UNDER THE LIGHT OF THE ROGUE
By Tommyhawk1@AOL.COM
WWW.TOMMYHAWKSFANTASYWORLD.COM
I was driving about downtown, looking for Brett. Not by sight, but by sound. If Brett was down here (and I knew he was, I'd found his Humvee ten minutes ago), then sooner or later, I'd hear it. My own car was a Cadillac, with a massive chunk of iron welded over the front grille because sometimes...like now.
A police car was sitting across the middle of the road, blocking the way. And I heard the gunfire, over about three streets at a guess. I grinned, gunned the engine, and aimed my Caddy at the police car and plowed into it. The sound of crunching car metal was satisfying, I knocked it aside and went on down the road, knocking two small cars out of the way as I went.
There was Brett, on a smaller building, aiming at a glass-covered behemoth of an office building, all smoked-black glass. He had a massive military rifle and a box of ammunition beside him and was methodically shooting out the glass of the building across the way. Not content with merely putting a hole in it, he would shoot until the entire square either fell into the building or (which I think was the main attraction to him) until it fell in a beautifully quiet arc out to splash into a million black crystals on the pavement. I know when an especially big piece would fall so, he stopped every time to watch it all the way down. All the long, long, quiet way down.
Didn't the glass know what was happening to it? What about those billions of bacteria on it, did they watch the pavement coming at them and calculate when it would arrive, when they'd all die? Did they shoot at their own office towers in their abandoned cities while the great, gray demon rose toward them, bigger and bigger and brighter....
I shook my head angrily. Honked my horn instead and waited.
Brett shot out the rest of the windows on the top five floors and then came down and joined me, hopping in the car. "Hey, Glenn, give me a ride back to my Humvee?"
"Sure." I said, and put the car in gear. Brett was still on his paramilitary kick, he was wearing combat fatigues and a fucking red beret hat which I think he picked up in a woman's shop, it had that "female fashion" look to it, and had pinned a shield-shaped medallion of some kind on it. The look was good if you didn't latch onto details.
"You got any plans for today?"
"Not really." I said. Then, wryly, "I'd decided not to look up today."
"I haven't looked up in three days."
I can't stop looking, you know?" I went on. "You can see Rogue up there in daylight now, a bright star. I wonder if we'll see it as a disk before it gets so close that it screws up the weather so bad that the clouds...."
"Shut up!" Brett snarled at me fiercely. "Shut up, shut up, shut the fuck up!"
"I'm sorry." I said and drove the rest of the way in silence.
As he got out, I said, "I'm sorry, Brett."
"It's okay." he said. "What'll we have tonight?"
"Pizza?" I said.
"Sure. Tony's?" Like there was any real choice about that part.
"Why not?"
"See you there at six." Brett went to his Humvee. Probably would drive around and find another building to shoot at.
Me, I drove my Cadillac out to the suburbs and up a hill. To look at Rogue.
It was up there. A star in daylight, just visible if you knew where to look. Bigger than yesterday, not a lot, but definitely there.
It'd get bigger over the next six weeks, a wandering planet from outside the solar system about the size of Mars. It'd turn from a star into a disc if we could see it through the storms the tidal effects would bring up. Then...it would strike the Earth at precisely next January 3 at 1:34 p.m. local time. The impact would turn the Earth and Rogue both into blobs of molten rock, maybe it would spin a second Moon out of the debris. There was debate whether our own Moon would join the fray or be knocked into its own orbit around the Sun or fly off to become its own Rogue to some other hapless planet.
Looked at the star-like object, almost cheerfully tinkling. "Damn you." I said to it. "Damn you to hell!"
My own daily ritual done, I turned the Caddy around and went to the job of scavenging enough food and supplies to last me for the next six weeks. Beyond that...well, there wasn't going to be a beyond that.
You might have wondered why Brett and I were alone in this big city. I wondered about it myself sometimes. You'd think, with a rogue planet barreling down, even forced evacuations wouldn't have gotten everyone out of a coastal city that could expect tides higher than Mount Everest. I mean, when a hurricane comes along, about a third of the population refuses to leave no matter what.
But we'd known about the Rogue for a year now. The chance of survival was nil, but there were those scientists that said if the blow wasn't direct then a few people in the inland areas of North America might survive. A chance in a million drew everyone out of their homes and toward the general area of Nebraska better than any hurricane could have.
I thought I was alone in town for a few weeks. But Brett was here too. He and I had, each for our own reasons, decided to wait out the remainder of our lives in familiar surroundings.
What we had wasn't a friendship, or not exactly. I barely knew him, and he knew little or nothing about me. But we were both human, and both otherwise alone. We would meet up and talk like we had today, talk and coordinate efforts (I'd pick up things he needed or vice versa) and we'd reminiscence about old days and how things used to be like movies we'd watched or vacations we'd gone on. I say I barely knew him because he edited out everything specific about himself on these things. No names, no details, nothing but generalities. Or maybe, nothing but the really important stuff.
That had worked with us for three months now. But now we saw Rogue by daylight. There'd be no pretending it wasn't there for us. No use acting like this was all some mad dream we'd wake up from sooner or later.
It was time to quit pretending.
I got to Tony's at four o'clock and set things up. Tony's was one restaurant that hadn't been totally gutted by the people who had left. Several boxes of pizza fixings were still in its refrigerator. Brett had found it, and had fixed up a generator to keep the refrigerator going; we had pizza at least four times a week as a result. Long as we had gasoline, we were okay, and God knows enough cars were sitting around to siphon gas out of. I had stayed indoors while it was all going on, but I knew that there had been traffic jams out the wazoo. I guess some people had given up or gotten rides or whatever, but it was like every car had some gasoline in it, pretty near. So loading the generator was finding a new car that didn't have the guard on it, most of them didn't.
Brett showed up at five thirty, still wearing his cammies. "Hey, Glenn, draw me a dark one, will you?"
"Sure, Brett." I said and pulled at the tap of the keg and drew him a beer, and another for myself. I'd made the pizza dough at four thirty, and would roll out the pizza in a little while, but for now, we'd catch up on the day's events.
"So how'd the shooting go?" I asked him as I handed him the beer.
"Not bad." Brett reared the chair back and looked so very male and confident and macho. There's a way that fatigues hang on a man's body, the bulge of the fabric right where the cock would be, you would look and wonder it it was the cloth or the cock making it stick out like that. His stomach was flat and taut, I was sure he spent a good part of each day working out. His hair was cut short (so was mine), but on me, it looked like I'd tried to shear myself. On Brett, it looked military. "I took out the buildings along the south side of Fifth between Carson and Bedry today. Tomorrow, I'll work on the north side and then move on down. What about you?"
"I've been gathering books this week." I had decided to try to save what I could from the carnage. I mean, if I lived through this by some miracle or other, then I wanted to be able to survive what came after, and more, be able to offer some cache of human knowledge to the others that would join with me. We didn't have to drop into the actual equivalent of riding thoats or something in the post-apocalyptic age. "I put the entire medicine section of the Settles Street library into the basement. Been welding steel boxes for them, I figure that ought to let them survive anything short of hot lava flowing over them. I'll spend tomorrow making more boxes, I figure twenty-five will let me get the biology and life sciences department in there and safe and...."
"Safe." Brett spat out the word. "No such thing."
"I know." I said patiently. He was in a foul mood. My own fault, bringing up the Rogue this morning, he must have....
"You went up on the hill today, didn't you?"
"Yeah, I...."
"So you saw the Rogue, didn't you?"
I was silent about ten seconds, and he waited me out. "I saw it." I said finally.
"So why the fuck are you wasting your time trying to save things?"
"It's...it's something to do."
"It's a waste. Everything's a waste! Why didn't you go with everyone else if you wanted to save something?"
"Because, I...."
"Come on, why are you still here? Why didn't you leave?"
"Why did you stay yourself?"
"I had my reasons."
I had him on the defensive and this wasn't a fair fight in any way. He'd hurt me, smashed my little fantasy, my way of dealing with the certain destruction, not just myself, but everything and everyone. I wanted to hurt him back.
"I'll tell you why you stayed!"
"So tell me, if you think you know."
"Because you're just like me!" I flared. "You didn't go because...." I cut it off, rather than say it.
"Because I'm like you how?" Brett demanded.
