He set about his task steadily, but angrily--I mean, he thought, seriously! The little shit is going to steal from me? Fuckin' hell!

He held her tight, one strong large arm wrapped around her chest and arms, as he stuffed the two pilfered twenties into his pocket. She squealed, and squirmed, but undaunted by her protestations he held her steady, and the skinny little thing didn't have a hope of escaping his righteous vengeance.

As he sat down on the bench of the picnic table, he unceremoniously yanked down her jeans without even bothering to unzip them first. He hadn't intended to pull her panties down as well, but they'd rolled half-way down her ass when the jeans came down and, as he pushed her belly-down onto his lap, he pulled the panties down as well. Then the palm of his hand made sharp contact with the bare flesh of her bottom; a stinging slap, fully intended to cause the little thief some well-deserved pain. She cried out, and squirmed some more, but he held her tight and slapped her hard again.

He wasn't a violent man, nor one prone to anger, but, to be honest, he was royally pissed off at the girl at this moment, and he wordlessly slapped her, hard, several more times until those pale brown globes shone red. The girl was lucky, really. Most people she might have encountered would have killed her on the spot for stealing their money, or maybe even worse still, would have simply abandoned her there on the side of the road. But he had fatherly feelings for her, and a good solid spanking seemed like the most honorable thing to do.

Once finished, then, he put his hand more gently on her ass, meaning it to be a tender gesture, even affectionate. He wanted to soothe the newly-rawed skin.

"What the fuck, Sam," he said to the girl, now that the worst of it was over. "Why the fuck did you steal from me?"

She didn't respond, just squirmed some more in his tight grip. Unintentionally, or at least unthinkingly, his hand slipped down, over the turn of her soft round cheeks and down to the back of her thigh, his fingers grazing over the mounded cleft between her legs. Until now, until this very instant in fact, he hadn't actually known if she was a girl or a boy. Sam was an intelligent kid, it seemed; she'd passed herself off as a boy to him, as she'd most likely been doing to everyone this last year or more. And he'd bought the act completely, at least until he suspected otherwise when he saw her crouch behind some bushes to relieve herself last night. Boys, you see, don't crouch to pee.

So he'd suspected that his new companion might actually be a girl, but he hadn't really known for certain until this very moment. And as his fingers slipped accidentally over her girlhood, he could feel that it was dusted with a fine trace of newly-sprouted hair. She squirmed again to get away, and he felt, then, too, a wetness seeping out, down there between her legs. Shocked, and unnerved by his body's animal reaction to this new information, he withdrew his fingers, raised his hand, and brought his palm down on her ass again, three more hard ringing slaps that painted her cheeks bright red.

And then, he let go of her. Despite her previous squirming, she lay quietly for a moment, perhaps unsure if it was indeed finally over, or perhaps expecting him to finger her again. Finally she stood and gingerly pulled her pants and underwear back up, tears rolling down her cheeks.

She lay belly-down on the opposite bench of the picnic table as he poured soup from a pan into two bowls.

"Here, eat," he grunted gruffly, pushing a bowl in her direction.

"Not hungry," she answered, her voice muffled in her arms as she lay with her face resting into them. These were the first words she'd spoken since she'd been caught with his money in the pocket of her jeans.

"Bullshit," he said. "You look like you're starving. Sit up and eat."

"I can't sit up," she said, words still muffled. "My butt hurts too much."

"How 'bout another peach?" he asked. He reached in a big box sitting on the table and pulled out a plump fat fruit and reached it out in her direction. She turned and looked at the peach, then took it from him and sunk her teeth into the syrupy flesh, juice running down her chin.

Once again, he was amazed at how much she reminded him of his son. Abrahim had had the same shock of unkempt curls on his head, the same round face, the same brown cheeks. And he was a messy eater, too.

"Why'd you do it, Sam?" he asked her. "Why'd you steal from me?"

She just took another sloppy bite.

"I mean," he continued when it was clear she wasn't going to answer, "I saved your fucking life. I could've left you at that old school, to be killed by the blackshirts, or worse. Maybe," he added, as something of an afterthought, "maybe I should've fucking left you there."

"Maybe you should have," was all she said in response.

"And this is how you repay me for my kindness?" he said rhetorically, driving home his point. "You steal from me?"

She sat up, grimacing as her bottom made contact with the bench, then just shrugged her shoulders and took another bite of the fruit.

"Well, anyway," he concluded, unhappily confused by her nonchalance, "I'm sorry your butt hurts."

The girl narrowed her dark eyes to look at him. "You liked doing it, didn't you?"

"Huh? Of course not," he answered.

"I could tell," she said, taking a final bite and tossing the pit away into the tall grass near the table. "I could tell you liked doing it."

"Bullshit," he said defensively, remembering with embarrassment the way his body had reacted. "Besides, what about you?" he added, even more defensive. "It seemed like you liked it, that's for sure."

"I didn't like it," she answered, with her own defensiveness, and maybe her own embarrassment. She leaned over the bowl of soup and attacked it with the same messy vengeance that she'd used on the peach.

"You don't need to steal from me, Sam," he said, wanting very badly to change the direction of the conversation, return it to the real subject at hand. "I'll share everything I've got with you."

Her eyes looked up at him, over her bowl of soup. They were remarkably beautiful eyes, yellow-brown irises that caught, then reflected back, the noon-day sun, spots of light that danced like sparkles, like tiny little almond-colored fireworks. Her eyes seemed hopeful. But, "I don't trust you," she said.

"That's understandable."

"You hurt me." The girl had a matter-of-fact way about her; he'd noticed this before, no doubt honed from a year or more of base survival, all by herself in a world gone mad.

"I spanked you," he answered, trying to be just as matter-of-fact as her. "And you deserved it."

"You did more than just spank me," she said. Matter-of-fact again, it seems.

With even more embarrassment than he'd felt earlier, he remembered how his fingers had lingered between her legs. "Well..." he stammered, "I didn't know..." He stammered some more, then finally found his voice. "You told me you were a boy. I mean, at least, you pretended to be a boy."

