The wiseacres who coined the platitudinous proverbs with which our early lives are studded had a talent for hedging their bets; as soon as they thought up one, another was minted stating precisely the converse. This way, whatever happened in the long run, they were bound to be right. Maybe that's why moralistic proverbs are so popular with parents. Thus, "Many hands make light work," is balanced by, "Too many cooks spoil the broth."
"Nothing ventured, nothing gained," opposes, "Curiosity killed the cat."
"A rolling stone gathers no moss," contradicts, "Travel broadens the mind," and so on. But among these homespun truths, one stands out as universally acceptable and incapable of being gainsaid. Its simplest expression is, "Look before you leap." Another is, "Never trust first impressions."
Kent Delaney provides a graphic and spine-chilling illustration of this precept. In this story, set in a country area of modern America, author Delaney spells out with devastating effect the result among an isolated group of people of a refusal to recognize the verity of that simple dictum.
The fruit farmers of Blossom Valley, led by the tough, intractable Bram Stollmer, are mad because their fertile land has been compulsorily acquired by the state and is shortly to be submerged by the waters of a new reservoir. Jeff Milner, the designer of the new dam, and Senator Gilmore, the man behind the project, anxious for the prestige the scheme will bring them, are mad at the farmers' opposition. The local mayor wants the project to succeed because of the profit it will bring to his stores. The sheriff is unwilling to invoke the law because he will lose support of the farmers. Neither side can or will see the other's point of view.
Into this potentially explosive situation, Delaney injects one other component: a natural catastrophe. There is a flood disaster, and protagonists of both sides find themselves marooned together in a situation of extreme peril.
How the apparently brutal and ruthless Stollmer, the weak and studious Milner, his voluptuous wife and nubile teenage daughter emerge from their ordeal surely one of the most nail-biting suspense stories in modern fiction provides as gripping and hair-raising a cautionary tale as we have ever read.
By the end of this chronicle of human and elemental fury, each of the characters realizes to his or her cost the stupidity of prejudice based on misinformation but not before violence, rape, fear, cowardice and simple human courage in the face of nature's savagery have all played their gripping parts, and, as an added bonus, each of the female members of the party has finally to come to terms with the fact that it is unwise even dangerous to deny the dictates of her own sensuality.
-The Publishers
CHAPTER ONE
For some time now, the mood of the meeting had been growing progressively more hostile. The undercurrent of violence and menace, never far beneath the surface, was finally bursting out into the open as the fifty men grouped around the improvised platform at the far end of the diner voiced their implacable opposition to the scheme that was going to bring money to the town ... and wreck their lives.
Jeff Milner, sitting with four other officials behind the trestle table on the platform, shifted uneasily on the bent-back chair. He eased the collar of his Brooks Brothers shirt, nervously unbuttoned the jacket of his Ivy League suit, uncomfortably aware that a large part of the resentment and fury manifesting itself under the low ceiling of the diner was directed at him personally.
Milner, a quiet studious man of 38, was a civil engineer. For ten years, his work with the giant Grissom Corporation, the biggest contractors west of the Rockies, had won him increasing respect. When he had been chosen to design the State Development Board's favorite project, the Blossom Valley Dam, he had been excited by the sheer immensity of the task, regarding it as the crowning achievement of a career already unusually distinguished for his age. It had taken him six months to calculate with his associates the stresses and strains involved in holding back so many millions of tons of water; another three months to work out the basic design and then a further two years to supervise the actual building of the dam. Now, when the job was finished and the official opening only a week away, the whole deal had suddenly turned sour on him. He wished he'd never heard of the goddamn dam!
Blossom Valley was a long winding defile bordered on one side by a limestone escarpment and on the other by a steep scrub-covered slope. But the mile-wide valley floor was rich in alluvial soil. . . and the reservoir created by the vast new dam would drown miles of this fertile country and annihilate scores of the small farms and orchards which gave the place its name. The dispossessed farmers, bitterly angry at the compulsory acquisition of their land, were in a truculent mood. Most of them were self-reliant, independent backwoodsmen whose fathers and grandfathers had grubbed the homesteads they were losing from the virgin soil of the valley.
They could not see why they should be deprived of the fruits of all those years of hard labor . . . or, indeed, why there was a need for the dam at all. There was already a smaller reservoir higher up the valley where the terrain was bleaker. Why in hell the planners in Washington and their yes-men in the state Capitol should want another was beyond their comprehension. Naturally enough, their hostility was directed at the men on the spot; Milner himself, whom they saw as the architect of their downfall, and Senator Gilmore, the moving spirit behind the project.
Gilmore, paunchy and red-faced, was on his feet now, vainly trying to stem the flood of criticism angrily boiling around the platform. He had asked for a hearing at the protest meeting called by the farmers and it was obvious that now he was beginning to regret it. Beside him the sheriff, the Mayor of Pointsville, and a slick young public relations man from the development board stared uneasily at the table.
"You people don't understand," Gilmore shouted. "If you'd just cool off and . . . No! Let me finish! . . . If you'd just take a calm look at this thing, you'd see that-"
"Calm?" a voice yelled furiously. "He asks us to be calm!"
"Ain't nobody figgerin' to drown out his fuckin' home!" another cried.
"Who does the sonofabitch think he is, for Chrissakes!"
"Go back to Washington!"
"Pipe down, Gilmore!"
" will bring prosperity to your town!" Gilmore blustered, striving to make himself heard over the clamor. "There'll be boating on the lake, hotels, a Lido, fishing, a holiday camp. Pointsville, all of you, will benefit! There'll be tourists coming from all over!"
"The dam is already one of the major engineering marvels in the United States," the P.R. man put in smoothly, profiting from a temporary lull in the uproar. "Several hundred feet high, almost a mile across . . . and the generating station below it will provide hydroelectric power for the whole state!"
"Fuck the rest of the state!" somebody stormed. "We already got electric power hire from the old dam. Why should we lose our homes and our land to suit some other bastards someplace else?"
"Jem's right! Let them flood their own goddamn land!"
"I worked this land for forty years. Ain't no lousy committee in Washington got the right to take it away from me!"
"You're getting compensation," Gilmore snapped. "And generous compensation, let me tell you. Thanks to the efforts of Mister Mayor here, you're getting paid the full rate for zonal development land. Far more than-"
"Just a minute!" a husky black-browed farmer interrupted. He shouldered his way to the front and planted one foot aggressively on the platform, a tall muscular man in Levi's and a red checkered shirt. "Don't give us any of that crap about good prices," he said roughly. "No price is a good price when the land ain't for sale. And this land ain't."
His companions fell suddenly silent. Bram Stollmer, tough, 30 years old, a Vietnam veteran, was their leader the most violent and intractable of them all. If Bram was speaking, they were content to stay quiet.
"You people don't seem to realize," Gilmore said loftily. "There's no question of the land being for sale or not for sale. The compulsory purchase orders were signed weeks ago. The deal's gone through. You know that."
"You can bring down as many smart-assed punks as you like," Stollmer said with a malevolent glare at Milner and the P.R. man, "but it don't make any difference to us. We ain't quittin,' and that's that!"
Milner looked away over the sea of hostile faces surrounding the platform. Behind the varnished rustic bar at the far end of the diner, Joe Harbord was polishing glasses. It was just nine o'clock. There were no customers in right now, but most of the boys had eaten there before the meeting . . . and they'd certainly be drinking after it. He had a good site, at the intersection where the road linking Pointsville to the valley crossed the state highway. The noisier the meeting got, the more the boys would drink before they went home afterwards.
"You don't understand," Gilmore said again. He shook his balding head, his fleshy jowls quivering. "There's nothing you can do about it. One week from today's the official opening. The sluices of the old dam will be opened, the valley will gradually fill up . . . and two weeks from today, the power station below the new dam will be in operation. There isn't anything you can do."
"It ain't what we'll do it's what we won't do," Stollmer said.
"What are you talking about? I tell you, you don't understand-"
"And, I tell you that you don't understand!" Stollmer shouted angrily. Shooting out an arm furred with coarse black hair, he stabbed a finger at the Senator and cried: "We ain't quittin' our land, that's all!"
There was a low growl of agreement from the men around him.
"W-w-wh-what d'you mean, you won't quit?" Gilmore blustered. "You've got to quit! I told you; the orders are signed."
"And, if we're still there . . . sittin' on our land . . . the land that belonged to our fathers. . . when it's time for your precious opening? If we refuse to leave that land and those homesteads? What are you gonna do then, mister? I guess even Washington wouldn't go ahead and drown twenty families in cold blood, huh?"
Stollmer stepped back and folded his arms, glaring threateningly at the five men on the platform as his companions shouted their approval.
Gilmore lost his temper. "If you're stupid enough to refuse to leave when you're told to leave," he snapped, "you'll be removed by force!"
A howl of rage went up from the farmers grouped around the platform. Amidst the brandishing of fists and the shouting of abuse, Stollmer stepped forward again. "By force?" he repeated in a dangerously quiet voice.
"Certainly. The state militia would be called in. If necessary, the federal authorities would-"
"Shuddup!" Stollmer yelled, his face reddening with fury. "There's one thing you people" he spat out Gilmore's favorite condescending phrase with a sneer "don't seem to realize, and that is, we mean what we say! I'm tellin' you right now. There's a shotgun and there's huntin' rifles out at my place. I guess most of the folks in the valley have 'em too. And the first sonofabitch of a Fed sets foot on my land gets his fuckin' head blown off . . . and that goes for any goddamn trooper, too!"
"That's the way to talk, Bram!"
"Give it to 'em straight, boy!"
"That goes for me too, Gilmore!"
"Me too! Plug the lousy bastards in the guts!"
"Just let 'em try. We'll gun the shit-heads down!"
Faced with a crescendo of threatening shouts, Gilmore turned desperately to his colleagues. "Mister Mayor . . . Sheriff . . . there's such a thing in this country as the rule of law! Maybe you could tell them . . . "
Sheriff Hardstaff, a lean gray man with a weather-beaten face, rasped back his chair and stood up. His father had once been the owner of a small fruit farm in the valley. His jaws chewed rhythmically on a plug of tobacco as he spoke. "Personally, I'd say the boys had a good case here," he drawled.
"But surely it's your duty . . . the enforcement of the law . . . " Gilmore's flabby face was a study in surprise.
"Bill . . . " The Mayor leaned across towards the sheriff. As the owner of the best hotel and the only supermarket in Pointsville, he was all in favor of the project and the increased trade it would bring. "Don't you think . . . ? "
"I don't want to hear no talk of shootin', and I don't want to listen to no threats," Bill Hardstaff went on calmly. "Anyways, I got other things to do right now. But, if it came to a showdown . . . well, I reckon I'd have to think seriously of turnin' in my badge."
He stepped down from the platform, spat into a cuspidor, and strode out of the diner without a backward look.
"But, you can't . . . I mean, good God! This is 1973!" Gilmore raged. "Surely, it's accepted in this land of ours that, for the good of the majority-"
He was howled down in a fresh storm of jeering and abuse. And, although he and the mayor and the P.R. man all tried in turn to make themselves heard over the tumult, the angry farmers refused to listen to another word. Finally, Gilmore, dabbing at his sweating brow with a silk handkerchief, led his discomfited companions from the diner amid a fresh outburst of catcalls and boos. The militant farmers gathered around the bar to cement their plans for sabotaging the opening of the dam.
Outside, beyond the circle of light thrown on the parking lot by the lamp above Joe Harbord's sign, the night was chilly and dark. Low ragged clouds scudding across the sky hid the half-moon, and there was a moist wind blowing strongly from the north. Gilmore stood by his Cadillac talking in a low voice to Milner, the P.R. man and the mayor. He was still shaking with rage.
"Those crazy fools!" he muttered angrily. "Do you think they'd really dare?"
"I wouldn't put it past them, Senator," the mayor said soberly. He'd been born and raised in Pointsville, and he didn't have much in common with the valley men. "You know how ornery and obstinate these country folks can be!"
"Yes, but . . . surely . . . Good Christ, there'd be a national scandal! We'd have newspapers here from all over. I can see the headlines!"
"Just the wrong kind of publicity," the P.R. man said gloomily. "Instead of the progressive, go-ahead brand image we want, we'd be held up as, you know, soul-less oppressors of the honest country folk, the backbone of America! Exposure-wise, it'd be a disaster."
"I can see it all," Gilmore said. "A state of siege in the valley . . . bloodshed maybe . . . the schedule put back by weeks," He thumped his closed fist impotently on the roof of the car. "We've got to put a stop to it!" he cried fiercely. "Don't you think so, Jeff?"
Milner was staring out across the state highway. Beyond the headlights of the traffic roaring north and south past the intersection, the land dipped sharply towards the valley. The limestone bluff on the far side showed as an irregular silhouette against the angry sky. He was sick of the whole routine. "Just so we get the damned thing opened on schedule," he said in a lack-luster voice. "I agree . . . any kind of sit-in by those farmers, any attempt to flout the authority of the state by force it would be too much!"
"There you are, you see!" Gilmore said to nobody in particular. He plucked indecisively at his lower lip with fat fingers, the flashing neon sign over the door of the diner turning his face alternately blue and red. Abruptly, he seemed to come to a decision. His small eyes glittered craftily in the changing light. "Mister Mayor," he said crisply. "Do you have a half hour to spare? I have an idea . . . but I shall need your authority to carry it out. Would you ride up the state highway a mile or so with me?"
"Why, certainly, Senator. Anything you say."
Gilmore nodded and turned towards the Cadillac. As he opened the rear door, lights approached down the road leading to the town, and an Oldsmobile sedan bumped into the parking lot and cut its motor.
"Excuse me," Milner said. "I think that's my wife come to collect me."
"Yes, yes," the Senator said absently. "Off you go, Jeff." He swung round and clapped the P.R. man on the shoulder. "No need for you to stick around either, Graham. See you back at the hotel later, eh?"
"Just as you say, Senator. Sure I can't be of help?" the publicity man asked. But Gilmore was already leaning into the Cadillac to give the chauffeur instructions.
Milner walked across to the Oldsmobile. His wife Nesta was behind the wheel. Tired and dispirited as he was, the sight of her thrilled him with that exhilarating tingle of excitement that he had never lost since the first time he laid eyes on her at a college prom eighteen years before. It had been her twentieth birthday and she didn't look a day older, he told himself as he waved a greeting. If anything, she was more gorgeous than ever! Her glossy dark hair, coiled into a loose chignon on the nape of her neck, shone in the diffuse light from the instrument panel, and the soft planes of her face creased into a tender smile as she saw him approach.
"Hi darling!" she called cheerfully. "How did it go?"
Milner shrugged. "More trouble! It seems we may have to cope with mob violence before we're through!"
"Oh, no!" Nesta Milner's throaty voice was alarmed. "What happened?"
"The farmers whose lands have been acquired won't play. They threaten to stage some sort of sit-in strike, and they say they'll shoot anyone who tries to put them off."
"How awful! What are you going to do?"
He shrugged again. "Search me. Gilmore seems to have some scheme in mind, but he's keeping it a secret." Looking down at her through the open window of the car, he felt a sudden rush of warmth and affection. Even the folds of the thick tweed topcoat she was wearing couldn't hide the voluptuous curve of her high-set, ripely swelling breasts.
"Where's Jane?" Nesta Milner asked suddenly.
He raised his eyebrows, looking past her to the empty passenger seat. "I thought she was with you!"
"No darling. I understood she was coming with you. I thought she wanted to see what a public meeting was like. Something to do with that course in civics, she said."
"I haven't seen her since lunch," Milner said blankly.
His wife sighed in exasperation, "Teenagers!" she said.
"Excuse me, old man . . . " The suave voice of the S.D.B.'s publicity wizard spoke at Milner's elbow. "If you're looking for your daughter by any chance . . . I saw her getting into a car with that boy who's always hanging around the reception desk at the hotel."
"The mayor's nephew?" Nesta exclaimed. "That tall blond boy?"
The P.R. man nodded. "That's the one. The local heart-throb."
Milner compressed his lips and breathed heavily. Mark Digby's reputation as the Casanova of Pointsville was embroidered with lurid accounts of his success with young and impressionable girls. "You didn't.. . you didn't by any chance happen to see which way they went?" he asked with forced nonchalance.
"Actually, no. But I did see them again just as I was arriving here, as a matter-of-fact. The boy stopped his car at the intersection. I think they were trying to decide which way to go then. The window was down and I happened to hear him say something about a viaduct. Then they shot across the highway and took the road leading down into the valley."
"The abandoned railroad bridge down towards the dam," Nesta said in a low voice. "The valley road ends there. It's a favorite necking spot for the local kids."
Milner straightened up. "Thank you very much," he said stiffly.
"Be my guest!" the P.R. man raised a languid hand and strolled off towards his own car, a faintly malicious gleam of amusement in his eye.
Milner jerked open the door of the Oldsmobile. "Move over honey," he said curtly.
"What are you going to do?" Nesta asked.
"I'm going on down that valley and get her right back!" her husband replied grimly. "I'm not having any sixteen year old daughter of mine pawed about by some hick-town Lothario!"
"Darling, you don't think . . . ? "
Milner glanced at his watch as he slid behind the wheel. "I don't know. It's over an hour and a half since that meeting started. But we'll damned soon find out!"
Pressing the starter, he gunned the Oldsmobile's motor and swung the big car around in a tight circle to head for the exit from the lot. As they passed in front of the entrance to the diner, Harbord's sign creaked, groaning in a sudden gust of wind, and a scatter of raindrops sprayed across the windshield. By the time they pulled up behind Gilmore's Cadillac, which was waiting at the intersection for a gap in the traffic on the highway, it was raining heavily. Milner switched on the wipers.
The Cadillac shot forward, turned left, and hissed away along the already wet blacktop towards the old dam. Milner waited for a truck to pass and then sent the Oldsmobile surging across the highway to plunge down the dirt road zigzagging into the valley.
"I'll have something to say to that young lady when we find her," he said furiously. "And, as for that . . . that overdressed young gigolo, he'll be lucky if I don't punch him right in the nose, mayor or no mayor!"
CHAPTER TWO
Rain drummed on the roof of the overheated Volkswagen, splashing off the windshield and bouncing high along the curve of the hood. Below the improvised parking lot at the end of the road, the rush and gurgle of the river was drowned in the steady pelting of the downpour.
Inside the small sedan, petite sixteen year old Jane Milner lay flat on her back and stared out the streaming window at the stormy night. Beyond the bushes screening the lot, she could just make out the dark blurs of the valley sides against the sky. Almost immediately overhead, the giant arches of the disused railroad viaduct spanned the defile. And at her side . . . at her side was the most exciting young man she had ever met in her life!
The voluptuous teenager turned and stared through the gloom at the blond head outlined against the windshield. Mark Digby's face was invisible in the shadow; she had no clue to the expression on his handsome slightly sullen features. But his lewdly roaming hands were expressive enough for a whole army of faces!
Jane's brassiere was unfastened and her sweater had been pushed up under her armpits.
Her jeans and her white nylon panties had been hauled down and were now hanging from one slender ankle. Between her spread thighs, the pleated leather of the seat cushion was cold against her naked buttocks. And over the softly trembling curves, of her warm young flesh the blond boy's practiced hands moved rhythmically in maddening arabesques that sent indecent swirls of lust-provoking sensation tingling through her veins to spike out her tender nipples in stiff little buds.
The half-naked girl was used to petting, of course with the high school boys in her crowd. Sometimes she allowed them to massage her breasts underneath her sweater; sometimes she would even let a boy's hand stray over the springy mound of softly curling pussy hair concealed by her panties. But she had never got near to going the whole way. . . not until tonight.
And tonight was different. Mark was different for a start. He was much older than the other beaux she knew almost twenty. And there was something about his clean-cut good looks that stirred unfamiliar flickers of desire deep down in Jane's loins a chaotic mixture of fluttery curiosity and forbidden pleasure and sheer wicked lustful thrills that caused her heart to pound and her brown eyes to shine lasciviously in the dark. There was liquor, too. They had drunk almost a fifth of bourbon between them since he had picked her up at the hotel after her father had left for the meeting. And now the unfamiliar spirit was flaming like fire in her blood, dizzily blurring her vision and sending her mind spiraling out beyond her body so that she seemed to be looking down with a curious detachment on the obscenely exciting thing she was doing.
She had gasped with surprise when Mark had pulled the lever that flattened the seat, so that she could he straight out with her head on the back seat. But, before she could protest, he had leaned over, chuckling, and started with experienced hands to unfasten her clothes. Jane knew she should have stopped him right then . . . before it was too late! But somehow the touch of his fingers on her flesh had stilled the alarm bells ringing wildly at the back of her mind. Her nerves were ablaze with lustfully wanton desire. She had never felt so thrilled and aroused in all her life! She had to let him go on.. . just a little bit longer.. .just for a minute.
Normally a cautious girl, the nakedly trembling teenager had been possessed of a curious liglitheaded devil-may-care attitude ever since she had smoked that cigarette soon after the boy had picked her up. Mark had rolled it himself, and it had a strange, sweetish, almost aromatic flavor. Jane wondered if perhaps there was marijuana mixed in with the tobacco. Lots of kids in her grade smoked grass or hash, but she had never tried it herself. What the hell, though! You had to dare something to win something! And she wanted to win the handsome, blond Mark Digby more than anything she had wanted before. Supposing it was marijuana, she thought to herself. . . well, she preferred not to know! Anyway, she felt absolutely out of this world! Mark was out of this world! Everything was out of this world tonight!
After he had pushed up her sweater and unclasped her brassiere, the hotly panting youth had caressed her tautly swelling young breasts into maddening hardness, rolling the tender pink buds of the nipples around and massaging the sensitive areolas with the palms of his hands.
When he had taken one of the stiffly erect buttons of flesh into his mouth, the gentle playing of his tongue around the darkly quivering hypersensitive skin had driven her into such a transport of lustful ecstasy that she hardly noticed the hand that unzipped her jeans and plunged inside to stroke the cool softness of her thighs.
"Ooooooh! Aaaaaagh! No, Mark! Please, nooooo!" she gasped involuntarily, sensing as his caresses grew more urgent that the lewdly aroused blond boy might be more difficult to hold back than the high-school kids she knew.
But his hands kept on stroking her, roving the whole length of her voluptuously curved body, over the soft whiteness of her softly trembling stomach, across her ribs, back to the hard ridge of her hips. . . and finally down to the nylon-sheathed warmth of her quivering loins. But this time, as she had feared, the hand did not stay on the outside! Mark insinuated his fingers under the elastic waistband of her panties and eased them downwards towards the silky vee of pubic hair sparsely curling between her thighs.
As she shuddered and gasped with excitement, he stroked her there, slowly working his middle finger into the moist virginal slit of her cunt to arouse a thrilling, tingling sensation she had never experienced before. Still incoherently murmuring the automatic protests that sprang unbidden to her lips, she squirmed around on the cold leather of the Volkswagen seat under the pressure of the boy's expert hands.
Then Jane never knew quite how it happened! her jeans were bunched up around her ankles and she was kicking one leg frenziedly to free it from her panties! Almost involuntarily, she spread her thighs, sensuously relaxing as the cool air in the car played over her hotly pulsating loins. Now, with the blood thundering in her ears, she lay wondering excitedly what Mark would do next.
She heard the metallic rip of his zipped fly opening . . . and then he was half out of the driving seat, leaning over her, as the strength and urgency of his caresses increased in tempo. She felt a blunt, heavy pressure against her naked hip. It was his penis! She had never touched one, or been touched by one, before and the muscles of her body contracted away involuntarily at the unfamiliar and disturbing touch.
She was about to demur, tensing herself to withdraw still further, when abruptly he hauled himself across her reclining figure and squeezed down between her parted knees in front of the passenger seat. Jane's breath gasped out of her lungs as the full weight of his lean and husky body smashed down over her softly trembling flesh. She could feel the hard bulge of his cock in the groove of her hip as he strained forward and took the ripely swelling mound of one quivering breast in his two hands. She gasped again and jerked convulsively as the lustfully inflamed youth craned his neck to suck the tautly throbbing nipple deep into his wet mouth.
"Ooooooh!" she moaned. "Oh God! Aaaaagggh! Oh, noooooo!"
The short dark curls clustering around her head thrashed dazedly from side to side on the seat as he began a gentle sucking pressure against the sensitive rubbery bud of flesh between his lips. His hands dropped down to course lightly over the soft firmness of her waist and hips, the thumbs insinuating themselves between their two bodies to rotate the tender skin of her belly, stroking her to a trembling awareness that flamed suddenly through her loins.
