more than once to protect herself. With the Judge, unless the enemy had a dense thick barrier to hide behind, the powerful 44 caliber bullet would penetrate what they hid behind, easily killing them. People had been amazed that such a slender young woman could fire such a monster.

The man switched on a light, she marveled that he had electricity to run the small lighting system. She was initially blinded by the quick change in lighting, but since it wasn't that bright she quickly recovered.

The man commanded her to turn towards him slowly with her hands outstretched. She was told if she made any threatening move, she would be shot. Megan grimaced, this guy was careful. She expected him to have moved in to frisk her, which she would have stuck him with her knife or pulled out the Judge and shot him. No such luck.

She finally got a good look at the man. He looked to be in his mid-30s, and he had clean auburn curly hair, a bushy beard, and seemed to be well fed. What surprised her the most was him being clean; the man actually smelled of soap!

Megan considered herself lucky, really. Having been caught dead to rights like she had, there should have been a greater than even chance that the man would have shot first and asked questions of her corpse. The fact she was still alive attested to the luck she had over the last 3 years.

The man asked, "How old are you, Megan Riordan?"

Megan shrugged, "I'm 18."

The man shook his head in disbelief, "You don't look much older than 15 or 16."

Megan grinned, trying to woo the man into her confidence. She responded, "Well, I would show you my driver's license if I had one. They stopped issuing them about the time I was getting old enough to have one."

The man looked at her svelte frame and her greasy stringy hair. He simple said, "You stink."

She grinned and responded, "You don't. Where the hell did you find soap?"

He smiled, "I was smart enough to stock up a nice hoard of it before the shit hit the fan. I've got all sorts of things that make life reasonably enjoyable. My only regret is that I didn't have a warehouse full of toilet paper somewhere."

"Oh my goodness," Megan exclaimed, "wouldn't that be nice!"

The man's face changed, suddenly he was all business again. "Okay, I want you to slowly strip off your clothes. Keep your hands and fingers visible. Don't make any sudden moves and you just might stay alive over the next 5 minutes."

Alarm bells went off in Megan's head. She stilled remembered vividly being raped by the stranger in Illinois. The man who shot and killed her two brothers. It had been about 3 or 4 months after her parents were gunned down. The man who raped her over two years earlier had ordered her to strip off her clothes, just like the man inside the shelter was doing now.

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When rapist demanded she remover her things, her two brothers charged the evil man to protect Megan from whatever the man holding the pistol had in mind. First he put a round through Eric's chest, and then he turned and put another through Michael's forehead. Megan almost went insane in the months following, after watching her brothers be slaughtered up close. It was bad enough watching her mom and dad get gunned down, but they had been 50 yards away, while she and her brothers watch from concealment.

The man grinned maliciously at Megan after shooting both of her brothers dead, he demanded, "Off with your clothes or you'll be joining your companions!"

She endured it the humiliation of the man's cock up inside her body; that was until she was able to quietly slip her knife from her discarded clothing. She had been pretending to enjoy the man's unwelcome attention, lulling him into complacency. So when she slipped the shiny steel knife blade between the man's ribs and up into his heart, it came as a complete surprise. She was bathed in blood before she could get the heavy man off of her, and his still hard penis out of her vagina. How a dead man could stay hard was beyond her understanding.

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Ending the flashback, Megan figured this man was going to try and rape her too. She figured if he did, it wouldn't be the first time, and probably not the last. She had already been raped twice before. She managed to kill both her attackers, either during the act like the first time, or after the attacker went to sleep, like the second. As careful as the man in the bunker was being, he probably was going to succeed with rape number 3. She figured as long as he left her alive after taking his pleasure on her, she would come out a winner. She smiled to herself, at least this rapist isn't bad looking.

Megan knew that she only had seconds to start complying with is commands or she would die. The man didn't look like he was too keen on having her dilly dally around. She reached up and unbuttoned her farmer's coat, one of those brown thick jackets that was impervious to the wind. She held it out and asked, "Okay, where do you want me to put it."