"And you were hard," she said, maintaining her new advantage in the conversation. "I could feel it."

"I'm sorry," he admitted, giving more way to her. "It's just... I haven't been with a woman in..."

"I'm not a woman," she said, driving the advantage home.

"I know. I promise I won't touch you again, Sam."

"Even if I steal from you?"

"I'll spank you again if you steal from me," he said.

Finally, the girl smiled, just a little. "See? I told you. I knew you liked it."

"Bullshit," he said again, lost. How could this little shit of a girl get the better of him, so easily? "Just don't steal from me. There's no reason. Everything I have, I'll share with you, I promise."

She nodded. "Okay."

They spent the better part of the afternoon cleaning out his truck. A scavenger acquires a lot of crap, stuff you can't find a buyer for, stuff you just grab at random when you hear the helicopters and have to flee. He was getting tired of sleeping in the pickup's cab, and now that there were two of them, there wasn't enough room even for that. There was a decent mattress up front in the truck topper that could sleep two easily, especially if one of them were as little as Sam. But that meant cleaning the topper out, so that was their afternoon's entertainment.

They made a pile of the copper. He had a good deal of copper, pipes from the basement of the school, where he'd found Sam's nest, and wires that he'd dug out of the walls of various buildings. It's good to keep the copper separate. It's the easiest to sell. He also had a couple boxes full of circuit boards and other detritus of the electronic age, mostly valuable for the scant bit of precious metals. They made another pile of the garbage, all kinds of garbage, books, broken appliances, cheap metal cutlery that he'd hope might prove to be silver. That's when Sam found the box of jewelry. She pulled a necklace out, a chain that most certainly was silver, with a sizable green stone for a broach. He'd found the jewelry in an old plantation house, hidden off in the overgrown woods in south Georgia. The place looked like it had been recently inhabited, hell, he was worried that the owner might have even been there as he walked in. He was a scavenger, not a thief; not so much out of honor, more because of safety. The sentences for thieving are harsh, but mostly you don't make it before a judge at all. Justice is swift and cruel these days.

The house had proven to be empty. Maybe the occupants were out for the afternoon. Maybe they'd recently gone insane and ran off into the woods. It happened these days, more than you'd think. He was mainly interested in the larder, and it lived up to his expectations. Even now, weeks later, he was still scooping rice out of the fifty pound bag he'd found, though the beans and the canned meat were long gone. The jewels had been an afterthought. He was rifling through to second floor, looking for weapons and about ready to leave before the owners returned, if they were still alive, when he spied the safe partly hidden under a bedside table.

It'd taken him and a sledgehammer two weeks to finally crack open the door, and he'd been a bit disappointed by the contents inside. No cash, just some personal documents and the jewelry. The jewelry was nice, and surely valuable, but it wasn't likely to bring him much more than stress. His buyers were only interested in practical items. Sure, any of them would take the jewels off his hands, but not happily; they'd have the same problem with them as he had; to fetch a really good price, you'd have to take them into the city, and that would rise eyebrows, and questions. Johnson hated questions even more than he hated the city. Neither of them were ever any good.

Sam held the necklace up to her chest. "Oh, it's beautiful!" Her mouth was open in a wide smile, almond eyes a-glitter. It was the first nod to femininity that he'd seen from her in the nearly forty-eight hours that their friendship had existed.

"It's prob'ly an emerald," he said. "It's prob'ly worth a lot of money."

She looked down at it. "Really?" He shrugged his shoulders. For all he knew, it was colored glass. "How much?"

"It's hard to say," he answered. "Things are only worth what people are willing to pay you for them."

"Well, I think it's pretty. Can I put it on?" She did. "I ain't stealing it," she added, as she walked over to the truck's rear-view mirror to look at herself. "Just trying it."

"I know you ain't. You can keep it."

"Really?" Her pretty eyes shone even brighter.

"Careful with it, though. People might kill you for something like that." Of course, people would kill you for anything these days.

The girl looked at herself in the mirror again. "Does it make me look like a girl?"

"Maybe, a bit," he answered. "More than that dirty ol' baseball cap."

"This ain't a baseball cap," she said, even though it was. "It's a Bulls cap. The Bulls were a basketball team." She had a sense of authority about her.

"Well, it's dirty as hell, whatever it is."

She slipped the necklace off and was about to drop it back in the box, then thought the better of it and crumpled it in her hand and stuffed it in her pocket. "I ain't stealing it," she said again.

"Of course not. It's yours."

"It's ours, right? We share everything, right?"

"Right," he said, nodding in agreement.

She gave him a smile and climbed back in the truck.

A minute later she emerged, with one of his dirty magazines in her hand. "What's this?" she said, looked down at it with a nose-scrunched scowl. "'Spread-eagle?'"

"It's..."

"You like this stuff?" she said, opening it, paging through it. "Gross!!!" She threw it on the garbage pile. Back into the truck, and back out a second later, four more magazines in her hands. She flipped through the pages for a moment, pausing to look at an occasional picture and shaking her head, then threw them on the garbage pile as well. She sat down on the step to the door to the pickup topper and took off her dirty old Chicago Bulls cap, her curly head of hair a floppy mop, and wiped the cap across her sweat-soaked forehead.

"You need to take a bath," he said, nodding his head in the direction of the creek down the hill a hundred feet. "I promise I won't look. And wash your clothes, you stink like a boy."

She watched him with a curious expression as he picked the dirty magazines up off the garbage pile and stacked them neatly next to the box of jewelry.

"Go on now," he said. "I'll put this stuff back."

"Those, too?" she said, looking at the stack of magazines. "You're saving them, too?"

He looked at her crossly, and she hopped up on her feet. "Wash that damn hat, too," he said. "It's filthy. I'll make us some rice and boil something for dinner."