Knowing that she should stop him now . . . that she really must stop him now . . . she must! The wantonly aroused young girl tried again to protest but somehow the words stuck in her throat as Mark's mouth played for long delicious moments around her throbbing breasts, moving from one to the other in hypnotic succession, his tongue trailing wetly through the narrow fleshy valley between them.
And then his body was sliding down her as he backed off into the confined space under the dashboard of the car, his cock moving down the inside of her thigh as his slavering mouth nibbled moistly at the softly quivering bulge of her belly. Faint mewls and gasps of pleasure panted from her open mouth as he ground his tongue for a moment in her navel. Again she sought to stop him . . . but it was as though she had been temporarily paralyzed; her hands and her voice refused to obey the dictates of her mind! She settled herself lower on the extended seat, maddening pictures of indecent sensation spiraling away from his gently nipping teeth. She felt her thighs being pressed farther apart as he hunched himself down between them. She sucked in her breath with a shuddering gasp as she felt his thumbs on the hotly throbbing lips of her vagina, splaying them tenderly apart as the coolness of the air touched her there.
Mark was panting hoarsely with desire. With a stifled moan, he dropped his head again and flicked his tongue forward, the tip teasing moistly against the tiny bud of her nakedly exposed clitoris. The inflamed young brunette jerked galvanically at the sudden electrifying contact. "Aaaaagh!" she moaned. "Oh no! No . . . you mustn't.. . You mustn't. Please! Oooooohhhh!"
But, as the sensitive shaft of her secret flesh throbbed into hardness, the boy lowered his fingers and spread the opening of her cunt wider still. The next moment, the raping tongue had speared deep into the moist pink flesh of the shuddering girl's vaginal passage. Jane jerked spasmodically again, a low moan escaping from deep in her throat. Involuntarily, her hands stretched down and her fingers tangled in Mark's hair, pulling his face hard and wantonly up into her loins. His tongue circled around maddeningly inside her, the tip flickering against the wetly sensitive walls of her pussy to send spasms of insane desire coursing wildly through her half-naked body.
Then suddenly, to her astonishment and disappointment, he was moving up and over her again, leaving her frustrated cunt aflame with lustful hunger. An instant later, he was kissing her, thrusting his tongue deep into her throat as he took one of her hands and placed it demandingly on his cock, wrapping the fingers around the pulsating shaft.
She clenched them hard, hearing the groan of pleasure that forced itself between his lips over her own gasping breath. God, it was enormous! She had never expected that a penis would be so big! If she did let him put it up inside her, it would split her cunt wide open! It would kill her! Nevertheless, even the lewdly provoking thought of such a thing, the feel of the rigidly pulsing shaft in her hand, was delighting her as it caused a tremor of fear to ripple through her veins. She would like to feel it splitting her apart! She wanted to have its hotly pulsing length plunged into her seething pussy at this very minute! She'd like to feel that raping pole of flesh spear deep into her hungry loins! Instinctively, she began to massage the outer skin of Mark's huge cock back and forth, up and down the iron-hard rod. Nothing in the world had ever seemed to her so right and so good; nothing had ever felt so Complete!
The lustfully panting blond boy reached back and lewdly slipped his middle finger once more between her legs. Parting the blood-gorged vaginal lips whose hair-fringed edges were now sliding wet with the fluid seeping excitedly from her scalding pussy, he ground it tantalizingly against Jane's erectly throbbing clitoris. The wantonly spread-eagled teenager tensed on the seat as an electric shock of abandoned pleasure rippled up through her body. For a moment she was unable to move: She was frozen like a statue as the exquisite sensation seared outwards from her plundered genitals. And Mark took this to mean that she had at last given way. Carefully, he began to lever himself up off his knees.
Wildly excited, the girl felt a sudden wetness cold on her thigh as his massive cock swayed above her flesh. For an instant she wondered hazily if he had cum. Then she remembered that men too produced a seminal fluid before they reached orgasm. Automatically, she increased the speed of her obscenely milking fingers, smearing the wetly sliding lubricant over the sensitive head, skimming the greased skin more and more rapidly up and down the moistly throbbing shaft.
Mark was panting hotly. His breath played over her naked breasts. "Jane baby," he moaned frantically, "I want you! My God, I want you! Honey baby! I've got to fuck you, kid. I must!"
"No!" gasped the lustfully aroused young brunette. "No, Mark! Please! You'd . . . you'd hate me afterwards, really you would! We mustn't! Please!" Drawing up one knee, she scissored shut her thighs, craving him with every fiber of her physical being while her brain fought to maintain control of her inflamed senses, shouting: No, no, no, no!
"Jane!" the boy groaned desperately. "Come on . . . I got to!"
Thrusting with his lean hips, he tried to squirm his madly throbbing penis between her now tightly closed thighs, forcing the bulbous blood-gorged head down through the upper part of her wetly hair-lined slit, fighting to reach the mouth of the hot pink passage she was denying him, his every plunge sending wild sensations of abandon through her as his cock ground against the trembling bud of her clitoris.
"No, Mark! No, we . . . oooohhhhh . . . ! No, we mustn't! It would ruin everything!" the girl whispered passionately once more. She hugged him tight and murmured wetly into his mouth, breathing incoherent and obscene endearments up into his slavering lips as their tongues laced together and she clamped her legs more tightly still.
The blond boy arched up his thrusting hips and jammed one knee between Jane's thighs, forcing them slowly apart. She struggled against him with all her strength . . . and inadvertently her grip tightened around his straining cock just as the wetly seeping head was poised between the splayed open lips of her cunt. He gave a shuddering cry . . . and suddenly Jane knew what she had to do. If she could make him cum he must be almost at the point of orgasm already the pressure would be off and she could relax, secure in the knowledge that her virginity was preserved!
Deliberately, she increased the tension of her clasping fingers, jerking savagely at the massively throbbing staff as he lunged downwards. Mark threw back his head and uttered a gasping groan.
His breath jetted out in an explosive sigh as Jane felt the rigid shaft in her hand begin to heave and jerk uncontrollably and a hot, thick stream of liquid spurted from it, pumping out in diminishing squirts until her milking hand, and the pubic hair below it, were drenched with warmly sticky sperm. It lay in moist pools on her quivering belly, ran down the insides of her thighs, and dripped wetly down between her legs to smear the car seat beneath her trembling buttocks.
Mark emitted a final groan and collapsed across her body as she lay listening to the rain beating on the misted windows while his cum grew cold on her skin, and she almost wished, in her own frustration, that he would try again. At last he pushed himself upright and grinned down at her. She could just see his teeth glimmering in the dark. "Sorry, kid," he said easily. "It happens like that sometimes. We'll try again in a minute. Guess we might as well take another smoke and have a little drink while we wait."
"Oh, no Mark. Darling.. . I don't think we should . . . " Jane began.
"No problem," the blond boy cut in. "I got a joint ready, right here in my pocket." He fumbled in his pants for a moment and then produced a battered cigarette, the paper at each end twisted into a short spiral. Sticking it between his lips, he eased himself back onto the driving seat and reached for his lighter. She could feel the limp tube of his cock drag wetly away across her thigh.
He thumbed the lighter into flame. In the sudden bright glare that etched the rakish lines of his face against the dark, she watched him take a deep drag, screwing up her eyes against the unaccustomed light. Automatically, she held out her hand for the cigarette as he passed it over and then frowned as Mark's features were again limned against the blackness beyond the Volkswagen's windshield.
The pale glimmer of his face grew brighter; and then suddenly Jane gasped and sat hurriedly upright. The twin headlamp beams of another car were probing the night beyond the parking lot, swinging through the bushes, rising and falling as the vehicle bumped across the rough ground. "Mark!" she breathed. "There's somebody coming!"
"Shit!" the boy exclaimed. Hastily, he rolled down the window, snatching the joint from her hand to toss it out into the downpour. "I guess it's just some other kids out for a petting party," he said, fanning the marijuana fumes towards the open window. "But it's best to make sure. That pesky sheriff sometimes takes it into his head . . . "
He twisted his head to stare out the back of the Volkswagen as the newcomers drew up a few yards behind them. For a moment they were bathed in a brilliant glare, watching the silver lances of rain spear down through the vivid beams. Then the motor of the other car cut off and the lights went out. As Jane pulled down her sweater and struggled to get her naked leg into her panties and jeans, they heard the squish of approaching footsteps over the steady pelting of the downpour.
"What the hell.. . ? " Mark growled furiously.
The passenger door of the Volkswagen was jerked violently open. "What in God's name's going on here?" an angry voice demanded.
Jane gave a stifled cry. "Daddy!" she croaked. "I . . . we . . . Mark was just showing me the valley and the old viaduct b-b-before it was . . . before the water c-c-c-covered it all up . . . " Her voice trailed away before the rage in Jeff Milner's eyes.
"Don't give me that stuff!" he snapped. "This car stinks of liquor . . . and something else too, if I'm not mistaken." He sniffed suspiciously and seized the girl's trembling arm. "You get out of here and go right on back to your mother," he said peremptorily. "I'll have something to say to you later. As for you, young man . . . "
Mark Digby leaned across from the driving seat. "Relax, daddy," he said insolently. "You don't want to blow your cool. So I took your little girl joy-riding. So we had a couple of drinks. So what? I didn't force her to come. Is she still in nursery school, or what?"
Milner's shoulders were already dark with rain. His sodden hair was plastered to his skull. He tramped around to the other side of the Volkswagen and yanked open the driver's door. "Get out," he said curtly. "She's under-age and you know it. I'm not having any good-for-nothing hick-town gigolo taking advantage of her! Your reputation's bad enough already, without you fouling your dirty hands still further with jail-bait . . . "
"Just a minute!" Mark uncoiled himself from the seat and stood up in the rain facing the furious engineer. He was a full two and a half inches taller than Milner. "I think you better be careful what you say, daddy," he drawled. "That's pretty strong language you're using there!"
"Behavior like yours needs strong language," Milner raged. "People like you should be behind bars! Why don't you keep your filthy hands for little tramps of your own age? I will not have you associating with my daughter!"
"Oh yeah?" the blond boy jeered. "So what are you going to do about it? Knock my head off to, uh teach me a lesson? Is that it?"
Milner's hands clenched and unclenched by his sides. Staring wrathfully at the tall, husky youth, he felt his courage evaporate, aware suddenly of the cold wetness of the rain trickling under his collar. He bit his lip. "If I don't, somebody sure as hell will before long," he said weakly.
Mark Digby smiled contemptuously. "Why don't you try then?" he said. "Seeing you think it's so urgent."
The enraged engineer dropped his eyes. Sucking in his breath with a gasp of outrage, he saw that the blond youth's penis, limp and still greasily shining, was protruding from the open fly of his pants. He took a step towards the boy, clenching his fists again. And then abruptly, he ducked his head and almost ran around the back of the Volkswagen to haul Jane out by her arm. "Just don't let me catch you with her again, that's all," he called from the other side of the car. Pushing the frightened teenager in front of him, he hurried back to the Oldsmobile.
Digby stared after them for a moment, and then, suddenly realizing from the pounding of the rain on his sensitive flesh that he was exposed, he laughed aloud, stuffed his cock back into his pants, and lowered himself into the Volkswagen's driving seat.
* * *
The mood of the angry farmers back in Joe Harbord's diner was more inflamed than ever. A great deal of beer had been drunk since the end of the meeting. Now Bram Stollmer and several of his more militant friends had gone on to the hard stuff. The big veteran himself was in an ugly temper.
"I tell you we'll shoot it out with the bastards if necessary," he yelled. "There ain't no mother-fuckin' Senator from Washington goin' to put me off my land!"
"Supposin' they open the gates of the old dam just the same?" somebody objected.
"They won't."
"But if we sit tight on our land, they'll just send in the militia and the army and . . . "
"I told you: we'll gun the slobs down!" Stollmer roared.
"Bram's right." Jem Snipe, a thin, shifty-eyed neighbor of Stollmer's, drained his rye and banged the glass down on the bar. "They ain't gonna dare to use mortars and bozookas and such-like. Think of how it'd look in the papers. If they do send 'em in, they'll try to manhandle us off the property, and that's when we start shootin'. Reckon we're a match for any goddamn squad of draftees in this here valley."
There was a growl of agreement from most of the men around the bar. But one young farmer who had only bought his land three years before raised a solitary voice in protest. "You're crazy," he said. "You know we couldn't win on that kind of deal. Not in the long run. Sure, they'd handle it slow and easy . . . at first. But if we started shooting, you think they'd allow us to get away with that? Resisting federal authority by force of arms? They'd send in the army with tear gas and have us in jail within a couple of hours! Act your age, for chrissake!"
Stollmer put his glass of bourbon on the bar and walked slowly towards the dissenter. His footsteps rang heavily on the board floor in the sudden silence which had fallen. "You figgerin' to chicken out or somethin', Disley?" he scowled.
"Certainly not. I just think we should be realistic, is all. Anyway, I don't believe we'd get the opportunity to stage a sit-in. I figure they'll just warn us and then go ahead and open those gates on schedule."
"What, and run the risk of drownin' half the population?" Jem Snipe sneered. "They'll send in the army and try to take us first. What the hell do you know about it anyway? You ain't been here but ten minutes!"
"It's all very well for you and Stollmer," Disley said heatedly. "You just have yourselves to think of. I've got a wife and kids on my farm and so have lots of others. I don't want to have my family mixed up in any shooting war. And I don't want them drowned either."
Stollmer planted himself in front of the young man with his hands on his hips. There was an evil glitter in his eye and his face had darkened. "Meanin' just what?" he said truculently.
"Meaning you've got less to lose than we have, if you want the truth. And we're all going to lose in the end. You know that. I guess it's just one of those things. But this crazy talk . . . "
Disley's words choked in his throat as Stollmer trod heavily on his foot and slammed a pile-driving right to the young man's solar plexus. The blow traveled only a few inches but it had all the veteran's weight behind it. Unable to ride the punch because of his trapped foot, Disley folded forward involuntarily as the breath whooshed from his lungs. Stollmer seized the lapels of his lumber jacket, hauled him upright, and smashed another savage blow full into the young farmer's face. The crowd around the bar scattered as Disley staggered back under the impact, blood from his broken nose spurting over his mouth and chin. Stollmer strode after him and hit him again a roundhouse right that thudded violently home just over the heart.
Disley shot backwards over a table, which collapsed under his weight in a splintering of broken legs. "I ain't havin' no yellow-bellied newcomer tell me what I got to lose!" Stollmer said through set teeth. He watched the young man rise groggily to his feet and moved purposefully forward.
Disley shook his head like a dog coming out of the water, brushed the back of his hand across his bloodied face, and stepped in to meet him. The left hook he aimed at Stollmer's jaw glanced harmlessly off the big man's cheek. Stollmer blocked the right that followed it with his open hand, and then uppercut viciously to the point of Disley's chin. The battered young farmer teetered on his feet. Stollmer steadied him with his left, judged his distance, drew back his right, and rocketed a powerhouse punch to the pit of Disley's stomach. As the semi-conscious man doubled up with a groan, Stollmer brought up one knee to smash sickeningly against his forehead, and then slammed his linked hands mercilessly down on the nape of Disley's neck. Disley dropped face down on the floor like a felled tree.
Hauling him by the collar, Stollmer dragged him across the floor and deposited him amidst the wreckage of the table. "If there's any other quitters among you guys, now's the time to say so!" he announced, blowing on his knuckles as he returned to the bar. He was breathing heavily and his eyes were still glittering with anger.
The dissident farmers moved respectfully aside to let him through. Nobody said a word.
"Right," Stollmer said. "Hey, Joe set 'em up again, will you? Now listen. We agreed, we can handle the goddamn military. But it seems there's some folks think those bastards'll open the dam on schedule and try to flood us out without calling in the army. Is that right?"
There was a confused murmur from the men grouped around him. "You got to take it into account, Bram," someone at the back said finally. "Like I mean it could happen."
"Okay, okay, it could happen," Stollmer said genially. "So what if we cut our problems in half and make sure it can't happen, eh?"
"What do you mean?"
"How's that again, Bram?"
"Come on, Stollmer put us wise!"
"Either they run the risk of drownin' us and flood us out," the big man explained, "or they send in the militia. We can handle Number Two. So if we fix it that Number One's impossible, we're sittin' pretty, ain't we?"
"Sure thing. But. . . "
"Look," Stollmer said. "What happens if they keep to their lousy schedule? They open the fuckin' gates of the old dam, don't they? To let the water out? Okay. Well supposin' just supposin' we fix it so those gates can't be opened . . . what then?"
A buzz of questions and answers agitated the farmers as the implication of his words sank in. Stollmer silenced it with an upraised hand. "Jem," he said, stabbing a finger at his thin and shifty crony. "You blew a chunk of the bluff last fall, to make you an extra terrace on the far side of the bottom. You got any of that dynamite left in your barn, by any chance?"
"Sure have," Jem Snipe answered with a grin.
"Right then," Stollmer said triumphantly. His eyes were bleary with the liquor he had taken. He looked around the bar and lowered his voice. "I want half a dozen of you guys to help and the rest of you keep your goddamn mouths shut. Now listen while I tell you what we're gonna do . . . "
Ten minutes later the meeting broke up. Stollmer, Snipe and four other men lurched drunkenly out into the parking lot and piled into Snipe's old station wagon. The rest of them dispersed in excitedly chattering groups, leaving the bruised and bloody Disley groaning on the floor. As Joe Harbord hurried towards him with a towel and a basin of hot water, the drumming of the rain on the asphalted roof of the diner increased to a steady roar.
* * *
Senator Gilmore splashed hastily across the ten yards of concrete separating the Cadillac from the entrance to the control house above the old dam. The mayor, holding a large umbrella over the fat man's head, was hard put to it to keep up with him.
"Do you really think, Senator," he panted as they gained the shelter of the doorway, "do you really think it's wise to . . . ? "
"I've made up my mind," Gilmore snapped. "I'll take full responsibility." The angry tone of the meeting had frightened him. Faced with implacable hostility and the threat of violence, he had panicked. It seemed to him now that only desperate measures could avoid the kind of confrontation from which he cringed. The thought of having to call for military help to deal with a handful of rebellious hillbillies who were insolent enough to consider themselves above the law, the idea that instead of congratulations he might receive censure, even be held up as a laughing-stock, caused his fat neck to quiver and the sweat to stand out on his pasty brow.
In the control room of the concrete blockhouse, a gray-faced man in overalls and a peaked fatigue cap stood staring out the wide window at the dark sheet of water curving away between the steepening valley sides. There were angry wavelets lapping at the sloping wall of the reservoir. In the band of light projected through the glass they could see the turbulent surface pitted by the driving rain.
"Hi, Charley!" the mayor said. "How's it goin'? "
The controller swung around. He was holding a pastrami sandwich wrapped in greased paper and his mouth was full. "Hallo there, Ed!" he said thickly. "Didn't expect to see you tonight!"
"What's the position right now?" the mayor said.
Charley moved across and glanced at the row of indicators and gauges above the shining wheels that operated the sluices at the bottom of the dam wall. "I got Two, Four and Six open," he said. "Ten to Fifteen are on half. Nineteen and Twenty are open just a mite. The rest are closed."
"You got quite a flow there already," the mayor said. "What's the forecast?"
Charley shook his head. "There's dirty weather ahead," he said gloomily. "And accordin' to the radio it's gonna get worse. With all that rain we had last week, she's only two inches from the danger mark now. Guess I'll have to open up a few more notches before the night's out. And if it keeps on rainin' like this . . . " He shrugged and shook his gray head again.
"How far can you go?"
"Up to fifty-fifty. After that, there's a danger the river in the valley will break its banks." He chuckled. "You can imagine how pleased the boys would be with that!"
For a moment there was silence in the room. Over the pelting of the rain, they could hear he distant roar of water pouring through he sluices. Suddenly a small bell pinged above one of the dials. The controller turned toward; it with a gasp of astonishment. The needle had just jerked past a red line painted on the face. 'Til be damned!" he exclaimed wonderingly. "She's up to the mark already! Jesus them streams up in the hills there must be floodin'. " He glanced out at the water slapping the concrete a few feet from the lip of the dam. "Reckon I'd better open up Nineteen and Twenty to the half."
Gilmore had been pacing impatiently up and down. Now he stopped and turned towards the controller. "Open them all," he said. "All the way."
"Open.. . ? " Charley chuckled good-humoredly. "I can't do that Senator! The river in the valley ain't big enough to take that amount of flow. Like I say, she'd bust her banks and flood the valley floor. Then, with the new dam at the other end, your water wouldn't all be able to get out, and she'd build up, creepin' further and further back up the valley. By mornin', you'd have another reservoir on your hands." He moved towards the wheels, still laughing at his own joke.
"Senator, are you sure . . . ? " The mayor was looking worried.
"We've been over all this before," Gilmore snapped. "Those hicks are capable of anything. I know men in a dangerous mood when I see them. We'll have nothing but trouble if we keep to the schedule. But if we, so to speak, advance the schedule by a week . . . if we open up the gates and start flooding the valley now, why they'll be presented with a fait, accompli and there'll be no trouble. After all, they can't un-flood the valley. And there'll be no land left for them to stage their lousy sit-in on." . "I don't speak Spanish," the mayor said doggedly, "so I don't know about that. But I do know there's folks down in that valley, women and children, too, who are my responsibility. We can't just leave them there."
"I told you I'll take the responsibility," Gilmore shouted. "Those that have phones, we'll call them and tell them to get out. Those that haven't, we'll send a loudspeaker truck down the valley road to warn them. Tell them there's been a mistake. Good God, man . . . it's not going to fill up in five minutes like a goddamn bath! That valley's five miles long. It's not as though the dam had broken."
Charley was spinning one of the wheels between his hands. "Don't be too sure about that!" lie said soberly, keeping his eyes fixed on the dial above the wheel.
"What do you mean?" the mayor said anxiously.
The controller gave the wheel a final turn and braked it with the palm of one hand. "I don't think you understand, Senator," he said, moving across to the window on the opposite side of the room. He gestured towards the dark trough of the valley lying below the steep hundred-foot slant of the dam. "Your new dam out there, now she's an arch dam, built in a curve so that the thrust of all those millions of tons of water is transmitted to the sides of the valley. She'll take anything. But this old girl here, she's more'n ninety years old; she's one of your old-fashioned buttress dams, and it ain't quite the same, see."
"What are you talking about?" Gilmore said crossly.
"Just a straight wall with buttresses to stop the weight of water pushin' her out," Charley said. "Now if she was even older, she'd be a pyramid dam gettin' thicker all the way down so she couldn't be pushed over. But she ain't."
"You don't mean . . . ? " The mayor said nervously. "You don't mean there's a risk, if we open all the sluices at once . . . ? But what about the official opening?"
"We'd have advised you to postpone her until the level dropped. With all those twenty sluices going full bore and all that extra weight of water, plus you got one buttress that oughta been repaired a year ago . . . " Charley shook his head again.
"Look, will you stop all this talk!" Gilmore stormed. He stamped his foot like a small boy in a temper. "Do as I tell you! Open those goddamn sluices! At once!"
The controller looked questioning at the mayor, who heaved a deep sigh. "Guess you'd better do what the senator tells you, Charley," he said reluctantly. "Go ahead and open 'em."
Shaking his head and muttering, the controller moved to the far end of the line of wheels and began turning the spokes. "Just don't say I didn't warn you, that's all!" he said ominously.
As the sluice gates were raised to their fullest opening one by one, the distant roar of water gradually increased in volume until finally it was so loud that conversation in the control room was impossible without shouting. It was at that moment that the delayed-action charges of dynamite laid by Stollmer and his friends in the pumping house below the dam exploded.
A livid blast of orange flame stabbed the night as the thunderous detonation shook the valley. The building collapsed in a cloud of dust and rubble. The mechanism it housed, which was designed to regulate the outflow and channel it either into the river or along a series of escape canals, was reduced to a tangle of twisted ironwork. The charges, intended to jam the sluices and prevent them opening any further, in fact locked them as they were fully open. And the monstrous concussion of the explosion shivered the cracked masonry at the foot of the faulty buttress in the center of the dam.
New cracks rayed out suddenly from the original fissure. A segment of stonework a yard square detached itself and fell into the outflow channel swirling past below. Disturbed by the vibration of hundreds of tons of water a second roaring through the open sluices on either side of the buttress, a shower of cement and fragments followed it. A second section of masonry suddenly shifted, slipped . . . and fell into the torrent. The old dam wall, groaning under the remorseless pressure of hundreds of millions of extra gallons, shivered again.
