They’d hunkered down in a little farmhouse in the San Luis Valley for the winter, the three of them crowded around the iron stove, feeding the fire as the snow fell and the winds howled. Zach and Zadie thought that maybe they’d discovered their forever home.
But then the shit hit: Hal tangled with the Overlay on the outskirts of Alamosa and the Feds took notice and everything went south. They had to abandon Hal and rush to the cabin and pack what they could into the ancient Toyota truck and rumble down Hwy 285 as fast as the old truck allowed, taking sideroads to avoid Taos, catching 87 in Raton and riding it all the way down past Capulin crater to the tiny town of Des Moines, New Mexico.
“Hal’s gone, doll.” Zach had the wheel, refusing to let the tears roll.
“You did everything you could.” Zadie took his hand.
“We have to go back, Zay.”
“He’s gone, baby. He’s just gone. I’m so sorry.”
They pulled into the Little Moon Motel in the middle of the night. The “n” in the neon sign had burned out so the sign read “Little Moo Motel.“ They’d known of the place for months, and knew that the owner took actual cash, not that government bullshit that only existed as 1s and 0s inside some data center. They’d known that Capulin crater—a small cinder-cone volcano crater--was a five-minute drive away from Des Moines, which was the point of the entire mad dash across the dark plains of Colorado and New Mexico. Getting to the coordinates on time, with the Mayday device intact.
Most importantly, the owner of the Little Moo didn’t care that he was harboring bank robbers. Actual public enemies. The Feds would have put their pictures up at the post office if there were any post offices around anymore.
Zach and Zadie unpacked their shit. Zach placed his gun on the bedtable, then fell backwards onto the bed. Zadie flung the last bag into the corner and plopped onto the bed next to him.
“Oh honey.” She leaned into his shoulder. “Baby.”
“Yeah.” Zach had his eyes closed, his head tilted away from her. She knew what that meant.
“You know how much I loved him.”
“Yeah.” Long pause. Then: “Fucking Feds.” He kept his head turned away from her. She looped an arm over his chest, then moved her hand up to his cheek, trying to let him know he was not alone. That was never easy. He was used to alone. He was comfortable there.
He nuzzled his head into her hand, and turned and looked into her eyes, and that old familiar fire began to burn. She pulled him toward her lips, and as they kissed the sweet knot of desire between her legs untied itself. His breath quickened, and she could see his cock hardening beneath the fabric of his jeans, but he didn’t take charge as he usually did, didn’t wrap her in his arms, didn’t hold her down by the wrists and tell her all the dirty things he was about to do to her.
She knew what she had to do. Follow him down. Swim down into the dark water and reach out and take his hand and pull him out of the deep. Hal had been his best friend.
Fucking Feds.
She eased a long brown leg over his chest, straddling him, covering his face in kisses. He eventually turned his face toward her and began to return the kisses, tongue pouring into her mouth like the waters of an open spring. She shucked off her clothes, kissing him. His hands went to her breasts, molding them into the palms of his hand, squeezing her nipples between thumb and forefinger. She flung her jeans onto the floor and pulled his cock out of his open fly. The head of it was angry red, swollen, trembling.
She touched the folds of her pussy, smeared her wetness onto his cock, and then lay herself across his body, her pussy centered over him. She rocked back and forth, her wet lips parting, enfolding him as his cock teased her entrance. She came over and over, just a wet mess as his cock teased her clit at the end of each slide forward. He tilted his hips finally, to catch the soft sweet groove of her flesh, and cried out as he pushed inside. He ground his cock into her and stayed there, burrowing deep, throbbing. She took him inside her and held him. They came together as the first fingers of dawn were reaching up toward the night sky.
#
The sun was high in the mid-afternoon sky when they awoke. Zadie lounged in bed, sleepy and disheveled. Zach shook the road-dust out of his jeans and pulled them back on. He added a wrinkled tee shirt and a flannel as Zadie watched from under cover of blanket.
“You okay, baby?” she asked, but he didn’t know how to answer. Nothing was okay. Hal was dead. The Overlay had flagged them, and worse, the old Toyota. They had to make their run three weeks early, hiding from the Big Eye as they hauled ass to the Little Moo. Now they had to hunker down and just try to survive until Mayday.
He sauntered over to the bed and gave Zadie a simmering kiss. “I’m okay, doll.”
“You sure?”
He sat on the bed. “We did the hard part. Now, we just need to keep our heads down for twenty-one days and plant the receiver the day before Mayday.”
Zadie let loose a wickedly lopsided smile. “Whatever will we do, trapped together in a motel room for three weeks straight?”
“We’ll think of something.” He leaned into her body and pinned her to the bed with a hungry look.
“We left the rope back in the cabin, honey.”
He slipped his belt out of the loops of his jeans. “Then I guess we’ll have to improvise.”
#
Zadie was still in bed as Zach opened the motel room door and walked out into the harsh afternoon light.
He poked his head into the registration cabin and settled with the owner, Mr. Ames, casually sliding an envelope of twenties—actual cash, the real thing, a federal crime to possess—across the desk as they talked about nothing. Zach asked for directions and walked back out into the unrelenting sun.
According to Mr. Ames, about a mile down Main St. was a Sinclair gas station that sold cheap pizza and basic necessities. Not wanting to show the Toyota in daylight, Zach walked the mile by foot as the sun beat down. By the time he reached the gas station he was drenched.
