Surviving When The Lights Went Out

"De... Jack..." he said, "No... that's not it at all. I was in lov..."

She shook her head.

"Oh for fuck's sake, now he says he was in love with me; just shoot him Jimmy then we won't have to listen to his bullshit."

"NO!" he gasped, the look on his face suggesting he realised it was an option for us now.

I decided I needed more information.

"So where did you get all the gear from?"

"Internet," he said his face extremely pale, "equipment vest from eBay, uniform and boots from an army surplus place back home."

"Where's that?" I said.

"Luton," he said with a sigh, and I wasn't sure if he felt that wasn't a place an injured SAS rapist should come from.

"Where did you get the rifle?"

"Found it!" he snapped back, far to quickly, "honest! Found it in the park, stuffed in a hedge, swear to God!" He winced again as his arm pained him, "I ran home with it, chucked it in the shed, then went upstairs and put on the gear and grabbed my Bergen. I... knew where my old neighbour kept the keys to his car and that he'd boasted it was full up with petrol... so... at four in the morning I loaded up all the food I could find and headed west, knew the gun would keep me safe see..."

"Well it's quite evident you really know how to operate it. Didn't the Royal Anglians Reserve show you how to use it?"

"Never got that far into the training," he said with his eyes screwed closed, "I went on my first training weekend and had an argument with one of the instructors, he was bang out of..."

"So you thought seeing as you couldn't hack the real army you'd invent your own."

"You was never in the army either!" he snapped back at me.

"Yeah, but I never pretended to either dicksplash!"

He looked so fucking angry now, there were two big bullet holes in his shoulder but the thought that the adrenaline rush might be helping him through did cross my mind.

"So what now?" I said, "what were your plans -- going to live the 'vagrant gypsy life' in my Dad's house and the woods until the lights went back on, then go back to Mum's house?"

"My Mum died," he said looking far too sorrowful and just totally overacted.

"She wouldn't have been pleased to know you lost your virginity raping a girl would she?" said Jack.

He face went into some very strange shapes.

"I wasn't a virgin!" he said angrily.

"Really?" said Jack with a grin, "you needed a fucking signpost to where my vagina was and you would have carried on shagging my leg like fucking Labrador if you hadn't moved at the right time. You slipped inside me and came the second you pushed in. Fucking... Virgin!" She sneered, her anger at his assault of her still so very real.

"I wasn't a fucking virgin!" he snapped back again, as if that was more important than all of his criminal activities up to and including rape and the two bullet wounds in his shoulder.

"No, course you weren't," she bent slightly, "I was only ever an amateur Lesbian mate," she hissed, "but I've slept with more woman than you have."

"You fucking bitch!" he snarled and the sneaky bastard swung his uninjured leg catching her on her bare ankle with his heavy combat boot and knocking her feet from under her and down to the ground. With his right arm he snatched the foregrip of the falling rifle, dragging it from her surprised hands and dropping it to grab the pistol grip again.

With gritted teeth he pointed it at her and I watched in a flash of horror as he snatched at the trigger.

"Nooooooo!" I snarled throwing myself down and on to him expecting the burst of automatic fire that would do for both of us...

But there was just a dull click of trigger going back against nothing and he gnashed his teeth as he snatched at it again and again. I rolled on top him fighting against his one hand on his gun with my one hand pressing it into his chest, Dad's P226 in the other and pushing uselessly down and into the gravel, completely off balance and knowing I couldn't let go of the SA80.

I tried to work out in my head what had gone wrong with his gun as we rolled and fought, his adrenaline rush definitely taking him through his agony as I tried to both elbow and head butt the raw wound in his naked shoulder.

Then it came to me; the twat really didn't know how to shoot the thing and while he had shown off and tried to scare us by flicking the change lever from single shot to full auto, or flicking the safety catch back and forth, he'd never actually cocked the thing to put a round in the chamber let alone fired it.

I dropped Dad's pistol and brought that fist down on the shoulder wound, eliciting a howl from him and splattering me with his blood, then I flipped back the bolt which put a round into the chamber of the gun pinched between us with a gritty, grinding sound. I had now to just push down on the body of the weapon raising myself up and off of him, then press down on his trigger finger.

I did and it sent a burst of bullets under his chin and out of the top of his head. It was noisy, messy but short. With a throwback to cadets at school I lifted the SA80 from his dead fingers, removed the magazine and cocked it to clear the round in the chamber.

I lay the gun on the ground behind me. The struggle was over and I climbed up and grabbed Jack, pulling her to safety in my arms.

She cried for a good few minutes; the shock of his raping her, the gunshots she took for him shooting me, the fight and the noise, the blood, the second burst of gunshots and the smoke slowly drifting up and blowing away.

She had started to shiver so I held her tighter.

She looked down at the man that had raped her,

"Is he dead?"

"Yeah," I said looking down at the mess, "live people generally have more of their brains on the inside." I snarled down at the man that had terrorised us for the last three days, his life blood running out of the strange rectangle of mess at the top of his head, his blank expressionless face unmarked but for the neat entry wounds under his chin.

I wrapped both arms around her and we just held each other, still in shock but glad it was over.

I took her back inside and into the bathroom, pulling her T-shirt over her head and insisting she get in the shower.

Although it went against every CSI episode I'd ever seen I very gently washed her down getting soaked at the same time, confident that justice had been well and truly served and no one would be coming to investigate the noise or a missing person from Luton in the next month or six weeks.

I put in the plug and ran her a bath, stroking her face, washing her back, kissing her, paying every loving attention to her that I could to calm her and get that dead twat out of her head and her subconscious.

"Thank you Jimmy," she said kissing me.

"Tea?" It couldn't make it any worse after all.

"I'd love one," she said and lay back in the tub.

I switched on the kettle then stepped back out to the yard and the dead body there, the big pool of his blood looking like a giant red thought-bubble above him.

I had another task. As Jack lay back in the hot purifying water sipping her red bush tea I checked around the croft for anything he might have brought with him. I packed the dead twat in the first of several large sheets of plastic I'd bought some weeks before in case I needed to repair any leaking roofs, sealing him in with black tape and collected the head-mush and bone fragments into a plastic bag. I hosed his remaining blood off of the slate slabbed yard and into the drains.

Leaving him behind one of the sheds and out of sight for the night I went back indoors stripping off my wet clothes then the sheets from our bed then remaking it, loading all into the washing machine before I added more hot water to the bath, let out some cold, then climbed in with my beautiful girl and we cuddled very nicely for an hour as I pondered on a way to get away with this killing, however justified it may have been and the unlicensed pistol I'd shot him with first.

We had some dinner and hardly spoke just grinning at each other that it was all over, then went to bed and she slept through in my arms while I spent half the night working on my plan.

The next morning I told Jack about my plan, hardly fool-proof but I felt a better than average chance of success as things stood at the moment.

As the sun set that evening I put on some plastic gloves then his bergen rucksack stuffed with his stinking sleeping bag, topped off with his equipment vest and stinking combat jacket, more importantly a supply of food and water, and for twenty eight almost straight hours I carried and dragged him on a jerry-rigged sled to some woods on the outskirts of a small town some thirty odd miles away from us by road at least that me and Dad had regularly hiked to years before.

On arrival I put together a small but rather convincing military bivouac just as my Dad had showed me when I was kid when we went there and slept rough using the same trees to hang the tarp from next to our original scraped-out fire pit, and just how he described it in his survival manual.

With some more agricultural plastic sheeting borrowed from a nearby silage pile it looked so cosy I even thought of spending my third night in it. Instead I just made myself a mug of tea.

I started a small fire with some adjacent dry branches, onto which went the initial bloodstained plastic sheet he'd been wrapped in, the tree-branch and string sled I'd created to transport him once I was five miles from our place, the surgical gloves I'd worn for the last few days, my blood spattered T-shirt and finally his copies of my Dad's books. It roared quite nicely and burned down quickly and with little smoke and once the books were no more than black dust I left it to itself throwing on some more branches.

It had been a tough carry but I became more confident that I really would get away with this. After all, if you never counted the two bullet holes in his shoulder (minus the 9mm slugs I'd removed from him with almost surgical care), the half-dozen 5.56mm bullets that had torn into his throat and through his head did support my set-up. The pieces of bone and brain that I'd scraped into a bag were arranged just as I'd found them initially and modelled on the pictures on my phone.

Like he'd said to Jack before he raped her there were lots of bodies around that needed dealing with and our wounded, hurt country wouldn't be wanting to be too long about it. He would be taken for a sad, hungry, lonely soldier miles from home and any support, losing his morale and deciding to shoot himself. This was emphasised by my laying his camp out with a supply of empty tins and food packages that I'd eaten on my journey but had kept, then spread around his fire.

The final and almost Dickensian misery was added to our saddened hero by his empty water bottle, his final used tea bag (Earl Grey of course), his empty mug by his right hand, the blackened mess tin he'd made it in still sat on the hexamine cooker I'd found in his kit, just awaiting the Valkyries to whisk him off to Valhalla - albeit the special Walter Mitty one full of SAS Marine sniper Para commandos.

My last task was to shoot a burst of rounds over him to get the noise for someone to hear, some bullets in the local woodland and more importantly six empty shiny brass cartridge cases to the right side of him in his plastic sheet basha he'd lived in until his food and water ran out. With his rucksack at his feet, his jacket and equipment vest as his pillow and SA80 A3 (wiped clean of all but his finger prints) on his chest, laid out like a Bronze Age warrior in his barrow.

I stood there in the woods, the pockets of my Barbour coat still with enough food to get me home and a Camelbak half-full of water, and made my final check. It was pretty bloody good and now it was time to go, back to my girlfriend.

I walked out checking and removing any tracks my tiny sled had left, and once convinced it hadn't I headed for the main road and thought about how my homeward journey might be made a bit easier.

To Jack's great joy she started her period the morning of my return, and she was delighted that not only had I returned alive and well, I was riding her motorbike having found it exactly where she had described and had started pushing it, a discarded washing machine pipe tied around one of the handlebars.

I never needed my siphon as the unlocked shed of the cricket club a mile uphill had some petrol cans in it for the mowers, trimmers and chainsaws every one has out here and I helped myself, putting the empty cans back of course.

It was rather smoky but just enough to get me to the petrol station that I'd used in better days which was now guarded by the military who were kind enough to fill up the bubble tank on the off-road style Kawasaki to enable the lost boy to get back to his girlfriend in a tenth of the time. The squaddies laughed long and loud when I bought two dozen condoms as well as lots of Coca-Cola, Cadbury's chocolate and Mars bars.

"You are keen to get home aren't you laddie!" said the Scottish Royal Logistics Corps Staff Sergeant.

"More than you'll ever know sarge." I said opening the panniers, "don't suppose you boys like tinned fish do you?"

Despite me having slept rough for a night while I carried and dragged a dead man across half of the county, Jack grabbed me by the collar of my Barbour and pulled me from her bike kissing and hugging me as I stalled the engine trying to get off of it.

"Jack, I'm filthy," I said.

She kissed me again,

"I know," she said, "you can have a shower, then you can fuck me."

"What?"

"I've come on Jimmy," she said pulling me towards the house and dragging my Barbour off of my shoulders, "which means I can't be or can't get pregnant, not today at least! Your sister gave me lots of comes while I was on and it's quite lovely, trust me."

We left a trail of clothes between the kitchen and bathroom and pretty soon we were stood in the shower with me holding her up against the wall while I pushed myself up and into her, both of us gasping and encouraging the other as the warm water poured down over us.

It was the most amazing orgasm, and as I lowered Jack's feet back down to the ground she was beaming with pleasure.

"Not quite what I imagined our first fuck was going to be like Jimmy but WOW!"

"Yeah!" I grinned at her, "not complaining either!"

"I'll want more tonight Jimmy," she kissed me again, "Now finish your shower and I'll cook you something lovely."

She stepped out of the bath and I couldn't resist a slight slap on that lovely bare arse of hers. She turned and grinned,

"Ooooh Jimmy!"

Jack had found just the right piece of bacon and she grilled large slices of belly rashers and it was just the best, she even added some of the maple syrup she'd found in the store room.

We went to bed that night and made love again, no mess from her menstruation as we were careful.

It was just how I'd imagined it would be with her; simple sexy missionary, hugging and kissing our way through some very sensual moments. As I drew closer to my orgasm I felt her tremble beneath me.

"Oh Jimmy," she gasped, "Jimmy please keep going, Jimmy... I'm gonna come, OH JIM, YES!"

I joined her quite quickly and finished off inside her, kissing and cuddling until she wriggled from beneath me and ran to the bathroom.

She was using the last of her pads she'd brought with her and some left in the bathroom and had already fashioned some emergency sanitary towels from some old tea towels she'd found in the cleaning cupboard and could wash, then dry them, hoping that quite soon she could get to a shop and buy some disposable ones.

I slept almost all of the next day waking just in time to hear the radio announce that fuel supplies had arrived, most of the country's power supply was live and the army was running things without their guns while the police had came out of hiding.

The food supplies turned up next and in no time the forces of law and order, and the bits and pieces of the establishment such as the doctors, nurses and hospitals were up and back to their work. Before anyone thought it even remotely possible the schools had re-opened and the children were back being taught again.

It was incredible.

The damaged infrastructure, mostly shops, schools, offices etc. were repaired or made good as much as resources allowed and people tried to get back to normality, as much of 'normal' that hadn't been stolen, burnt and generally fucked over in the violent maelstrom by those savages with more teeth than brain cells. The biggest and loudest complaint had been about getting the mobile phones, TV and internet running again.

The new temporary county governors did point out that it would have been a lot quicker if people hadn't attacked the phone masts and electrical sub-stations for some strange reason as part of their hunger protests. They also planned and plotted and one night the army struck and the Fiefmeisters and their supporting gangs were rounded up and locked in tented camps, they only had to shoot a few internees to get the message out that the law was back.

The morning after the announcement we drove to the local town and went shopping for the first time buying the feminine hygiene products that Jack had been trying to make herself, along with cheese for me and breakfast cereal for her of course. When we got home she had two bowls. The food was more expensive of course but we could afford it.

I'd emptied the tiny safe I'd found and as well as the bank books and bonds there was at least one hundred thousand pounds in twenties and fifties, more blood money I guessed and something that Dad was probably hoping to get around explaining to me until I took him home to Mum and his death surrounded by his family.

Jack sat at our kitchen table giggling at first then getting quieter and quieter as the piles of £1000's became £10,000's as we ran out of space. We put it all back safely of course, keeping some out for 'shopping'.

Dad's P226 was cleaned of my finger prints and oiled and put back into the safe and behind a false back I created for it, and while we thought about guns Jack said that she really needed to take her shotgun back as it would still be on her employers gun licence and we wouldn't be able to just lie about how we had it. Any arguments could be challenged by telling the 'food and accommodation in exchange for sex' tale.

We took it back to the country estate in my car, and the very embarrassed lord of the manor looked like shit never making eye contact with her, eventually apologising for his appalling behaviour and asking if she could ever forgive him. I guessed this would have been followed up with 'and please don't report me to the police'.

She looked him up and down,

"No, I don't think I ever will, thanks to you I was pushed out into that bloody apocalypse because you wanted a few shags," she said at the top of her voice, "Sooooo, no I won't, and if you ever come with ten yards of me ever again I'll shoot you where you stand you heartless, creepy, pervy bastard." She thrust the shotgun back at him with a smile.

"Jacinda!" said a bright voice from behind him, "Darling girl! Who's going to shoot who?"

Jack smiled back at the elder lady of the manor,

"I said I would shoot Mister Toby if the pervert bastard ever came within ten feet of me again!"

"It's nothing mother, honestly!" said the blustery much younger Lord.

"Not another one Tobias!" she snorted at her son.

"Mother..."

She looked disappointed and angry at the same time,

"Did he throw you out, then offer to let you stay if he could sleep with you?"

"Yeah," said Jack to the real power in this earldom.

"That looks like one of the estate guns," she said reaching for it.

"I think so," said Jack handing it across to her. It was empty, we made sure of that and the tiny bolt handle needed to load it was in her pocket.