And abruptly something gave. The whole of the lower half of the buttress subsided into the river. Like lightning in reverse, a huge crack zigzagged up from its base to the hp of the barrage. Another arrowed down from the lip to join it. And the wedge of masonry between them burst explosively outwards, collapsing into a shower of rubble as it fell. For a thousandth of a second an immense wall of water hung terrifyingly in the fifty-foot gap. And then, with a roar like all the express trains in the world, the contents of the reservoir began surging through the breach.
The gigantic rush of water hurtled to the valley floor, raising a cloud of dust and spume and debris two-hundred feet into the night sky. The remains of the pumping station were carried away. And as the seething flood raged through the breach, widening the gap as it went, a twenty-foot tidal wave swept down the valley, destroying everything in its path.
* * *
Inside the Milners' Oldsmobile, nobody had spoken for several minutes. Jane was too frightened to say anything. Nesta remained silent in sympathy with her husband. And Milner himself, humiliated and ashamed at the lack of courage he had displayed in front of his daughter, was too angry even to think. The rain, blown slantwise by the freshening wind, battered at the windshield as the car bumped along the twisting valley road.
They had passed several turn-offs when the engineer cursed suddenly and trod on the brakes. "Goddammit," he muttered, "I think I've passed the road to the town!"
"Oh, I don't think so, dear," Nesta ventured as the car slowed to a standstill on the muddy surface. "I'm sure it was . . . "
"I have!" Milner interrupted brusquely. "It wasn't as far as this. I must have passed it without noticing. It's this damned rain!"
"But darling, I'm sure I recognize that shack by the roadside there. And look, that . . . "
"Are you driving or am I?" her husband cut in rudely. "Just let me handle this my way, will you? I know what I'm doing."
Over the sodden thickets of fruit trees massed on either side of the road, a fitful orange glare momentarily lit up the sky. A second later a heavy reverberation rumbled and echoed among the hills.
"What was that?" Nesta asked. "Thunder?"
"Probably," Milner growled. "Who cares anyway?" He reversed the car up beside the shack, hauled the wheel around, and drove back down the road. Five minutes later they arrived at the turnaround beside the parking lot. In front of them, the huge arches of the abandoned viaduct reared up against the stormy sky. Mark Digby's Volkswagen was still parked among the bushes. They could see the glow of his cigarette through the window.
Breathing heavily, Milner turned again. His wife repressed a smile, resisting the temptation to say: I told you so! They had gone less than a quarter of a mile when a curious roaring noise made itself heard over the throbbing of the motor, the swish of the wipers, and the drumming of the rain. "Whatever can that be?" Nesta asked uneasily.
"Search me!" Milner said, steering carefully around a bend. "Good Christ! Look at that!"
At the far end of a long straight, the high beams of their headlamps illuminated a solid wall of water bearing remorselessly down the valley towards them, an unbroken wave whose frothing crest was jagged with planks and crates and uprooted trees.
"My God!" Milner choked. "The dam must have broken!"
Frantically, he looked around him. On the right of the road, a plank bridge led over a stream feeding the turbulent river to a rutted driveway winding through an orchard towards the lights of a house on a piece of higher ground.
"It's our only chance," he muttered desperately. "Hold on!"
Stamping on the accelerator, he sent the big car hurtling over the bridge. The rear wheels spun and slithered in the muddy ruts as he urged the Oldsmobile frenziedly up the slope. And all the time the thunder of the advancing tidal wave increased in volume, a mind-deadening crescendo of horror that drowned the scream of the laboring motor and filled their ears until they thought their heads would burst.
The tail end of the wave, which had split to sweep around the knoll on which the house was standing, hit the trunk of the car like a giant fist, rolling it over onto its roof like a child's toy. The Oldsmobile spun around twice and came to rest against the bole of an apple tree. Miraculously, none of them was hurt. Milner opened a door and helped his trembling wife and daughter out. He was shaking all over. Two yards away, the raging floodwaters following in the wake of that first terrifying wave seethed past towards the new dam. He stared at the frothing, white-streaked surface and swallowed. "My God," he said huskily, if it hadn't been for that bridge . . . "
With Nesta and Jane hanging on to his arms, he staggered on up the slope towards the house. By the time they got to the wooden steps leading to the stoop, they were soaked to the skin. Milner clattered across the boards and banged on the door. The man who opened it was tall and beetle-browed. There was a double-barreled shotgun in his hands. "Well," he said thickly, "just look what the storm blew in, for Chrissakes!"
They had come to seek refuge at Bram Stollmer's farm!
CHAPTER THREE
Jeff Milner swallowed nervously, trying to accustom himself to the fact that, of all places, they had to seek asylum at the house of the one man in the valley who had the most cause to hate him! "Hallo, there, Stollmer." he said with forced cordiality. "I-uh-we didn't know this was your place. Sorry to intrude, but it was the only refuge we could find from the flood. If we could stay here until they . . . " He broke off, staring at the big man's face.
Stollmer's eyes were bloodshot and his breath stank of liquor, "Refuge?" he echoed in a slurred voice. "Flood?" He gazed drunkenly past the soaked and shivering refugees, and suddenly his jaw dropped open. Was it possible that he was so far gone that he hadn't even noticed the roar of the tidal wave as it swept past?
Evidently it was. He gaped at the overturned Oldsmobile and the swirling expanse of muddy water racing past beyond it, stretching out into the night as far as the eye could see. His eyes narrowed and his heavy brows knitted in a ferocious scowl. "Jesus fucking Christ!" he shouted. And then, his face a mask of rage, he turned on the engineer and spat out, "You dirty bastard! You lousy fuckin' cocksucker!"
"Me?" Milner's voice rose half-an-octave with surprise. "It's not my fault, for God's sake! We were damned near caught ourselves. If it hadn't been for "
"Sure it's your fault, you crummy punk!" Stollmer interrupted furiously. "You built the lousy dam that started all this, didn't you? You talked them into requisitioning our land! Now you think you can steal a march on us by openin' the floodgates ahead of schedule, you bastard!"
"I don't know what you're talking about," Milner said. "This is no surplus overflow, man. The damn must have broken! There was some kind of an explosion and "
"The explosion had nothing to do with it," Stollmer cut in.
"How do you know? It was just a moment before "
"I do know," the enraged farmer shouted. For an instant a cunning expression flickered across his bloated features, only to be replaced by the same savage anger which had darkened them before. He gestured furiously towards the flood. "This is your work. You and that fat slob from Washington!"
"Stollmer, be reasonable! I told you we were caught "
"Reasonable!" the. big man roared. "Reasonable? Why, you . . . what about my land? There's a hundred acres of fruit trees under that water! What about my livestock? What about my crops? What about my barns?" The towering rage contorting his face suddenly seemed to get the better of him. Raising the shotgun so that the twin barrels pointed menacingly at Milner's belly, he screamed: "Get on in there all of you quick, before I blow your fuckin' guts out!"
Hurriedly, the engineer pushed his wife and daughter into the house ahead of him. Try as he would, he was unable to stop the nervous chattering of his own teeth. Stollmer kicked the door shut and strode after them. They emerged from a short passageway into a large, brightly-lit kitchen at the back of the building. There were dirty dishes stacked in the stone sink. The remains of a meal surrounded by opened cans congealed on a tall Welsh dresser. Jem Snipe sat hunched over a tumbler half-full of whiskey at a scrubbed deal table in the center of the room. "What's with all the yellin', Bram?" he mumbled without looking up.
"Bastards have opened the dam!" Stollmer cried. "The whole goddamn valley's under water!"
"What!" Snipe lurched to his feet and staggered to a window in the back wall of the house. "Jeez! It's almost up to the bam at the end of your yard!" he exclaimed.
"It's within a few yards of the front porch," Stollmer said tightly.
"Christ! My farm! My land!" Snipe swung around to face them, his hands hanging loose at his sides. His thin, lined face was ashy gray in the harsh glare of the unshaded electric bulb.
"Under twenty feet of water by now," Stollmer said grimly, "Being right on the river bank. Your house too, I reckon. And it just so happens that we have the bastard responsible right here with us. Or one of 'em."
"How many more times do I have to tell you, Stollmer," the engineer said angrily, "that we know no more about it than you do? For the last time . . . "
Stollmer's face darkened with fury. Shifting his grip to the barrels of the gun, he swung it viciously around like a baseball bat, so that the heavy wooden stock crashed against the side of Milner's head.
As Jane and Nesta screamed, the engineer, caught entirely off guard, stumbled and fell against the wall. Throwing the gun to Snipe, Stollmer leaped like a tiger after him. Bunching up the front of Milner's jacket in his huge left hand, he hauled him away from the wall and smashed his right fist three times into the dazed engineer's face.
Milner groaned and sagged in his grasp. His lips were split and bleeding, one eye was closed, and blood poured from his nose. Stollmer let go of the jacket, twisted his fingers cruelly in Milner's hair, and dragged the semi-conscious man's head back. "How many more times do you have to tell me, punk?" he said softly. "That's what you asked, ain't it? Well, you don't have to tell me no more times. I don't want to hear no more of that shit. Like you said that was for the last time!"
Bunching his free fist, he drove it with all his force into Milner's unprotected belly. Milner gave a dreadful strangled groan. His body jerked and shuddered as his breath wheezed out through his battered lips. Stollmer hit him again, and again the blows smashing into his defenseless abdomen and solar plexus with the force of a steam hammer.
"Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! . . . you brute! . . . you sadistic monster! . . . Leave him alone! . . . " Screaming hysterically, Nesta Milner and Jane hurled themselves on Stollmer's broad back, beating ineffectually at his head with their clenched hands.
He shook them off impatiently as Jem Snipe moved forward and jammed the barrels of the shotgun into Nesta's back. "Git over there by that door, you ornery bitches!" he snarled. "You try to interfere again, and I'll let you have it where it hurts most!"
Nesta's dark eyes were blazing with scorn and contempt as she backed away. Jane, her face buried in her hands, was weeping uncontrollably. Stollmer struck her father a final backhanded blow across the face and then let him slump heavily to the floor. Milner rolled over on to his face, groaning. He retched several times and his body shuddered from neck to heel. After awhile he levered himself slowly and painfully up onto his hands and knees. Stollmer stood over him, waiting. "Whyn't you join in the fun, Jem boy?" he asked genially. "Remember, this is the guy who put your farm under water!"
"That's right," the thin farmer said. His eyes were glittering sadistically. "I guess I owe the bastard a thing or two."
Shifting the gun to the crook of his arm, he came up behind Milner as he knelt there with his hair hanging over his face. Then, looking quickly at Stollmer for approval, he raised one booted foot and kicked viciously upwards into the engineer's groin, his toecap sinking brutally into the soft bulge of Milner's testicles where they swelled out the damp material of his pants leg.
Milner screamed like an animal. His arms and legs shot out, and he collapsed on his face again, his pelvis arching and flattening spasmodically at the intolerable agony searing through his loins. He vomited noisily on the floor. His breath whistled through his flared nostrils, and a series of shrill whinnying yelps forced themselves past his lips. Finally, he writhed onto his side, drew his knees convulsively up into his belly, and pressed his hands between his jerking thighs. At once Stollmer and Snipe were onto him, kicking him mercilessly in the stomach, the ribs, the back, the kidneys, their heavy boots thudding again and again with sickening force against his unprotected flesh and bone.
Over the pounding of the rain and the roar of the flood, the brightly lit room was filled with the sounds of Nesta's entreaties, Jane's strangled sobs, the stomping of feet and the hoarse panting of the two farmers as they hacked at the man threshing in agony on the floor.
For Milner himself, the world had long ago dissolved into a raging crimson sea of pain whose waves thundered monstrously at the innermost core of his being. When finally they closed over his head and he sank into the black depths beneath, Stollmer stepped away from his now inert body and turned around towards Nesta and her daughter. "That'll do for Mister Smart-Ass.. . for the moment," he said hoarsely. "But seein' we gotta wait until mornin' for someone to come and ferry us off, it's only right that the folks responsible for our predicament for gettin' us here, should kinda entertain us while we wait. Ain't that so, Jem?"
Snipe launched a last ferocious kick at the unconscious engineer's back and straightened up. There was an evil glint in his small eyes. "Sure is, Bram," he said. He licked his lips and stared lasciviously at Nesta and the trembling girl.
"W-w-what do you mean?" Nesta quavered fearfully. She glanced unbelievingly at the two leering, drink-sodden faces before her. "Surely you can't.. . ? "
Stollmer chuckled. "What say we take the ripe one first, Jem?" he asked. "The kid'll keep for later, eh?"
Snipe nodded. "Me, I like a bit of flesh on a broad," he said. The two men exchanged meaningful looks and slowly began to unbuckle their belts.
"But you can't!" Nesta cried desperately. "You can't! It's . . . it's inhuman! You'll never get away with it!"
Ignoring her, Stollmer and his companion leaped suddenly on the hysterical teenager. Hurling her face downwards across the big table, they twisted her arms behind her back and lashed her wrists together with one of the belts. Then, while Snipe bound her ankles with the other, Stollmer jammed a dish-cloth from the sink into her screaming mouth and tied it in place with a handkerchief. The bound and gagged young brunette writhed and mumbled, but the big man picked her up effortlessly and slammed her down in a wooden armchair standing against the wall.
Nesta screamed again as the two drunken farmers approached her. Bucking, kicking and twisting, she struggled frenziedly as they seized her roughly and bore her remorselessly towards the table. "You can.. . scream all you like . . . darlin', " Stollmer panted. "There ain't no one to hear you . . . but us. And you can thank . . . your old man . . . for that!"
Finally they forced the darkly voluptuous woman back over the table and Stollmer threw himself across her desperately threshing body. Grasping her wrists, he dragged her arms above her head and held them there while Snipe ran for a coil of rope and lashed them securely to the table legs. From her position in the chair, the gagged teenager stared with bulging eyes at her mother's wildly kicking, nylon-clad legs.
Stollmer shifted his weight to flatten the bound woman's thighs, and Snipe lashed her ankles in turn to the other two table legs. She was helplessly spread-eagled, her limbs stretched to the four corners of the table completely at their mercy!
Staring up into the harsh light of the naked bulb, Nesta Milner bit back a sob. To be mastered like this by those two drunken bums . . . to be laid out on a table like a slab of meat under the anguished eyes of her own daughter . . . to have the child see her father beaten to a pulp and reduced to a gibbering wreck . . . to know, worst of all, that Jane, as well as she herself, was completely theirs, to do with as they liked. It was intolerable. Straining fruitlessly against the cruel bonds, she felt the bitter tears of shame and humiliation and impotent rage well up into her eyes and course down her cheeks.
Stollmer and Snipe were standing one at each side of the table, leering down at her bound body. Slowly, almost caressingly, the big man leaned over and unbuttoned Nesta's rain-sodden tweed topcoat. Then, folding back the edges so that they lay along the table top between her spread-eagled limbs, he grasped the hem of her dark blue wool dress and yanked it up towards her hips.
The helplessly bound brunette ground her buttocks hard down against the table in a vain effort to keep the garment from moving, but Stollmer hauled it relentlessly past the fleshy curve of her hips, up over the smoothly trembling taper of her waist, and finally with a savage tug beyond the tautly swelling bulge of her full, high-set breasts. As the twin mounds of flesh, straining against the black satin cups of Nesta's brassiere, sprang into view, Jem Snipe caught his breath. "Jeez!" he whispered. "Would you look at them tits, Bram!"
"That's just what I aim to do, Jem," Stollmer chuckled lewdly. Thrusting his hands under the defenseless brunette's back, he fumbled for the clasp of the flimsy undergarment. She jerked and arched her back, instinctively recoiling away from the contact of his work-calloused fingers with her bare skin. But the movement only made his task easier. As he chuckled lasciviously again, triumphantly gripping the snap fastener of the brassiere, she felt his hot liquor-laden breath on her face. Shuddering with revulsion, she stared as defiantly as she could into his bloodshot eyes. "You're out of your mind," she said. "You'll get ten years for this if you go through with it. When they find out "
"If they find out," Stollmer said ominously.
"W-w-what do you mean?"
"There'll be folks drowned in this flood. Be kind of funny if the people responsible for it were among 'em," the big man muttered. "What they call poetic justice, ain't it?"
An icy chill ran down Nesta's spine. Was he really mad enough to . . . ? She put the horrifying thought from her mind. If Stollmer! and the furtively leering Jem Snipe were determined to ravish her helpless body as now she knew they must be she could do nothing to stop them. The only victory she could win was a moral one. They could do what they liked with her body, just so long as her spirit remained unbroken. It was the only way to help Jane too: By showing that, whatever they did to her, her mind was undefeated, Nesta could set an example that would benefit the defenseless teenager in the dreadful ordeal that must surely lie ahead for her as well.
The anguished wife felt the cool air suddenly on the sensitive skin of her breasts as Stollmer finally released the clasp of her brassiere with a grunt of satisfaction. Breathing heavily, he lifted the loose foundation garment from her quivering flesh and bunched it up with the wool dress under her armpits. Nesta bit her lip and closed her eyes. A moment later she sucked in her breath with a shuddering gasp as his fingers hooked under the lace bordering the crotch of her black satin panties. With a single savage jerk of his hand, he ripped them clean away from her body. She lay stretched out on the table like a human sacrifice, naked except for the clothes ridged under her chin and the sheer nylon panty-hose clinging darkly to her flesh from waist to toe.
Stollmer and his crony gazed for an instant at the ripe contours lewdly displayed before them, staring with lustful anticipation at the fleshy swell of hip and nylon-sheathed thigh, gloating over the full rounded moons of Nesta's lush breasts. Then, as if they had a life of their own, their hands reached out and began kneading, pinching and pawing obscenely at the softly trembling satin curves. "Jesus!" Snipe breathed again and again. "Jesus, would you look at that, Bram! Just look at them big tits! Shall I untie one leg so we can get them doodads off'n her?"
"No, I got a better idea," Stollmer chuckled. Reaching into the hip-pocket of his Levi's, he fished out a heavy clasp knife and sprang open the blade. From her chair beyond the foot of the table, Jane Milner uttered a muffled cry behind the gag as he bent down and poised the shining tip over her mother's loins.
His eyes gleaming with wanton desire, Stollmer lowered the razor-sharp blade until it was almost touching the nylon veiling the blackly shadowed triangle of pubic hair covering Nesta's genitals. Slowly, he pressed the point against it. The cobwebby material, stretched tight by the helpless brunette's cruelly splayed thighs, parted instantly and an oval hole appeared in the crotch of the tights. Nesta jerked involuntarily and Jem Snipe caught his breath as Stollmer threw aside the knife, hooked his forefinger into the hole, and wrenched them fiercely apart. The panty-hose split with a thin ripping sound, exposing the whole of the half-naked woman's hair-lined vaginal furrow to the two men's lustful gaze. With horrified eyes, the bound and gagged teenage girl in the chair saw the pinkly folded lips of her mother's cunt nestling in the crisp dark pussy hair between her wide-stretched legs.
Surely these two drunken monsters weren't really going to.. . to violate her mother, to ravish her while she was trussed up like that on the table? Surely even they wouldn't dare to commit such a vile and unspeakable act? The anguished young captive sobbed and closed her eyes as she saw Jem Snipe's work-stained hands move down to touch the hard bulge thrusting out the faded material of his pants at the top of his thighs. There was a similar bulge at Stollmer's loins, too. The shaft of his huge penis was clearly outlined against his straining Levi's, and there was a darkly spreading spot of moisture over its wetly seeping head.
"All right, Jem," she heard the big man say huskily. "You take first go. I'll get her ready while you open up."
Snipe's lean, sallow face was contorted with desire. His lips drew back from his teeth in an expression that was half smile and half snarl. His breath jetted A hoarsely past the black hairs tufting his nostrils. "Bram," he panted, "is it okay it I . . . kin I go down on 'er first?"
Stollmer was working at the petrified brunette's cunt. He insinuated his fingers roughly up into the hot moist passage of her vagina, bringing a small mewl of protest from behind her tightly clenched teeth, and then began smoothing them around inside, widening and stretching the ridged and clasping tunnel of flesh in preparation for the greater entry that was to follow. "You do whatever you want, Jem boy," he said thickly. "Christ! She's gettin' wet already!"
Humiliatingly spread-eagled on the table, Nesta repressed a gasp of horror. It couldn't be true! Surely . . . surely her body couldn't be betraying her, responding sexually against her will to the obscenely crude manipulations of the lust-crazed and drunken farmer whose hard fingers were plundering her secret genitals? Shuddering with self-disgust, she shut her eyes tight and fought with all her strength to subdue the tiny flickers of sensation that were beginning to course unbidden through her loins. Once again she realized that the only resistance she could offer was mental. She must struggle to put the whole nauseating scene from her mind, she must somehow contrive to remove herself to another plane. She must!
Stollmer snatched his lewdly probing hand away from her now wetly throbbing cunt and cupped one of her breasts in both palms, dropping his head to suck savagely on the tender bud of flesh as his hard fingers squeezed cruelly at the soft flesh beneath. Snipe was staring as if mesmerized at the wet, pink gash of the captive brunette's blood-engorged cuntal lips in their nest of dark, curling hair. "Jesus," he exulted, "what a pussy!"
Nesta froze in terror as he leaned forward across the foot of the table between her cruelly spread thighs, his black boot-button eyes feasting on the vision of her fearfully trembling loins. As his head sank toward her nakedly exposed vaginal slit, and the realization of what he was about to do seared its way into her consciousness, a despairing groan forced its way past her lips. They were going to plunder her of every last vestige of decency! There would be nothing left!
A convulsive spasm jerked the helpless woman's thigh and abdominal muscles as Snipe's depraved and wet-lipped mouth pressed suddenly into the tender flesh of her lower belly. Grinding her buttocks down onto the rough wood of the table top, she tried to cringe away from his touch; yet somehow the moist unwanted contact sent an unwanted thrill racing the length of her spine. She felt his tongue trace tantalizingly downwards to the fleshy crease between her thighs as he placed his thumbs on the softly curling pussy hair mantling her cunt and dragged the swollen lips apart. A moment later, his tongue had laced lizard-like into the warmly pulsating depths of her vagina, sending a ripple of unwelcome pleasure shuddering through her body at the electrifying contact of its tip with her clitoris.
He clamped his sweating palms roughly against the soft insides of her thighs, splaying them wider still against the pull of the ropes at her ankles. Despite herself, she forced her head up, her eyes wide with abject horror to see, beyond the obscenely sucking features of Stollmer at her ravaged breast, that Snipe too had raised his head and was grinning impudently up at her between the proud upstanding globes. She watched the thin farmer's tongue circling his saliva-flecked lips as he slid his palms under her trembling buttocks, his thumbs resting again on the wetly pulsing flanges of her cunt. Then, with a slow, torturing, outward movement, he drew the interfolded cuntal lips apart, exposing the darkly moist flesh up between her widespread legs to his lascivious gaze. Her humiliation was complete.
For a moment, Snipe panted hoarsely as his wickedly lustful eyes roamed over the defenseless brunette's loins. Then, with an animal groan, he dropped his head again and buried the full length of his long slippery tongue in the hotly throbbing tunnel of her pussy.
"Aaaaaaghhhh! Don't! Please don't. No, pleeeeeese!" The anguished cry was dragged from Nesta in spite of her determination to suffer in silence. She jerked convulsively, a whimpering moan escaping from deep in her chest. Once more her naked buttocks ground hard against the table, endeavoring to escape the maddening assault on her sensitive cunt to deny the hotly clamoring zephyrs of desire. She shivered uncontrollably as Snipe, with a liquid suck of his lips, drew her tiny erect clitoris wetly up into his devouring mouth.
God, this can't be happening to me! It can't! she groaned over and over to herself as her head fell back helplessly to the table. Her long dark hair, loosened now from the chignon by her exertions, flailed from side to side as Snipe's face rocked up and down in it's greedy feast between her legs, and his tongue speared in and out of the involuntarily dilating lips of her pussy.
And yet.. . and yet.. . in spite of her terror and revulsion at the depraved attack on her defenseless genitals, the tiny wisps of forbidden pleasure were unmistakably beginning to purl deep down in Nesta's belly! And on her firmly rounded breasts, inflamed and tingling from the assault of Stollmer's teeth and fingers, the nipples were now spiked out hard and taut and erect!
Seeing the big man smirk maliciously at her over his sucking mouth, she clenched her eyes tightly shut again as the whirlpools of sensation spiraling outwards from her loins began to build and build. Dear God, she must fight this with all her strength! She must not succumb to the betrayal of her body! She couldn't let them win!
But suddenly Jem Snipe's tongue lanced forward, burrowing far up into her hotly straining cunt. And shock seared crazily up her spine to the base of her skull, where it burst like a Fourth-of-July rocket into a million stars, showering hot pinpoints of desire racing over her whole trembling body. Her loins sprang involuntarily forward, burying the flickering tongue up to its root. Fire was rapidly and incomprehensibly replacing fear.. . and everything else!