Mr. Ames had already contacted the cashier at the Sinclair and let him know Zach was on the way. Together they loaded Zach’s purchases into a large brown paper bag. Zach paid in cash.
His energy began to return as he walked back to the motel, pizza held level on one hand, a paper bag of goods in the other hand, a little inflatable dinosaur under his arm. The heat was leaking out of the day, and his legs were loosening after a full day of driving. Zay and he had a place to lay their heads for the next few weeks. No worries.
The police cruiser appeared on Main St. like a figure from a dream. No preamble, no context: it was just there. The shimmer of the Overlay caressed the chrome of the car, and sparkled within the glass of the windows. The colors of the car appeared hyperreal, perfectly hued, unshadowed, like watching real life through an HD television.
Keep walking. Don’t speed up. Don’t slow down. A calm, steady pace. Nothing to see here, officer.
The cruiser turned off onto a side street, and Zach felt nominally better.
Fucking Feds. They’d killed Hal.
Zach closed the door shut behind him.
Zadie was still in bed. She’d taken a shower, put on a little lipstick and a thin tee shirt designed to show off the curve of her tits and the thrill of her nipples. Zach got the sense she’d been posing in bed, waiting for him.
“Why, it’s the pizza delivery man!” cried Zadie.
“That’s not all I deliver,” added Zach. He lay the pizza next to the TV and tossed the dino over to Zadie.
Then he emptied the contents of the brown paper bag onto the bed: a 50-foot bundle of natural sisal rope, a calendar, four rolls of gray duct tape, and every box of aluminum foil the gas station had.
“Let’s get to work,” he said. He hung the calendar up first, above the microwave and tiny fridge. He marked off two days with Zay’s eyebrow pencil.
Nineteen days til Mayday.
“You start with the big window in front,” he said. I’ll do the door and the bathroom window.”
“What’s the rope for, baby?”
Zach shot her a cartoonishly wolfish look. “You’ll find out when you’re done with the window.”
#
Dark was upon them by the time they were done. Strips of aluminum foil covered every inch of glass on the big window, held in place by a grid of duct tape. Foil strips masked the edges of the front door. A block of foil covered the small bathroom window.
He stood at the foot of the bed. “On your knees, doll. Cross those pretty wrists behind your back.”
She did as told. Zach trimmed the two ends of the rope with a pocket knife as she kneeled. He placed each end of the rope around a bedpost, then pulled back until he found the bight—the center of the rope. He brought the rope onto the bed and set it under Zadie’s wrists.
Her mouth grew lax, her eyes lidded.
She’d been here before.
He slid his palm between her wrists, to grant enough space to finish the tie. The rope wrapped around her wrists, a palm’s-width of space between them. A second loop captured her wrists. After taking great care to ensure the loops were uniformly tight, he took both ends of the rope and fed them through the central hitch, between her wrists. He jerked the rope hard, tightening all knots simultaneously.
Zadie collapsed, moaning, her body relaxing into the sharp grasp of the rope, her head lolling back on the swivel of her neck. She spoke words Zach could not decipher, as if speaking in tongues.
“I love the feel of your skin under my rope,” he whispered, preparing the next loop by feel. The rope caught her halfway between wrist and elbow. He yanked it taut. Her skin flushed, her heartbeat raced. He could smell her hungry pussy.
He took the other end of the rope and looped in in the opposite direction, so that it crossed at the midpoint between her arms. With each tug of the rope, every adjustment to the weave, her body reacted as if the synapses of her brain had melted and fused into one overwhelming desire.
Three loops later and the weave covered her from wrist to shoulder. Naked, reddened skin peeked out from between the ropes. He’d placed the bight well, his weaving and pulling was precise. He was left with two equal lengths of rope in either hand. The kazara nawa. The leftover ends of the rope. It was important not to waste. Whatever you had left over needed to be used, with consideration and care. The goal was to create something meaningful with everything given you by the small-g gods of the natural world.
He stood behind her, fondling the hard miracle of her nipples through the thin material of her shirt. He kissed her on the forehead.
Her body knew he was done and began to shiver.
He let go of the rope. His hands walked up the thin material of her tee shirt. He gripped the neck of the shirt in his fists and with one motion ripped the shirt straight down the middle. He seized her tits roughly. She twisted, back arched, neck exposed and vulnerable, arms caught in a tight vice of rope. When he threw her onto the bed she released whatever shred of composure that remained, crying, “I need you so bad baby, I need you inside me, take me and fuck me hard, I need it so hard,” as she presented her ass to him. He kneed her legs apart and laid his cock against her pussy, slapping her clit with the head of it. She jerked moaning with each slap of hard cock and suddenly he was inside her and the night turned from muted grays and shadows to a bright Technicolor blast of desire.
He untied her with a twist of the rope. The loops fell away around her, revealing the imprint of the rope against her skin, like the first letters of some new alphabet. He stroked her arms and wrists as the blood slowly returned to her skin. She purred at his touch, slowly returning to the real world. He studied his mark on her skin with gentle fingers until she fell asleep, and soon he was asleep himself.
#
He kept her tied to the bed for three days.
She was given freedom whenever she asked, of course. He’d untie her and walk down to the Sinclair for gas station burritos and Fanta. She’d explore the room while he was gone. The little soaps in the bathroom. The bible in the bedside table. When she felt he was about to return, she’d wash her face and put on some makeup and return to bed. