Road to Santa Barbara (2/3)

Her first mistake was failing to keep an eye on the floor ahead of her. Having waited until the raider had done most of a circuit of the room and arrived at the workbench, Ellie shot a wary glance at the shutter. He'd opened it wider than before, but she could tell it was still far enough down that the rest of his group would be blind to much of anything that went on behind it, and while he had his back turned to her, she figured she wasn't likely to get a better shot at him than this. Sure, she could have just stayed behind the boxes and held her breath, played the part of the frightened mouse cowering in the corner until the alley cats had had their fill of sniffing about and gone back on their way again. But no, the thought of that was... no, she couldn't ever play that part again. Didn't fit her, suffocating just to try and slip it on, even if only for a few short minutes.

Ellie swept her hair back over her shoulder, slid a shiv out of her pocket and crept forward. She was a practiced hand at this, even made it most of the way before the problems started. She really should have noticed the slivers of broken glass on the ground ahead of her, but her attention was already split too many ways—the shutter and the muttering shadows however many feet beyond it, the lone raider in front of her—and when she trod on it and cracked a couple of the shards cleanly into a half dozen smaller pieces each, her shoulders sank and her stomach dropped, and she found herself looking up just in time to see the raider starting and turning jerkily about to find the maker of the noise. There was a pause of about three seconds, both of them staring at each other with a combination of exasperation, disbelief, and slowly dawning resgination. Ellie struck first, flipped the shiv into a backhanded grip, launched herself to her feet and aimed the point of the blade for the cartilage at the join of his shoulder. The steel pricked at the seam where the kevlar met his sleeve, but wholly failed to penetrate. She shifted its position, tried to drive it vertically up through the seam, but by then his hand was already closing over hers while a guttural growl rose up out of his throat.

His knuckles clamped down over hers, drew a gasp from her, then twisted her hand back on itself and drove the shiv from her grip. She stumbled sideways, and in an instant he was swiping at her with her own blade, the sharp edge whistling through the air toward her. Ellie found her balance again, backstepped away, but he sent another swipe at her, driving at her midriff maybe, her stomach, the delicate cradle of organs pooling under her navel, but all he found was the front of her jeans. The shiv-tip caught, but not on her bare skin; it hooked instead around the copper button holding the front of her jeans together. In the end, the smallest application of pressure was more than it could handle, and with a loud ping it tore clean off and shot into a distant corner. Ellie winced, glancing down as the jeans slackened at her hips, and slithered neatly down her slender legs. They gathered in a bunch of rumpled denim at her shins, revealing the careworn pair of white-pink panties underneath. A snort bubbled up from the raider, and despite herself she blushed. Something faintly ridiculous in it all—him taking her weapon, him trying to kill her and managing to shuck her pants down in the process, the little flash of girliness beneath them coming into stark relief. Something faintly ridiculous, something faintly... pleasant. Can't just be a cold-veined killer with your pants around your knees; can't just be an empty shell when you're wearing stupid underwear. There was a sharp intake of breath as the raider took the sight of her in, and in a burst of instinct she saw her shot and took it with a driving forwards jab of her knee. She aimed for his belly and found it, the hard jut of her kneecap cutting into the shallow softness there. "Not so funny now, is it?" she hissed into his ear. He grunted, brought the blade up to stab at her again, but she caught him by the wrist. They struggled, the shiv moving back and forth in the air between them, closer to one face and farther from another, again and again as their muscles worked and strained and popped. She pressed her index into one of his veins, drew a yelp from him, **** him to drop it.