Dear God, what could have happened to her? She enjoyed her love-making with Jeff, but it had never seemed to rise to the heights she had once expected; it had become almost a routine, really. Then, too, he himself wasn't very well, adventurous, if she was frank about it. Only once in the whole of their married life had he gone so far as to kiss her down there. That had been years ago, after a rather drunken party when they were staying with friends in New York. And it had certainly never made her feel as she was beginning to feel now . . . despite the terrifying circumstances of her ordeal and the despicable men profiting from them.
What was happening to her? She was coming erotically alive spontaneously! She writhed and strained against her bonds, striving frantically to quell the searing lashes of hot flame suddenly licking maddeningly all over her naked flesh. But her struggles only thrust her seething cunt tighter up against the obscenely sucking mouth of the drunken farmer who was so deliciously tongue-fucking her fiery cuntal flesh. A low moan of lewd hunger rasped from her throat as she ground her now shamelessly aroused loins up into his face.
And then the air of the kitchen was cold against her hotly throbbing cuntal flesh. Unexpectedly exasperatingly Jem Snipe had jerked his slavering mouth away from her. Now he was kneeling upright on the table between her splayed thighs, his trembling fingers scrabbling at the zipper of his faded pants. "Man, I got to get it in there!" he crowed. "I got to get that ole prick of mind plowing into that tight little pussy!" Gleefully, he reached in the open vee of his fly and pulled his long, thin, rigidly pulsating cock free of his shirt-tail and jockey shorts. It was iron-hard and slightly curving, the purple bulbous head already protruding evilly from the stretched foreskin with a pearl of seminal fluid glistening wetly at its seeping tip. With a gasp of lustful satisfaction, Snipe seized the hard, aching shaft with both hands and guided it straight into the moistly gaping cavern of Nesta's yearning cunt.
"Aaaaaggghhh!" the helplessly bound brunette groaned as it slithered deep inside her quaking belly. "Oh no . . . oooooooh!" She lay moaning and sobbing, partly in abject humiliation and shame, partly in lustful abandon, as Snipe began furiously fucking in and out of her hot, wet pussy and Stollmer, relinquishing his hold on her swollen and inflamed breasts, straightened up to watch with a sadistic smile twisting his features.
From the chair in which she sat pinioned and helpless, Jane Milner watched hypnotized as Snipe's raping pole of flesh skewered into her mother's wide-stretched loins like a battering-ram. Her horrified eyes stared unbelievingly at the long, veined cock wetly gleaming along its full length from the ravished woman's vaginal secretions plunging with ever-increasing urgency into Nesta's hotly clasping cunt. She was only a few feet away from Snipe's pounding hips and she could see the moist pink flanges of the captive brunette's cunt pulled lasciviously outwards with the drunken farmer's penis as he withdrew, only to be stuffed fiercely back inside as he smacked down again on the next plunge.
Jane felt the blood drain from her head. She was sure she was going to faint from the shock of seeing the unbelievable scene taking place in front of her. Her own mother, obscenely stretched and helpless on the table, being brutally ravished by one man while another looked on, ready to take his place! She tried to blot the dreadful tableau from her eyes but she could not. Some obscure compulsion froze her eyelids open, forcing her to watch the debasement of her mother's body.
Nesta Milner was uttering a continuous low whining noise now, interrupted from time to time by a deep grunt low down in her chest as Snipe slammed his hips against her loins with harder and harder force.
And then the unthinkable happened!
Hesitantly at first and then with increasing urgency, the savagely violated brunette began undulating her own hips, thrusting her pelvis up to meet Snipe's powerful lunges. The low whining moans coming from her mouth altered subtly, almost imperceptibly to begin with, and then in tones that left no room for doubt, to a whimper of passionate pleading.
It was incredible, but.. . it sounded as though she was beginning to enjoy it! Jane couldn't believe her ears!
Nesta herself was unable to believe it. It was a strange kind of joy that held her in its grip, a masochistic joy, engendered perhaps by the very helplessness of her position, or by the lewd, obscene thought, the realization that she was being fucked half-to-death by one man with another standing by to take over. But whatever it was, it was a kind of pleasure and a kind of joy that she found herself powerless to deny. Her seething loins jerked ferociously upwards to swallow the whole length of Snipe's cock in her wetly clasping, suddenly scalding pussy. Her naked body shuddered and strained against him and her buttocks began a rhythm of their own, squirming in abandoned circles on the table.
"Ooooooohhh! Aaaaggghh! Ooooohhh!" she chanted . . . on and on in time with the frenzied thrusts of the lust-crazed farmer driving his raping cock so furiously up into the hot, wet walls of her womb. His passion-thickened rod of flesh pistoned mercilessly into her, splatting pelvis against pelvis with every brutal hammering lunge. He was going to bring her to climax with the savage pounding of his body alone! And then suddenly, as she bucked wantonly, uncontrollably beneath him, -she felt his lust-hardened, thickly spearing penis bulge and expand without warning, spewing its white-hot release far up into the obscenely milking depths of her tortured cunt.
"Goddamn!" Snipe shouted. "The bitch is so tight she made me cum already! Aaaahhhh!"
He collapsed face downwards over Nesta's shuddering body as the violated young mother bit back a cry of disappointment and frustration: She'd been so close to her own orgasm! The peak had only been a fraction away! Straining crazily for his deflating cock until he pulled it free with a lewd wet sucking sound, she was a prey to a storm of conflicting emotions. Appalled by her abject debasement and her own unwantedly passionate response to it, she nevertheless found that the guilt she felt because of that excitement served only to increase the lecherous sensations flaming through her veins! She was out of her mind with desire! It was the most incredible thing that had ever happened!
Snipe eased himself away from the table, a furtive, slightly shameful grin twisting his thin features. A thin trail of his sperm swayed from the limp, rubbery tube of his flaccid cock to fall coldly across the trembling flesh of Nesta's thigh. Bram Stollmer was already standing at the foot of the table, eager to take his place. The big man had stripped off his Levi's and shorts, the thick, blunt shaft of his iron-hard penis standing rigidly out from the muscled hairiness of his belly beneath the checkered shirt like the trunk of some massive tree. His drink-crazed eyes were aflame with lust.
"Okay, Jem," he said thickly, "we're gonna have a little variety this time. Untie her feet and hold her legs back over her head!"
Stuffing his cock back inside his pants, Snipe hurried to obey. Hastily loosening the ropes binding Nesta's ankles to the legs of the table, he seized her behind the knees and roughly pushed her into a jackknife position. Then, moving around until he was standing behind her head, he grasped her ankles and hauled them towards him, bending her body double so that the whole expanse of her wetly hair-lined vaginal furrow was shamelessly exposed to the gaze of Stollmer and the petrified teenager in the chair.
And suddenly the demons of desire which had been dancing in Nesta's veins were stilled. She was all at once afraid. Excruciatingly doubled up as she was, she writhed and struggled in vain against the ropes binding her wrists and the cruel pull of Snipe's hands on her ankles. Between her tensed thighs, she gazed horror-struck at the thickly pulsating length of Stollmer's cock. It was monstrous the ram-rod shaft webbed all along the underside with heavy throbbing veins, the bloated purplish head glistening obscenely with seminal fluid welling from its tip. Her despairing eyes trailed a slow path up the muscular planes of his torso, past the menacing cock with its hair-covered, sperm-packed balls, past the black down furring the belly and the rumpled shirt with his chest hair curling wirily from its neck, to the strong, lined face staring maliciously down at her nakedly exposed genitals.
A piteous and unspoken plea for mercy shone forth from her tearfully brimming eyes as she strove wordlessly to appeal to whatever sense of honor or decency still remained in Stollmer's mind. But she found none: The bloodshot eyes beneath his heavy brows stared back at her with cold and implacable determination. He had obviously worked himself up into a state of lustful anticipation watching her being raped by his friend.
"Look at this cock, baby," he leered with a contemptuous glance over his shoulder at the unconscious figure of her husband. "This is what a real man's cock looks like, see. And now I'm gonna stuff it so far up that soft white belly of yours that you can taste it!"
Snipe guffawed loudly as he hauled down harder on Nesta's straining legs, upturning her loins still more shamelessly beneath the swaying length of Stollmer's plank-stiff penis. "At's a boy, Bram," he chortled. "You throw it to her, man. Screw the ass off the sexy bitch!"
"Watch me!" Stollmer grinned as he kneeled up on the scrubbed table behind the helplessly jackknifed brunette. His voice was husky from the salacious thought of what he was going to do. His dilated eyes gleamed in lustful arousal. But for a moment longer he hesitated, gazing down at the seductive body that was now beyond all resistance and care, staring at the full white moons of Nesta's upturned buttocks, his face a mask of uncontrolled desire. His semen-bloated testicles tingled and ached; he longed to thrust forward into the teasing pink vaginal slit quivering moistly before him. Yet he held himself back, savoring the moment, deliberately torturing himself in anticipation of the moment when he would slide his wetly gleaming cock deep in between those quivering ass-cheeks, plunging it far up into that hotly throbbing cunt! He wanted to work it so that he could once more trigger off those unmistakable signs of sexual arousal he had seen when the bitch was being fucked by Snipe. He wanted to feel her squirming under him, needing him as much as he needed her.
That would be the big thrill. A stuck-up city housewife, who was horrified at the thought of a real man's cock fucking into her, suddenly turning animal and losing control over herself, forgetting who she was, where she was, forgetting everything but the overpowering need to be fucked and fucked and fucked until she couldn't move! That would go some way towards assuaging the anger at the loss of his farm that still burned hotly in his mind, and slake the thirst for revenge that was souring his life.
The thought raced through his loins like an electric shock. By God, he'd play it that way. He'd get a little of his own back on the bastard who'd dreamed up that plan for the new dam. And give his bitch of a wife something to think about as well. Too bad the punk was still out for the count. For a moment he toyed with the thought of having Snipe revive him with a bucket of water, but he put it from his mind. It would take too long.
Right now his penis and balls ached so intolerably that he knew he must stuff it into her soon. If he delayed much longer it would be too late. His lascivious thoughts had brought him almost to the point of orgasm himself. There was only an inch of space between Nesta's upturned pussy and the end of his bulging cock. Leaning forward, he pressed her ass-cheeks still further apart to see it more clearly. His penis jerked with impatient desire at the sight of her tiny puckered anus nestling in the wide-split crevice between her thighs. For an instant he was tempted to take her there, but the thought receded from his mind as another drop of moisture seeped slowly from the tip of his throbbing cock. He had to have it now or he would waste his sperm all over those soft white buttocks stretched in sacrificial offering before him: He couldn't hold back another instant!
He shuffled forward, sliding his knees as far up between her cruelly spread thighs as he could, guiding his rigidly pulsing penis with his forefinger and thumb, gently parting her darkly curling pubic hair with the rubbery head.
The painfully doubled-up brunette caught her breath as the hot soft outer folds of her fleshy cuntal lips closed wetly over the raping farmer's bulbous glans.
Stollmer groaned.
Never in his life had he felt anything so delicious! Trapped between the sensuously pulsating layers of wet and ready flesh, he let his cock lie there throbbing for a moment. Then the lewd contact between the walls of Nesta's cunt and the quivering pole rammed in between her milk-white thighs incited him to a further frenzy of lust, and all the bitterness and frustration and hatred of the past few days surged suddenly forward with him into the warm wet pussy of the groaning young wife.
He gasped aloud with relief as he felt the tight, hot ridges of her contracting vagina slip smoothly over, and then enclose, the rock-hard length of his plunging penis. And then, gripping the sides of the table with his hands, he flexed his hips and began fucking into her like a wild man, his pistoning hips splatting viciously down against her upturned ass with every savage thrust.
"Aaaaaggghhh!" Nesta screamed frantically as the massively surging rod seared ferociously in and out of her belly. "Ohhhhhh! It's too . . . big! You're . . . hurting meeee! Arrrrrrrgh!"
Her loins were on fire. Desperately she writhed and flexed her body, trying to kick her legs free to ease the torture of this agonizing impalement. But Snipe held her ankles fast and she screamed again: "Uuuuuuggh! Aiiiiee! It's tearing me! Stop!"
She was certain the lips of her ravished cunt must be splitting. The pain was unendurable, racking her sadistically stretched body like bolts of flesh-searing lightning. And then, as Stollmer began a rocking, saw-like motion in and out of her hotly clasping, wide-splayed pussy, plunging pitilessly from the crest of each withdrawal to ram her agony-filled body hard down against the table, the pain began miraculously to subside and that strange sensation of tingling joy seeped again through Nesta's nakedly defenseless loins. Her gaping mouth opened still wider as whines and whimpers of unexpected elation bubbled past her lips in obscene tempo with the rhythm of Stollmer's fiercely fucking hips.
The outrageous subjugation and debasement caused bizarre masochistic delights to flare through the captive brunette's bloodstream. Almost of their own volition, her hips, too, commenced unanticipated gyrating movements in abandoned unison with the accelerating speed of the huge cock drubbing into her.
Stollmer looked up, gasping. He knew how to interpret the signs when he saw them. "Okay, Jem," he panted. "You can let go now."
Chuckling lewdly, Snipe released the captive wife's ankles, and Stollmer fell forward with a groan over Nesta's naked belly and breasts as she kicked her legs free and then wrapped them convulsively around his hairy, pumping buttocks, spiraling her calves far up his sweating back to clamp his loins even more closely to her hotly clasping pussy.
"Oh God!" she moaned wantonly. "Oh God, yes! Fuck me! Fuck me! Fuck me! Screw the shit out of me, you bastard! Aaaaaagh!"
It was at this moment that Jeff Milner hazily regained consciousness and rolled over with a deep groan to stare unbelievingly at the obscene spectacle being played out on the table above him.
Bound and gagged on the chair, Jane had been watching the metamorphosis of her mother with increasing disbelief, herself. To see the normally correct and almost prudish Nesta, abjectly humiliated and then viciously raped by two loathsome drunks, transformed in the space of less than a half-hour into the mewling, squirming nymphomaniac panting in lustful abandon before her eyes it was blowing her young mind.
That mind was still numbed with the shock of seeing her beloved father brutally beaten senseless and the subsequent debauch of Nesta. But a part of it, she was forced to admit, was curiously and shamefully . . . yes! . . . curiously excited by the double violation of her mother! She knew it was wicked and it was wrong; she was filled with pity and terror and revulsion at the mindless brutality of Stollmer and his shifty friend. Yet the fact couldn't be denied: It wasn't the actual ravishment of Nesta that caused those twinges of unfamiliar sensation to spiral through her young loins: It was the fact that the subjugated woman was actually enjoying it!
The forbidden twinges of excitement couldn't be denied either. The horrified young girl gasped into the stifling gag and felt a tide of crimson flooding her cheeks as she realized that there was a faint but unmistakable warm wetness between her tightly bound thighs. She wriggled slightly on the hard chair, hoping desperately that she might be wrong.. . but no! There could be no doubt. Oozing moistly from between the tender lips of her virginal cunt, the evidence of her own erotic arousal at the debasement of her mother was steadily soaking the white satin of her panties.
On the table, Stollmer was pistoning into the naked brunette like a jack-hammer, the greedy wet walls of her inflamed cunt clasped hungrily around his sinewy cudgel. His testicles smacked rhythmically into the damp crevice of her buttocks; his hard chest smashed down on the full quivering globes of her breasts as her slavering lips mouthed endearments and obscenities and mewling cries of passion up into his stubbled cheeks. And then suddenly the muscles of her belly began to quiver and the cords of her neck tightened in the signs of an approaching orgasm.
Jem Snipe guffawed and Jeff Milner uttered a hoarse cry of anguish and outrage as she screamed in a voice shrill with erotic desire; "Oh God! Oh, God, I'm going to cum! I'm going to cum! Fuck me harder! Harder! I'm going to cum! I'm cumming! I'm cumming., . . aaaaaaa aghh!"
Her ankles locked behind Stollmer's driving buttocks, her heels drummed maniacally on his naked flesh, pulling him deeper and deeper into her scalding cunt. Her juices flowed wetly out around his still pumping cock, streaming down the crack of her buttocks to flood his balls as they swung forcefully against her moistly puckered anus. Spurred on by the furious jerking of Nesta's satiated body, he rammed his cock more deeply into her, faster and faster, forcing her legs back over her head again, fucking into her like a pile-driver as he gasped and panted with the violence of his efforts.
And then suddenly his back and buttocks shuddered galvanically. He gave a deep grunt. . . and the wildly moaning brunette felt the hot surge of his sperm shooting deep into her dilating womb, mingling obscenely with the mucous pool throbbed into her a few minutes before by Snipe. Her head reeled in depraved sensuality as the powerful scalding squirts jetted fiercely into her, filling the seething cavern of her cunt with sticky whiteness. The hot, wet walls of her vagina clasped and unclasped convulsively, obscenely milking at the jerking staff like a sucking, starving mouth.
In a delirium of ecstasy, her limbs collapsed loosely on the table as Stollmer, chuckling lewdly to himself, levered himself upright. She lay spread-eagled and inert as she felt the weight lift from her breasts and belly, and his cock pulled free of her with a sucking squish. Then there was the rush of cool air across her sweat-soaked body . . . and suddenly all the lights in the house went out.
CHAPTER FOUR
The rain had fallen ceaselessly all night. Outside the shuttered windows of Bram Stollmer's marooned farmhouse, it pounded on the lean-to roof of a barn, drummed relentlessly on the porch, and obscured the irregular outline of the high ground on either side of the inundated valley. All around the building it cascaded from choked gutter, streamed through unsuspected cracks, and gurgled in secret places beneath the floor. A canvas awning protecting Stollmer's jeep had become transformed into the bulging container for an artificial lake. Those parts of the yard still above the raging floodwaters were a waste of muddy puddles into which the downpour remorselessly hissed, and even the ornamental trees and shrubs on either side of the entrance had become sodden and limp in the deluge.
"Jesus, but it's wet!" Bram Stollmer exclaimed, kicking the door of the kitchen open and dropping a load of damp kindling on the floor. He stamped his feet on the flagstones and stripped off his dripping oilskin. A spreading pool of moisture surrounded his soaked feet.
Jem Snipe looked up from the pan of coffee he was brewing over the old-fashioned stove. "You can say that again," he agreed. "You been out back where your view's hidden by that barn, Bram. Did you take a look at the other side?"
Stollmer stared at him without replying and then strode down the passageway to the front door. Jerking it towards him, he whistled and then cried: "Shit! Just look at that goddamn level!"
"And she's still risin', " Snipe said behind him with gloomy satisfaction.
For a moment the two men gazed out into the rain. The Milners' wrecked automobile, which had been just clear of the high-water mark the previous night, was now jammed hard against the fruit trees into which it had crashed by the current and only the wheels showed above the surface of the flood! The water, gurgling menacingly as it swept past, was within a few feet of the porch. With a last look at the overturned Oldsmobile, Stommer slammed the door and hurried back to the kitchen, where he began fiddling with the dials of an ancient radio.
Upstairs in the small room in which she and her family had been locked, Nesta Milner stood by the window and gazed despairingly out through a gap in a broken shutter. Between the house and the rain-blurred side of the valley, a waste of gray waters streaked with white surged toward the new dam. Beyond the drowned Oldsmobile and again near the far side of the three-quarter-mile stretch of raging floodwater the tops of trees battled against the racing current. But in between there were nothing but menacing swirls and eddies punctuated here and there by huge drifts of debris and flotsam born rapidly downstream on the turbulent surface. The angry ragged clouds from which the rain was falling were so low that they seemed almost to touch the sloping valley side as they streamed across the sky.
Listening to the uneasy moan of the wind around the caves of the house, Nesta turned back into the room. Jane, fully dressed, lay on the stained mattress of the narrow bed, staring with wide-open eyes at the ceiling. Jeff Milner, his bruised and battered body elongated on a couch covered with blankets, snored to one side of the door. Bitterly ashamed and humiliated by his own performance the previous night and outraged beyond measure by his wife's he had refused to speak to either of them after Stollmer and Snipe had herded them upstairs soon after the lights failed. Finally he had fallen into a tortured sleep interrupted by moans and violent shuddering of his ravaged torso. But Nesta, her mind seething with mixed emotions, had stayed awake throughout the hours of darkness. She was about to move towards her daughter when the professional voice of a radio announcer boomed through the house:
. . . We interrupt this program to bring you news of the Blossom Valley disaster. It is now known that a mysterious explosion caused the dam to give way. And this, in turn, caused the entire valley to be flooded late yesterday evening and prematurely inundated dozens of farms already doomed by the new Blossom Valley Dam project due to be inaugurated next week.
"Twenty people are known to have lost their lives in the disaster and many more are still missing. Some of these may be marooned on high ground above the still rising floodwaters, but rescue attempts are hampered by the violence of the current as the old reservoir empties itself into the condemned valley and rivers swollen by the recent abnormal rains complicate the task still further. Dense low cloud and high winds above the treacherous hills to the east of Blossom Valley render any attempt at an air rescue similarly hazardous until the weather improves.
"The situation is made still worse by the existence of the new dam blocking off the mouth of the valley. At the moment only the minimum number of sluice gates necessary to take the normal outflow of the river are open. Until the remainder can be opened, the floodwaters will continue to rise behind the new damn. But the power supply to the new dam is cut. Electricity Board engineers, faced with failures all over the State, are trying desperately"
In the kitchen, Stollmer switched off the radio with an oath. "Looks like we ain't gonna be taken off for some time yet," he said, staring angrily out the window at the pelting rain.
"According to that bulletin, lover-boy upstairs wasn't responsible for the flood neither," Jem Snipe observed. "Who'd of thought a few sticks of dynamite-"
"You don't have to believe that crap they feed you on the radio," Stollmer cut in roughly. "It should be a cover-up faked by that fat slob Gilmore. Anyways, Milner's at the bottom of it for sure. He built the fuckin' new damn, didn't he? He made them take our land!"
Snipe nodded. "I guess so . . . How long d'you figure we'll have to wait, Bram?"
The big man shrugged. "Search me. No boat could stay afloat in them waters right now, that's for sure. Reckon we'll have to wait for the weather to clear so they can fly the choppers in or else . . . "
"Or else, what?"
"Hope they get the goddamn power lines hitched up, so they can let the floodwaters out. It'll take that reservoir three days to empty. I know; I used to work for the Water Board when my old man ran the farm."
"But if she goes on risin' at this rate . . . ? " I Snipe left the sentence unfinished and glanced nervously out the window.
"I know it. We'll be under water by tomorrow I mornin'. Unless the weather breaks, they'll be I too fuckin'late!"
"What are we gonna do, Bram?" There was a plaintive whine in Snipe's voice.
Stollmer drained his mug of coffee and banged it down on the table. "Pray, if you're that way inclined," he said with a harsh laugh. "In the meantime, we got entertainment laid on, ain't we? Me, I feel like a piece of fresh tail. You figure on lendin' me a hand, Jem?"
Snipe licked his lips. "Anything you say, Bram," he agreed with a last look over his shoulder at the rain hissing into the drowned yard.
Nesta Milner and Jane backed fearfully against the far wall as the two men burst into the upstairs room. Jeff Milner was sitting up on the settee with his aching head held in his hands.
"Seems like we have a while to wait before any rescuers turn up," Stollmer said. "I guess you heard the radio? Maybe they'll never come. Whichever way the cookie crumbles, I reckon we might as well have ourselves a ball to pass the time, eh? Could be the last chance we'll ever have!" He chuckled suggestively and winked at Snipe.
"W-w-w-w-what do you mean?" Nesta quavered, staring anxiously at their two sadistic captors'. Both men were unshaven, their chins blue with stubble, their hung-over eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot.
"It's up to you how it pans out," Stollmer said evenly. "Either you two broads can cooperate, and we'll all have a ball or you can play hard-to-get and only us two'll get the kicks. It's up to you . . . and the result'll be the same in any case."
Jeff Milner rose shakily to his feet. "Stollmer-" he began.
"Shuddup!" the big man snapped without turning his head.
"I haven't the least idea what you mean," Nesta said distantly.
"No?" Stollmer laughed aloud. "Maybe we can give you a little example." He turned to Jane. "Take off them clothes and get down on that bed," he ordered brusquely.
"I'll do no such thing!" the trembling teenager cried defiantly. She moved closer to her mother and the older woman placed a protective arm around her quivering shoulders. "You can't make me!" Jane added with a confidence she was far from feeling.
"I don't aim to make you," Stollmer said quietly. "You're gonna do it of your own free will, baby."
