Road to Santa Barbara (3/3)

Breathing hard, she flattened herself against the wall at the point where it rounded off onto a corner and held the barrel of the rifle skyward, the brickwork behind her biting dull and coldly into her rear. She closed her eyes, listening to the thuds of footsteps and the rusty grinding of the shutter's ancient mechanism. There was a pause, then another round of shouting echoed toward her on the wind. "In here! He's in here! Fuck me, whoever it is they got him too!" One of them yelled.
"I'm coming!" the other hollered back.
"No, fuckin' idiot! Stay out there and keep lookin' for the bastard!"
"Alright... god fucking damn it, alright!" More footsteps, closer now. Ellie exhaled, then turned her head and chanced a peek around the corner. Couldn't see him from this angle, but she could tell he was in front of the garage from the sound of his voice. Her fingers found the magazine, and she looked away for a second to check there was no need to reload. It was now or never, even if she was still bare below the waist. She reached into the side pocket of her backpack, found a small, weathered stone, took it out and tossed it at the dumpster. It rapped loudly against the side, and almost immediately the raider inside the garage called out again to his partner. "Go check that out!" he barked, and in response she heard the other start to make his way around the side of the building toward her. As he approached, Ellie pushed to control her breathing, slowing the rise and fall of her chest in preparation for what was about to happen. When he was almost on her, she flipped the rifle around in her hands, rounded the corner and swung the butt full-tilt at him. What she hadn't accounted for was the backpack; instead of striking him in the face or chest, the rifle bounced harmlessly off its cushioning bulk. For a half-second, her appearance startled him, but then his look of shock contorted into a snarl, and he surged forward, his weight pressing forward into her and pushing the rifle back into her breastbone.

There was a sickly instant of surprise as he fell on her, and it was all she could do not to lose her footing completely. She grappled with him for the rifle, grunting as his strength threatened to wrench it out of her grip. Her fingers scrabbled past the trigger guard, gripped it, squeezed down hard on it. The rifle jerked wildly between them, the gunshot defeaning them, the muzzle flash nearly blinding them. Still blinking away the glare, she felt his strength wane and took the opportunity to pull it away from him, backpedaling wildly to get a scrap of distance from him. Levelling the barrel at him, she fired, struck him good and cleanly in the side. "Bitch!" he screamed, the wound only seeming to make him angrier. Ellie's eyes widened, suddenly wondering if she might have miscalculated. He was coming for her, closing the distance faster than she'd be able to get another shot off. She flipped the rifle again, went to take his legs out from under him with the butt, but he was ready now; this time, he watted it away with his forearm; this time, his tackle was a success, and she really did lose her footing. They fell together, his weight driving the breath from her lungs, her landing flat on her back, him landing squarely on top of her. Lose something?" the backpacker snarled, his knee jamming her legs open, and his arms pinning hers above her head. She shuddered as the material of his khaki trousers slid into place over her pussy; the rough material rubbing nauseatingly against her partially-spread vulva, her slit yawning wider than was comfortable to receive it. "Did you think you weren't gonna get yours? Did you think we wouldn't find you, bitch?" Ellie tried to wriggle out of his grip, but his leg shifted to hold her in place, the jut of his kneecap running up along her inner lips and nipping sharply at her clit. A warm, warbling pulse went through her, radiating outward from it. She made a face, the most undignified, darkly ludicrous face; it was open-mouthed, squint-eyed, lip-biting, her cheeks coloured in with lurid rouge circles. Her thighs clenched and quivered, and in that moment, she was absolutely sure she'd never longed for underwear more in her life.