Like he promised, he didn't look while she bathed. Maybe he wanted to. He was tempted. She'd watched him, earlier, in the morning. That's when he saw her guiltily putting his wallet back on the sand where he'd left it, after she'd stolen from him. He'd been too shocked to respond at the time, too shocked to hide himself from her staring almond eyes, even though by then he was pretty sure she was a girl, having watched her squat to pee during the night. He just stood there, too shocked to move, and she stood there, too, no doubt afraid that he'd caught her. If she thought of running then, it would have been a good decision. But she just stood, and stared.

"I'm sorry," Sam said, quietly, from her side of the bed in the top front of the pickup topper.

"Hmmm?" he said, from his side, half asleep. There was four feet of mattress between them.

"I'm sorry," she said again.

"It's okay," he said, half a mumble. "You learned your lesson. You don't need to steal from me."

"No," she said, "not that. I mean, I'm sorry about that, too."

He rolled over onto his side to face her, aware now that she was in a talkative mood. This was new. "Okay, what then?"

"I'm sorry I'm not a woman. I'm sorry I'm just a girl."

"What?" he said, confused.

"I'm sorry I''m not like the women in your magazines," she said.

"Huh? You don't... I don't want you to be like that."

"Maybe I can learn?" she said, rising up on an elbow, almond eyes catching what little nighttime light came through the cloudy windows of the pickup topper.

"Sam..."

"I know I'm just a girl, but... But maybe you're one of those guys that likes little girls?"

He could see her smiling teasingly at him. "Go to sleep, Sam."

Sometime during the night, the four foot gulf of mattress between them had narrowed into nothing, and he awoke in the soft sunlight of dawn to find that Sam was snuggled against him, still sound asleep. She was wearing one of his shirts, a button-up that looked like a nightgown on her small frame, her clothing still drying on the picnic table after she'd washed it in the creek the afternoon before. And, thank god, she'd washed that damn baseball cap, too, which meant that she was bare-headed and he could feel the tickles of her soft brown curls against his neck. That brought back a flood of painful memories of his son, that's for damn sure.

Sam had the necklace with the green stone on as well, which gave her just a hint of a storybook princess air about her, and she had a placid smile on her face. It made him glad, despite his sudden sorrowful memories, to see the girl smile. He could only imagine that she hadn't had very many moments of happiness lately. Not in that damned nest of hers in that burned-out school where he'd found her. Hardly thinking, he wrapped his arms around her and held her, as his thoughts went back to the old school, and the nest, and how that day went from fine to pure shit in a heartbeat.

He was cutting copper pipes in the bombed-out basement of the school. It was surprisingly easy pickings. He was amazed to find that the place hadn't been visited by any scavengers yet. Maybe it'd just recently been bombed? Not likely, this town didn't look like it'd had many people in it for a long time, and when he noticed the nest in the corner of the basement, it looked like it had been occupied for a couple of months, at least based on the piles of crap laying around the old stained mattress. Shit, the filth that people will live in, he thought to himself. That's a rat hole right there. Of course, maybe the occupant likes the rats. They can be good eats if it's all the meat you've got.

Cautiously, he looked around for the nest's occupant. There didn't appear to be much for him to scavenge from that pile of crap, but was likely that some money was squirreled away under the mattress. There usually was in a nest like this. You'd be amazed how many people think stuffing your money under the mattress is a good hiding place. He'd just started towards the nest to have a closer look when he heard a noise, the crunch of feet on loose masonry. By the time he turned, he found himself staring straight into the business end of an AK-47, not but ten feet away from him.

This wasn't the first rifle barrel he'd had aimed at his head, and he was going to make damned sure it wouldn't be the last. But this one was different. It was held in the little shaking hands of a child. Johnson just stood there, stunned for a moment. What threw him off his game was how much the kid looked like his son. Abrahim would have been about this age, if he'd survived. He had the same look about him. Fierce independence, is what him and his wife had always said it was.

He lifted his arms in the air. "Whoa there, kid, careful. I ain't doing anything, just cutting down some old pipes." Johnson could be a talker when he needed too. Back before the war, he could talk his way out of anything, and talk other people into anything, too. "I didn't touch a thing, okay? And I ain't armed, right?" He gestured to his gun, which was leaning against a crumbling wall a disappointingly distant thirty feet away.

The kid lowered his gun, just a bit. "There we go," Johnson said, "we don't want anybody to get hurt, right?" He smiled as best he could at the boy, then set off in a conversational tone. "So's this your nest? You live here all by yourself?"

The kid's yellow-brown eyes narrowed under the brim of his old dirty Chicago Bulls cap, giving a cold wordless stare.

"I don't mean to pry, kid. It's just... it's fucking impressive, out here all by yourself. Shit, I can barely make it on my own. Where're your parents?"

The cold stare was accompanied by the gun barrel raising again.

"Okay..." He stuck my hands out in front of him. "No more questions, I understand." The gun lowered a bit again. "Listen, you hungry? I got some​ food in the truck." The kid looked like he was starving, to be honest. Skinny as a rail. And Johnson could tell from the way the kid's eyes changed from cold to sad, that he wanted very badly to take him up on his offer. And, Johnson had to admit, thinking about how the kid looked like his boy Abrahim was making him feel a little sad, too, and maybe a little fatherly. He kinda wanted to help this poor kid out.

"Com'on, kid, let's go get some food. I got some fresh peaches."

"Peaches?" It was the first word the boy spoke. His voice was high and pure. He definitely hadn't hit puberty yet.

"Yeah, peaches. I bet you ain't had a fresh peach in years, eh? There was a guy down by the gulf, selling boxes full of 'em. I couldn't help myself, I had to..."

"I ain't never had a fresh peach," the kid said, interrupting the story.

"Really? Shit, well, you're in for a treat. I got a whole box of 'em in my truck."

"So, nice place you got here," he said to the boy as they sat on the hood of the truck, the kid's rifle slung over his back, the man's on the hood next to them, a box full of peaches behind that. And a pile of pits on the ground nearby. "You like that nest o' yours? It looks comfortable."

The kid nodded. He didn't seem​ so sure about it, though.

"But it does seem a little exposed to me," Johnson said, kicking the truck's grill with the heel of his boot. "You should get yourself hidden away a little better, if you ask me." Kid just nodded. He's not much of a talker. Not that Johnson could blame him for that. People like them, like Johnson and this kid, they had good reason to keep to themselves.

"'Course, ya didn't ask me," Johnson added. "Ain't none of my business, right? You done pretty good, all by yourself, without some fucking nosy adult giving you their opinion o' things."

More nodding, and another peach. It must have been the third, maybe the fourth, the kid had ate.

"Being solo's nice, huh?" Johnson just kept right on talking, as much to himself as to the boy. "Nobody to answer to, nobody to take care of. Just you. Nobody else."

He looked at the kid, making a mess of the peach. He definitely reminded him of his boy Abrahim. Abrahim's mother, Mari, had been a sweet Moroccan beauty, and her son got most of his mother's fine North African features. He was lucky, and terribly unlucky, for that. Lucky, 'cause he didn't get his father's sickly pale Scandinavian looks, but unlucky, because that perfect olive skin made him a ripe target for the motherfucking blackshirts. They kill lots of people, the blackshirts do, but they get a particularly enjoyment out of killing the ones with the darker skin.

He'd stood there helpless, in the early days of the war before they'd really realized how serious it all was. He'd just stood there like a fucking idiot and watched the blackshirts mow down his wife and his boy. They laughed about it, the fuckers. They literally laughed as they took away the lives of the two most beautiful things on earth.

Johnson pulled out his wallet and took out a tattered old picture of Abrahim. He handed it to the boy. "That's my son," he told the kid. "He looks kinda like you, don't ya think?"

The boy looked at the picture for a bit, then handed it back. "Where's he now?" he asked in his soft high voice, peach juice running down his chin.

"The blackshirts killed him, back last year."

The boy didn't say anything in response. Stone cold silence.

"Well," Johnson said, jumping off the hood of the truck, "I pro'ly oughta be heading out."

He'd looked hard at the boy at that moment, wondering what he should do with him. What the fuck, Mari wouldn't have wanted him to leave the little shit alone, right? And Abrahim would have insisted that he help the kid out, too. He knew that.

"Look kid, why don't you tag along with me for a bit? I could use some company."

The boy looked at the man, but didn't say anything.

"Well, I ain't gonna twist your arm, kid. But I gotta tell you, your set up here, I don't like it much. Seems dangerous to me. And you..." he paused, not sure if he should continue with his thought. "...you're a ripe target for the blackshirts, I'm sure you know that. They don't like your type."

The kid just kept looking at Johnson, staring with those big yellow-brown almond eyes. They glittered in the low late evening sunlight, like little sparklers on the Fourth of July, back when the Fourth of July meant something.

It was dusk now, and getting darker, and Sam still hadn't said a word about whether she would leave with him, or to stay behind by herself, when they heard the helicopters. Nothing good ever happens when the helicopters come.

"I'm outta here, kid," he said, picking up his rifle and the box of peaches, jumping in the cap, firing up the engine.

Big almond eyes, the biggest you ever damned seen. Mouth slightly open, hesitating. The helicopters coming closer, filling the air with the rush of their blades so that the trees were shaking now, the wind.

"Shit, we gotta go kid!" he yelled.

"Gimme... gimme one sec!" Sam hollered, and she ran off to the burned-out school. To her nest. Johnson stared nervously at the tops of the trees, dreading the moment when the helicopters crested the horizon. They were shatteringly loud now, it was only a matter of seconds. Suddenly out from the woods that lined the back of the schoolyard emerged a person; a single, solitary person, running as fast as he could. The first helicopter appeared, fired a grenade. Where the runner had been, there was a deep pit dug in the dirt, and nobody running any more.

Wide-eyed, Johnson threw the truck into gear. The kid was too late. He had to get the fuck out of there. And sure enough, from the woods, more runners. Two, three, a dozen, two dozen. Some stopped, and turned, and fired at the helicopters. One had a big gun, a shoulder-fired RPG, and a helicopter exploded into a ball of flames and a million pieces of molten steel. The gunner didn't get a chance to fire a second grenade. He was literally cut in half by a line of bullets fired from another copter.

Johnson slammed the truck into reverse and squealed back to the hole in the wall where Sam had disappeared, and there she was, a bag slung over one shoulder, her gun over the other, running as fast as she could. He flung open the passenger side door and slammed down the gas the second she hit the seat. Luckily the gunships and the rebel soldiers in the field hadn't even noticed them yet, and they were able to squeal off to the road and around the curve.

They didn't see the Warthogs come, but they heard them, that's for sure, and felt the explosions of their bombs. The fireballs in the evening sky gave evidence that the school, and Sam's nest, had been obliterated, along with everything else in the vicinity. The battle raged on nonetheless, there must have been a fuck of a lot of rebels in those woods. That explains why the copper in the school basement hadn't been scavenged yet, if this place was a rebel stronghold. I gotta do my research a little better, Johnson thought to himself. He'd just causally waltzed into a war zone, without even realizing it.

Still, the thought of all the copper still down there made his wallet seem extra light. It shoulda been his...

The rest of his memories of that night started to take on a dreamlike feel as he lay there in the early morning dawn with Sammie snuggled up against him. He closed his eyes, and his mind wondered.

There were the blackshirts at the checkpoint as they fled town, but when he tried to explain to them that the boy pretending to be asleep in the passenger seat was his son, in his dream he called him Abrahim, not Sam. And it was Abrahim, alive, safe and sound, sitting there in the passenger seat. He was so happy to have his son with him again!

But then it wasn't Abrahim after all. In fact, it wasn't a boy at all, sitting there next to him in the cab of the pickup, all cherub-cheeked and rosy from her cool bath in the creek, wearing a green stone necklace and his button-up shirt. The shirt was slipped high up her thin brown legs. She most certainly wasn't a boy at all.