"Never!"
He grinned malevolently. "You'd be surprised, kid."
Milner tottered into the center of the room. His face was puffed and discolored, his lips scarred and bloated, and his whole body a mass of agony. One of his eyes was half-closed and his swollen nose was spread over his bruised cheeks. "If only you'd listen to me, Stollmer," he said thickly. "There's no need for all this senseless violence. Things aren't nearly as bad as you think. If you'd just listen for one minute
Stollmer's face darkened with fury. Pivoting on his toes, he drew back his left arm and smashed a terrifying blow into the battered engineer's distorted face. Milner flew backwards under the pile-driving impact of the punch, tripped over a stool, cracked his head against the wall, and slid slowly to the floor. Blood streamed from the reopened wounds around his mouth.
The angry farmer leaped after him, hauled him up by the lapels, and slammed him down again with another brutal left to the jaw. "I thought I told you . . . to shuddup . . . punk!" he panted, standing aggressively over the fallen man.
As Nesta screamed and moved protectively towards her husband, Snipe struck her a vicious blow across the face with the back of his hand and sent her reeling into a chair. She sat sobbing with her fingers pressed to her cheeks, a thin trickle of blood from her split lip running down her shaking wrist.
"Like I said," Stollmer resumed, breathing heavily, "are you gonna take off them clothes or not, baby?"
"Certainly not!" Jane stormed, striving hard to hold back the tears that threatened to overcome her. She stared fixedly at the wall above the big man's head, averting her eyes from the distressing spectacle of her subjugated father and mother.
"We'll see," Stollmer said, suddenly grinning again. He jerked his head at Snipe and moved purposefully towards Milner. As his thin-faced crony hauled the semi-conscious man to his feet and held him there with a full-Nelson arm-lock behind his neck, Stollmer reached slowly down and groped for the bulge of Milner's penis and testicles through the material of his pants. Finally, with a grunt of satisfaction, he found the helpless engineer's balls, closed his hand around them, and squeezed. Milner tensed and jerked in the crippling arm-lock, a groan forcing itself past his savaged lips.
"Well.. . are you gonna take 'em off?" Stollmer raised his brows at the horrified teenager.
"N-n-n-n-no . . . Certainly not!"
Stollmer increased the pressure until his knuckles whitened and the muscles of his arm showed in ridges through his shirt sleeve. Milner threw back his head and screamed a shrill animal howl that sobbed up the scale like the wail of a lost soul in hell. As the pain from his brutalized testicles, already swollen and inflamed from Snipe's vicious kick the night before, seared through his frame in bolts of indescribable agony, his limbs shuddered and jerked, his head twisted desperately from side to side, and his hips threshed in a frantic effort to evade Stollmer's merciless grasp. He heaved and bucked, dragging Snipe this way and that in his frenzied attempts to escape the intolerable assault on his genitals. One of his flailing legs caught the big man a painful blow on the shin.
"Goddamn!" Stollmer cried. "The bastard up and kicked me!" He increased the torturing pressure still further. Milner went on screaming.
"Stop! Stop! Stop!" Nesta screeched. "Jane for God's sake do what they say! Don't let them hurt him any more!"
"All right!" the hysterical teenager shouted. "All right, I'll do it! Anything you say! Just leave him alone, for pity's sake!"
Stollmer released his grasp and stepped back, panting. Snipe loosened the arm-and-neck-lock and allowed the tormented man to slump on his face to the floor, where he writhed and groaned, arching and flattening his hips as he tried to ease the unbearable agony in his loins.
"That's better," Stollmer said genially. "Didn't I tell you, you'd do it of your own free will, baby?"
Jane was tearing off her clothes with trembling fingers, Whatever these two inhuman monsters were going to do to her, the sooner it began, the sooner it would be over. She would simply shut her mind to the whole thing; try and think of something else and let them get on with it.
Stollmer and his crony caught their breath as she stepped out of her panties and shrugged off her brassiere, revealing the voluptuous young curves of her virginal body, the tender bulges of her taut, wide-set breasts and the sparsely curling triangle of silky pubic hair at her loins to their' lecherous gaze. "Jesus Christ!" Stollmer said huskily. "Okay get over there and lie face downwards on that bed, kid."
Trembling with apprehension, Jane did as she was told. Her mother moved impulsively towards the big man; she opened her mouth to say something and then caught sight of the pitiable figure of her husband, his hands pressed tightly over his ravaged genitals, rolling on the floor on the far side of the room. She bit her lip and turned away to stare helplessly out the window.
Grinning sadistically, Stollmer clambered onto the bed and rolled across the full length of Jane's quivering back, his face pressed momentarily into the clean, soft odor of her hair. As he reached under his hips to unzip his fly and take out his rigidly throbbing cock, Jane began weakly to struggle, but Jem Snipe leaned over the bed and planted the flat of one hand between her shoulder blades, forcing her upper-half down on the stained mattress. With his other hand, he gripped her fiercely by the nape of the neck, thrusting her contorted face cruelly into the pillow. Behind her, Stollmer's muscular knees were prying her legs apart.
She strained with all her might to keep her thighs closed, but it was hopeless. Half-suffocated by the combined weight of the two men, she had no chance. All at once, the breath surged from her lungs and her resistance broke. Stollmer lowered himself between her legs and they spread wide across the bed, her toes hanging over the sides of the mattress. The helpless girl moaned softly between her clenched teeth as she felt the hardness of his penis make wet, warm contact with the sensitive flesh of her inner thighs. Easing himself forward, the ruthless farmer insinuated the whole lust-inflamed length of his steely shaft into the narrow cleft of her buttocks. Jane struggled again, but as her head and shoulders were so brutally held down, squashing her tender young breasts against the rough ticking of the mattress, her movements were limited to the lower-half of her body. She squirmed wildly beneath him, the threshing of her hips against his pelvis causing his wetly seeping rod to expand and harden still further.
"Get up on your knees," he breathed hoarsely in her ear.
The petrified teenager froze, trying to stiffen her body and press herself further down into the mattress. At once Snipe's brutal hand on her neck rammed her face into the pillow, cutting off her breath. She tried to cry out but she was dizzy from lack of air and her mouth wouldn't open. As she went limp again, the hand was removed; and then, while she gulped desperately for the life-giving oxygen, unable to concentrate on anything else, Stollmer's powerful hands were at her hips, pulling them forcefully up off the bed. By the time she had recovered her breath, her buttocks were swaying lewdly high in the air.
She essayed a lurch forward in a vain attempt to flatten herself on the bed once more. Snipe's hand was immediately replaced on her neck, pushing her face into the pillow and cutting off her supply of air, forcing her to relax and stop struggling. Jane knew she must give in eventually. There was nothing left but the final degradation of submitting to their obscene desires. Her body was theirs to do with as they wished in their mindless quest for animal satisfaction.. . a quest that would only end when they had exploded their white-hot liquid lust far up inside her softly trembling belly.
Kneeling up behind her, Stollmer shook with excitement. He could sense the turmoil of confused thoughts racing through the nakedly exposed teenager's mind. If he wanted to score a double and have the daughter moaning for him to fuck her harder like the mother, now was the time for patience. The kid had passed the first stage of submission to physical violence; now the conquest of her spirit must be attempted -and the weapons to use were caresses and tenderness. The unexpected switch should catch her off guard in spite of her resistance. Stollmer knew; he'd done it before.
Slowly, he leaned forward and traced a warm wet kiss along the ridge of Jane's curved spine. She groaned slightly and her back trembled at the moist contact of his lips. He backed off, running his tongue slowly and moistly down the full length of her back until he reached the tightly clenched crevice of her buttocks, quivering high off the bed.
Then, dropping his hands to her lushly rounded ass-cheeks, he drew the twin globes of flesh gently outwards. As her muscles tensed again, he eased off a little, still maintaining a constant teasing pressure, until the contracted flesh of her inner thighs tired and began to relax. His face was level with the thin coral folds of her virginal pussy; and as he watched with gleaming eyes, they parted slowly under the almost imperceptible outward pressure of his thumbs. He could see a slight moisture forming, glistening on the pink, interfolded lips and the soft insides of her thighs as she let her buttocks slip wider and wider apart in the relief from resistance and pain. She had geared her mind to a struggle against anguish and humiliation but she wasn't prepared for tenderness and even pleasure.
Stollmer swallowed as his gently but remorselessly pressing thumbs drew her ass-cheeks apart until suddenly her secret cavern flowered open and the moist inner flesh came tantalizingly into view, smooth and dark and warm and faintly gleaming with her secretions. He blew his hot breath softly into her, making her moan faintly and squirm on the bed. She tried to move, but the pressure of Snipe's hand on her shoulders kept her fixed in place. She was quieter now, and her movements were prompted neither by fear nor thoughts of escape but by the automatic reflexes stemming from the big man's touch on her secret flesh.
The sudden lessening of the violence and brutality had done something to her . . . something frightening. It had been like the release of a great weight, and in the relief that follows the lifting of such a burden, her mind was prepared to forego its reasoning role and simply accept.. . accept the moist, feather-like, magical sensations that played so warmly and beguilingly around her loins.
"Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm," she sighed, allowing her buttocks to relax in a comforting feeling of warmth and reassurance. And suddenly her pussy felt open and wet as it had never felt before. She resisted no longer, mewling slightly as her buttocks were pulled open wide, wide, until all of her hair-covered vaginal furrow stood exposed and unprotected before Stollmer's lascivious gaze. He grinned knowingly at Jem Snipe over the curve of her back, knowing that he had won the battle as the naked teenager's buttocks slowly began to rotate in front of his excited face.
Thrusting his head forward, he planted his open mouth hard against the wetness of her splayed cunt. Jane squirmed, and he tightened his hands on her buttocks so that she couldn't elude him. Then, with one quick spearing rush, he lanced his tongue in between the warm fleshy folds of her pussy. The captive young brunette gasped aloud at the unexpected entry into her hot wet cuntal passage. She had started forward at the first hot, teasing contact but now she screwed her ass hard back against the lustfully aroused farmer's obscenely buried face. Her vaginal passage contracted, opening and closing around the long smooth length of the tongue swirling maddeningly around inside her. Her breath exploded down into' the mattress in a series of small quick gasps that muffled themselves in choking grunts. Pushing his mouth even harder against her wide-splayed loins, Stollmer worked his slavering lips over the whole of her tongue-spread cunt, sucking and licking wildly as her buttocks gyrated uncontrollably around his face.
"Goddamn!" Snipe breathed in amazement at the other end of the bed as he watched with unbelieving eyes the girl's sudden surrender to the wildly sucking mouth buried in her cunt. "Would you look at that bitch screw!"
Stollmer increased the tempo of his tongue-fucking behind the lewdly kneeling young brunette, his tongue plunging and withdrawing, plunging and withdrawing from her trembling pussy with a sucking, sluicing sound that drowned the continuous low moaning now drooling from her open mouth. He withdrew his lashing tongue suddenly from the scalding depths of her smooth warm passage and found the erect little rubbery shaft of her throbbing clitoris, pushing his face further into the wetly shuddering crevice as he sucked and teased it with his teeth while she writhed and churned her ass-cheeks in lust-inciting arabesques of desire.
" O o o o o o o o o o h ! Aaaaaaaaaah! Mmmmmmmmmm," she chanted softly, her mind and body alike completely out of control at the delicious and obscene sucking of her loins. Jane's cunt flowered open wider and wider, its hotly sliding wetness increasing with every wicked thrust of Stollmer's tongue into her wide-stretched hole. Jesus Christ! he thought excitedly. The little bitch was almost ready to cum! He could sense it from the abandoned tempo of her wildly squirming body and he knew it was time to plunge his cock into her virginal depths. He wanted to feel that hotly sliding flesh throbbing around his own hardness when the snotty little city brat reached the climax that was so near now, wanted desperately to explode his boiling sperm inside her in time with her own gasping cries of fulfillment. His lust-expanded penis ached from the anticipation building deep in his cum-bloated testicles as he worked at her steaming loins with his punishing mouth.
Panting with lecherous abandon, he pulled himself up to his knees and slotted his hips into the wetly glistening opening of her buttocks. Kneeling behind the frenzied teenager, he held the rigidly pulsating shaft of his cock between his fingers with the hard rubbery head poised outside her tight elastic cuntal opening. With lust-glazed eyes, he watched the soft, wet pussy lips dilating and contracting; and then, with a groan of desire, he thrust the bulbous head fiercely in between the quivering layers of scalding cuntal flesh.
"Aaaaaaaagggggggh!" Jane screamed. "Stop it! Stop it! It's too big! You'll tear me apart!"
By the window, Nesta Milner shuddered and covered her ears with her hands. The tears were streaming down her shaking cheeks. As the ravished teenager sobbed and groaned beneath him, Stollmer plowed relentlessly through the tender membrane of her hymen, brutally ripping her virginity away in one lust-crazed lunge. In spite of the violated teenager's frenzied arousal, the narrow, unstretched passage of her cunt was too tight for the big farmer's huge penis. She had passively accepted the curiously consoling caresses which were such a contrast to the humiliating indignities she had suffered before but now the mood had changed again. The wetly tender probing of her vagina that had induced such ecstasy were a thing of the past; the hallucinatory stroking that had set the nerves of her spine quivering were only a memory; the daze of half-conscious pleasure which had encompassed her abruptly gave way to the squalid reality of the narrow bed in the bare room, as she felt her thighs and buttocks ruthlessly swept apart by Stollmer's blood-engorged cock tunneling pitilessly up between her legs. Her whole body trembled and shook before the unexpected assault.
"Man, this is a tight one!" she heard the gasping farmer exclaim. "Wait'll you get inside this one, Jem!" And he thrust his savage male hardness a few more torturing inches inside her.
Once more Jane screamed for him to stop, bitter tears of shame and agony spurting from her terror-stricken eyes. But there was no respite from the raping pole of flesh skewering so relentlessly into her from behind. The brutal intrusion deep in her cruelly dilated vagina grew and grew until she felt the sudden weight of strong muscular loins crushing against her splayed ass-cheeks, and Stollmer's hard rubbery cockhead rammed up against the tenderly cushioned tip of her cervix far up in her trembling belly.
"Whaddya know," Stollmer breathed, raising his eyes to meet the lasciviously smirking gaze of Jem Snipe at the other end of the bed. "I'm all the way in there!"
The raped teenager moaned piteously beneath him. Her back ached horribly from the contorted position in which she had been held for so long. Her ravished vagina felt as though it had been stretched beyond any possible recall. She tried to fight against the sadistic impalement, clenching the muscles of her buttocks together in a desperate attempt to expel the lewdly invading shaft of Stollmer's cock. But her frantic writhing only incited him more, as her cuntal flesh clasped wetly and warmly around him, sucking at the hugely throbbing cock like a teasingly expert mouth.
Still kneeling behind her bent and subjugated body, Stollmer began to fuck in and out of her with long, plunging strokes. His strong hands grasped the rounded curves of her quivering hips, hauling the moist sheath of her wetly stretched vagina back and forth over the rigidly pulsating thickness of his cock as though he were thrusting a finger into a Vaseline-filled rubber glove. But this still wasn't enough for the lustfully-aroused farmer. He wanted her bent completely to his will. Raising his hand, he brought it savagely down across her buttocks in a stinging slap. "Move that tender little ass, kid," he snarled, "and see you move it good!"
Jane gave a muffled scream and hurried to obey. She knew enough by now to realize what would happen if she failed to comply with Stollmer's insanely erotic demands. She rotated her buttocks slightly in an experimental way and then, feeling no pain, she allowed herself to follow his rhythm, twisting and grinding her ass back against his pistoning pelvis as he thrust more and more fiercely into her. He rammed his brutally expanding cock into her with a savagery and a lustful frenzy that increased every second at the sight of her obediently bucking body. Her respiration had become one continuous groaning obbligato to the smacking of his hips against her buttocks, her face twisted sideways on the mattress so that he could savor with lewdly gleaming eyes the effect he Was having on her. Her lips opened and closed, partly in torment, and partly in humiliation and shame at the sudden uncontrollable feelings of wantonness and desire that were beginning to surge through her buffeted frame.
Then suddenly the pressure on her back lifted and she felt the mattress in front of her face sink down as a heavy weight descended on it. Coarse fingers fumbled at her lips, trying to pry her jaws apart. At the same time she felt a spongy wet sensation around her mouth. She opened her eyes and saw to her horror a long, thin, rigidly throbbing' cock in front of her face. Jem Snipe, no longer able to stand by watching while Stollmer fucked into her from behind, had sat on the bed and wriggled his pelvis under her chin. Her head was now pressed tightly into his loins as his legs splayed out on either side of her shoulders.
With the flat of his hand, he forced back her forehead, tilting her head so that the blood-engorged head of his penis was poised in front of her quivering lips. Jane mumbled in terror and tried to turn her head away, but the lustfully aroused farmer clamped his other hand around the back of her neck and held her immovable as he thrust the bulbous cock-head against her trembling mouth. She could only compress her lips and clench her teeth together in an attempt to keep the menacing instrument out.
Snipe was not to be denied, however. He increased the pressure until the frantic young brunette felt as though her lips were being pushed back through the sharpness of her teeth. Thrusting fiercely against their yielding softness, he felt them part little by little until suddenly -with the help of an extra savage lunge from Stollmer she opened her mouth to gasp.. . and the broadly throbbing penis crushed through into the warm, wet cavern of her mouth, slithering up the length of her tongue and filling her mouth completely with its thick fleshy hardness.
Jane gagged and choked at the unnatural invasion, struggling mentally against the additional rape of her mouth, but it was useless to resist. Snipe began to screw his hips up and down towards her contorted face, his thin wiry fingers bobbing her head along the wetly glistening shaft of his cock as he quickened his thrusts to match those of his friend fucking into her from behind. The lust-bloated shaft was never pulled quite all the way out; the huge bulbous tip was always left beyond her lips in the hot moist shelter of her agonized mouth.
In a trance-like state of revulsion, Jane watched with glazed eyes the dark-fleshed length of the pulsating instrument where it emerged from the fly of Snipe's pants and jerked towards her. "Go on, suck it you little bitch! Suck!" his lewd voice rasped from above her tortured head. And there was nothing she could do but obey. She was conditioned by fear to carry out their every command. Slowly her lips began to nibble at the obscenely thrusting rod as she coughed and spluttered at the degrading invasion of her mouth. She tried not to think about what she was being forced to do but Snipe's hairy testicles were bouncing against her chin and the stale odor of sweat around his loins filled her nostrils with a continuous reminder of the brutal and depraved assault she was suffering.
Behind the doubly skewered teenager, Stollmer could feel himself mounting irresistibly towards his climax. Every sensation in his body seemed to be draining away towards his loins, shuddering his veins with tremors of liquid fire. It couldn't be long now, he thought, his eyes flickering wantonly towards the violated girl's tender pink lips clasping and unclasping around the angry red cock of his companion at the other end of the bed who was forcing her to suck him. The contrast of Snipe's darkly pulsing penis disappearing into the chalky whiteness of Jane's tearful face rocketed chills of lewd desire along his spine, and he began fucking into her uplifted cunt still harder, battering mercilessly with his hips at her quivering ass-cheeks.
The trembling girl worked hypnotically at the command of Snipe's hands, licking and sucking like a hungry child as he forced her to follow with her lips each thrust of his cock into the tender shelter of her mouth. The saliva flooding her throat increased and increased, thickening every moment as emissions of seminal fluid seeped from the end of his plunging rod and flowed into her warm depths. He slipped her distended mouth up and down his fleshy staff as though it was another cunt into which he was plowing the full force of his animal lust, fiercely thrusting forward as if he hoped to ram it against the hard cruel penis skewering deep into her belly from behind.
Jane had never felt so debauched, so used, in her life, and she sucked wildly with her mouth and gyrated her buttocks frantically in an effort to end the torture as quickly as she could. That was all that was left to please them as well as she could, and pray that it would be all they would demand! Yet somehow, somewhere -this was the most horrifying thing of all deep down in her consciousness, tiny wisps and flickers of forbidden pleasure were again beginning to tremor in response to the brutal misuse of her body. As she had reacted earlier to the tender ministrations of Stollmer's tongue, so now she was finding herself a prey to unwanted desire at the thought of the obscene ravishment of her mouth and loins.
In front of her, Jem Snipe convulsed suddenly as though he had received an electric shock. He writhed his hips tightly up into her face to bury the full length of his cock deep down in her gasping throat. Then, as she fought for breath. the bulging rod erupted in the warm, wet interior of her mouth, his hot, thick sperm squirting between her ovaled lips in raging gusts.
It lasted for a seeming eternity. Her mouth was filled with the pungent, acrid taste of the viscous, white-hot fluid as she sucked and swallowed, sucked and swallowed, her cheeks inflating and deflating in an effort to get rid of the bursting dam of semen. She had lost all sense of time when at last his softening cock gave a final jerk and slipped wetly from between her lips.
As he pulled her head limply forward to lie trapped against his trembling loins, there was a low grunt from behind her. She felt her thighs and buttocks swept wide apart in one last loin-battering rush as Stollmer, fucking mercilessly into her from the other end of the bed, speared his bursting penis as far as it would go into her naked belly and spewed his scalding semen against the trembling walls of her womb. He groaned aloud with lustful satisfaction as his rampant sperm gushed out to fill her vaginal passage in wild, shuddering spurts. She could feel it shooting hotly into her and filling the depths of her belly until she thought her insides must burst, and then oozing slowly out again his still jerking shaft. Finally he fell forward over her back, pushing her face down across the exhausted and satiated figure of the friend who had just forced the girl to suck him dry.
Soon there was a movement of bodies as
Snipe eased himself from under her and Stollmer levered himself tiredly from her back. Jane felt herself sliding down the mattress. A sudden rush of air cooled her inflamed genitals as the jig man's spent penis withdrew from her wet and ravished loins, leaving a long thread of sperm glistening across her inner thigh.
The raped girl rolled over on to her back and closed her eyes, unable to move and no longer caring how she looked. She had no thought for her mother, petrified and weeping at the window, none for her father, huddled in a groaning heap of agony on the floor; in the midst of her anguish and distress at the way she had been debauched was the unmistakable and growing conviction that something still was wrong. She had to admit it: the uninvited and unwanted devils of desire first aroused by Stollmer's slavering tongue and later incited further by the twin rape of her mouth and cunt were clamoring for satisfaction!
Unbelievable as it seemed, the brutal violation of her defenseless body, following on the unexpectedly lust-provoking rape of her mother the previous night, had stimulated a lewdly insidious passion that smoldered still in the quivering depths of her loins. Unfulfilled without knowing it, she craved obscurely some continuation of the degradation against which she had fought so bitterly. Twisting her head around toward the chuckling farmers, she was about to open her mouth and speak when a low rumbling noise followed by a muffled thump that shook the house stilled the words in her throat. Somewhere downstairs a window pane fell from its frame and shattered on the floor.
"Christ!" Jem Snipe exclaimed. "You know what that is, Bram? The barn's gone the one on the upstream side of the house! The water was almost up to her before I made the coffee."
Stuffing the limp wet tubes of their cocks back inside their pants the two men, followed by a suddenly anxious Nesta, pounded down the wooden staircase. Stollmer froze as he reached the hallway and looked out the front window. "Goddamn!" he cried wildly. "Would you look at that!"
Behind him, Nesta gasped with alarm. In front of the house, the four wheels of the overturned Oldsmobile now barely disturbed the surface of the raging flood, and the foaming water was already churning around the steps leading up to the porch. With one accord they raced down the short passage and into the kitchen. Stollmer halted on the threshold with a curse. A slowly widening pool, its gleaming runnels dulled by dust, was spreading across the flagstones from under the back door.
CHAPTER FIVE
Within a half hour, the dirty water welling slowly under the back door of Stollmer's house had risen enough to spill over the step leading up to the hallway. A few minutes later it had joined up with an equally sinister pool flooding in beneath the front door from the racing tide that was now washing noisily over the stoop. The ceaseless drumming and pelting of rain, the splash and gurgle of water escaping from the overloaded and choked guttering, was now swamped by the rush and roar of flood water making its way around the foundations of the frame house and the uneasy creaking of timbers subjected to the remorseless pressure of the current. From time to time portions of the collapsed barn were washed past the windows and swept out to join the mass of uprooted trees, disintegrated chicken houses, broken branches and anonymous beams of wood streaming dizzily towards the new dam on the eddying surface of the flood. The wrecked Oldsmobile was now completely submerged.
Every now and then the carcasses of drowned livestock were carried past. Occasionally a flock of waterfowl swooped low down over the stormy surface, and once, far out towards the scrub-covered valley side, they saw a group of ragged refugees spinning helplessly along on an improvised raft. But otherwise no living creature broke the monotony of tumbling gray waters beneath the lowering sky.