My anger evaporated like "Because I didn't have anyone to go with, either." I'd started to pack my stuff back then like everyone else, but then I'd looked out the window. At all the families packing their things together, helping each other, deciding what to take and what to leave. I'd have been alone in that multitude. So I unpacked...and never packed back up again. "Because you knew that you'd get there and nobody would be helping you or watching out for you or sharing it with you. Better to be alone here, really alone, than standing in a crowd and still be alone. Because to want to live through the end of the world, you have to have a reason to live. And like me, you don't have one. Right?"
The confidence and machismo he'd exuded vanished like water on a hot skillet. Now he looked like a little boy playing dress-up. A little boy six foot two, muscled and gorgeous still, but a little boy just the same. Little boy lost.
"That's why you shoot up the buildings, isn't it?" I pressed it. "All those buildings that used to be full of people, and now they're empty, totally empty."
"Shut up, shut up, shut up." He said, but it wasn't the peremptory shout of this morning, it had lost all its power.
"It's why I'm saving what I can." I said. "If I live through the Rogue, then others will, too, and they'll have to come to me for what they need to rebuild. I'll be important. They'll need me, like they never needed me before."
Brett looked like he thought I was crazy! "You think that? You really expect to live through this?"
"No." I admitted. "But you never know. Every scientist said that they couldn't be sure just where the Rogue will hit. It might even miss us, you know? It might."
"It won't."
"But it might." I insisted. "And if it did, I'll be ready for it, you know?"
"You know we aren't going to live through this, don't you?" Brett countered. "You do know that, don't you? Don't you?"
"I know." I said in a small voice. "But I can't think of it. Just like you."
"You're a moron, Glenn! A total fucking moron!" Brett snarled, turned and walked out the door. I made the pizza, thinking he'd come back, but he didn't.
I'd been an idiot. I'd made an enemy of the only person I knew. Could I handle the total lack of human contact? Could I handle being truly alone, with the Rogue bearing down on me.
One thing was sure...if I killed myself, I wouldn't be losing that much, you know?
It was something to think about.
I'd taken a room for myself in a hotel. Rich man's suite, gigantic bed, silken sheets. When a room would get too dirty for me, I'd move to another one. A generator gave my room power, the only light in an otherwise dark hotel in an otherwise dark city.
It wasn't surprising that Brett found me. A knock at the door and the light of a flashlight shining around the bottom of it. I opened the door without bothering getting dressed. Brett was still in his camouflage outfit, looking at me with an intensity I couldn't fathom.
"You're right." he said to me, his first words.
"About what?"
"If we make it through this, you'll be the one everyone has to come to. They'll need you."
I didn't feel triumphant. "You're right, too. It's not going to miss us. It won't. We got another six weeks to live, and then it's all over. I'm wasting my time, nobody's ever going to need me. I might as well join you in shooting the windows out of the skyscrapers from now on."
Brett pushed past me, came on inside. "Can I stay with you from now on?" he said, rather than asked.
I gulped hard. "Sure, Brett. Sure." My cock got hard in a hurry and Brett saw it, I guess, though I didn't see his eyes move down there.
"I'm not gay." he said to me. "Never have been."
"Oh."
"But I want you anyhow." he said and stepped closer to me. His face was everything I'd ever wanted to see on a man's face. Passion, desire, and a stern majesty. "Okay?"
"Yeah, Brett." I said. "Sure." And I reached out and so did he and we took each other in our arms, and I held him tight to me. Or maybe he held me tight to him. We held each other with one hand high and one hand low, interlaced like that.
"I'm not gay." He murmured to my neck. "But I can't stop thinking about you. Can't stop wanting you. I don't understand it, but it's true."
"I understand it, don't worry." I soothed him. "We're all alone and we have a fucking wild planet barreling down on us in another six weeks. You don't want to be alone, that's all. Neither do I."
His right hand came down and cupped my buttock clad only in briefs and pulled my crotch up against his. I felt his erection in there and lost all my inhibitions. You can't argue with a hard cock, the one thing in which a man is totally, thoroughly honest. I rubbed myself against him, trying only to worm that cock of his back and forth. Brett gave a soft gasp and then his lips began to kiss my neck and nuzzle my hair with his nose. His other hand, the high one, stroked my bare back, then came down and cupped my other buttock and he gripped me tight, lifted me against himself, I rose up so that my chest pressed into his throat and he kissed my upper breast as I raised my eyes to the ceiling and closed them and moaned.
Brett lowered me and I panted, "Come on, Brett, let's get in bed!"
I skinned out of my briefs and busied myself in clearing the rather sample coverings from the bed. I always did my bedding up royally, multiple pillows, arranged sheets and pillow tams and such, all of that had to go and go now!
Done, I crawled up onto the middle of the large, circular bed and arranged myself, a display of naked, tumescent manhood awaiting Brett's pleasure. Brett was sitting on the couch, undoing his boots still, and I wondered if I should go over and help, but he looked up and smiled at me and I decided not to. Instead, I watched him undress. He pulled off his shoes and socks, showing large, athletic feet. My first look at them. His toes wriggled in happy freedom as he placed his feet on the floor flat again and stood up.
His "military" persona had returned. He looked thoroughly masculine and male, as he undid the fat black buttons of his shirt and slid it from his shoulders. Underneath was a green-tinted t-shirt, which did nothing to obscure the lithe wasp-waist or broad shoulders they contained. His hands went next to the cloth belt, unfastened the square buckle clasp with his fingers at top and bottom, and then the top button and large-toothed zipper. Opening them showed me a pair of white briefs, sharply clean. Why not, the department stores had been largely untouched in the gathering of possessions by the departing masses. I'd expected some people or organizations to come back for all the immense supplies the cities held, but they never had. No news for some time, either, it was like the great mass of the human race had simply vanished. Underground, probably.
Brett peeled down his trousers and stepped out of them. Now he returned to his top, both hands peeled the t-shirt up and off, showing me the ample, muscle-rippled chest, a scratchy dusting of hairs marring its otherwise flawless appearance. One large mole decorated a spot above to the left of his right breast nipple. I would have studied that mole but then his hands pushed down his briefs and I lost all interest in the parts north of his waistline.
His dong was long, tubular, full and plump, like a pickle decorated with the squat tip of his foreskin covering the head, showing only a small black hole where it lived. The entire thing wasn't erect at this moment, having gone down in his disrobing, but it was big, thick, and promised to be a monster when it was hungry.
I grinned at Brett in his unclad glory and he grinned back, and the dong I'd been studying began to rise and grow. "You ready to try this?" he asked me, gesturing at his pud as if it were a foreign object attached to his body.
"Ready? I've been dreaming about it for months." I said emphatically.
He walked/waddled over to me, cock foremost. "So I'll just feed this to you a little at a time until you can take it all down."
"Come on over here and feed it to me." I urged him.
He crawled onto the bed on his knees and straddled my chest with them. I raised my head and neck up and my hand caught hold of that now-turgid pud and fed it into my mouth. Brett's hand touched the back of my head, not hard, just urging me to take it down, deeper, deeper! As I took him into my mouth, his moan built up in his chest and was a murmur, a low sound building and building until it was a full groan and I had more than half the length inside my mouth, hot and salty and warm, so warm!
"Yeah, come on, Glenn, suck on my cock! Come on, chow down, really go to town, come on, suck it, suck it!" he urged me as his hand gripped my hair at the back of my head and took on an authority of its own. I went from sucking on him to having my face fucked over the space of less than a minute. Brett was groaning with a ferocity that almost frightened me. Now that he had me, he intended to use me, to get his rocks off, to squirt and then, probably to just get up and leave. It'd be just like him, he was smashing everything he could and my feelings were next on his list, I bet.
For now, though, he was all mine. This hard cock was being shoved in and out, and all I had to do was hold on for the ride! So big, so thick, so firm, so hot, so fucking hot! Oh, God, I loved the heat it gave off, the smell it thrust into my nostrils with every move, the flavor of the precome that was leaking out onto my tongue as he humped at me.
"Ah-hah, ah-hah, ah-hah!" he grunted to me. "Goddamn it, you love this, don't you, Glenn! You think I haven't been watching you watching me, staring at my crotch, you think I didn't see you looking! You think I didn't know you wanted my cock. That's why you stuck around, wasn't it, you were hoping for a chance to suck on my dick, didn't you? Didn't you? Ah-ah-AH-AH-AH, GAH-AH-AH, HAHHHHHH!"