Whatever lies he told the blackshirt soldier, just a boy himself, with the barrel of a rifle aimed right at his head, whatever lies he told, the soldier boy bought them, or at least didn't care to challenge them so long as the two people in the pickup truck weren't rebels, and were heading out of town. Johnson knew he'd lied to the blackshirt about their identity papers, because he didn't have any idea if Sam had any papers. Probably not. But this time, in this memory, when he turned back to look at the kid, after the soldier agreed that it'd be best to let him sleep rather than dig the papers out of the glove box, when he turned back to look at her, Sam had a smile on her face as she said, "Maybe I can learn to be a woman?"

And Johnson knew that he'd driven for three hours after that checkpoint, into the deep dark of night, turning down one unused road after another to throw any pursuers off their trail, before finally succumbing to sleep and pulling over to a little wayside rest that was nothing but a picnic table with a creek down the hill a ways. Sam already sound asleep, and Johnson was fading fast, even though he had to sit up uncomfortably in the driver's seat to sleep.

But in this memory, in this dream, it was a mere instant from the checkpoint to the wayside rest, there wasn't even a break in their conversation.

"Maybe I can learn to be a woman?" Sammie said.

"Maybe I can teach you?"

"I think I'd like that," she answered.

They weren't in the cab now, in this memory, they were in a bed, the bed back in his old house in Prioria. And Sam was Mari now, except she wasn't; she was Mari what Mari would have been, if he'd made love to her when she was eleven years old. They were naked, they were kissing, they were touching. He was hard, she was wet. She smiled her sweet accepting smile as he climbed on top of her. She kissed him, she spread her legs...

Just as the head of his aching cock made contact with the warmth of her sex, Johnson suddenly opened his eyes, blinking. The morning sun was brighter now, filling the cab with a warm glow. Damn. He was sorely disappointed. He had wanted to fuck her so badly...

Still blinking, he gradually became more aware of his surroundings. Sam was still snuggled up tight against him. Her lips were actually pressed against his neck, a warm and moist and steady breath just below his ear. His shirt that she was wearing was pulled up, like in his dream, but even higher, high enough that her bottom was...

That's when he realized his hand was on the girl's soft bare ass. Just sitting there, unassuming, just like it was Mari's ass, and he was her husband again, and he was touching her like she always loved. In fact, it was a hell of a lot like Mari's ass: olive-brown, round and full, and oh so fucking soft...

Mortified, he lifted the hand away. This caused the girl to stir, and she rolled over, onto her back. In her sleep, she cocked one knee to the side, spreading her legs open.

In the sunlight, with the shirt still pulled up to her waist, he could see every detail of her naked sex. The rise of her pubic mound, the pink swell of her lips, the hint of newly-forming curls. He tried not to look, he didn't want to look, but how could he help it? How could he not look?

He lay there for a while in the warm sunlight, waiting for her to awaken. But she did not. She was still sound asleep, a little curly-frocked angel next to him. His hand moved, almost without volition, reaching over, reaching down, not wanting to awaken her but wanting so badly, oh so very badly, to touch her.

She didn't stir as his fingers gently grazed along her soft new-sprouting fur, nor when a finger carefully pushed between her lips, finding womanly warmth amid silky wettening folds, finding her little button, teasing it, just briefly.

It was only once that he'd withdrawn his hand that she opened her eyes and smiled. The same sweet smile he'd seen in his dreams.

"Good morning, Sam," he said.

"Good morning, Henry" she answered, rubbing her eyes in the bright sunshine. If she was aware that the shirt was above her waist, that her legs were spread, that she was exposing her sex to him, she did nothing in response. She just lay there, smiling at him.

Scrambled eggs, then, for breakfast, and stale bread toasted in a pan over his camp stove and slathered with butter. And peaches, of course. Sam, naked under the oversized shirt, dug one out of the half-emptied box.

"I know why you like peaches," she said.

"Hmmm?"

"'Cause they look like little butts!" She giggled, holding the fruit up with the seam facing him.

He laughed, too. "Oh? And you think I like little butts?"

She looked at him over the peach as she took a bite. "Yes."

He shook his head with a smile. "You're crazy, Sam."

"Well," she said between more bites, "I think you like mine."

"It is a pretty cute butt," he admitted.

"I think you liked spanking it."

"Well..." he said, half-teasing, half-confessing.

"Are you gonna do it again?" she asked, her brown eyes looking up over the peach as she finished eating it.

"Why? Did you steal from me again?"

"No," she said.

"Good."

"I just thought," she continued, cheeks getting pink, "maybe you just want to."

"Do you want me to?" he asked her.

Her almond eyes twinkled in the morning sun. Her round brown cheeks blushed even brighter, the prettiest color of pink he'd ever seen. She looked him in the face, then lowered her eyes. And then she nodded.

"Com'er, Sammie," he said, turning on the picnic table bench so that he was facing outward, and patting his lap.

"Okay, Daddy," the girl said.

Hearing her call him "Daddy" made his heart leap to his throat, and suddenly, quite unexpectedly, his cock stiffened with blood.

Sam stood, and walked slowly, with a hint of hesitation, to him. She lay down belly-first on his lap, then lifted the back of the shirt above her naked ass.

"Do you like my peach, Daddy?" she asked, looking back and up at him.

"She's very beautiful, babygirl," he said.

"Thanks." Her dark eyes glistened and she gave a nervous smile. "You can spank her, if you want."

He brought his hand down in a solid slap on her sweet pale round brown cheeks. She let out a little painful cry.

"Did that hurt?" he said, a bit surprised. He hadn't intended to slap her that hard.

"It's okay, Daddy," she said, her voice shaking. Tears were welling in her eyes. "I don't mind. I deserve it."

He slapped her ass again, harder, and she squinted her eyes shut tight. After a half dozen solid strokes, he left his hand on her reddened ass, then slid it down, his fingers grazing over the fur of her little pink lips. This time, she spread her legs open slightly, giving him access, giving him leave to grope. He slid a finger along her slit, pushing in a bit, then used his thumb and index finger to part her lips. He stared in fascination at the glistening dark pink inside her.

"Are you done spanking me, Daddy?" she asked, her eyes still closed, though not squinted tight now.

"Maybe," he said, lifting his hand away from her pussy and giving her ass a little slap. "Maybe not."

"You can keep going, Daddy," she said. "You can go as long as you want."

"I think I'm done. For now."

"Okay," she said. "You can do more, later."

He slid his fingers back down to her pussy. "I've found another little peach, babygirl," he said, fingers petting.

She smiled back at him. "I have two peaches, huh? One bigger, one little."

"You do!"

Sammie squirmed, pressing her pussy back against his fingers, pressing her belly against his erection. "But you don't have a little peach like me, Daddy."

"I don't." He pushed just the tip his finger inside her warm peach-slit. She was wet already.

"I can feel your..." She squirmed some more. "It feels so hard! You get hard when you spank me!"

"I guess I do." He took his finger away from her pussy and gave her brown ass a playful slap, which made her squirm all the more. "Now," he said, "what I'd really like to do is taste your little peach."

"Taste it?"

"Yeah. And you can taste my cock, too."

"I think I'd like that.'

He unbuttoned her shirt as he lay her gently on the picnic table. Forgotten peaches lay half eaten on the table; another peach, small and pink, ripe and fragrant, showed herself to him between the girl's spread-open legs. She had no breasts to speak of, only little flower buds stiffening in the summer breeze, two pink blossoms that rose and fell on her chest with each deep and trembling breath.

He leaned over her and kissed her, a gentle, tender kiss. Almost fatherly. She smiled up at him with a look of nervous happiness. He gave her a reassuring smile in response, then leaned down and kissed the soft brown skin of her breastbone; kiss, kiss, moving down. He took a blossom in his mouth, giving suck. The sound of her deep exhale, almost a moan, caused his manhood to lurch in its confines of his pants. The nipple tasted sweeter to him than any candy he had ever known, sweeter even than the peaches they'd been feasting on these last two days. He moved to her other nipple and suckled it as well.

Down now, kissing her stomach. At her belly button, he blew air out, making a fluttering sound between his lips, and she had a fit of giggles.

"That tickles, Daddy!" she shrieked, putting her hands on top of his head.

He lifted his eyes to look at her, smiling, then tickled her again amid more giggles.

He moved down further still, to her lower belly, to the rise of her mound, to her little fur-covered peach. When his lips kissed hers, the sound of her exhaled breath was louder now and accompanied by a soft, high vowel, "Uuuooohhhh...," and she lifted her legs into the air.

He licked, and kissed, and suckled at the child's little sex. He could taste the candy-sweetness of her nipples, but richer now, stronger flavored. Caramel. A perfect match for her perfect caramel-colored skin. Her pussy-candy was infused, as well, with the flavor of salt, a delicate balance of youthful sugar and womanly spice. This was, without question, the finest taste he'd ever known.

His tongue licked the full length of her peach's dimple, pushing in, wanting as much of her flavor as he could find. And then he settled on her little child's button, licking, sucking, teasing.

"Oh Daddy," she said in a quiet whisper, her voice cracking. Her legs began to shake. "Oh Daddy," she said again, louder now. He licked, circled, rubbed; her fingers gripped at his head and her entire body began to shake, and little Sammie, his little eleven-year-old babygirl, came for him, arching her back and moaning, shaking from toe to tip.

He stepped away when she was finished, unbuttoning his pants. She moved immediately, without any direction from him, sliding off the table and down onto her knees. When his cock was free, she simply stared at it for a moment, eyes filled with wonder.

"Does it..." she stammered, "...does it hurt?"

"Hurt?" was his response.

"It just... It looks so swollen."

"You're so beautiful, Sammie," he said, his voice soft, and cracking with his own excitement. "It doesn't hurt. It only hurts if it doesn't get relief."

"Relief?" she said, not taking her eyes from his manhood.

"Yeah..."

"Can I... Can I give you relief?"

"I'd like that."

She looked up at him now, her almond eyes sparking in the sunshine, her brown curly locks framing her angelic face, her round cheeks pink, her full lips unsmiling, serious. "I'd like it, too," she said.

Sammie looked back down at his cock again, her eyes crossing slightly to focus on the tip of his engorged, purplish head that stood assertively right in front of her. And she opened her mouth.

Her lips were wet, dark-pink and swollen, as they slid over his thick head and down to his crown. With the tip of his manhood inside her now, the girl lifted a little hand and began gently rubbing. She pulled her head back, away, and looked up at him again.

"Am I doing it right, Daddy?" she asked.

"Perfect, babygirl," he said. "Perfect."

And she opened her mouth and took him in again.

While it wasn't the most skilled blowjob he'd ever received in his life, it was by far the most erotic. His little cherub, his little peach, his little black angel, on her knees before him, all her attention focused entirely on his pleasure and his relief. He came quickly. It didn't take more than a minute for the child to get him off. She pulled away after the first shot filled her mouth, taking the rest on her round-cheeked face.

They sat together on the edge of the table afterwards. She didn't bother cleaning his cum off of her nose and cheeks. She seemed proud to wear it.

"We should probably get going," he said. "It's never a good idea to stay in the same place for very long these days."

She nodded. He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her, not quite so fatherly this time. He could taste the residue of his cum in her mouth. And they climbed off the table and packed up their things and left.

His main goal, at this point, was to find gas. Between locations for plunder, the life of a scavenger was mostly about finding gas. While he was willing, even eager, to pay for gas, out here in the war-torn landscapes of southern Georgia there weren't many commercial stations open anymore, and the few that there were, were often dry. Instead, he hoped to find a farm; farms usually have plenty of gas available, so long as they haven't been raided yet, and even then, he found that most people neglected to consider the gas in the tanks of the trucks and tractors, and you could usually siphon a full tank's worth if you were willing to try.

He found a promising little farm not but ten miles down the dusty old deserted road. There was a fairly nice late-model Ford sedan parked in front of the modest house, which made him wonder if perhaps the place was still occupied. If it was, he would try to convince them to sell him some gas, or at least some food.

As they approached the house, they heard a little mewing sound, and around the corner came trotting a skinny orange tabby kitten.

"Oh! A kitty!" Sammie said with a sound of delight in her voice.

The kitten rubbed at their ankles, and Sam leaned down and scratched it between its ears.

"She's lonely," Sammie said, looking up at Johnson. "She's all alone. Can we keep her? Can we take her with us?"

Normally, Johnson would have balked at the notion of taking on a pet in this god-forsaken world. But how could he possibly say no to his sweet babygirl? He just smiled, and nodded. "Sure, why not?"

Sam grinned broadly as she picked the kitten up. "Her name is peaches."

"Oh is it?"

"Yes, it is!" she said, with absolute certainty.

The front door of the house had obviously been broken open before, the first sign they'd found that the house had in fact been abandoned, and that they weren't the first visitors since then. This caused him to pause for a moment. Why, then, the new car parked outside? Something about that made him a little uncomfortable. So the two of them went back to the truck and retrieved their rifles, one each slung over their shoulders, then back to the door. They knocked, then shouted, then let themselves in.

Johnson immediately noticed the smell. There was the stale rot of months-old food, for sure, but something else. Something more unsettling. It was a smell he recognized from more than a year of scavenging around in homes just like this one. It was the smell of death.

At his suggestion, Sam stayed downstairs to look for any food that might be salvageable. She seemed to understand why he didn't want her coming upstairs; perhaps she recognized the smell as well. On the second floor, in the bedroom at the top of the stairs, he found what he'd been expecting. A woman lay on the bed, dressed in her finest evening gown. She looked remarkably serene for a woman who'd had her head blown off by a shotgun blast. The bedspread around the remains of her scull was soaked to a dark unsettling brown from long-ago dried blood. In the chair next to the bed sat a man, the barrel of a shotgun still lodged in his mouth, the back of his head splattered against the wall behind. Both had been dead for months. They were only skeletons, gray bones, and hair. Lots of hair.

It was a common sight in houses like this. Lots of people these days decided it was better to risk what might lay beyond the Great Unknown, than to stay in living hell on Earth.

As he had suspected was the case, he soon found that he was not the first scavenger on the scene. The room had been picked clean of whatever valuables that there might have been. But, at least, the shotgun was something, and if there were more shells for it somewhere, it would be a valuable thing indeed. So, with an unspoken apology to the gun's former owner, he extracted the barrel from the skeleton's mouth. As an afterthought, he decided to check the man's trousers, to see if his wallet was there. Indeed it was, and while the twenty-five dollars contained within was hardly worth the effort to dig around in a dead man's pants, at least it was something.

He wasn't at all surprised, when he went into the next bedroom over, to find a third corpse. This one was a girl, right around Sam's age, he guessed. He suddenly was very glad that Sammie hadn't come upstairs with him. The girl had been shot in her sleep, it seems, a blast to her chest leaving a gaping hole.

The sad presence of the dead girl's body did, however, give him reason to hope that he might be able to solve one dilemma that he'd been mulling over these last couple of days--what to do about Sam's clothing. The only outfit that she owned was so threadbare and worn that he was worried it wouldn't last another month. In the bedroom closet, he found what he'd hoped, a dozen dresses neatly hung. They seemed to him to be about the perfect size, maybe a bit too big, but that was better than a bit too small of course. He picked out the three that he liked the best, then opened the dresser drawer. There he found something even more valuable, in a way: Underwear--a whole pile of girl's panties. He grabbed a handful, and some socks, and was about to shut the drawer again when he spied one final important thing. Bras. Sam didn't necessarily need them yet, but soon enough she would. So he grabbed a handful of those as well. There was more in the other drawers: shorts and pants and teeshirts, and he took as much as he could carry.

Back downstairs, Sam had gathered up a surprisingly large pile of canned food and dry goods; chicken noodle soup, rice and beans; powdered milk. She greeted him with a happy smile, and then her sparkling almond eyes went wide when she saw the clothing that he'd brought down for her. She dropped whatever she'd had in her hands and ran to him, taking a light cotton yellow sun dress from him and holding it up against herself.

"How do I look?" she asked, twirling, the yellow dress flowing out from her like the embodiment of a summer breeze.

"Beautiful," he said, all smiles at the sight of her.

"I'll put it on," she said.

"Okay," he answered. "I'm going to go out and see if I can't siphon some gas from that car out front, and whatever else."

Unfortunately, the sedan proved to have a locked gas cap. This required a more forceful effort, so he returned to the truck to get a hammer and an awl, a hand-cranked drill, and a bucket. Then he slid under the car with his tools, and a minute later, a slow trickle of gas flowed from the bottom of the tank into the bucket. This was good. And there was a lot of gas in this car. That made him wonder, again, about why this car was just sitting here, unmolested, since the murder-suicide inside. Seems awfully weird.

As if on queue, he heard an unsettling noise. An automobile engine, no, more than one, and not so very far away. Motorcycles, that's what it was.

By the time he'd backed out from under the Ford, they were already pulling into the driveway, three motorcycles, it wound up being, and behind them a cherry-red late model Jeep. Well, shit, he thought to himself, I been waiting for the other shoe to drop. This was too good to be true. He eyed his rifle, only a few feet away, sitting on the trunk of the sedan where he'd left it, and was about to make his move to grab it; but the first motorcycle had already pulled up and the man already had the barrel of a gun aimed right at Johnson's head. So he raised his hands in the air instead.

"Well," the motorcycle man said, "what the fuck do we have here?" Johnson didn't answer, on the assumption that it was a rhetorical question.

By then the rest of the vehicles had pulled up as well. The Jeep emptied of its occupants, three more men joining the three from the motorcycles. The one who'd been driving the Jeep surveyed the scene with a scowl.

"What the hell?" he said loudly, beady eyes falling on Johnson. "The fuck did you do to my car?"

"I..." Johnson stammered. "I'm just a scavenger, I was just..."

"You're a fucking dead scavenger now," the man answered, raising a pistol.

"No, man!" Johnson said, holding his hands in front of him. "Don't shoot! You can have anything I got. My truck's over there." He nodded to indicate the direction.

"Nice truck," another one of the men said.

"I got the key right here in my pocket," Johnson said. "I'll just..."

"Don't you fucking move!" the first motorcycle man said. "Get on your fucking knees."

He knelt.

"Now get down on the fucking ground."

He lay down, face first. He felt the boot of the motorcycle man slam gruffly on his back.

"What should I do with 'im?" motorcycle man asked his colleagues.

"Just blow the shithead's head off."

"You got it, boss."

Sammie, Johnson thought to himself as he closed his eyes and waited for the end. Be careful, Sammie. You don't need to be a hero, just run out the back door. Go and hide. You'll be okay, you never needed me anyway, you survived all by yourself without me and you'll survive now, just fine. Just get the fuck out of the house so these guys don't find you. I'm okay, babygirl, I'm not afraid to die. Just run, Sammie, run!

The gun was loud as it lit off, a staccato machine gun blast, followed by another, and another. He was surprised by the sound of it, because he was sure the motorcycle man had a shotgun, not a machine gun... And it surprised him, too, that he felt no pain. Maybe this is what death is like? Perfectly peaceful?

When the motorcycle man's body hit the ground next to him in a resounding thud and a splatter of warm red blood, Johnson turned his head towards the house, almost as if he were moving in slow motion, and there was Sammie, standing in the doorway, her sweet new yellow sun dress wafting in the afternoon breeze. She had her AR-15 held tight in her hands, down at her side. Another staccato blast, and another, flames leaping from the barrel of her gun.

"So are you going to spank me again?" the girl asked, as they sat together on the landing of the old wood steps that lead up to the front door of the farmhouse.

"Why?" he asked. "Did you steal from me again?"

Sammie grinned, reached into the pocket of her yellow sun dress, and pulled out a silver coin.

"I did," she said, holding up the coin, then dropping it back in her pocket again with a self-satisfied smile...

They'd found the sliver dollars in a crate in the back of the jeep, a hundred of them at least, along with a thick bundle of cash. And a whole arsenal of guns, and ammo, and knives, and other tools of the criminal's trade.

While Sam stood cover, Johnson had done his best to patch up the survivors; one man had a bullet in his belly, and was bleeding bad and getting worse. Another had his leg shorn near off at the shin, a gut-retching sight. But he was better off than the other; at least he could scream though the pain.

A third man, the driver of the Jeep and the apparent ring leader of the gang, had been unharmed. Johnson sent them off in the Jeep to find a hospital, generously giving the uninjured man forty bucks for gas, and warning him to be gone in thirty seconds, or be dead. The driver chose the former, although whether or not he gave a shit about the other two is anybody's guess. Likely he shoved them out onto the side of the road at the first opportunity.

Sammie and him dragged the dead bodies of the remaining three out behind the barn, doused them in gasoline, said something of a prayer over them to the Lord of the Great Beyond, and set their earthly shells afire.

"You're a naughty little thief," he said to the girl.

"I am!" She hopped up off the landing of the old wood stairs. "So are you gonna spank me, Daddy?"

"I am!" he mimicked her.

She smiled, then reached up under the skirt of her sun dress and pulled her panties down. She lay down, belly-first, on the landing of the stairs and lifted the dress up over her sweet round baby ass.

He stood up, lifted his hand, and brought it down with a solid smack on those pretty brown globes. She let out a loud exhale, and he lifted his hand, and brought it down again. Five slaps later, his cock was already engorged, and he freed it from its confines, dropping his pants to the ground with a solid thud.

"Do you need relief again, Daddy?" she asked, looking back over her shoulder at him.

"I do, babygirl," he said. "But this time, you're gonna help me in another way."

"Okay, Daddy," she said.

He took hold of her stinging reddened ass and pulled her into position. Her furry little peach was at the perfect hight, and he positioned his cockhead against her slit. He gripped his manhood with one hand, spread her lips with the other, and pushed into her.

"Oh, Daddy," she whispered, the words partly caught in her throat.

He pushed against her maidenhead with all his strength, and she wept, the poor little girl, eyes squinted tight, tears rolling down her cheeks. But she endured the rude intrusion, as all girls must; the human race depends upon their willingness to let a man do this to them. And soon he was inside, hymen torn away, virgin blood mixed with womanwine.

And then he fucked her, little Sammie, his little babygirl. He stood behind her as she lay belly-first on the landing of the old wood stairs and had his way with her, as a man will do. He slid his cock deep into her immature sex, then back, then deep again, over and over, a slow and steady pace. She was his now, and he was hers, and he knew that they would be together forever and ever, her Daddy, and his babygirl.

When he finished, she rolled over onto her back with her legs spread open, blood and cum and pussy-wetness coating the insides of her thighs.

"My little woman," he said, leaning over as he sat down next to her, giving her a tender kiss.

"I told you I could learn to be a woman," she said.

"You did."

"I hope you liked it, Daddy," she said.

"I did, Sammie babygirl. A whole lot."

"I'm glad."

The little tabby orange kitten rubbed against their feet. "Oh, Peaches!" Sammie said, sitting up on her elbows to look down at the cat.

While Sammie went inside to make them dinner, and pack up the food she'd gathered earlier, Johnson filled the truck with gas from the Ford sedan, and found other gas as well around the farm and filled as many cans as they could carry. Then, he hid the silver and the cash as best he could in the topper of the truck. As he did, he came upon the dirty magazines that he'd saved back when they cleaned out the truck the day before. He paged through them briefly, smiling, and then, magazines in hand, hopped out of the back of the truck and tossed them in the garbage.

It was eveningtime when they left that farm; Johnson didn't want to stay the night, for fear the driver of the Jeep might return with reinforcements. The sun was hanging low in the sky, a big red orange glowing globe; Peaches the kitten was curled up in a perfect ball on Sammie's lap; and Sammie had a big sweet dimpled round-cheeked smile on her face. And so they set off down the dusty road, destination: unknown, but whatever lay ahead, they both knew they would arrive there together.