She yelped as he grabbed a fistful of her hair and roughly yanked her head forward, her muscles radiating fiery tongues of pain up and down the length of her neck. "Off... g-get..." Ellie growled, her feet scrabbling wildly for purchase against the ground. Blindly, she aimed a kick at his shin but between his jostling and the closeness of their bodies it swing wide and sailed into the dumpster, her toes throbbing where they struck the dense grey metal instead of his flesh. In desperation, she trained her gaze on his forehead, the beginnings and end of a last ditch effort pooling inside her skull like a torrent of blood. Gritting her teeth, Ellie tensed her shoulders, took a deep breath, and rocked her head right up into the backpacker's face. She heard a crunch; something broken, whether his or hers she couldn't say at first, for all the adrenaline pumping through her, but then he let out a piteous howl and all his weight went directionless and dead, and she knew she'd made herself an opening. Trying to ignore the crawling of her skin, Ellie wrapped her thighs around him and locked her legs together behind his back, the warm, hairy core between her legs pressing uncomfortably into his midriff in the process. Distantly, she remembered her training, Joel's training, the lessons he'd given her on the sunny yellow days in Jackson, before it all went seven different kinds of wrong. "If guns don't do the job for whatever reason, if you're out of bullets or if he closes the gap before you can reposition, you'll need to use your weight like a pendulum, drag the whole man down with every last pound you got on you, then pummel him into the dirt until there's no telling his face apart from it." Every last pound... didn't help him too much in that house, did it? Didn't help him swerve that nine iron. At that thought, a trickle of spite coursed through her, as cool and jagged as crystallised ice. From somewhere inside her, some far-off black and buried place, a roar escaped her, and she shifted all of her weight sideways into a roll. The backpacker gasped as he lost his balance; he was pulled along in her wake, rolling, rolling, rolling clean into the side of the dumpster. His back jarred into it, and the air was filled with his scream. His arms turned to jelly, and she was finally able to slip hers out from under their yolk and give him a solid right hook to the jaw. Like his back, his head rocked back into the dumpster, then again when she gave him a left-handed jab to the opposite side. Drunkenly, he blinked and shook his head in a bid to clear it. Ellie thought she saw another opening, but when her fist came up again to meet his nose, he blocked the strike with his forearm before trying to close his fingers around her throat.

Wheezingly, she tried to squirm backwards out of his reach, but his fingers hooked onto the collar of her shirt, tugging and stretching it wider to keep her in her place. In spite of that, she pressed on trying to escape, the fabric pulling tauter and tauter as his grip on the shirt grew stronger and more ****, until, at last, it reached its absolute limit. With a sinking feeling, Ellie heard a tear, followed by a column of air rushing over her chest. No, god no! She swallowed thickly, before risking a glance down at the place where there had been a shirt. Now, there were only her small, bare breasts. A wave of shame crashed over her, and until her gaze returned to the backpack-wearer, the only thought inside her skull was the awareness that one of the oldest, worst fears of all had up and come true. She might have been another girl in the video store, neighbour to the babe in the red bikini. Girl On A Doomed **** Quest, cover art of her flushed red face, jaybird-naked, cringing and crouching and desperately hiding her goodies behind her own backpack.

Not enough heft for them to sag, instead they simply sat pronounced and puffy on her chest, faintly sugared at the curves with another handful of freckles, and pinkly frosted by grooved and lightly wrinkled nipples. They were ripening into a full, rich bloom by the chill of the open air playing over them, and the areolas were studded over with a ring of tiny, suckable bumps, gathered loosely round the peaks like beach stones peeking shyly up from the sand along a peaky stretch of shoreline. The backpacker drank the sight of them in, chuckled stupidly, and said, in a slurred and faraway tone, "P-porn... mags..." Ellie was furious, incensed between her own nakedness and the dipshit look on his face; that hint of amusement, as if her tits were a private joke intended just for him. Glaring daggers at him, she grabbed his head with both hands and wrenched it back one more time into the dumpster's scored and dented hull. Even that wouldn't have been enough, if not for the mirror above them, which had apparently taken one too many shakes, its top half tilting forward out of the dumpster and smashing over the top of the backpacker's head. Shards of it fell loose, found the base of his neck. His eyes went wide, then blank, then there wasn't much of anything behind them at all. She took a few moments to catch her breath, unwrapping her legs from his torso and letting his dead weight sag silently down onto her. After that, she put her palms on his chest and spent nearly half a minute slowly pushing him off of her.

Ellie rose unsteadily to her feet, clutching the ruined fabric of her shirt to her crotch and fussing sheepishly with it as the aftershocks of all that unwanted attention fizzed and flickered through her overstimulated clit. She balled it up and pressed it uselessly into her bush, as if hoping to make herself less naked with it, but it somehow only made her feel more hopelessly, frighteningly nude. Her lips quivered, and her eyes had the faint impression of that glassy look they sometimes took on when Dina emerged from one of her expeditions under the bedsheets, leaving Ellie's upper legs all glistening and striped with her saliva. Besides making quick work of the backpacker, she was glad the mirror was broke; seeing herself in whatever mortifying state she'd ended up in would probably have taken the last of her strength (shivering, her legs and belly covered in tiny cuts and gashes, the beginnings of a bruise percolating bluely on her right hip, tender little breasts all red and sore and streaked in dirt, clods of loosened mud and soil marking the nips like clumps of stark black warpaint, the bush turned wispy and dishevelled by all that struggling and rubbing, her shoes clinging defiantly to her feet and only making more of a clownish display of her in the process—something funny in a cowering, naked girl; something hysterical in a cowering, naked girl who still yet had her shoes and socks on, like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.)

In all honesty, she might have stood there forever, if she'd only been left alone. But it wasn't long before her attention was snapped back to reality. Sounds of movement nearby, scrabbling at the garage door she'd burst out from just minutes prior. Muffled calls from behind it; didn't take a genius to figure he was calling for the dead man on the floor beside her. Her backpack was listing by one strap off her left shoulder; she brought the other back up onto the other, dropped her ruined shirt, stooped and grasped numbly about on the ground for the rifle, then she turned and started on the move, her legs already carrying her forward before she'd even fully registered what was happening. Conscious thought gave way to instinct as she tore along the side of the garage and across the road, making for a patch of curling long grass that stood mouldering in the shadow of the open-roofed derelict opposite. She looked a pink-white streak as she ran, the rifle dangling loosely from her shoulder, the strap digging into the blade and the stock smacking her repeatedly in the side in time with the sway of her hips. Behind, her exposed bottom, toned and shapely as it was, quivered and bounced with her footfalls. Despite herself, despite the urgency of the situation and the pointlessness of the gesture, Ellie couldn't resist the urge to reach around and cradle the cheeks with her palms from beneath in hopes of holding them steady. It was cringeworthy, imagining the spectacle she'd be making of herself otherwise, sprinting bare-assed and blushing away from danger. Idiot girl stripped down to her birthday suit, sunlight winking off of her curves and everything jiggling like a basketful of peaches as she fled from the mess she'd made of a chance encounter with a couple of low-rent scavs. A finger of breeze ran over her in passing, the cooling rush of it teasing her nipples, riffling her bush, billowing through the narrow gap between her thighs, and she almost let out a sob as the reality of it crashed back over her anew. Naked, the word kept coming to her like a whispered taunt. Naked. Not a stitch, not a thread. Not a boy-short or boxer or panty in sight. Just you. All of you. Dina's not so special anymore, now is she?

Reaching the shadow of the derelict, Ellie threw herself into the grass and maneuvuered about until she was lying flat on her belly facing the garage, wincing as the foliage scratched and tickled at her exposed skin wherever it could find it—ankles, hips, the backs of her thighs, the small of her back—and trying her best not to move for much for fear of only making it worse. Carefully, she drew the rifle off her shoulder and lined it up so she could peer through the scope at the garage's entrance, eyeing the shutter and the side of the building warily as her index wrapped around the trigger guard. Seconds passed, and she kept sweeping the scope back and forth, expecting to catch a hint of the last man standing any moment now. But that moment kept on growing, every successive heartbeat making her tenser and more wired. Suddenly, she sensed movement at the front of the garage, the shutter juddering ominously as she trained the scope back on it. In a burst of frayed nerves, she made a ballpark guess at where he might be standing behind the shutter, stilled her breath, lined up the shot, held it, held it, held it, held it... fired. The rifle let out a sharp, booming crack, and a millisecond later she screwed her eyes closed as the recoil shunted through her. It pushed her back a hare, sending a reverberating jiggle down her spine and over the low, creamy hills of her goosebumped buttocks, the freckles on them dancing like a constellation in a puddle as the cheeks shifted apart and the cleft between them widened. And briefly, very briefly, the mini-shockwave parted them to reveal a dainty, crinkled caramel knot to wink out sweetly from between them. Though the shot struck true, it dinged off the shutter's surface, and when all was said and done she wasn't even entirely sure the scav had still been there to begin with. That doubt might have grown larger, might have made her worry, if it hadn't been almost immediately proven right. Loudly, the grass behind her furled and snapped, and a loud, raspy cough rang out. Ellie's eyes bulged in surprise, and when she turned to look over her own shoulder, the scav in the sunglasses was standing over her, his gaze glued to her ass, and to the hint of vulva showing through her half-spread legs. He was ogling, perving, drinking up every last inch of lip and cheek and short, wiry hair he could get his eyes on. "Got a nice view, sweet cheeks?" he asked, chuckling. "Know I sure as hell do."

His hand shifted, and his hand twitched as it found the barrel of a makeshift pistol he'd strapped to his belt. She had a second, less than that maybe. Not enough time to move the rifle or line up a kick or even just to scramble to her feet. All she could do was distract him, and, unfortunately, she only had one thing left on her that might serve as a strong enough distraction. Ellie grimaced, twisted and shifted her hips around so that her lower half was facing him, then spread her legs and flashed him a good, long look at her pussy. Her inner lips unfurled, salmony and ruffled, her clit emerging meekly from its hood like a cute round button as her slit pulled open. In the span of about two seconds, Ellie saw the awe-struck look on his face, allowed herself a deep, rosy blush, swung the rifle about, raised it, pointed it squarely at his chest and planted her feet flat against the dirt, snapping her bare legs shut to let the barrel rest between her knees and pulling the trigger. The steel shaft of the barrel bit coldly into her legs, and the nape of her neck went bristly where the flat wedge of the rifle's mahogany butt slotted snugly into the soft, fuzzy cushion of her mound. When the shot went off, she felt the rifle buck into it hard enough to make her jerk and stutter out a moan. Her breasts, until now resting pooled and buoyant on her chest, shivered as the recoil travelled backwards up her body, a single jolt that made the teardrops bounce and wobble, and the nipples twitch in a flickering up and down motion. She watched as the scav's narrow, murky pig eyes went glassy, his shooting arm dropping loosely to his side while he fumbled blindly at the ragged chest wound in his abdomen with the other. He staggered back a step, opened his mouth to say something, then toppled lumpenly onto his back, and didn't move an inch thereafter.

Ellie sat up only long enough to see the smoke plume rising from the dead man's chest, then the last of her willpower left her. All at once, her fingers went numb and both her legs and the patch between them turned to liquid, runnels of something warm and clear and sticky dribbling down her legs in tiny tear-trails. And suddenly, she had such a neec to touch herself that she couldn't help but drop the rifle, shove her tingling hands between her thighs and curl over onto her side, rubbing and pinching and plucking at her folds in hopes of stopping the throbbing surge of breathtaking feeling down below. She found a rhythm, and played the process to completion, the hiss of skin-on-skin turning to a kind of splashing schlick as she rode herself to a finish. Ellie's cheeks burned, her fingers still working behind her lips to wring an extra couple pulses of roiling, heated pleasure from her clit. "God... goddamn it... god-fucking-damn it..." she whispered, nuzzling her nose into the dirt to better ground herself as she brought herself along the path to climax, her eyes welling up with flecks of watery salt and taking helpings of the soil into her mouth as it pursed and gaped and wavered.

Ellie sat in the doorway of the derelict tying her shoelaces, operating mostly on muscle memory and a vague, driving impulse to continue. It was cracked and aged like well-worn leather boots, but it fit her nonetheless, and she knew she'd need it to carry her along those many, many miles still to come. Too much road ahead, and still not nearly enough of it behind. She'd found a sleeveless vest in a smashed-up drawer and put it on, sucking air in through her teeth as it rode up a smidge above the hard-etched maze-lines of her stomach. She'd fix it, but there'd not be too much point in that until she found another pair of pants. She sat bottomless on the crumbling front, the steps embracing her rear with chilly stone palms. Her pussy shone wetly, the crease of her thigh drawing sharply up in parallel where her leg was folded to the side beneath her; she had the urge to pull the vest down and hide it out of modesty, but there was no one left to see her for the time being, and she'd only that extra bit a fool attempting to hide herself from the prying eyes of nothing and nobody. Beads of sweat were running down her calves, and along her arms, and through the furry carpet on her mound like drops of fresh, clean morning dew. When she was done fixing the laces, she gave one of the aglets a lazy flick with her fingernail, then rested her hands one palm atop the other on her elevated knee, letting out a long, weary sigh. There'd be a need to move on soon, she had a few clothes in her backpack, but she badly needed another of pants. Might be she could scavenge some extra wearables from the raiders' bodies, might be one of them had on a pair of panties she could borrow. A snort escaped her at the image, beefy legs and a shrimpy cock swaddled by cats or stripes or a girly shock of flower-print. Funny, like a tough girl with a big gun, utterly nude except for her shoes, and gasping for air like a fish for the blistering shame of it.

[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!]