And the come sprayed into me, oh, God, hot and hard, it sprayed! I had dreamed about this, the hot jizz pumping into me, and this was the real thing and it was alike, oh, God, just like what I'd dreamed!
And Brett was moaning, hunching his hips at me while his hands forced me to take him down and keep him down, harder, faster, faster, faster, all the time hot spunk squirting into my mouth!
"Ah-hah! Ah-hah! Ah-hah! Ah-hah! A-huh! Huh! Huh! Huh!" Brett gasped as his load ended and he was panting, heaving, face flushing bright red and he fell onto the bed beside me, gasping for air, his body covered in a sheen of sweat glittering like diamond dust.
Brett caught his breath, looked at me. "That was what you were wanting, wasn't it?"
"Yeah." I admitted, and he looked away, closed his eyes. "Was it what you were wanting?" I said softly.
He was quiet, then he made a sudden "whuff" sound and grinned. "Yeah. It was what I was wanting. How about that?"
"I'm glad." I said and snuggled in next to him.
Brett hesitated, then put his arm around me. "Hell of a way to end the human race. Two guys doing the nasty in bed, all alone in an otherwise empty city."
"What else can we do?" I asked him. "I'm doing what I can, saving the books if I can. Maybe some of them will make it through, maybe they'll be found some day."
"Maybe." Brett agreed, and I could tell it was charity from him. He didn't expect anyone to ever find the books I was hiding away from the Rogue. I didn't either, not really.
Was it better, though, to do what Brett was doing. Smash everything before the Rogue could smash it for us?
I was puzzling over this when I felt Brett's hand clutch my dong. I hadn't expected this, not from so-macho Brett! But he gripped my pud and I looked at him with eyes widened. "Just a bit of payback for you." he assured me, and I relaxed, lay back and he raised up and began to whack me off.
Brett pumped my cock with an uncharacteristic gentleness, like he owed it to me to let me have this pleasure, this joy, from his hand. His gaze was intent upon my prick, his hand was diligently and almost matter-of-factly jerking me, his whole attitude was like he was going to do this and get through it and get it over with.
Somehow that turned me on more than off. Brett wasn't gay, he was doing this because...because I was his friend. Because I mattered to him, if not as a lover, then as a fellow human being that he needed. Because I was all he had.
Knowing that, knowing the need was real, I felt my own pleasure rise up in me, slowly but reliably, his hand moving in mechanical reliability up and down, wringing my joy from me by brute force.
After a time, the pleasure rose to the point where I gasped, "I'm coming, Brett, I'm coming."
"Yeah, come on, shoot it for me." he said, a soft tone. "Squirt it all over yourself, man, all over yourself."
"Ah, ahah, ahah, AH-AH-GAH-HAH-AH! AH-HUHHHHH!" My come pumped out, rising only an inch above my cockhead's height, a small fountain of jizz that landed on Brett's hand and my balls and in my pubic hair.
Brett still jerked on me until I finished, until I stopped moaning, still pumping even when my breaths slowed down and my chest didn't heave, then he let go, wiped his hand clean on my chest, cleaned his fingers by wiping them around on my pillow, and said, "There, now! Go to sleep. You got books to save tomorrow."
"Yeah, yeah, I do." I said and his arms came back around me.
"Maybe I'll help you." were his last words to me before I heard his snores.
That was three weeks ago. Now the Rogue has begun to show a disc, a tiny, tiny ball in the daytime sky. Bigger every day. Time is running out.
And Brett and I are packing to leave. I know the chances are against us. But in three weeks, with our supplies, we can get high into the Rockies. We're going to try to find a valley there, find a place where maybe, just maybe, we'll live through the Rogue. I know it's unlikely, unlikely as hell, that'll we'll live through it, that anyone will. But as Brett put it, "Okay, so we only got one chance in a hundred million or something. It's like playing the lottery, you'll probably lose. But you never know, you might win, and you sure can't win unless you play the game, can you?" That's his logic.
Mine is, you have to have a reason to live through the end of the world. And we're leaving now, living now, because now we have each other to live for.
THE END
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E-mail the Author at Tommyhawk1@AOL.COM
WWW.TOMMYHAWKSFANTASYWORLD.COM