Talon thought about his situation and felt like just leaving his erection alone to subside by itself. He was that unhappy.
Right now and for the last couple of years, he'd felt like the biggest fool.
He was only twenty-two and he considered himself a full-blown failure at life. Left at the gates one day by someone who didn't want him, he'd been raised into an old cult and he was all that was left now. The other two youngest had been living alone with him for only a few days after the last priest had perished, telling them just to run and save themselves the day four years before when a small flock of demons had landed on the runway and stood looking at them for a minute. They ran and made it to the old bomb shelter, locking the door to sit weeping with their backs to the wall while outside, their priest walked calmly toward his death.
The creatures had spent two days at the blast door, trying to get to them before giving it up and moving on. The boys had waited another day, listening at the door for any sound before they opened up and walked out. All that they found of the older man had been his torn and blood-caked clothing, a few cracked bones, and a little hair.
It had happened on the worst day possible, the high day when the idol was to be pulled out into the sunshine and started. The three had tried to go on with the ceremony, but things seemed to have been fated to carry bad luck after that. Thomas was to do the honors of the start and he did get it done, lighting both turbines for the few minutes that it was allowed since there was hardly any fuel anymore.
Talon had genuflected and prayed in the propwash as he was supposed to, but Jerry did the unthinkable then. The boy had been talking of the pointlessness of it all but no one had taken him seriously in the days leading up to the high day ceremonies and Talon guessed that the strain of the loss of the old man was the clincher. The talk had gotten worse while they were locked inside the shelter. Talon wasn't the bullying kind but he finally stopped the incessant muttering by threatening to kick the snot out of Jerry again if he didn't think that he could shut his mouth. Things were bad enough without having to listen to his whining.
The incident in question had been a surprise to everyone – most especially to Talon himself. It had been Jerry who had needled and picked on Talon for years, being a lot larger and heavier. With his back to the wall, something had happened inside of Talon – and that was the only way that he had of describing it.
He'd almost killed the big goof before three priests had pulled him off with difficulty two years earlier. It had happened in front of everyone and Talon had supposed that it was one of the underlying causes that he'd snapped – the way that no one ever stood up for him. Jerry couldn't so much as look at any other boy sideways, but Talon had always been fair game until that day.
It brought the desired result in that Jerry shut up then, and it also earned him the hard stares from Thomas. Oddly enough, there was something inside Talon which told him that if the demons were successful somehow in getting in, he'd live through it and the thought just twisted his brain, so he discarded it quickly and tried to think of something else.
He still remembered noticing it when Jerry got to his feet and walked forward. Thomas was at the controls and he tried to shut everything off, but that wasn't something which could be done instantly and the prop blades could continue to windmill for many minutes even so. He watched in horror as Jerry walked straight into them and was killed instantly.
After that, Thomas just sat in the cockpit and cried. When he got a little past it, he just climbed down and walked away. Talon still couldn't fathom it. He'd walked along with Thomas, trying to talk to him, but Thomas wouldn't reply and just walked toward the town some miles distant. Talon had never seen him since.
Talon had buried Jerry alone and he'd spent the rest of the day trying to wash the blood and gore from the holy artifact before he pulled it back inside of the temple with the tractor and closed the doors after seeing that the prop blades were undamaged.
He hadn't known what to do then, and he still admitted that he didn't – but over time, he thought about things and realized that the whole thing, the entire religion had been based on foolishness. He could see that now from the vantage point of a man, but at the time, he'd still almost been a kid, brought up from infancy in the temple which worshipped an old flying machine as though it was the extension of a deity's will.
Knowing now that the temple had been nothing more than a building used to house flying machines from a greater age of man's distant past, Talon had used his brain and searched a lot more carefully, once he'd divested himself of the 'holy' garbage. From his present viewpoint, the artifact was no more holy than last week's dirty laundry, though it was a whole lot more valuable to him even so.
He still needed to eat and it was a hard business until he found a weapons lock-up three years ago. After finding and figuring out how to work an oxy-acetylene torch which still functioned, he'd cut the locking chain, pulled a rifle out of a rack full of them and with some ammunition, he'd taught himself to hunt so that he could eat a little more regularly.
He'd moved into this guard shack, since it was easier to keep warm, having a woodstove in it left over from God knows when and more importantly, it could be locked-down tightly at night and no one could see in through the bullet-proof polycarbonate windows after he'd closed the venetian blinds. He lived alone there, not wanting very much to try to live in the town. He supposed that what they'd been taught about the place was likely as steeped in horseshit as anything else that he'd been taught, but what the fuck, you know?
It was then that Talon discovered that living alone carried its own curses – like being alone, for one. Now that he'd been removed from the community of living with others, he'd also discovered his own curse and blessing in that he found, after a great deal of introspection, that he wasn't like a lot of the men that he'd lived with. Growing up as he had, his little discoveries about himself – the ones which related to his own sexuality, decided that they didn't necessarily like being as suppressed as they had been until then.
He found that, even though he lived out here all by himself, he didn't really fit in with anyone.
The year after the demise of the cult, a young woman had shown up one day and tried to live there. They'd just sort of fallen in together. Talon had finally known the love of a woman for a time. But that came with several costs to him as well.
For one thing, she wasn't inexperienced and he was. For another, he'd been far too trusting and open with his heart and had just assumed that he could say – or ask for things that he wanted just as she'd done. The trouble with that was that she'd then been able to point out just how 'weird' Talon was whenever she needed ammunition during their not-infrequent squabbles.
He didn't know any better at the time, but it was about the last thing that he needed to hear. Well for one thing, he wasn't a big guy, being only about 5'-8" tall. For another thing, Talon only weighed about one-fifty and though he was a little bit muscular and trim, for the most part, he was just thin-looking. Lonnie made a point of telling him that she liked bigger men – and not only in the size of their bodies, either.
Talon had never given it much thought before then, but using a steel rule from the maintenance section much later, he'd found that all that he'd been given to um, work with had been about five and a half inches at full erection. According to Lonnie, that left him critically short by about another inch and a half at least in her book and she was quite vocal rather often that she liked them a lot thicker as well.
The remark – the first time that he'd heard it – had caused him to look at what he had to think about it, not understanding the way that things can be said hurtfully even by someone that one might care for a lot and he concluded that while Lonnie might have wanted him to be fatter there, he'd have looked a little ludicrous with a dick any fatter than what he had. He wasn't a woman, so he didn't know what one of them would need or want, but on him, ... he couldn't imagine it much thicker somehow.
The time that she'd done some things to him in bed after sharing a bottle of wine that she'd been carrying on her travels, they'd both gotten snockered and the things that she'd done after their long bath together had blown his mind and ever since then, it had been what he'd wanted.
