Tracey and Buttercup hurriedly jumped up: Tracey pulling on her blouse and checking that she still had her bag with her precious passport inside. One thing was sure, a noise like that did not bode well. Buttercup gathered herself together more quickly than her lover, but nothing could disguise the look of real alarm on her face.
“What the fuck do we do?” asked Tracey. “And where’s Sharon?”
“It’s best not to worry about her,” Buttercup replied, wiping traces of Sharon’s vaginal juices from her lips. “We’re in real enough trouble ourselves.”
“Do you think she’s been killed? Oh fuck! What do we do?”
“We try and get as far away as we can.”
“What the fuck do you mean?”
Buttercup gazed into Tracey’s face and frowned. “This is a war zone. People get killed. We could get killed. We’ve got to get out of here!”
Tracey nodded, and followed Buttercup as she ran ahead through the thick wood. They heard more explosions in the distance. More roaring jets. And a sound which Tracey identified as gun fire, but not gun fire like in the vids, but uncoordinated spasms of it from unidentifiable directions. Sometimes a short spark, sometimes a loud bang, and sometimes a crackle. Between these sounds were moments of peculiar uneasy quiet, spasmodically broken by fresh and unpredictable noises. Each crack, bang and crackle sent a spasm down on her spine, and despite the heat of the day, she found that she was shivering.
They had no idea where they were running, but they knew it had to be in the shadows of the trees. However, the wood was not large enough for them to avoid coming to its edge after not too long. They had no idea where they were in relation to where they’d come, but in the near distance they could see the smouldering ruins of the factory where they had spent the night. It was clearly not a place to return to. It had collapsed from its previous dilapidation to little more than piles of smoking ruins around which were prostrate naked figures and the silhouettes of other darker figures running around.
“What’s going on?” whispered Tracey from behind the thick bush where she and Buttercup were sheltering.
“Soldiers killing each other. Soldiers killing other people. Lots of things.”
“It doesn’t look very organised,” whispered Tracey who’d always imagined warfare to be somehow more like the array of plastic soldiers she’d seen in model shops. Or even like the set pieces she’d seen on some movies. It was difficult in the smoke and the distance to make any sense of anything that was happening. Amongst the dark figures running around were also some jeeps who were dashing about, raising even more dust, associated with cracks of rifle and machine gun fire. One jeep appeared to spin out of control, ploughed over some pale bodies, collided with a wall and almost instantly exploded into a ball of fire.
“Quick!” whispered Buttercup. “This may be our only chance!”
“You what?” replied Tracey in a similarly low voice, but nonetheless took her cue from Buttercup and ran out of the protective shelter of the wood, through the orange and black smoke which was billowing their way and into the field. What about mines? she vocalised to herself, but nonetheless kept running. As they ran, Tracey knew not where, there were more figures to be seen running chaotically in the distance. She could make out that some of them were nude, although their skins were strangely dark and shadowed, but she was sure she caught glimpses of some strange protuberances from just above their legs. Shit! They’ve got hard-ons! What a fucking waste! She tripped on the ground, catching her knee on a rock, but she ignored the pain, more desperate to keep up with Buttercup, who continued racing onwards ahead of her, than to administer to her pain. Fuck! She was out of shape. You’d’ve thought all that fucking would have made her a bit fitter, but … Fuck!
She then saw some more shadows around a parked jeep to which they were running. It was almost as much a shock to realise that they were wearing clothes than that they were there at all. She almost felt like pointing this out to Buttercup. If she could ever catch up with her. Look! Normal people! Wearing clothes. All over them, Their crotch as well as their chest. Like back home! After leaving home, she’d almost forgotten that clothes existed. However, Buttercup was running in a quite different direction now, away from these figures, so Tracey followed. And the crackle of gun fire, both frighteningly close and thankfully too far away to hit them, reminded her of the true extremity of their situation.
Then she saw Buttercup had halted in a crater ahead of them, which was still slightly smouldering and in which could be seen some small traces of metal which she guessed was probably shrapnel. Or possibly something else. Puffing and wheezing she caught up with her lover and was about to greet her, to reassure her that she was well, that she hadn’t been shot, but was forcibly prevented from this by Buttercup forcibly grabbing her arm and urgently indicating with a finger to the lips that she should be quiet. Tracey concurred with a foolish smile, and lay beside Buttercup in the rocky recesses of the crater.
She then became gradually aware why she should be so quiet. Ahead of them was a group of about five fully clothed soldiers, with helmets on their heads, bags and belts hanging from their khaki uniforms and massive boots which noisily crunched on the dry earth. They were carrying in their arms some very formidable machine guns which occasionally they mopped the ground with in a rapid succession of automatic gunfire. They had come across the naked figure of another man who was crawling on his front on the ground, still with an erect penis from below him. Tracey could now make out that this figure although naked was somehow covered in splodges of dark brown and green over his tanned body. The soldiers moved towards him, with their guns pointed towards him but not firing.
And then they surrounded him. Tracey waited in anticipation for more machine gun fire, which would kill off the already wounded figure, but instead she was astonished to see one of the soldiers pull down his trousers while two others held the figure to the ground. What the fuck! And then, covered by the cocked guns of the remaining two soldiers, and despite the wounded soldier’s struggles and cries she could make out that the trouserless soldier was bobbing his arse up and down on the back of the wounded soldier. She squeezed Buttercup’s hand. Although she’d often seen buggery while in Throb, it had never been as obviously non-consensual as this. Nor was this first encounter the last of the wounded soldier’s suffering, as each soldier took it in turns to fuck the enemy soldier, while taking turns in standing guard and holding him down. And then finally, after an agony of waiting and the horror of the violence, the soldiers finished, buttoned up their baggy khaki trousers and with a rapid burst of gunfire extinguished what little was left of the wounded soldier’s misery.
And then they moved on, joking and clearly refreshed, plodding through the dry dead field, leaving the remains of the upturned carcass in several pieces scattered over the rocks and earth, relieved of both his rifle and his life. Even Buttercup found it difficult to disguise her disgust.