Jim nodded. “That’s true. Hey, Heather, why not go see if Miss Oliphaunt needs a hand out there?”
“Sure.”
Sly was looking worried, and Kyle leaned toward him, grinning. “Cheer up. What’s wrong?”
“Well, Kyle, me think Dad is seeing and looking and watching me.”
“Yeah?”
“So, if me eat lots of apple cobbler will Dad be real angry with Sly?”
“No, of course not. Chances to stoke up the engines are few and far between, Sly. Eat as much as you want.” Kyle hesitated. “Just don’t make yourself sick.”
Heather reappeared and sat down. “Says she doesn’t need help. Only be a minute.”
“You see the food?” asked Carrie.
The girl bit her lip. “Yeah. Well, kind of.”
Her father frowned. “Now what does…? Doesn’t matter. I hear her coming.”
Kyle rubbed his hands together. “I tell you, friends. This is going to be one meal to remember.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Nanci Simms was very good indeed at inflicting pain.
Good at knowing precisely where the limits were between simply making a man weep and reducing him to the state where he would lose all control of his body and slip away into the dark wilderness of unconsciousness.
If that happened, then it was no fun.
No fun to flog a dead horse, as one of Nanci’s CIA instructors had often told her, back around the year 2025, at one of those anonymous mansions that used to lie in the green valleys of West Virginia. Her reasons for keeping Jeff Thomas alive were purely selfish. In any other situation, the way he’d left her to die alone from the severed artery in her thigh would have merited death. As long and slow as time would allow.
Despite his self-serving cowardice, resembling a trapped sewer rat, Nanci was experienced enough in survivalism to know that the chances of living in post-Earthblood America were considerably enhanced if you had someone there to watch your back every now and again.
Granted, you might also need to watch your back against that very person some of the time. But it was still a reasonable trade-off. And she had done what she could to discourage Jeff Thomas from ever betraying her again.
An extra consideration in her careful, clinical punishment was that she knew well enough that she was dealing with a man who was a serious sexual masochist. Someone who would relish abasing himself by licking her boots while she whipped him. Who would grovel in the dirt, begging for greater and greater humiliations at the hands of his dominant mistress. At the hands, and other parts of her lean, tanned body.
Nanci knew the feeling, knew it from the other edge of the same sword. For her there was overwhelming sexual fulfillment in having someone like Jeff helpless beneath her. The fact that it was all a kind of morbid game didn’t diminish the flooding delight that surged through her as she dragged him down into ever-deeper levels of perverse degradation.
But this time, while they waited together in the darkness to complete their escape, had been different. The lesson had to be forced home into Jeff’s mind. A lesson that made clear the distinction between pain and pleasure.
Once, as the searching helicopter from the Hunters of the Sun flooded the barren hillside ten miles away with its futile searchlight, Nanci recalled the oldest of all jokes about the sadomasochistic relationship.
“Hit me, hit me,” begged the masochist.
“No,” smiled the sadist.
It had been like that. His pale bruised body, naked on the harsh pebbles, his ankles tied together, hands bound in the small of his back. A cord from his wrists around his neck, tight enough to make his breathing difficult, but not quite tight enough to throttle him.
Nanci had begun by making Jeff relax, cleverly allowing him the space to enjoy the start of the familiar games. It was all very gentle.
Then she changed the rules.
Upped the ante.
Using every splinter of her considerable sexual skills to bring him to the brink of a rushing satisfaction, then withholding that delight. Gradually working in a little more serious pain.
“Now the good times stop, Jefferson,” she whispered. “Out here in the desert you can scream and scream until your throat turns bleeding raw. And there isn’t anyone to hear you. Chopper’s gone back to base. Hours to dawn. You and me. Think what you might be like by then. Think on what you did to me, Jefferson.