Okay, I'll admit it. I'm one of those crazy ass preppers, a mountain man armed to the teeth, ready to hole up in my well-stocked, armored and armed fortress home in the advent of civilization's demise. I will also admit there's a chance it's all for naught, that I'm just another loose screw with a finger tip grip on reality. Sure, maybe the world just swims along for the next few decades and the worst that happens is we elect a couple of dipshit do-gooders or batshit crazy ego-driven senile old men to the most powerful offices in the world and nothing bad happens at all. The planet finds equilibrium, warms, cools, oceans rise, fall, whatever, and we all get to surf internet porn forever after. But maybe not. Maybe not. And that's what I'm prepped for. The Not factor.
Besides, I love the paraphernalia, the guns, the trucks, the gear, and I love what I'm working for - my survival.
Anyway, as you may have noticed, nothing bad has happened lately, batshits and dipshits notwithstanding. Life has been moving along at that same, slow, relentless boring pace it has for most of my time on this planet, the six months of my second wife being the most obvious exception.
I'm thirty five and mean and gruff and happy as shit. I live at and run a junk yard outside of town and have a dog who eats whatever I sic him on. But things went awry just recently. Badly.
Blame my neighbor. He's a drug lord. Really. The guy has a compound that must make Gitmo look like a school playground - triple fencing, guard towers, a small army of guards and dogs, countless sensors, cameras, helicopters. I don't doubt he's got small tactical nukes in there too. Paranoid is too tame a word to describe his level of anxiety. He's taken it three steps beyond basic paranoia.
So, it was inevitable somebody would come along and try to kill him, right? Like they used to say, being paranoid doesn't mean somebody's not out to get you. Now, the killers who showed up to do that, they couldn't just, like, storm his bastion. The U.S. Marine Corp would have a hard time taking down my neighbor's fortress.
Not really. The fucking Marines would turn him into a slice of crispy toast in about a half an hour. But the caravan of black SUV's full of ex-soldiers that arrived that day with body armor and a small armory of weapons knew enough that they didn't immediately launch an attack on Fort Drug Money. They sailed into my yard, right next door. They had a plan.
I saw them come in and I have enough of my own inbred paranoia to conclude that these boys weren't there looking for a transmission for a '64 Impala. Now the thing is, Dara was there, too. That made the situation about ten times worse. She's only nineteen and a stiff wind would launch her into the stratosphere. I mean, she must weigh all of 120 pounds with 20 pounds of weights strapped to her.
She's my other neighbor's kid, or something. I don't know exactly where she lives. I only know Killah won't sic on her. He becomes a wee little happy puppy around her. Well, I am open to the public and she sort of began taking advantage of that fact in the afternoons of that long hot summer. She apparently didn't want to go home to whatever trailer she lived in with her chain smoking, crack addicted, toothless mom, or that's how I pictured her old lady, anyway.
Dara just wandered in one day, sat down on one of the stools by the front counter and made herself at home. Being gruff and mean to her didn't work. She'd apparently been around bad attitudes her whole life. I guess my place was a quiet, safe place, had a cute dog, a coke machine and so, she hung around.
I'd actually known Dara since she was a kid. But I lost touch with her, and reality, when I joined up after 9/11 and went to Iraq. When I did, I shut the yard down. Paid the taxes and bills from afar and went off to kill a few bad guys over there on the other side of the planet. Gotta love your country. Or love killing. I met both types, though most loved both.
When I returned home another broken hero and reopened the yard, Dara had grown up. Well her mind did. Her body looked like it stopped at thirteen.
So, that day when I looked out the window of the yard office and see six shiny black SUVs cruise in between the piles of junk and skid to a dusty stop, I know its not somebody coming to deliver pizza. Before the dust settled I grabbed Dara by the hand and we dropped through the hidden door into my man cave. See, I dug out a cave behind the office with my backhoe, lined it and topped it with steel, covered it back over with dirt and made it about as comfortable as you can make a hole in the ground with steel walls and roof. I know, the bunker mentality sounds crazy, right? Well, that is, until it's not.