He nodded to an area off to her left. He told her to toss it out of reach. Megan frowned, there went her knife. She had it inside a sheath she sewed to the inside liner of the coat. She bent down slowly and started to untie her boots. She looked up at the man watching her and said, "Do you mind if I sit down so I can pull these off."

The man, who was watching her like a hawk, said, "As long as you move slow and keep your hands in view." So the girl sat down and slowly pulled her boots off. She debated on trying to pull out the shank she had hidden inside the liner of her boot, but she decided that he would we watching for such a move and he would shoot her. So she tossed first one and then the other boot over with her jacket.

She stood back up, and she started to unbutton her flannel shirt. She took her time, making sure she didn't spook the gunman. As she unbuttoned the garment, she was thinking about ways to get to the Judge she had tucked in a belt holster just over the upper part of her butt crack. She quickly concluded that the man was holding what appeared to be a 1911 colt 45 semi-automatic pistol. He could get off at least 3 rounds before she had the Judge out of its holster.

She finally resigned herself that she wasn't going to be able to counter attack. Her last line of defense, her hope of staying alive, was that he would find her lithe teenage body desirable, and that he would keep her around as a sex toy.

She thought to herself, 'Hey, as long as he keeps me fed, I wouldn't mind putting out. He's not a bad looking guy, I mean, look at those shoulders!' She hadn't had consensual sex since she wintered over, the winter before last, with the teenager she met named Jason. Jason headed off north once the weather turned warm and she thought the picking would be better in the south. So the two of them parted ways.

With her shirt off, Megan started to unbutton her thick denim jeans. They weren't the skinny jeans from her blissful early high school days. These were oversized and totally utilitarian. They protected her from injury as well as keeping her warm. The only thing she could think of better would have been stout leather pants. Megan pulled the jeans and her long john bottoms down her slender legs. She had been careful and was able to conceal the Judge from the man's view.

The man screwed up his face and said, "Whew, if anything, that makes you stink more! Don't you ever bathe?"

Megan scowled at her captor, "Well, it's not like I was expecting company. What the hell do you expect? I don't have a house with running hot water or anything!"

The man grinned and said, "Hey, the creek works just great. Try it sometime!"

Megan looked up at the hunk of a man with her large wide blue eyes and asked, "So, is that how you stay nice and clean. Soap and a cold ass creek? Haven't you heard of hyperthermia? We're just barely coming out of winter. I would rather stink and stay warm than be clean and die from exposure."

Then she decided that she wasn't going to be shot in the next few minutes as long as she behaved herself, she asked, "What's your name anyway?"

The man smiled and said, "Brandon. Brandon Selfridge."

Pulling her insulated underwear top over her head, she exposed the small Fairborn stiletto she had strapped to her side. It was her last line of defense during a rape. She could endure a rape as long as she had an opportunity to rid herself of the assailant in the process. The knife was in a sheath that was sewn to her bra upside down, making it easy for her to reach under her shirt, pull it out, and for her to stick into her attacker. She had to give Brandon credit, he was really smart having her disrobe. It rendered her harmless.

Brandon told her, "Don't move! Put your hands over your head!" When she complied, he reached over and pulled the Fairborn out of its sheath.

Finally, Megan was standing in front of the man in nothing but her bra and panties. The garments were relative clean in stark contrast to the rest of Megan's clothes, and her body. Megan hated to be wearing dirty underwear. She had a couple of bras and over a half dozen pairs of panties in her backpack. She kept them washed regularly so she could change them daily.

She just stood in front of the man in her undies. He shook his head, "Everything! Take them off?"

Megan protested, "What am I going to hide in my underwear?" Then she taunted Brandon and asked, "So, what are you going to do once I'm naked, you a pervert?"

Brandon chuckled, "Well, I thought after I check all your clothing for weapons, I would accompany you down to the creek so you could take a bath. There isn't any way I'm going to have you staying around here with you smelling like a wild boar."

Megan was taken back, the man was suggesting that he was going to let her stay. She might even consider not killing him when the opportunity arose. She would have to play it by ear, maybe she accidently stumbled into a good thing here.