Prickly Pairs

I considered. "Yeah, that sounds reasonable. But maybe you should take Alice. Why should Carol go with you?"

"Because it was my idea, and anyway, I haven't ridden in the Sequoia yet." My wife sounded determined.

Alice looked at Carol, then at me. "Oh, let them go." I thought maybe she was annoyed at having to listen to their banal business blather and entertainment chatter.

I was hesitant, but seemed outvoted. "Okay, let me find the part number. Get a factory part, not one made in China. And leave the VHF on, just in case."

We rigged a tarp shelter to the Land Cruiser's roof rack and unfolded a table and chairs. We would be comfortable while we waited.

I walked down to the wash and onto the packed sand, testing it. It seemed firm enough; water had stopped flowing an hour before. I climbed back up. Alice and I hugged and kissed our mates before they drove off.

"You know what that's really about, don't you?" Alice faced me.

"No, tell me." I really had no warning.

"They want time together to fuck."

I guess I showed a classic open-mouthed DUH? sort of double-take.

"What, cheating on us? My Carol? Your Ted?" I shook my head.

"That's what this weekend is all about. They planned it. Not the damage, obviously, but they knew they'd find an excuse to get away together, go someplace alone." Alice sounded sad but convinced.

"Uh, what makes you think they planned anything?"

"Ted's a little sloppy with his emails and passwords and computer security in general. He sends stuff to the KILL folder and empties his recycle bin, even defrags -- but doesn't do any disc scrubs, so they're all trivial to recover."

Besides being great with circuits, Alice was also a DOS, Windows, and *nix guru. She knew this shit. And she knew about security and encryption.

"Some little things he did and said made me suspicious. Cracking his laptop was child's-play. I'll bet there are traces on Carol's Vaio also. Want to take a look?"

My guts were grumbling now, and not from hunger. Did I want to see proof of my lifelong love's infidelity? Did I want to know I had been blindsided?

"Not really. But I guess we'd better. Let's see if she left it in the car."

Carol had taken her purse, but not her laptop carrier. I fired it up. Alice took over and played it like the maestra she was.

"What's her usual password?"

"I think she mainly uses her birthdate: 20-10-65"

"Okay, let's see... ah yes, right into her mail. Hmmm, nothing odd there. Let me run a recovery on her mail the last couple weeks..." tip-tap-tip-tap "...aha. There are a bunch to and from Teddy, but they're scrambled with a different password."

Alice tried a few pass-cracking schemes.

"Maybe my birthday?" I suggested.

"Wait, I have an idea." She keyed again and whooped quietly. "Got it. Guess what? She used Teddy's birthdate."

She scrolled the decrypted messaged on the screen. There is was, in glowing LCD characters: plots, plans, love notes. It looked like they deliberately seduced each other. And they had been fucking for a few weeks at least.

There were also references to a 'project' that might involve some legal trouble. But none of the emails contained any project details.

"What's this project stuff?" Alice murmured, almost to herself. "Let me scan her MY-DOCS folder tree..." tip-tap-tip-tap "...no, nothing there, nothing apparent anyway. Where else could that stuff be?" She traversed the File Manager window. "Oh yeah, the memory stick. I wonder what's on that?"

A little more keying, and another "AHA! Now the Teddy password again... yeah!" And then, "Oh shit."

I crowded beside Alice, our heads almost colliding. We read it together: Plans to defraud Ted's customers and Carol's clients. Plans to empty their accounts into offshore banks. Plans for them to follow the money out of the USA. Plans to just abandon their families.

Alice shook her head. "I knew Teddy had some schemes, but I never expected anything like THIS. I never found any of this on his laptop. I bet they both keep their sensitive stuff on memory sticks -- nothing on their servers or local hard drives. If Carol had pulled the stick, we'd never have known."

SHe looked at me. "As long as they kept their computers offline when they had memory sticks inserted, and pulled the sticks before connecting, then no search would ever find this stuff. The ultimate high-security data transfer is just to hand someone a stick."

I let paranoia nibble at me. "They can't think they can get away with this, not like 1-2-3. No way. They must have some blame-shifting plan. What's their backdoor, their scapegoat? Who gets shafted? Are we in danger?"

Alice's eyes bored into mine. "You think they'll try to burn us?"

"Wouldn't you?" I asked. Yes, paranoia strikes deep.

She turned back to the keyboard. "I'll check the later files... uh huh, here we are..." tip-tap-tip-tap "...fuck. It's a setup." She fingered the screen. "They'll run all the stolen money through our personal accounts and then fake their disappearance, but with traces showing that WE ran the scams and offed our innocent spouses when they got suspicious. They go to Rio. We go to prison. Cute."

My head spun. This was not rocket science. It was worse.

Do you want to know what I was thinking and feeling right then? A swirl of inchoate explosions in my mind. A froth of emotions rippling through me. A loud THIS CANNOT BE HAPPENING echoing in the empty corridors of my hopes. Churning guts, almost to the point of nausea. Confusion. Pain.

I looked at Alice. "Like you asked earlier, what now?"

"Well, I think our happy married lives are over, kaput. What can we do? Take this to the cops? If Ted and Carol are busted, they'll spend every penny we have jointly on lawyers. We'll be broke and our kids... fuck, I don't know what. I don't have family around here like you guys. No support system." She looked the saddest I had ever seen her. I touched her chin.

"We're engineers. Let's structure the problem and the possibilities, right?"

She nodded. I went on.

"Given: our mates are lost to us. They plan to royally fuck us over. No matter what else we do, we're divorcing. And what else? We could turn them in, and like you said, they'd break us. We could tell them we know their schemes, and just kick them out -- and then they could fight for child custody, property division, all sorts of shit, and break us anyway. Could we shut down their businesses and break THEM instead? Could we...??"

I left the thought unspoken but Alice read my face.

"No, not violence. No physical attacks. That's not even a last resort."

I sighed. I could never physically hurt Carol anyway, regardless of what she planned or did. I loved her too much. I saw similar feelings wash across Alice's mouth, cheeks, and eyes. I sighed again.

But the image remained in my brain like a death-pron filmstrip: Alice and I waiting upslope. The Sequoia climbing back up the wash. We push a rockpile. It descends, crushing the vehicle and our cheating mates. Such a tragedy. But no, we cannot do that.

I tried to get logical again. "Okay, what are our immediate options? Do we blow the whistle on them now or wait till we're back home? Do we try to get a message out, maybe to LunaDyne, something that will cover us, to show we know what's going on?" I felt I was grasping at straws.

Alice brightened. "That's a start! Can we see a cell tower? We can call our office phones. It's a holiday weekend so they'll go straight to voicemail. We can say what we've learned. Then, if anything happens to us, there'll be a trail to follow; and if there are any busts, we'll have this documented. And I've got extra memory sticks. I'll copy everything and we'll have even more evidence."

"Good ideas," I said. "But we still have to get away safely from here. So, we should play dumb when they get back. Everything's normal, for now. We'll be our usual selves. But yeah, we should make pre-emptive calls. You start copying all the emails and notes. I'll try to find a good signal path."

I checked the topo map. I had a good idea of our location, and the map showed a straight line to a cell tower from a nearby notch, just a couple hundred feet above us.

"I see a good prospect," I called to Alice as I scrambled up the slope.

I held my Nokia phone like a water-dowser's willow wand, searching for flow. No bars. I climbed higher. No bars. I reached the notch. Nope. Maybe up a side of the notch, I thought. I climbed a rockpile.

The stack of granite boulders rose maybe twenty-five feet above the slope's surface. Many of the boulders were ten feet across. Prickly pear cacti poked from some junctures. I climbed carefully to the top and pulled the phone from my pocket. One bar! "I have signal," I yelled.

Then I yelled something wordless. When I turned, the rockpile shifted. As in, it moved. As in, the big fucking stack of big fucking rocks I had climbed decided to go elsewhere. As in, downwards. And me with them.

It is a very eerie feeling. Everything is silent. You are on top of the world.

Then the world goes away, and you are falling. And the world falls with you. Not little grains of world -- big fucking CHUNKS of world, most of them much larger than you, all of them ready-willing-and-able to thoroughly pound you into instant strawberry pulp.

I danced down that rockpile with boulders as my dancing partners. Ouch.

I expected to hear... nothing, just oblivion. But that did not happen. When sound started up again, I heard the crashing around me. I did not hear my ankle snap. I did hear myself mutter, "Oh shit."

Do you believe in miracles? Before then, I did not, not really. After that moment... I was alive, and awake, and unbruised, lying on a rough sandy hill, and totally undamaged except for a numbly broken ankle. A miracle.

Alice ran up the slope to where I lay.

"Bobby, oh Bobby," she sobbed. She threw herself down next to me. "Bobby, please be alive, please don't be dead, oh Bobby, Bobby..."

I shifted my gaze from the closest peak to her tear-stained face.

"I'm not dead, Alice. I'm not even badly hurt. But my ankle is broken. That's all, I think. Calm down, Alice."

Alice clung to me, lying in the damp sand, pressing against me, kissing my face and sobbing.

"Oh fuck, Bobby, I heard that rumble, and I looked up, and you were falling with all those huge rocks... I thought for sure you were dead! You're my best friend, Bobby. I can't lose you. Oh shit, Bobby..."

Alice pulled herself together and sat up. She stood and wiped the sand from her jean shorts and the open overshirt she wore over her soggy tee. She was still braless; stiff nipples stood out under the wet skin-clutching fabric.

"You can't stay here. I'll get you down to the Land Cruiser. Maybe... yes, if you can get up on one foot, I'll support you..."

We slowly hobbled down the slope to the car, with me bouncing on my good foot, with my arm around Alice's shoulders, step by stumbling step. We had a couple close calls when I nearly fell into prickly-pear cactus patches.

I eased into a folding chair. Alice lifted my feet into another chair so my legs were elevated as I leaned back. It was almost a restful position.

"You can't stay there, either. I'll get camp set up and get you into a tent. You need to lay down out of the sun and weather till they get back."

Alice bustled with the gear and soon had me inside, sheltered, my feet up on air pillows. My head was at the tent door. She sat on the ground beside me.

"You're in luck. Besides not being crushed to a pulp, I mean. But I remember enough First Aid from my Girl Scout days. Your feet are elevated, you're not in shock, skin isn't clammy, pupils aren't constricted. Just pain."

She poked inside a medical bag. "Okay, here are some painkillers. Better not wash them down with tequila." I swallowed the pills, chased with Gatorade. "But now we can only wait. Teddy was a medic in the Army. He'll know what to do with you. Remember, we play dumb. Don't let them get suspicious."

We waited, and chatted, and plotted, and waited.

The sun passed its zenith. It sure felt like summer. Ted and Carol had been gone for five hours. Okay, I could understand taking an hour each way to and from Desert Center. But an extra three hours? I wondered what excuses they would make.

We heard crackling sounds on the VHF every now and then, but never a clear signal. Alice tried calling on several channels, but got no response; the rocky canyons blocked radio waves all too well. It was like we were in an electronic dead zone with no EMF in or out.

We finally heard the rumble of an engine. The Sequoia climbed the wash, then the slope, and parked near the Land Cruiser.

Ted and Carol looked smudged and unkempt when they emerged.

"Hey guys, sorry it took so long. We had to drag some tree trunks and debris out of the trails. The winch only did so much -- we had to strong-arm it a lot," Ted explained. Ah, so THAT was the excuse!

"Hey Bobby," my lovely wife asked, "why are you in the tent? You okay?"

"I had a little accident," I said. "Fell off a rockpile. Just damn clumsy of me. I know my ankle is broken. I think that's all."

Carol looked shocked. She ran to the tent and knelt beside me.

"Oh god, Bobby, are you okay?" She held my head while asking me that dumb question. If I was okay, I would not be lying here, I thought silently.

"I've had better days, but I think I'm still fairly good." I smiled faintly.

Ted switched into miliary medic mode and knelt beside me.

"Broken, huh? Let me check you out. Alice, would you get my aid kit from the back? Yeah, that's right. Umm Carol, you'll have to let go of his head." He looked at my pupils, felt my skin and skull and neck, and took my pulse and blood pressure. "Your vitals look good."

He crawled into the tent with me and gently prodded my leg.

"Does that hurt? Does that?"

"OUCH!!"

"Okay, that does indeed hurt. Yup, it's broken, all right. I can apply a quick fix." He pulled an air splint from his kit, wrapped it around my swollen ankle, and inflated it.

"You're on painkillers?" I grunted yes. "That's about all I can do right now. I can shoot you an dose of Demerol if it really hurts. Nothing looks life-threatening, but you need to go in for X-rays before too long. And I want to be sure you don't go into shock."

"The question is," Carol said to Ted, "what to do now? Do you try to tow us out of here? Or just drive Bob to a doctor, or what?"

I cut in. "Look, I can't walk, but I can crawl, and the rest of me still works. You can slide me under the Land Cruiser and I can bolt-in the new U-joint. Then... I don't know, I guess arrange stuff in the back so I can lay down with my foot raised and stabilized. Alice, you're a good driver -- better than Carol in the back country, right?"

Carol nodded. "I'll admit it -- I'm no good on rough roads."