I had installed a periscope, the top of which was hidden inside an anonymous pile of junk, alongside my air shaft, and I quickly began scanning the action up there. Sure enough those bad boys immediately deployed around my yard, closed the front gates, setting up a perimeter and posting guards here and there. Then they shot my dog. They coulda had my whole fucking yard and wouldn't have raised much ire in me. But they shot my motherfuckin' dog. More on that later.
A couple of guys that looked like the big boss bad boys made their way to the yard office and barged in, ready to dispose of any pesky old man who might be vegetating behind the cash register.
I don't imagine it ever really settled well with them that they never found the yard man. And of course it would never occur to them that I was six feet beneath their jackboots living in 12 by 12 subterranean comfort.
As I watched them make themselves at home on my property I realized that they were setting themselves up for a long haul. Fifth wheelers, a chow truck, a bus full of workers. When they brought in the big equipment trucks I finally surmised that they were doing exactly what I would do if I was in charge of taking down a ridiculously well protected target. I'd dig a tunnel, el Chapo style. Right under the middle of his house. Break through his living room floor and pop up to say hello. 9 mm hellos.
Well shit. That meant Dara and I were in for a long god damn wait. But, the good news was that we preppers prep for this kind of shit going down. I had plenty of food, canned and freeze dried, and water enough to last several months at least. But the bad news was that killing time eating MRE's, canned goods and tasteless camping food, pacing a 12 by 12 cell and playing Parchesi with a skinny blonde popsicle who's never had to think much beyond what color panties to wear any given day, well, might strain the fabric of my sanity, which was always hanging by a few threads anyway.
The first day we just sort of hunkered down, listened, peeked out the periscope, and hoped they would leave soon. No cell service down there, of course. We had a goddamn radio that barely got FM and AM, but had no way to contact the outside world. I hadn't got around to installing a CB or short wave. The second day was a repeat of the first, but now we were pacing a lot more. The third day dawned and I saw some of the bad boys had started overseeing a work crew of coolies. They were starting to dig.
Fuck. Stuck. Now I'm not what you would call a genius when it comes to interpersonal dynamics, ask either of my ex wives. But I swear Dara started acting like she was my third wife. It was like she somehow thought we'd set up house together down there, like we were some old couple as comfortable around each other as two old shoes in a shoebox.
This became especially clear that third night. See, I only have one bed in my bunker. Which I kindly gave up to Dara, making a bedroll thing for myself on the floor.
Sometime in the middle of that third night I had a dream that I was sticking my dick inside a fat cube of warm butter, then squeezing it and stroking it all over my hard cock.
As I ejaculated into the butter I awoke and found myself balls deep inside of Dara. She was laying on my side, spooned into me, quietly rocking back and forth on my shaft, like she was fucking a wall dildo or something, or like we'd been doing this kind of comfy coitus for the last twenty years of marital bliss.
I pulled out of her, stood up, hit the night light, and would have demanded she leave that very moment if there weren't a slew of assassins up there.
"What the hell are you doing?" I said through gritted teeth.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Dalton," she said, looking downcast, "It just sort of happened. You got so big and hard, my butt was right there next to it, it fit so nicely. I know you've had a vasectomy, so..."
"So you just saddled up and rode yourself to happiness?"
"You didn't seem to mind."
She had a point there.
She was really sorry. "I didn't mean to rape you."
"Oh now, Dara," I said, "I don't think that counts as rape."
"Really?" That seemed to brighten her up a bit. "Can I still sleep next to you?"
I assured her that sleeping with her butt at my crotch might indeed lead to sexual assault. Besides, I like the women who sleep butt to dick with me to be much older, more experienced, and about fifty pounds heavier.
But the next morning when I awoke I was sporting a massive boner. And despite a big breakfast, coffee and an hour or so with the weights, the big bear wouldn't go back down. He'd tasted from the honeypot and wanted more, even if I didn't.
"You seem to have a problem," Dara kind of smirked, "a big one."
"Yeah, well, it's my, um, my problem."
"Evidently."
"Look, we better lay out some ground rules here, Dara. About respect and personal space and...and..."
"Erections?"
"Fuck," I said, pure exasperation.
"Whatever," she said, sort of under her breath.
"Look, Dara. We may be here awhile. Let's just...keep cool-headed."
"Looks like your other head has something hotter in mind."
"Stop. Stop right now. I will not be disrespected."