For a weightless instant, she thought she had the best of him, but then his hand flailed downward and she felt him tugging at the waistband of her panties, stretching the delicate elastic, her wiry brown thatch poking up from underneath it. With a burst of effort, Ellie surged forward and pushed her shoulder into hin, shoving him hard back into the workbench behind him. A wrench on the wall lay in wait for his the base of his skull and met it with a fierceness as he fell heavily against it. His hand jerked sharply back with the rest of him; there was a loud crack, followed by a trickle of crimson. He didn't get back up. At the same time, she heard a rude, pointed tearing. In her peripheral view, she noted something sheer and delicate fluttering to the ground, a flash of white and banded pink. None of that subtle weight on her hips, none of the play of breathable fabric over the intimate places. A ripple of gooseflesh ran across the surface of her skin as she looked down at the ruined scrap of cotton that had been her undies. She stooped to hitch her pants back up, but the button was lost and she had no earthly way of finding it, and without it they kept sagging their way back down off her hips. In this state, they'd only be a trip hazard... or worse. They had to go, no two ways about it. Part of her wanted to scream, but swallowed the urge and yanked a wad of her t-shirt down over the fuzzy patch of foliage between the sensitive juncture at her thighs and cinching it in place by squatting and pinching them together. Swearing irritably under her breath, she waddled awkwardly over to the shutter, that freckled round tushie exposed and swaying under the hem of her shirt all the while. Ellie winced as the breeze filtered in from outside and riffled lightly through her undergrowth, feeling for all the world like some overgrown toddler—proudly ridiculous, and partially denuded.

She stood for a long moment by the shutter, pigeon-toed and pantless, and shivering slightly where the wind kept blowing fluttery, eye-watering kisses up her legs and onto her pussy from beneath, redness creeping up her neck like a waterline as she tried and failed to press both legs and lips together in protection against it. When the stupefying frisson of it had grown nearly too much for her to bear, she reached behind her, drew her rifle and lowered herself delicately into a crouch, trying not to expose her lower half to the open air any more than she already had. She negotiated it under the shutter, barrel and scope, and peering through the latter to find the other raiders still lying in wait outside. There were three of them in all, standing in a group at the bottom of the concrete lot where the raised-up lip of the curb met the tarmac spider's web of the interstate. One of them was a head taller than the others, and wearing a weatherbeaten baseball cap, the second was thickly-bearded, and had a backpack on over his chest, the third wore tinted sunglasses. Ellie kept the scope wandering between the three of them for a few minutes, trying to pin down which was the weakest link among them as she listened in to their idle chatter. "...Hell's taking him so long?" Grumbled the one in the baseball cap.
"You know how he is, he's... thorough," replied the tallest.
"Only when it comes to sniffing out old porn mags."
"Ain't nothin' wrong with a good porn mag," sniffed the man in the backpack. "Gets cold out on the road, cold and lonely."
"Think I don't know that? I just jerk off to my imagination, like a fucking grown-up."
"Your imagination, right. Very mature." She watched, and listened, searching and searching for the right sign. Eventually, she found what she'd been looking for. The tallest man had a nervous twitch, and a subtle stiffness to the way he shifted his right leg. Wounded, or at least he had been... relying on his size as a deterrent, and a way to encourage the others to make up for his weakness. She took a deep breath, zeroed in on that leg, trained the scope over his calf, waited, waited... waited...

Fired.

The sound of the shot rattled the shutter like a tin can, and set her ears ringing hollowly besides. Beneath it, Ellie heard a sickly crunch, a blood-curdling scream, then a thump, followed by indignant, incoherent shouting. "Fuck... fuck, fuck, fuck," she whispered, as if to spur herself on into action, turning and sprinting across the room and shouldering open the back door of the garage. As she kicked it shut behind her, she heard scrabbling at the shutter, followed by a loud rip and a snagging sensation as the hem of her shirt caught on the door handle in passing. Ellie whipped round and yanked it free, blushing a little despite herself as she carried on charging around the perimeter of the garage.

She passed a dumpster on her way, catching sight of herself in a cracked, rectangular mirror that stood jutting out of it at an odd angle. A wild-eyed girl locked eyes with her in the glass; below the waist, her body was a nude, athletic litheness, the lower abdomen sculpted and tapered by years of hard exercise, the hip bones flaring noticeably up from under the skin, the milky white buttocks hilling out behind her, all flexes and jiggles from the motion of her running. Chicken legs and crimson cheeks. Don't look at me, her expression seemed to say. For the love of fuck, don't tell anyone you saw. No pants, no panties; bush out and rustling between her supple young thighs, bolt-action cradled like a baby in her arms. Joel somewhere, laughing. This would never have happened to him—face going cherry-red in the middle of a gunfight, running around in a jock strap... or less—never. It was humiliating; it was goddamn fucking humiliating. And she only had herself to blame.

[Author's Note: I always enjoy and appreciate feedback in terms of what's working and what isn't, so please feel free to like and/or leave comments!]