Stollmer waded across the submerged kitchen floor and twisted the knobs of the radio. After a few minutes of some give-away quiz program, the announcer's breezy voice cut in:
"Here is a news flash from Pointsville, center of rescue operations in the Blossom Valley Dam disaster. According to the Weather Bureau, there is little hope of the dangerous low cloud blanketing the disaster area lifting before tomorrow noon. Any hope of flying out the scattered survivors believed to be marooned on several isolated pieces of higher ground has therefore been abandoned until that time. "
"Fire Chief William Webster told us a few minutes ago that until the old reservoir had completely drained into the doomed valley there was little hope of successfully launching a boat on the raging floodwaters. This was not expected to occur until after nightfall tomorrow, the Chief said. But by this time engineers working on the devastated electricity lines should have managed to operate the sluices of the new dam that is holding back the flood. The death-toll in the disaster, now known to be at least 37, is the worst-"
Stollmer cut the switch of the old battery-operated radio with a curse. "Fuckin' Bill Webster wouldn't wet his precious fingers in a John to fish out a lousy gold brick!" he growled. He looked around at Snipe, the two terrified women, and Milner, who was leaning groggily against the wall halfway up the stairs. "There's only one thing for it," he began. "We'll have to . . . "
He paused as something heavy crashed against the outer wall of the kitchen, shaking the frame of the house and shivering one of the windows. A pane of glass burst inwards and splashed into the floodwater covering the floor. Again, the wall shook as the unseen weight thumped menacingly against the outside of the house, tinkling the china on the big Welsh dresser.
"W-w-w-w-whatever's that?" Jane Milner, white-faced and fully dressed now, clung anxiously to her mother's arm.
Thrusting aside a floating chair, Stollmer swashed through the flood to look out the window. A huge tree trunk, its stripped branches fouled by some obstruction in the drowned yard, was being swung against the house by the current. As he watched, it floated free, backed off, nudged the wall a final time, and then swirled suddenly off to join the frothing tide sweeping past between the farm and the limestone bluff topping the nearer side of the valley. A moment later, there was a frantic hammering at the door!
"What the fuck . . . ? " Stollmer lifted the catch and hauled the door slowly open against the pressure of the water in the kitchen.
Knee-high in the eddying flood, a paunchy, pathetic figure stood outside in the downpour. Its clothes hung in sodden rags around its flabby form; its scant hair was plastered wetly to its skull; its chalky face, scarred with cuts and bruises, was trembling uncontrollably.
Nesta gasped in astonishment. They were looking at the half-drowned figure of Senator Gilmore!
"Well, well," Stollmer cried with heavy irony. "Just look what the tide brought in! A real live lawmaker and the other half of the team that cooked up this little party! Welcome to my home, mister! It may not be here for long . . . but come in, come in!"
The fat senator's teeth were chattering so much that he could hardly speak. "F-f-f-for God's sake, g-g-give me shelter," he babbled, stumbling through the flood to collapse across the table. "It's terrible . . . t-t-t-terrible! I was trying to help w-w-w-with the rescue operations and I . . . swept away with the tide! Thank God I managed to cling to that t-t-t-tree. I've been hanging on for d-d-d-dear life since early this morning."
"Well now ain't that too bad," Stollmer said with mock sympathy. "And now you're all wet, Senator. After all you done for us!"
"You've g-g-g-got to help me," Gilmore cried desperately.
Stollmer hauled him up by the shoulders of his drenched and torn jacket and dragged him to the staircase. "You got it the wrong way around, Mac," he said gently. "It's you who's goin' to help, us!"
"I don't know what you mean." Gilmore's voice was a mere croak.
"Like I was sayin' when you happened along," Stollmer explained, "there's only one tiling to do: We're gonna build a raft. And if we're gonna get it built before this place is washed away, it's gotta be built quicker'n hell."
He paused as the swill and gurgle of water around the house suddenly increased in volume and something fell with a crash in one of the front rooms.
"See what I mean?" he said. "Ain't no use sittin' around waitin' for any goddamn rescuers. They ain't gonna make it in time. We need every hand we can get. And that's the only reason you're welcome fatso 'cause you're gonna pull your lousy weight and help."
"Oh, but I can't do that," Gilmore protested with some return of his hectoring, autocratic manner. "I'm far too exhausted to indulge in any physical labor. Later perhaps, when I've rested up a little and had a hot drink, I'll be glad to advise . . . "
"Hot drink?" Jem Snipe echoed with a guffaw. "Listen, bud the only hot drink you'll get will last you for eternity if you don't move that fat ass and lend us a hand!"
"It's out of the question," Gilmore said loftily.
Stollmer hauled off and punched him heavily on the jaw. The fat man toppled over backwards with a gasping cry and landed flat on his back in the water swirling at the foot of the stairs. Stollmer leaped after him and hauled him dripping to his feet. "You'll do what you're fuckin' well told, or I'll beat the shit outa you!" he snarled, bunching his fist and flourishing it under Gilmore's nose.
The senator cringed abjectly away, gibbering incoherently. "Don't hit me! Don't hit me, please!" he whined. "There's no need for violence, please . . . I'll do anything you say, Mr. Stollmer. I'm not very strong but.. . don't hit me again."
As the big man thrust him contemptuously away, there was a cracking and splintering of wood followed by a low rumbling roar from outside the front door. The timber supports had given way under the relentless assault of the flood, and the roof of the porch collapsed into the water streaming over the area in a cloud of dust and debris.
"Jesus Christ!" Stollmer yelled. "Quick! Out there, all of you! Get as much of that wood as you can before it's swept away! We'll use it for the fuckin' raft!"
Thrusting aside the trembling Gilmore, he waded along the hallway and dragged open the door. They battled out after him, grappling with the chaos of shattered planking eddying against the house as the rain steadily drenched their bent backs. Already the force of the water bubbling over the stoop made it difficult for them to keep their feet.
Under Stollmer's direction, they manhandled it through into the kitchen and then began lashing the splintered wood to the big table, which he maneuvered out into the inundated yard and floated on its back with its legs in the air. "Wouldn't it be quicker to take the table out front and make the raft there?" Jeff Milner queried painfully through his swollen lips. Despite the racking pain that was throbbing through his body, he had been staggering through the flooded house with as much wood as anyone. If he had registered the brutal rape of his only daughter through the crimson mists of agony that had kept him writhing on the floor of the upstairs room, he was keeping his anguish to himself.
"Naw," Stollmer answered curtly without looking up from the planking outrigger he was building onto the table top. "We gotta build her the side she'll be used on. She'll be too big to get in the door and carry through when she's finished."
"Even so, I don't see-"
"You're the fuckin' hydraulics engineer, ain't pu?" Stollmer said angrily. "Act your age, man! There's three-quarters of a mile of rough water between the front of the house and the far side of the valley. We'd be capsized before we was halfway across! This side, there ain't more'n three-hundred yards between us and the bluff!"
"On the face of it, that's sensible," Milner said. "But the narrow channel means the current will be even faster and therefore rougher. Also, if we did make the far side, we could scramble up the hillside and go for help, whereas this side.. . " He shrugged. "We don't even know if there's a way up the bluff to safety."
"Will you keep your fuckin' mouth shut, doddammit!" Stollmer yelled. "I'm in charge of this lousy outfit and I say we do it this side! Now go fetch some more wood from the porch, for Chrissake."
"There isn't anymore. We've brought all there is."
"Well, Jesus, lift the doors off their hinges; rid out the window frames; bring me chairs, anything! I gotta have more wood. Just so's you don't sit around on your asses waitin' for the goddamn roof to fall in," the big man said sarcastically. He straightened up, his clothes plastered to his strong frame by the rain, and passed the back of one hand across his streaming brow. "Hell of a chance I'd of had in Vietnam I'd had punks like you under me to fight the gooks!" he said bitterly.
Milner flushed. "I was flying B-17's in Korea," he said quietly.
"Big deal! So bring me some more wood before I kick your fuckin' teeth in . . . Captain!"
Under the big man's direction, Milner, Nesta, Jane and the shivering Gilmore tore down, ripped out, pried away and dismantled every movable fragment of wood in the downstairs of the flooded house while Snipe and Stollmer himself wedged and lashed them into the form of a rough rectangle based on the upturned table. When it was finished, the crude raft was an extraordinary sight an unrecognizable tangle of chair backs, planks, empty gasoline drums, dismembered drawers and shattered door-frames, with the four table legs sticking up through the chaos like embryo masts. There was no means of controlling it and nothing to steer it by, but it floated . . . just barely.
Stollmer climbed aboard and the crazy structure sank low in the water under his weight. "She ain't pretty, but at least she's more goddamn use to us than that old heap," he shouted over the roar of the rain, nodding towards the jeep on the downstream side of the marooned house. The canopy and its supports had been blown away long ago, but the rugged little vehicle, parked on a rise leading to Stollmer's remaining barn, stood on the only piece of land left above the flood.
"I still don't think the raft's buoyant enough," Milner complained. "There's six of us, remember, and she's low in the water with just you on board. Don't you have any more empty drums in that barn?"
"Will you quit interferin', you creep!"
Stollmer yelled. "If I say she's ready to go, she's ready to go. One more word outa you, and I'll hit you so hard you won't need no raft to get to the other side of the fuckin' river!"
Milner shrugged helplessly and turned back towards the house. The afternoon was already far advanced. They were working waist-high in the water now, exhausted and chilled to the bone, their bellies ravaged by the gnawing pangs of hunger, their waterlogged clothes hanging heavy about their frames. Dare he risk the lives of his wife and daughter on so frail and dangerous a craft? Across that mill-race of darkly seething water with only the bleak limestone cliff face on the other side? With a maniac like Stollmer in charge? But if he didn't, what was the alternative? To retire to the upper story and hope that rescue arrived before the whole house collapsed and buried them under the onslaught of the flood? To be swept away and drowned as the waters inexorably rose? Mad and dangerous though Stollmer was, it was surely better to pitch in with him than to risk going it alone in such a perilous situation
"Okay," Stollmer was saying with forced jocularity. "So she's finished. We all worked hard, so I guess it's in order we should relax a little before we trust ourselves to that fuckin' flood out there. We're gonna have a little entertainment to set us up for the voyage!"
"Relax!" Milner repeated in a voice dazed with astonishment. "Entertainment? Have you gone out of your mind, Stollmer?"
"That's what I said, lover-boy. Like all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, and all that shit. You know."
"But You're crazy!" the battered engineer protested. "It's almost dusk already. We haven't a moment to lose. Christ! The damned house is going to collapse on us any minute! See what I mean?" he added, as an extra forceful swirl of water washed angrily through from the back door to the front and slapped hungrily at the denuded staircase.
Gilmore and the two women, dripping wetly halfway up the steps, murmured in agreement. Even Jem Snipe looked amazed. "Seems a hell of a time to talk about entertainin' ourselves," he said mildly.
Stollmer waded over and drew him aside, murmuring something into his ear. Snipe's saturnine features creased into a knowing smile. He nodded once or twice and then moved back into the flooded kitchen with a sly glance at the captives huddled on the stairs. Milner knitted his lacerated brows. There was something phony going on. Plain violence, much as he detested it, he could understand. But this was something different; the atmosphere had changed. Stollmer's false geniality didn't ring true. There was something suspect, something underhanded, about the whole deal. "What the hell's he talking about?" he whispered to Gilmore. "How can anyone relax, for God's sake? I don't like this at all."
"I don't like any of it," the fat senator replied through chattering teeth. "I wish I'd never heard of this goddamned valley!"
"Yes, but what's he going to do?"
Milner didn't have to wait long for an answer. Stollmer lifted his shotgun from a rack above the water level and moved back through the swilling water towards them. "Get on up those stairs, all of you," he ordered bleakly.
Gilmore glanced fearfully out through the shattered window at the frothing current, steel-gray and menacing now in the fading light. "For God's sake " he began.
"Please . . . " Nesta and Jane said with one voice.
"You're out of your mind!" Milner replied.
"Get on up there!" Stollmer roared with a return to his former bullying manner. He thumbed back the hammers of the gun and raised the barrels to point straight at Jane's chest. "If you ain't on the way before I count three," he shouted, "the kid gets a charge of buckshot in them pretty tits! One . . . two . . . "
Hastily, they scrambled back to the upstairs room.
"Okay," Stollmer said, shutting the door and leaning against it with the shotgun cradled in his arms. "Now you two broads sit on the bed. Momma, you take off your panties and lift that skirt; you, kid, you better strip to the waist like a good girl."
"Oh, no!" Nesta wailed tearfully. "Not again! Surely, at a time like this . . . you can't-"
"I ain't gonna do nothin', " Stollmer said easily. "Except maybe get me a little entertainment like I said. You're the ones gonna get the kicks this time, you and those two phony hunks of manhood, there. You worked hard, so now you're gonna get your reward, right?"
"W-w-w-what do you mean?" Jane quavered in a small voice.
The big man turned towards Gilmore and the engineer. "Strip off!" he ordered curtly.
"Stollmer, you can't be serious!" Milner protested angrily. "Good God, man . . . "
Stollmer raised the barrels of the gun.
When the two men were naked, shivering with cold in the oncoming dusk, and Nesta and her daughter were seated on the bed, legs obscenely spread with the dark triangles of their pubic hair shadowy between their palely glimmering thighs, he spoke again.
"Okay. Here's where the fun starts. Lover-boy I guess you get kinda bored plowin' the same field all the time, so Fatso'd better take Momma. That leaves the kid for you, Milner -which should be a new experience for both of you!"
The nakedly shivering men stared at him in blank incomprehension.
"Fatso goes down on the broad," Stollmer explained, "and Pop gets to lick the pussy of his own little gal. You can't say that ain't entertainin'! "
Nesta gave a gasp of outrage and her daughter squealed in alarm. Milner had gone white to the lips. "You dirty bastard!" he said in a shaking voice. "You foul-minded, disgusting animal! That's a monstrous thing to suggest.. . it's . . . it's inhuman! It's the most depraved and vile thing I ever-"
Stollmer slung the gun into his left hand and hit him with a powerful roundhouse-right that sent Milner crashing to the floor. When the engineer staggered shakily to his feet, his mouth was bleeding again. "Apart from which," he said thickly but doggedly, "there's the time! You're insane to delay now! Don' you realize we could be killed at any minute, all o'us! An' that goes for you, too!"
"So you better get to work, bud!" Stollmer said heartily. "We stay right here until you guys have made those bitches cum. How long that is well, it's up to you, ain't it?"
Gilmore was blubbering. "We'll all be drowned," he whined. "For God's sake, have pity . . . "
Stollmer moved towards him with his fist upraised. The fat man dropped to his knees at once. "All right, all right," he whimpered in abject terror. "Don't hit me! I'll do it, I'll do it!" Shuffling forward, he laid his pudgy hands on the insides of Nesta's softly curved thighs and pried them apart until the delicate coral slit of her cunt flowered into view in its nest of darkly curling pussy hair. Then, with a choked back sob, he lowered his quivering jowls to her loins. The anguished young mother bit her lip, looked up to the ceiling, and closed her eyes.
Milner was still on his feet, irresolute. How could he possibly carry out such a bestial and degrading command? To suck the cunt of his own young daughter! It was more than immoral it was the ultimate depth of degradation! For both of them! And yet if he refused, he was imperiling not only her life but that of her mother as well. It was intolerable.
While he hesitated, Stollmer strode forward and slapped the terrified teenager heavily and viciously across the face. Jane screamed. Stollmer slapped her again and finally Milner, with a groan of self-disgust, dropped to his knees and falteringly approached his bloodied face to her loins. His whole body was trembling, as though he expected the heavens to open and a thunderbolt to strike him dead on the spot.
Tenderly, he eased the horrified young girl's thighs apart and lowered his lips to the fleshy folds of her moist, warm vaginal slit. He was shuddering with horror at the enormity of his action. Good God, he'd only done it once to his own wife in the whole time they'd been married! To be forced to debauch his own daughter!
Standing above the two obscenely coupled pairs, Stollmer laughed coarsely. "No fakin', mind," he warned. "If you don't suck 'em good, they'll never cum and we'll be here the whole goddamn night."
Gilmore's jaws were already working, his loose-lipped mouth slavering at Nesta's unresponsive loins as his tongue lapped furiously at her cuntal lips with a rhythmic wet sluicing sound that drowned the rush and gurgle of water streaming past below the window. The ravished young mother was in an agony of indecision. Her every instinct impelled her to stiffen up, to tense away in revulsion from the fat tongue lashing into her secret genitals. Yet if she denied her body its natural reaction and already faint but unmistakable tremors of erotic desire were flickering through her belly she would be as good as signing her own death warrant. And that of her husband and daughter, too. Her husband and daughter . . . She shivered and dragged her mind away from the shameful activity that was creaking the bedsprings by her side.
Cautiously, almost furtively, Milner had allowed his bruised lips to touch the sensitive cuntal flesh quivering beneath his face. The appalled teenager jerked and fell back across the bed with a whimper of horror as she felt the tip of his tongue probe reluctantly between the fleshy, hair-covered flanges of her vagina. A strangled mewling cry burst from her trembling lips not so much at the shame and humiliation of the depraved thing she and her father were being forced to do, but because deep down in the depths of her mind she recognized the truth, the awful unacceptable, inadmissible truth that she wanted it! It was wicked, it was unnatural, it was vile, it was Sodom and Gomorrah but she wanted it! With every flick of Milner's unpracticed tongue into the innocent but no-longer-virginal tunnel of her moistly clasping young cunt, the unwelcome twinges of forbidden passion flamed through her veins.
She shuddered convulsively and half drew-up her splayed legs in a movement of abandon as the tip of the lewdly invading tongue lapped against the erect and sensitive bud of her clitoris. Dear God, her own father! She shut her eyes tight as the bitter tears welled from under her lashes and ran down her cheeks to moisten the stained ticking of the mattress.
Stollmer gazed at the two bobbing heads between the widely spread thighs of Jane and her mother and laughed again. "Just wait until Jem gets a load of this!" he chorted. "Listen -I'm gonna fetch him now. You two pricks keep right on workin'. And if either of you dare to lift your lousy heads from them cunts while I'm gone, I'll kick his balls so far up into his guts they'll burst outa his chest like fuckin' tits!" Still chuckling, he banged the door behind him, clattered down the stairs and splashed into the water swirling through the hallway.
For some time after he had gone, there was no sound in the dusk of the room but the hoarse breathing of the two lewdly slaving men, the suppressed cries of Jane and her mother, and the wet sucking noises of Gilmore's flabby lips at Nesta's loins.
When it seemed to him that his ears had been filled with the roar and hiss of the floodwater and the groaning of the house's timbers for an eternity, Milner cautiously detached his mouth from his daughter's genitals and lifted his head. There was blood from his injured Up all over the inside of her thighs. "Jane . . . " he muttered brokenly. "Baby . . . "
"Daddy, please . . . " The teenager's voice was a whisper in the dusk.
Milner thrust himself half-upright and listened. No heavy footsteps on the stairs. No lascivious chuckles, no coarse rib-nudging pleasantries outside the door. What in hell were Stollmer and Snipe doing? A prey to a sudden dreadful suspicion, he levered himself to his feet, crossed the room, and jerked open the door. "Stollmer!" he shouted. "For Christ's sake
Silence.
Gilmore too had lifted his head. "Milner," he babbled. "Come back here! That maniac'll kill us! Come back!" But the naked engineer was already halfway down the stairs.
"Stollmer--Stoll-mmmmmmer!" he yelled. "Stollmer?"
No sound but the suck and swill of water coursing through the hall, the racing swirl of the flood outside, the moan of wind and the steady pelting of rain. Somewhere downstairs wood split and a heavy object fell with a splash. Milner launched himself downstairs and waded into the kitchen. Oblivious of the chill grasp of the water on his bare flesh, he stared into the fast-falling dusk and gasped with disbelief.
The flooded room was empty. And through the gaping doorway he saw that the unwieldy raft which had been tethered outside had gone. No wonder Stollmer had effectively immobilized them by forcing them to undress. No wonder he had staged that apparently insane "entertainment" upstairs a function in which he himself took no part. No wonder Snipe had stayed below. And no wonder Stollmer had refused to listen when he pointed out the raft was too small: It had never been intended to carry more than two! Having made use of their forced labor, the brutal, unscrupulous farmer and his shifty crony had taken their only means of escape and left them to their fate.
CHAPTER SIX
"Build another raft of course." Gilmore said frenziedly. "It's our only chance!"
"Don't be a fool," Milner snapped. "It took six of us a whole afternoon to make the other -and that was too small. It's almost night; we couldn't hope to do it, even if we could find the wood. Even if we had a light, the whole damned place would collapse before we were through."
"We couldn't.. . try and swim for it?" Nesta ventured.
Her husband shook his head. "Impossible. Nobody could live in that." He jerked his head toward the waste of seething floodwater foaming past in the thickening dusk. "It's more than three-hundred yards to the bluff and it's like one continuous whirlpool out there. You'd be dragged under and drowned before you were halfway."
"But what are we going to do?" Gilmore blabbered frantically. Milner spread his arms and shrugged. They were all fully dressed again, standing in the water outside the kitchen door. Inside the house it was now chest-high, plucking stealthily at paneling and walls, sucking at the foundations as the rising tide around the building leaned relentlessly against the frame. The rain was pouring down as hard as ever.
"Daddy!" Jane said suddenly. "What about the jeep?"
"The jeep?" Her father looked across the eddying surface of the flood to the rise where the vehicle still stood on a tiny island just above the undulating water level. "It's not waterproofed, for God's sake! It's not an army 'duck'. It'd sink like a stone."
"No, no, silly. I didn't mean to drive it. But if we took off the wheels and tires and then inflated the inner tubes . . . ? "
Milner stared at her. "Baby, you're a genius!" he cried. "Quick! Gilmore there's a length of rope floating somewhere in the kitchen. Get it! You two girls, come with me!"
Cautiously, they felt their way along the uneven ground toward the rise. Around the house, the water was relatively calm, but further out, the current was strong enough to make them stagger. Battling their way forward, they felt the pressure on their shivering bodies drain down towards their feet as they rose above the surface. Finally, they were standing by the jeep. There was a toolbox in back of the small utility truck and in it they found a jack, a tire iron and a hand pump. Jane was frantically unfolding the jack when Milner stopped her.
"It'll take too long," he told her. "It'd probably sink into the mud, too. Be easier and quicker to heave her over onto her back, then we can work on all four at once. But wait! Loosen all the wheel-nuts first, or the wheels'll just turn around when we use the tire iron."
By the time Gilmore splashed up beside them with the rope, they had turned the jeep over onto its side on the muddy ground. With the fat man's reluctant help, they succeeded at the third try in inverting it completely. The soft top collapsed as the hood-irons gave way, and one of the windshield pillars broke but although the vehicle was at a drunken angle, now resting upside down in the shallows of the encroaching tide, they could get at all the wheels at once. Taking one wheel each, they spun off the loosened nuts, lifted them off, and stood on the tires to force the air out through the unscrewed valves. In less than five minutes, Milner was levering the tires off the rims and pulling out the deflated rubber tubes.
As he began replacing the valves and pumping up the tubes again, a small wavelet, followed by a larger swell, washed over the tiny island and washed around their feet in the gloom. Milner looked up through the driving rain. "Got the rope, Gilmore?" he panted. "You and the girls could get to work."
"I don't see why you want it," Gilmore said petulantly.
"Tie the tubes together about six feet between each," Milner explained. "Otherwise we'll all be swept apart and lose each other."
He was on the third tube when the suck-swish, suck-swish, suck-swish of the pump was drowned by a louder, more menacing, sound. They all looked up towards the house. A dreadful groaning, cracking noise, accompanied by the breaking of glass and the rending of split wood, floated eerily across the water through the dusk.
"Christ!" Milner said. "She's going at any minute! Thank God we didn't try to sit it out on the upper floor!" Jerking the pump hose free, he fixed it with trembling fingers to the valve of the last tube and began furiously forcing air into the empty chamber. He knew that between the house, a half-submerged line of trees behind it, and Stollmer's remaining barn on the far side of the jeep, they were comparatively sheltered. But once the house was gone, the full force of the raging current would be on them.
"Slip those inflated tubes over your shoulders; fix them around your waists," he shouted. "And for God's sake watch out!"
As they strained their eyes through the almost-dark, the bulk of the half-drowned house seemed to lean towards them. A length of planking burst from the roof and spun away into the flood. The groaning of the distorted frame and the shriek of splitting wood increased in volume. And then with a roar and a clatter of falling bricks the whole building exploded outwards in a cloud of dust and spray and subsided into the water.
"Look out!" Milner yelled. "Here she comes!" He had just time to jerk the pump away and thrust his arms through the half-inflated tube before the water rose menacingly halfway up their thighs and dragged them off their feet. A moment later a five-foot swell, cresting with dirty foam and hauling a mass of spinning timber and floating furniture in its wake, had swept them remorselessly dff the island and away into the dark.
* * *
The voyage was a nightmare. Carried out into the full fury of the raging torrent, blinded by the dark, choking and gasping for air in the broken water that frothed over them from every direction, battered by floating debris, Milner and his three companions were tossed about by the speeding flood like corks in a mill-race.
The engineer himself, lower in the water than the others because his tube was only half-inflated,, gashed his left thigh on some submarine obstruction. Gilmore suffered a paralyzing blow on the shoulder from a heavy piece of flotsam that swung between them. Once, Nesta and the two men had to paddle frenziedly against the current to free Jane from the branches of a submerged tree that threatened to drag her beneath the surface. All of them were chilled to the marrow and faint with exhaustion.
They had no means of knowing how far they were from the bluff, or indeed whether they might not be being swept towards the far side of the valley. All they could see in the darkness was the crest of the next wave-top cresting towards their rain-stung faces. But Milner had calculated that the current should cast them ashore somewhere beneath the limestone cliff where it swung towards them as the valley curves away to the south. Failing that, the prospect was not encouraging; they could be dashed against one of the piles of the abandoned viaduct or carried on through to end up against the new dam -where they risked being sucked into one of the sluices.
In any event, after an eternity of struggle to keep their heads above the boiling water, still lashed together by the providential rope, they found themselves suddenly in a calmer stretch. And the next moment Milner felt his foot ground astonishingly against a firmly rising slope. Thankfully, they dragged themselves ashore and flopped down like drowned rats on a stretch of sodden turf. The bluff rose darkly into the night above them. Downstream, the arches of the old viaduct printed themselves blackly against the night. Behind, the flood swept past with a constant chuckling roar, and from overhead the rain lanced pitilessly down on their shivering bodies. After what seemed a long time, Milner realized that his feet were colder than the rest of him. Exhaustedly, he pushed himself half-upright and glanced over his shoulder. The water was washing over his legs!
He strained his eyes into the dark. They were on a narrow strip of terraced land at the foot of the bluff, imprisoned between the towering cliff face and the flood, which was evidently still rising and would soon submerge the terrace. Stumbling agitatedly to his feet, he saw a rough she d beyond a patch of plowed earth and suddenly he recognized where they were. The terrace belonged to a neighbor of Stollmer's, who had been going to plant fruit trees before the land was compulsorily acquired. Milner remembered it well from when he had surveyed the valley. He remembered, too, that there was customarily a tractor in the shed, and that behind it there was a wide, rough trail zigzagging in crazy hairpins up the bluff to join the abandoned railroad track where it emerged from a tunnel to cross the viaduct.
Rousing the others, he stumbled across the drenched earth to the shed. The tractor was gone but leaning against one of the walls they found a shotgun. Evidently Stollmer and Snipe had been there before them.
"We'll have to make it on foot," Milner said dejectedly. "It's our only chance. This terrace will be under water in a half-hour. At least we can grope our way through the tunnel when we get there it's only a quarter of a mile, and the main highway to Michaelsburg's not far from the other end."
Wearily, they stumbled towards the rutted trail. Milner slung the shotgun over his shoulder and led the way. It was another hair-rais'ng journey. The trail was more like a river-bed, with surplus rainwater gushing furiously down .he steep incline, rattling pebbles and small stories against their dragging feet. The higher they jot, the more the wind plucked at their sodden clothes and drove the stinging rain into their faces. The moon had not yet risen. In the pitch blackness under the lowering clouds, they were forced to feel out every foot of the way, fearful of the dizzy drop between the twisting, shale surface of the trail and the dwindling roar of the flood below.
But finally they made it. The trail ended high above the drowned valley at an abandoned siding where produce had long ago been loaded from a crumbling wooden platform which now served only as a sounding board for the drumming of the rain. To their right, the old permanent way, trackless and weed-grown, led out into the night over the viaduct. To their left was the tunnel mouth . . . or rather the place where the tunnel mouth had been.
Continuous rain had washed away some of the softer strata in the cliff face above and there had been a landslide. Their escape route was blocked by a gigantic rock-fall slanting up to the bluff and completely sealing off the tunnel!
Nesta Milner had not voiced a single complaint since the disappearance of Stollmer. But this last setback was too much for her overstrained nerves. She burst into tears. "It's too much! It's really too much," she wailed. "I can't take anymore. I'm not going another step. At least the water can't get us here. Let's wait until they send out the planes to find us."
"We can't!" Her husband's voice was sharp. "We'd die of cold and exposure. They won't be flying until tomorrow afternoon at the earliest the radio said so. Besides, they'll be looking in the valley, not here."
"But what are we going to do?"
"There's only one thing we can do," Milner said grimly. "Cross that viaduct and keep along the old railroad track until it crosses the State Highway somewhere on the other side."
"But darling I thought it was supposed to be unsafe."
"And Daddy you can't stand heights; you know you can't!" Jane cried. "In the dark, and with this terrible wind . . . "
"It is unsafe. It should have been pulled down years ago. The pillars are air eroded and crumbling away. But we've got to try," Milner said doggedly. Bending his head against the rain, he led them toward the old viaduct. It had been a single-track railroad so the bridge was narrow. Every ten yards a pillar that was less than waist-high supported the frail, rusty guard rails that had protected the linesmen from the 300-foot drop to the valley below. The converging perspectives of these guard rails and the weed-grown ballast between them disappeared into the night. The darker line of the hill on the far side of the valley seemed immensely far away.
As soon as they left the shelter of the bluff, the full fury of the gale-force wind hit them, buffeting them towards the flimsy protective barrier and the horrifying drop beyond, spearing the rain horizontally at their faces. Milner gritted his teeth and battled on. He kept his eyes fixed on the dim expanse of pebbly ballast immediately in front of his feet, staggering from . side to side, knowing that if he allowed himself to look up and out towards the chasm on either side even in the almost total darkness the chill fingers of vertigo would be clawing at his stomach and prickling at the nape of his neck. Gilmore and the two women crunched wearily after him, their numbed senses dead to everything but the intolerable assault of the storm.
They were about a third of the way across when Milner halted. Incredibly, from somewhere ahead, the sound of drunken laughter floated above the howling of the wind. Shushing the others into silence, he listened. The whole of the viaduct was shuddering, trembling under the twin attacks of the tempest above and the floodwaters sucking at the ancient pillars below. Yet there were human beings ahead of them; he could distinguish several voices now. Treading with infinite care, he stole forward.
Soon he could identify a darker silhouette against the night. It was the missing tractor from the shed below, and yes! two of the voices were Stollmer's and Snipe's! They must have steered the thing up somehow from the terrace. But there was a third voice with them that Milner couldn't identify. And what in God's name were they doing stalled in the middle of this shaking apology for a bridge in weather like this?
He advanced another cautious yard or two -and gasped aloud as he realized why they had gone no further. Beyond the tractor and the three indistinct shapes grouped around it, there was nothing but a shrieking abyss of wind and rain and darkness: The flood had washed away the further arches of the viaduct, leaving them facing a black void!
Choking down his rising nausea, the engineer scrambled back to the others. Unsecured at its further end, it was no wonder that the structure was shaking! The whole lot could collapse into the flood at any moment! They would have to make their way back to the blocked tunnel mouth and wait for rescue after all, hoping to God that they could remain hidden from Stollmer and his friends.
Milner had opened his mouth to convey this shattering information to Gilmore, Nesta and Jane when suddenly the beam of a powerful flashlight stabbed the night and they were limned against the dark in its glare. "Jesus, if it ain't the broads themselves!" Stollmer's drunken voice brayed. "Come on over, sweethearts; we was just talkin' about you."
CHAPTER SEVEN
Milner unslung the shotgun from his shoulder and squinted into the dazzling beam of the torch. "Stay away from us, Stollmer," he called, thumbing back the hammers.
The big man's drunken laugh was snatched away by the wind and lost in the squalls of rain gusting through the glaring ray of light. "Don't kid yourself, lover-boy," he shouted. "She got a thorough soakin', that ole gun. Them cartridges is sodden through and through. Why do you think we left her down below?" Slowly, the flashlight approached the wetly shivering group.
"I warn you, Stollmer . . . " Milner yelled.
The drunken farmer laughed once more and continued his steady approach. Milner compressed his lips and tightened his finger on the triggers. The hammers clicked uselessly on the waterlogged caps. As Stollmer's jeering laugh rang out for the third time, something snapped in Milner's mind. He had been brutally beaten, kicked, humiliated, forced to watch the debauch of his wife and daughter, and finally almost overcome by the elements. His gashed leg was aching horribly. Now suddenly it all seemed too much. Snarling with rage and frustration, he seized the gun by its barrels and leaped forward, swinging it in a vicious arc at the sneering voice behind the electric lamp.
Stollmer dodged and sprang aside. The beam of his light swung around and lanced into the void as the furious civil engineer, carried on by the impetus of his air-slashing swing, stumbled past toward the tractor. Now Gilmore too, astonishingly, seemed suddenly possessed of a spark of courage. Mouthing curses, he hurled himself at Jem Snipe, who had run up in support of the big man. The two of them cannoned into one of the stone pillars supporting the guard rails, fell to the ground, and rolled over and over, gouging and clawing at each other, along the stony bed of the old railroad track.
Stollmer whirled around to meet a fresh attack from Milner..As the stock of the shotgun whistled through the air at his head, he dropped the torch and closed with the maddened engineer to ward off the murderous blow with one hand and seize the weapon about the breech with the other. For a moment the two adversaries grappled fiercely, and then Stollmer's superior strength told; with an immense heave he wrested the gun from Milner's grasp and sent the smaller man reeling backwards. Then, swinging it menacingly himself, he moved into the attack. Milner danced back out of range, tripped, and fell heavily backward. As he plummeted to the ground, he cracked the back of his head on the massive iron tow-bar of the tractor. The black void of the night spun dizzily in to engulf him, sucking him down into a vortex of total silence.
Leaving the unconscious man between the huge wheels of the tractor, Stollmer turned back towards Gilmore and Snipe. Still wrestling ferociously, they had rolled some way back along the viaduct towards the tunnel mouth. In the light of the fallen lamp, which was streaming along the rain-soaked ribbon of ballast, their fists and feet rose and fell, rose and fell as they struggled for the advantage.
"For Christ's sake quit fightin', you two!" Stollmer roared. "This ain't no time for unarmed combat!"
Cursing, he started forward toward the kicking, punching men . . . and then suddenly halted in mid-stride. The broken viaduct, which had been shuddering and shaking under the fury of the wind for some minutes, had given a curious sickening lurch, followed by a sustained tremor that sent their hearts into their mouths.
Jane and her mother, who had backed up against one of the stone pillars to avoid being knocked over by the fighting men, stared aghast at the section of the bridge illuminated by the torch. A huge crack had appeared in the rough surface of the ballast. As they watched, horrified, others rayed out from it until the whole width of the track bed was seamed with a spider-web of rapidly spreading fissures. There was a long loud rumbling roar that mounted to a crescendo of ear-splitting intensity. And suddenly the permanent way linking them to the bluff appeared to curve outwards into the dark.
For a timeless moment it hung against the night and then the whole section they had traversed detached itself with a thunderous reverberation, canted sideways, and dropped into the flood. Gilmore and Snipe, who had struggled upright, their faces blanched with terror, were visible for a frozen moment on a section of the disintegrating track, and then they had plunged out of the beam of the torch and vanished into the abyss. Two wild despairing cries sobbed out for an instant over the shriek of the wind before they were swallowed up in the night.
The shattering echoes of the disaster seemed to echo between the walls of the valley for minutes. The survivors stared at one another, united by a common bond of horror. Their path had been blocked because the bridge ahead of them was down; now the combined assault of floodwaters and wind had caused the tottering structure behind them to collapse as well. Once more they were marooned . . . this time on a crumbling rectangle of track bed perched precariously 300 feet above the flood on top of the sole remaining pillar of the viaduct!
Nesta and Jane jumped back with a cry of alarm as another section of masonry and ballast detached itself from the jagged lip separating them from the chasm and disappeared into the howling darkness below. It was a long time before they heard the faint splash as it hit the water.
Stollmer shepherded them back into the partial shelter afforded by the tractor. "Goddamn!" he kept muttering dazedly to himself. "Goddamn!"
They were greeted by a burst of near-hysterical laughter. The third member of the trio, who had taken no part in the drama so far, was sitting with his back to one of the wheels, cradling a gallon jug on his knees. He was wild-eyed and very drunk. It was Disley, the young farmer Stollmer had beaten up after the protest meeting at Harbord's diner . . . how many years ago? Had it been only yesterday?
"Welcome!" Disley called, half laughing and half crying. "I lost my wife and kids out there: They were carried away by that first big wave. You just lost your friends. We all lost the goddamn viaduct! There's only one thing left to do, folks have a fucking drink!" Swaying, he held out the jug towards them. "Even big-shot Stollmer drinks with me in a situation like this!" he cried.
"Ain't no sense wastin' energy fightin' when nobody can win," Stollmer said in a strangely subdued voice. "Anyways, there's one thing we can all be grateful for." Tilting back his head, he shone the torch up into the darkness and laughed. It had stopped raining.
* * *
Nesta and Jane had at first refused the moonshine whiskey proffered in Disley's jar. They had forced some between Milner's lips in an attempt to revive him, but the unconscious man was still out to the world. "Best let him sleep it off," Stollmer said roughly. "The skin ain't broke but he's concussed some. Do him more good than sittin" up all night worryin', with a fuckin' headache." And then, turning to the two shivering females, he added. "Do you more good to drink. You got no food in your bellies. You're wetter'n a polecat. You're cold right through. If you don't get some warmth into you, you're like to die before mornin'. "
"Come on," Disley said blearily. "Join the party."
"A fine time to start thinking of our welfare," Nesta said distantly. She tried to make her voice icy and disdainful but her teeth were chattering so much that it was hardly successful, "You -you degrade and humiliate us all. You behave in an unspeakably vile manner. And then you and that I know I shouldn't speak ill of the dead -but that insufferable little toady . . . you make us work for you and then sneak off alone and leave us to die. Now all of a sudden you worry about our health."
"Aw . . . hell, I was mad." The liquor had mellowed Stollmer a little. "And I was goddamn right to be mad! But when I'm mad I get mean. Plenty of guys do. As to the rest, a man has
"A man?" Nesta interrupted shrilly. "You call yourself a man? I never saw you do anything an animal couldn't do better!"
"Shuddup and have a drink, for Chrissake!" Disley said.
And finally Nesta did. She knew in her heart of hearts that the big farmer was right. The liquor could warm them internally, might even, as Stollmer said, save them from perishing from the cold and exposure. But save them for what? Hours and hours of terror in the darkness, wondering if at any moment the crazy structure on which they were perched would collapse and plunge them to certain death like Gilmore and Snipe? Hours of anguished hope in the light, if they survived the night, wondering if the clouds would lift in time for a helicopter to see them before . . . ? Well, maybe the liquor could help them forget that heart-stopping problem, too.
Reluctantly, she took the heavy jug and raised it to her lips. The fiery moonshine made her gag and choke, spilling out of the sides of her trembling mouth and running down her chin. Choking back her rising nausea, she forced herself to swallow some more and then passed the jug to Jane.
The distressed teenager could scarcely keep the burning home-brew whiskey down. Coughing and retching, her eyes streaming, her mind reeling from the horror of their predicament and her worry for her injured father, she finally managed to allow a little to trickle down her convulsed throat. As soon as it was down, though, it certainly warmed her up a little inside. The raw spirit flamed through her veins, dispelling for the first time in hours and hours the heavy, cold dead weight that had seemed to numb the very center of her being. She swallowed some more.
Mmmmmmmmm! she thought. It was crude stuff not like the velvety liquor she had drunk with Mark Digby in the Volkswagen but the sudden warmth it brought, and the curious muzzy feeling she began to experience, almost as though she was looking at everything through a plate-glass window, did help to comfort her and force her terror at their predicament away to a manageable distance. The effect of the high-proof liquor on their empty stomachs was almost immediate. Within a few minutes, the four of them were passing around the jug as sociably as if they had been friends on a camping holiday. The wind, still howling around their exposed refuge as strongly as ever, dried their drenched clothes. Disley produced a couple of blankets from a bedroll on his back and they spread these in the shelter of the tractor and lay down. Soon Nesta, her mind over-strained by the ordeals of the past twenty-four hours, fell into an uneasy sleep.
For Jane, the night had receded through the mists of alcohol to a point where reality and illusion, memory and dream, were no longer clearly distinguished; a warm drowsiness had overtaken her senses and neither time nor place any longer had any meaning. The two men had been singing. Now they were quiet. Perhaps she had been singing, too. She couldn't remember. She was on top of the dangerously swaying pillar with the wind cold around her neck . . . and then in some way she was at the foot of the pillar, lying on the seat of the Volkswagen with Mark. But it wasn't the wind, it was the chill touch of the floodwater in the half-submerged house back in the devastated valley. And it was not cooling her neck, it was washing over her hips. Were those Mark's fingers stirring such wickedly beguiling flickers of desire into her loins? One of the boys from school? Of course they weren't! The lust-arousing digits belonged to her father, up to his neck in water in the drowning first-floor bedroom. Only it shouldn't have been his fingers: It should have been his mouth. Yet there were fingers straying tantalizingly over her pussy, probing softly into the moistly tender depths of her cunt, twining themselves in her pubic hair. And the lower half of her body was cold.
Abruptly the half-drunk teenager opened her eyes. She was lying on her back on the blanket between Disley, and Stollmer. Her naked legs were drawn up over their hips on either side, so that her knees were in the air and her thighs widely spread, the whole flat plane of her cuntal region exposed to their lewdly exploring hands.
She gave an incoherent whimper of protest, ineffectually trying to squirm her body away from the maddening assault of those ravishing fingers. But the pressure of the invading hands was too strong for her. Disley was working at the helpless young brunette's vagina, insinuating his fingers roughly up into the hot moist passage of her cunt, smoothing them around inside and then sliding his other hand between her buttocks and the rug, so that they were drawn up tight against the invading digits within her pussy. "She's getting wet," she heard his voice say thickly from a long way away.
Stollmer's head was bent over her nipples below her undone brassiere and her pushed up sweater. His teeth were nibbling at the softly throbbing buds of flesh as his big fingers squeezed cruelly at the sensitive flesh beneath. "Great," he mumbled. "I'll fuck her now."
"Wait a minute," Disley protested. "Hell, you had both of them down in your farm, you told me. You and poor old Jem. But shit, I don't have anyone. Not anymore . . . " He was crying, blubbering quietly in the dark as the hot salt tears splashed onto the quivering teenager's naked belly.
"Fuck that," Stollmer growled. "Whose idea was this anyway?"
"Who was it got her ready?" Disley sobbed.
The burly farmer raised his head from the girl's swollen and inflamed nipples, opening his mouth to shout abuse at his companion. But suddenly he changed his mind and chuckled. "No sense gettin' into a hassle over it," he said mildly. "We'll both do her at once you in front and me in the back."
Disley, who had been rummaging in the unresisting brunette's vagina, stretching it wider and wider with each rotation of his lewdly probing fingers, suddenly withdrew his hand and gave a drunken laugh. "Jesus!" he exclaimed. "Trust Big Bram to come with the answer, eh?"
Before Jane had realized the implication of their words, they had turned her over onto her face, where she lay passively on the blanket, her liquor-dimmed mind struggling vainly to strike a balance between the obscure but compulsive craving gnawing at her loins and the alarm bells of her drugged conscience ringing wildly for them to stop, stop, stop!
Stollmer knelt up beside her, his eyes taking in the long sleek line of her milk-white body, the full firm breasts squashed beneath her by the pressure of Disley's hands on her shoulders, the rounded globes of her buttocks trembling palely in the diffused light of the moon that had now risen behind the clouds. His cock stood out from his hairy belly through the opened fly of his pants, long and thick and dark like the trunk of some forest tree, the underside marbled with pulsating veins. And suddenly he leaned down and grabbed hold of the defenseless girl's ankles, wrenching them fiercely apart to splay her legs agonizingly wide on the blanket.
For the first time the full horror of the indecent ravishment he was proposing struck her and she screamed. "No! Please, no! I can't.. . I won't! Not that way, please! Noooooooo!"
Feeling the cold rush of air between her thighs, she jerked convulsively and tried desperately to squirm out of their grasp. "Hold her down!" Stollmer gasped and Disley slammed his hand into the small of her back, thrusting her forcefully down against the rough ballast through the thickness of the blanket. For a moment longer she writhed frantically. And then, realizing that there was nothing she could do against their combined strength, she lay still, her whole body shuddering and shaking with the violent emotions tearing at her mind.
Chuckling lasciviously, Stollmer clambered between her spread thighs and rammed his forefinger brutally into the tight puckered ring of her anus.
Hearing the spread-eagled teenager's frantic shriek, a surge of excitement flamed through the drunken farmer's loins. For a moment his mad anger at the loss of his farm, and his hatred for the family he thought was responsible, took hold of him again. This would be the ultimate humiliation of the bastards, he thought, stroking his gleaming penis so hard that the hairy, sperm-bloated sac of his balls swung heavily beneath it. To have their snotty little bitch of a daughter fucked and sodomized at the same time . . . and better still to hear her screaming for more, as he was sure she would! That would go some way to quench his raging thirst for revenge! Too bad lover-boy wasn't awake to hear her scream. For a moment he contemplated trying to arouse the unconscious man that sexy bitch of a mother, too, but his need was too great. He couldn't wait a moment longer.
Jane cried aloud as his raping finger plowed into her unprotected ass-hole, gyrating viciously in the warm rubbery depths of her rectum, widening and stretching the narrow elastic passage in preparation for the more brutal penetration that was to come. Opening her trembling buttocks wide with the forefinger and thumb of his other hand, he leaned forward to allow a large drop of spittle to fall on the convulsively clenched nether ring of the sobbing teenager spread on her belly below him. This would help to lubricate the way, he gloated, staring lustfully as the pinioned girl jerked away from the sudden hot, wet contact of his saliva with her skin.
Snatching away his invading finger, Stollmer pulled back the thick foreskin sheathing his cock and aimed the smooth wet bulbous head he exposed directly at the tiny wrinkled opening he had stretched wide by his lewd manipulations. Then, lowering himself slowly, he pressed the whole length of his body along the weeping girl's back, the thick hard staff of his penis lying crammed into the crevice of her ass. Splaying the quaking half-moons apart with his two hands, he levered himself up on his elbows, thrust fiercely with his hips, and plunged his stone-hard cock straight at the spit-wet orifice of her anus.
"Aaaaaiiiiieeeee!" Jane screamed as the huge pole of lust-hardened flesh pressed relentlessly up between her wide-held buttocks. "No! No! No! Please! Stop!" And her hips began a wild thrashing from side to side in a futile attempt to evade the imminent skewering. But Stollmer, driven by the twin urges of lust and revenge, was too strong for her. His merciless instrument battered forward with increasing power as he flexed his muscular hips.. . to plunge suddenly through the restricting ring of nether flesh as the tight-stretched opening of the bucking teenager's anus slipped over his bloated cockhead like a rubber band.
"Aaaarrrggghhhh!" Jane screamed again as she felt the first brutal thrust into her plundered rectum, gasping at the effect of the blinding pain that seared through her defenseless loins. Stollmer lunged again and sank his penis halfway to the hilt. The girl shrieked once more, her legs flailing wildly on either side of him as she strove to escape the sadistic impalement that was setting her belly on fire. Her ass-cheeks jerked and twisted beneath his weight, trying to throw him off. But her frantic struggles only worsened her position; every time she bucked and writhed, she skewered herself further and further on to the steely cock ramming itself inch by tortured inch up into her tightly resisting anus. At last she gave a long howling moan as Stollmer's throbbing penis slid the final inch into the hot buttery depths of her rectum and his balls smacked heavily against her cunt.
For a moment she twitched spasmodically, still grinding her hips in a vain attempt to repulse him. Then she lay still, panting and sobbing, to ease the agony of the cruel and total invasion of her ass. It was pointless to resist anymore; each movement of her ravished body served only to widen and stretch the tiny cavern to greater and more painful dimensions.