"Okay then," Ted said. "Alice and I will drive. Now, get the Land Cruiser fixed and ready. The sooner we get you out of here, the better." Scattered raindrops fell around us. "Yes, sooner is definitely better than later."

The three helped me slide under the chassis. I quickly replaced the U-joint. I was surprised when Carol told Ted and Alice to take a walk for a few minutes, and crawled in beside me, and held me. On my un-injured side. Whew.

"Oh Bobby, are you okay? Actually? No bullshit?" She looked and sounded distraught. Did this woman really intend to betray me, like I read in her notes and emails? I knew she could act and manipulate like a champ -- was she faking now? She sure felt genuine.

"Like I said, I've been better. I'll admit to being worried when those boulders moved out from under me."

"Oh Bobby, I couldn't stand to lose you, I just couldn't."

Carol slid down my body, unfastened my belt and fly, and pulled my jeans and briefs away from my waist, just far enough. She looked up into my eyes. "I would do anything for you. Anything!" She licked my cock. Just like she had licked Ted's cock, according to their emails.

I watched as my wife nuzzled my groin and then lovingly swallowed me. Carol had always given world-class blowjobs. This was one of her finest. Slow and tender, alternating with deep-throating and tender licking, with her hands skillfully working my rigid ramrod and burning balls.

The outcome was inevitable and fairly fast. I groaned and spewed what felt like a liter of hot semen into Carol's mouth. Her lips and fingers milked me for what seemed like an hour. Fuck, that was intense!

Carol looked at me again. Her eyes radiated a golden glow I had never seen before, like firelight. She opened her mouth to display a full load of milky, gooey cum. She smiled and swallowed ostentatiously. "Yummy," she murmured.

"I want you nice and relaxed when we drive out of here. I can't stand to see you hurting." Damn, she was good! An Oscar-quality performance!

Rain fell more heavily as they carefully dragged me from under the car and then loaded me inside. The passenger seat was tilted forward and half the rear had been cleared out and padded with unrolled sleeping bags. I was laid on my back, head-forward, feet up on a bag stuffed with pillows. Ted stick-splinted my leg to keep it immobilized, so I would not bang my ankle around.

"All ready?" Carol's voice came on the VHF radio.

I keyed my mic. "Looks like we're good to go here."

"Okay, let's roll."

Ted took the lead. Alice stayed back about twenty yards, or more on steeper grades. The rain was now a dense dark downpour.

"I can't even see the Sequoia. This sucks big-time," Alice said. I could not see the surrounding terrain, only the unforgiving sky, but I had to agree.

I keyed the mic again. "Can you guys see anything up there? How does the track look?"

Carol's voice crackled on the airwaves. "We're just around the bend in front of you. I think we're coming to a side wash, and..."

The radio cut off. I heard a roaring, and a crash, and more roaring.

"STOP!!" I yelled. Alice slowed from a crawl to a standstill.

I keyed the mic again. "Carol, are you there? Carol? Answer me!"

Nothing. Alice stomped the parking brake and jumped out the door. She was back eight seconds later, looking frantic. "Hold on!" she yelled. I tightly gripped the seatback under me while Alice skooted the 4x4 backward, then up a side track to a rocky slab tilted nose-up at about thirty degrees.

"What...??" I tried to ask. My voice was drowned by more roaring behind us.

Alice was crying, great deep weeping, and hanging onto the steering wheel with a death-grip. She looked up into the rearview mirror, then slumped and continued crying.

"They're gone," she wailed. "The water. The flash flood. The washes behind and below us are just scoured clean. They're gone." Her slender body was wracked with sobs. "Oh fuck, what'll I tell the kids?"

Gone? Ted and Carol are gone? Oh fuck. Our kids. Carol's folks. They're nearby; my folks are gone, and Alice and Ted's are across the country. And Ted and Carol had employees...

Wait, why am I saying "they had"? Why past tense? Do I assume they're dead?

"Alice, how sure are you...??"

"Try the VHF again. Maybe they managed to find a safe hideout. Give it a try, c'mon." She was grasping for hope.

I keyed the radio. Nothing. And again. And again. And still nothing.

The storm cell passed by, the rain stopped, and the sky cleared. That is all I could see from my supine position.

"Wait here. Don't go anywhere," Alice needlessly instructed me. She locked the parking brake and hopped outside into the cool air, her door left open. The key in the ignition beeped constantly during the minutes she was gone.

"The track below looks clear," she told me when she returned. "I'll try getting us down. I'll stop everywhere that seems safe and look for the Sequoia again. You can keep trying the radio."