"Christ! It's tighter'n hell in there!" Stollmer growled, resting momentarily despite his raging desire to begin fucking into her ass.
Disley, crooning with lustful excitement beside the lustfully coupled pair, was going out of his mind. His fingers, lewdly insinuated between the thrashing young brunette's body and the blanket, were plucking furiously at her belly and breasts, kneading insanely at the soft white flesh in an agony of impatience as his exposed, blood-engorged cock swayed lecherously over her, dripping seminal fluid onto her satiny skin. "Stollmer," he gasped. "For Chrissake, man! Turn her over and let me in."
The big man locked his hands around Jane's hips and rolled to one side, pulling the impaled girl over on top of him. His hugely throbbing cock was still imbedded deep in her tortured anus as she lay full length on her back, hard against his stomach and heaving chest. Her legs trailed out limply on either side of his as a low pleading moan forced its way between her clenched teeth. Disley scrambled onto the blanket straddling the drunken farmer's knees and pushing Jane's trembling thighs still further apart. Then, grasping his steel-hard aching cock with both hands, he stuffed it straight up into the moistly gaping, scalding cavern of her cunt.
Biting her lip, the doubly skewered teenager tried to utter no sound, but a shrill squeal forced itself from her throat as the second man's rigid penis slithered up inside her quaking belly to join Stollmer's cock already forcefully buried in her rectum. Groaning with shame and pain, she was sandwiched securely between the lustfully raping farmers, impaled on their two rods with only the thin wall of flesh separating her anus and cunt between them.
Inflamed with desire from watching Stollmer's cruel invasion of the girl's anus, Disley began to fuck furiously into Jane's hot wet pussy while his drunken companion thrust up from beneath her with powerful strokes into her rectum. Soon, panting hoarsely with the mounting excitement of their depraved attack, they were buffeting her rhythmically between them like a sack of softly resilient foam rubber, the rigid poles of male hardness shafting mercilessly into her belly like alternating pistons.
The lust-thickened rods of gleaming flesh skewered on and on into her jerking loins. The wetly clasping flanges of Jane's cunt drew back with Disley's plunging cock on the out-stroke, to be stuffed savagely back inside as he rammed his hips hard down again on her trembling loins; then it was the turn of the tautly stretched opening of her distended anus as Stollmer screwed into it from below with demonic fury.
Suddenly the violated teenager reared up convulsively between them, her mouth opening to emit a long wailing cry of shame and subservience which somehow translated itself into a groan overlaid with a note of desperate pleading. But, incredibly, she wasn't pleading for them to stop she wanted them to go on, harder and harder!
The alcoholic mists fogging her mind had momentarily cleared, and in the sudden instant of clarity she came to terms with the awful, the unacceptable fact she had been striving to suppress: Now that the pain had subsided, she knew that the wild twinges of sensation flaming outward from her plundered loins and ravaging her nerves were twinges of desire! Just as it had happened in the Volkswagen with Mark, again during the rape of her mother, and finally when she was being forced to suck Jem Snipe while Stollmer fucked her, so now the abandoned tremors of lustful arousal were triggering off a reaction and a wanton excitement she had never dreamed of! Only this time, her conscience lulled by the insidious effect of the liquor she had drunk, she allowed those previously unadmitted surges of passion to take command.
All at once she felt free to yes, to exult in the rape of her body! The wantonly lewd thought that she was being fucked half-to-death by two men at once within a few feet of her own father and mother was sending lurid thrills searing all over her and exciting her beyond her wildest imagination! And again the guilt she felt because of that wicked, forbidden excitement served only to redouble the lustful sensations that were sending her mind reeling.
The low whining moans gargling in her throat altered to gasping groans of pleasure. Her hips began to thrust backwards to meet the plunging strokes of Stollmer's cock crammed up in her rectum and then forward again to engulf the whole wet length of Disley's hotly throbbing penis plowing into her quivering, scalding cunt. Her entire body undulated frenziedly between the two drink-crazed farmers and her buttocks began a lascivious gyrating movement of their own, squirming in abandoned circles between their two impaling rods.
"Ooooooogh!" she chanted in time to their pile-driving thrusts. "Aaaaaagh! Eeeeeuuugggh! Aiiieeeeef Ohhhhhhh!"
Her eyes stared wildly into the darkness. Her ecstatically contorted body bucked and jerked under their twin assault. Her head flailed from side to side as they battered mercilessly at her loins on and on in time with their jackhammer thrusts into her cunt and anus. More and more frenzied the three of them became, heaving and groaning and plunging on the rumpled blanket with ever-increasing fury as their grunts of animal desire mingled with the rampant suck and slap of flesh on naked flesh in a wild crescendo of abandon.
Jane was the first to cum.
"Oh, God; oh, God; oh, God!" she screamed, as she was borne up on the irresistible wave of her approaching climax and the clamor of the blood thundering in her ears drowned the howl of the wind. "I'm going to cum . . . I'm going to cum . . . I'm going to cum! Oh, God, I'm cumming. Yes, I'm cumming! Fuck me! Bugger me! Screw me, you bastards! Oh, God; keep on! I'm cuuuummmiiinnngggg!"
Out of her mind with desire, she sobbed out an orgasm that seemed as though it would never end, begging and pleading with them to go on and on and on. This was the moment Stollmer knew he would relish more than any other. Excitement flared wildly within him as he and Disley, sensing their total conquest of the frantically jerking teenager's mind and body, both plunged savagely forward at the same time, imbedding their all-at-once furiously ejaculating cocks deep in her seething cunt and anus . . . pumping their thick, white-hot sperm far up into her heaving belly in savage, viscous squirts.
When finally the hoarse gasping cries of release had subsided, when at last the grasping clutch of Jane's plundered cunt and anus had sucked the last drop of creamy semen from the now deflated cocks of the two men, they collapsed in a satiated tangle of limbs on the blanket. For a long time there was no sound but the moan of the wind around their precarious refuge and the gradually subsiding, panting breath from three pairs of overtaxed lungs.
And then suddenly Bram Stollmer realized -he lifted his head to listen that he could in fact hear the laboring of four pairs of lungs. And whereas his and Disley's and Jane's were quieting down, the others were quickening and deepening in hoarse little trembling gasps that shuddered out into the night and stirred an involuntary flicker of anticipation in his loins. It was Nesta Milner; she must have been awakened by the noise of their lustful excesses and heard it all. Now she was lying panting into the dark.
Opening his mouth to speak, he felt a trembling hand on his arm. "It's.. . it's mighty cold up here," Nesta said in a small voice. "Would you could you do you two think you could find anyway to warm me up?"
CHAPTER EIGHT
Jeff Milner opened his eyes and groaned. There was a blacksmith inside his skull trying to fight his way out with a sledgehammer. His gashed thigh smarted abominably. And Ins face and body were a throbbing mass of hard, dull aches.
It was daylight and it was dry though the sky was still filled with ragged black clouds scurrying across the horizon. Raising himself painfully on to one elbow he stared along the rough surface beneath the tractor which had been sheltering him. Nesta, Jane, Bram Stollmer and a man he didn't know were sleeping on the other side of the vehicle in a tangle of blankets. Beyond them, the ragged hp of the broken viaduct yawned . . . and a long way beyond that was the scrub-covered valley slope they had been trying to reach. What had happened to him? He remembered the beginning of his fight with Stollmer and then nothing more. What on earth were they doing, sleeping on this crazy structure all night? And where were Gilmore and Snipe? Why hadn't they . . .
Twisting his head to look back along the old track towards the bluff and the tunnel mouth, he gasped aloud. The shock of seeing another chasm cutting off their escape hit him like a physical blow. He swallowed and pulled himself out from under the tractor as the pillar shivered in an extra-strong gust of wind and the familiar sensation of vertigo sent spasms of nausea rippling through his stomach.
Forcing himself to look out through the guard rails, the battered engineer stared unbelievingly up the twisting length of the valley. The flood had subsided. Yesterday an inferno of raging water had filled it from side to side, destroying everything in its path; now there was just a broad river. A river that was ten times wider than the normal stream, an angry torrent whose turbulent current swept past the ruined viaduct with a menacing roar. But nevertheless a river whose menace could be gauged, whose danger could be allowed for. The rescuers must have reconnected the power lines and opened all the sluices of the new dam soon after they had escaped from the house.
He gazed appalled at the desolation on either side of this minor flood. As far as the eye could see, the once fertile valley was blanketed with thick black ooze punctuated here and there by drowned trees whose stripped branches were packed with driftwood and tufted with jetsam like some surrealist fruit. Innumerable rivulets cut their way through the mud towards the river from the pockets of water left in hollows by the receding flood. Here and there, between great masses of uprooted trees stranded as the water level sank, he could see the remains of dwellings like the spars of sunken ships. Below the knoll on which Stollmer's farm had stood, the twisted wreckage of the jeep and his Oldsmobile were caught among the broken branches of a ruined orchard.
Milner turned and looked the other way. Half a mile down the valley, the perfect arc of his dam spanned the defile in the early morning light. He could see at the fringe of the huge lake still held back by the barrage the foaming of the floodwater above the yawning sluices.
The pillar shuddered again. He drew back involuntarily as a two-yard section of the lip suddenly twisted sideways, canted away, and dropped into the depths with a roar of falling masonry. A cloud of yellow dust blossomed up over the edge and momentarily hid the broken guard rails drooping into the void.
Milner bit his Up. He would have to force himself to prospect; he must find out for himself exactly how bad their position was. Breathing deeply through his nose, he dragged himself towards the low parapet and the rusty rails above it. It took every ounce of courage he possessed to make himself look over . . . and when he had done so the sweat was starting cold from his forehead and his belly was heaving with nausea.
The ten-yard stretch of the old railroad trackbed on which they were marooned was balanced exactly over the center of the viaduct's sole remaining pillar, supported by segments of the arches which had flanked it. Now that it had lost the rigidity of an anchorage at either side, the 300-foot pile was swaying like a reed in the wind. From his giddy vantage point, Milner could see at once that the blocks of stone from which it was built had been fatally eroded; wind and frost had eaten away practically all the mortar, and the track must have been standing on what amounted to dry stone pillars. And now that the pile was free-standing, swaying dizzily with the plucking of the wind, the situation was rapidly worsening. Every few seconds he could hear another shower of stones and rubble break loose and plunge down to join the chaos of tumbled masonry spanning the valley. It must only be a matter of time before the slender pillar collapsed . . .and not much time at that!
What could they do? They had nothing except their clothes to signal with . . . and there was nobody to see if they did. There were no houses on either side of the valley; the State Highway was half a mile away from the top of the scrub-covered slope. Unless they were sighted by one of the rescue helicopters, they were doomed to be flung to a violent death when the pillar fell. But the clouds were not expected to clear before the afternoon and the choppers wouldn't fly until they did: The radio had announced it yesterday!
As a civil engineer, Milner knew the pillar would collapse long before then. He ground his teeth in frustration. After all they had gone through . . . to be left to die like this, so near and yet so far from help . . . without a single hope to buoy them up. Suddenly he stiffened. Without a single hope? Wasn't there one hope, just one, a crazy, million-to-one chance that might make it as a last mad venture against impossible odds? Hadn't he seen . . . ?
Clenching his nails into the palms of his hands, he shuffled forward on his knees and steeled himself to look over the edge once more. As he had thought, the pillar was slightly tapered towards the top, perhaps one or two degrees off the vertical. The stonework was cracked and fissured all the way down. Here and there, gaps showed in the masonry where whole chunks had fallen away. It was just conceivable
it was barely within the bounds of possibility
that a very determined man, given all the luck in the world, knowing that he was going to die anyway . . .
Milner sighed. All the frustration and shame and humiliation at his own weakness, all the helplessness and anguish he had suffered at his inability to protect his own wife and daughter, flooded his mind and submerged everything but one single spark of determination that burned like a distant star at the back of his consciousness. All right, he thought, he'd damned well show them, vertigo or no goddamn vertigo! Straightening up, he slowly uncoiled the rope which for some reason he had detached from the inflated inner tubes and coiled around his waist beneath his jacket.
"What the fuck are you playin' at, lover-boy?" Stollmer's voice said softly behind him. The hatred and anger and bitterness seemed to have spewed out of him with his sexual excesses the previous night, and his tone was curiously calm.
"This pillar's liable to collapse at any minute," Milner said, swinging around to stare into the big man's eyes. "It'll go long before there's any chance of anyone finding us. I'm going over there . . . " He nodded at the guard rails. ". . . and you're going to help me."
"Going . . . ? " Stollmer's face was a study of incomprehension.
"I'm going to try to climb down and go for help. The stonework's cracked to hell. I did a bit of mountain climbing when I was at college before I suffered from vertigo. There's a slim chance I might make it. Even if I don't.. . " he shrugged. "What do I lose?"
"You're out of your mind!" Stollmer breathed. "You must be nuts!"
Milner gave him a crooked smile. "Only thing is," he went on, "the platform carrying the old track bed overhangs the pillar, and then there's a stretch of polished stone that's too smooth to offer a foothold until you get to the ledge at the foot of the arch. If I tie this rope around my waist and you pay it out until I drop to the level of that ledge, we're in business. Unless you'd rather do it yourself, of course."
"You have to be joking!" Stollmer said. "We got more chance of being rescued in the next five minutes than you have of making that! You're out of your cotton-pickin' mind!"
Milner knotted the rope and handed him the other end. "Pay it out slowly," he said. "When I'm there, I'll give it a tug, and you can let go." With a lingering glance at his sleeping wife and daughter, he moved towards the flimsy guard rail. His face was deathly white and his hands were trembling. Stollmer shook his head. But he wound the rope around his own burly waist, took two more turns around his right wrist, and sat down on the track bed with his feet braced against the low stone parapet.
Milner stared him in the eye, backed to the rail, swung his leg over, brought his other leg across, and stood balanced on the coping on the far side, teetering over the 300-foot drop. His chalky face was dewed with sweat. Throwing the slack of the rope to Stollmer, who at once braced himself and took the strain, he stepped backwards off the ledge into space.
It was a wild idea, an insane idea born of desperation, but for his own sake he had to carry it through. It wasn't an idea he wanted to think about though; the very thought of thinking about it made him sick to his stomach. The only thing was to get on with it. Anything was better than waiting and wondering . . . and hating himself as he waited! Time enough to think about what he was doing afterwards . . . if there was an afterwards.
He closed his eyes tight and clenched his teeth to stop the shaking of his jaws as Stollmer lowered him slowly into the abyss, one hand grasping the rope just above the level of his head and the other held in front of him to ward off the masonry. The wind stirred his hair and plucked at his clothes. There was a strange, ringing silence all around him, and the rush of the water below sounded immeasurably distant. He jerked his mind away; he didn't want to think about below.
After a long time he cautiously opened his eyes. The gray, still-damp surface of the weathered stonework was sliding slowly upwards past his face. There was nearly thirty feet of rope; it should be enough to get him to the ledge at the bottom of the broken arch. He concentrated his attention on the crumbling stone. If he looked out beyond the pillar towards the new dam, he would gain an idea of height and that would be fatal.. . in every sense!
The ledge slid into view. Milner drew a deep, shuddering breath. This was it! He was hanging about eighteen inches away from the pillar. He began rocking himself slowly backwards and forwards on the end of the rope until he could touch the eroded masonry. Finally, he was able to grasp the ledge firmly with both hands.
Flattening himself against the stone, he felt for and found a crack into which he could insert one toe. He tested it to see if it would bear his weight, and it held.
This was the point of no return. For a wild moment of panic, he was tempted to shout to Stollmer to pull him up again. He couldn't go through with it; it was insanity. Anything was better than the thought. But he mustn't think. He tugged sharply on the rope. It slackened immediately. And then the whole length of it came snaking past him to drop down from the knot at his waist into the chasm. He was alone, spread-eagled like a fly against the rotten fabric of the pillar 270 feet above the ground!
Groaning with terror, he prepared himself for the nightmare descent. He must keep his eyes fixed rigidly on the stone immediately in front of his face. All his concentration must go into the fingers and toes searching for crevices beneath him. If he allowed his gaze even once to stray down or outwards, he would be lost. Worse, if he so much as thought about what he might see if he did look down, the effect would be the same! He must will himself into a one-dimensional world where there was no past and no future, no time and no space but the few square feet of eroded stone immediately before him.
Only two things served to ameliorate his perilous situation, to take his self-appointed task out of the realms of the utterly impossible into the just conceivable: First, the fact that the pillar was tapered meant that it was sloping very slightly away from him, so that he could lean himself against it without feeling the whole of his body weight trying to tear him away from the face; second, the blocks of which it was built grew progressively larger towards the foot of the pile, so that the interstices between them where the mortar had crumbled away should grow proportionately larger as he descended.
But that was cold comfort at the moment. Here the blocks were relatively small and the cracks narrow, especially for his toes. The rain moreover had turned the crumbs of old mortar and eroded limestone flakes in the gaps into a greasy paste in which fingers and toes skidded more easily than grasped. Under such circumstances, buffeted by the wind and constantly threatened by nausea, even to stay still on the almost vertical face was a hell beyond his wildest imagination.
For minutes he remained still, his trembling cheek pressed to the cold stone, willing himself to move. When at last he stirred, his progress was measurable in inches rather than feet. He lowered a hand from the ledge, groped for a crack beneath it, tested it, rested his weight on it as he let go of the ledge with his other hand and searched for a fissure lower down still, dislodged one foot from its crevice and probed unseeingly for another that would take his weight below, repeated the process with his other foot . . . and so on ad infinitum.
Added to this was the fear fear of falling, fear of looking down, fear of vertigo, fear for his wife and daughter each time the pillar shivered and shook under the attack of the wind, fear that even if he made it he would be too late . . . a weight of sheer terror that threatened every moment to engulf him.
Every foot of the descent became a hellish test of will power, coaxing the screaming muscles and overtaxed sinews to hang on for just that second longer while the questing toe found a temporary resting place that would take the strain, the groping fingers, a cleft that wouldn't flake away the moment any weight was put on it. He began to suffer from hallucinations: He was still only a yard away from that first ledge; he had been climbing all day, and night was about to fall; the others had already been rescued and had forgotten about him: they had been blown to their deaths by a freak gust of Wind; he had reversed his direction without realizing it and was climbing up instead of down.
But gradually he began to make progress. The limestone blocks increased in size and the cracks between them grew wider and easier to find. He passed a section where whole chunks of masonry had fallen away and he could wedge himself in the gap like a mountaineer in a chimney. The first crises occurred when he was still 150 feet from the ground. Through some anomaly of the weather, there was a whole 20-foot section where the mortar had held and there wasn't a crack to be found: The smoothly polished stone stretched impassably below him. He moved sideways, searching, with no better luck. And then he remembered, a little higher up, there had been a rusty iron peg, part of the original reinforcement, jutting through a gash in the stone. Wearily, he dragged himself back up to it, hauled up the rope dangling from his waist, and secured the free end to the metal stanchion. This was what he had brought the rope for. Grasping the slack with both hands, he tested the strength of the peg and then slowly let himself down past the difficult section.
Finding a foothold among the larger blocks beneath it, he rested against the rope panting hoarsely, grateful for the respite. But now he would be entirely on his own; untying the life-saving cord from around his waist, he continued his perilous descent.
The second crisis came when he was 70 feet lower down. Reaching a similar section of smooth stone, he found that if he could move around the right-angle of the pillar to the inside of the old arch, there were handholds and footholds to be found. Gritting his teeth, he started to edge around the right-angle. For a moment he was splayed out, like a butterfly on a pin, with his right hand and foot on the inside of the pillar and his left on the outer. The problem now was to swing the left hand and foot outwards and around the edge without losing purchase with the right while doing it!
Milner knew better than to look down. Behind him was an unknown drop to a certain death, a dizzying perspective of crumbling stone dropping away to the drowned valley far below. But he did look up. He had to. As his glance raked the towering column of smooth damp stonework overhead, his eyes was drawn by the clouds scudding past across the sky. As they streamed out of sight behind the coping far above him, it seemed for a moment that the clouds stood still and the pillar moved, leaning over towards him . . . falling towards him, forcing him back and back.
A spasm of nausea gripped him and his stomach heaved as the dread vertigo laid clammy hands on his guts. Frenziedly he fought to keep it down; if he did throw up, the convulsions of his muscles would inevitably dislodge him from his precarious perch and hurl him into the abyss!
Breathing deeply, he managed to suppress the spasm. And then abruptly, as he shuddered with relief, the niche into which his left toe was wedged crumbled away and the foot shot into space. He plunged downwards.
The shock of the fall tore his right hand and toe away from their holds around the corner, and for a heart-stopping instant his body dropped to the full extent of his left arm and he hung giddily over the void supported only by the four fingers of that hand. The air was torn from his lungs in an agonized gasp. From below
seconds later, it seemed he heard clearly the patter of rubble on some hard surface.
Desperately he fought for purchase, pressing himself as close to the wet stone as he could to minimize the strain on those fingers. And at last his foot found a ledge, it held firm, and then his fingers, scrabbling wildly over the rough blocks, groped for and found a crevice level and strong enough to hold him. For a moment his shrieking muscles refused to obey him anymore. Spread-eagled between heaven and earth, he dropped his face to the cold limestone and wept ,in the extremity of his exhaustion. Then, moving as though his body weighed a ton, he continued the dreadful descent.
He was concentrating his attention so hard on the fissured blocks of masonry in front of his face that when, after an eternity of torment, his-lowered foot struck something hard and solid beneath him, he cried aloud in surprise and terror. Daring at last to look down, he saw that he was standing on the roof of a battered Volkswagen jammed against the pillar by the flood!
He had made it! With an incoherent shout, he cast himself to the welcome, incredible, wonderful, beautiful bed of slimy mud beneath it, shaking and shuddering in every limb. For a long time he lay there quaking, unable to believe that at last he was on relatively solid ground. Then he dragged himself slowly to his feet. Through the windows of the wrecked car, he could see the huddled shape of the drowned body of young Mark Digby. Milner vomited . . . and then lurched out from the shelter of the pillar to look upwards.
Far, far above, the tiny silhouette of Bram Stollmer leaned out over the flimsy guard rail to wave excitedly. Milner waved back and then looked around him. He was already between the swollen river and the scrub-covered valley side. His lungs bursting with effort, his hands lacerated to the bone, his bloodied toes protruding through his worn-away shoes, Milner, ten feet tall, splashed and staggered through the ooze towards the slope, the highway beyond it, the automobiles, the telephones . . . and the hope of rescue for the others.
* * *
"Lover-boy," Bram Stollmer said, "that was a hell of a thing you did there, and you with no head for heights an' all! Man, I'd be kinda proud to shake you by the hand." He held out his meaty paw.
Awkwardly, Jeff Milner took it in his own throbbing fingers. The devastated valley spun away below them as the helicopter soared into the air over the solitary pillar that had been their prison. Nesta was smiling proudly at her husband as she blinked back the tears that threatened to overflow her tired eyes. Disley sat with his head sunk between his shoulders, nursing his grief and a monumental hangover.
Jane moved closer to the big farmer and took his arm possessively. There was a light in her eyes that her father had never seen before. "You've got to realize, Daddy, that Bram has qualities it may be difficult for you to appreciate," she began.
Milner looked at this child who suddenly seemed to have turned into a woman overnight and smiled. "He's got other things that even he doesn't appreciate," he said.
"How's that again?" Stollmer asked with a frown.
"I've been trying to tell you for weeks," Milner said. "But you'd never listen. You have twenty-five acres of land on the hillside above the level of the new reservoir, don't you?"
"Hell, yes but it ain't no good for fruit growin'. Soil's too poor. That's what I've been beefin' about all the time."
"You don't want to waste your time messing about with fruit," Milner said. "Don't you realize, you idiot: That land's worth a fortune! It'll be a gold mine. It's on the water's edge. You can do boating, trout fishing, bathing.. . a holiday camp, a Lido, caravans, a hotel, whatever. You could clean up in a couple of years."
Stollmer stared at him open-mouthed. "Well for Christ's sake!" he said slowly. "How d'ya like that!" Jane leaned her head on his shoulder and looked up into his eyes. "You'll need somebody to watch the hired help," she said softly.
Over the clatter of the chopper's rotors, a roar like an artillery barrage assailed their ears. Startled, they peered out through the Perspex blister to see the last remaining pillar of the broken viaduct collapse into the valley in a great fountain of yellow dust which rose hundreds of feet into the air.
Milner moved closer to his wife and put his arm around her waist. Every nerve and muscle and bone and sinew in his body ached, but he felt stronger than he ever had in his life. "As for you," he whispered, "you're going straight back to that hotel to bed . . . and I don't mean to sleep!"
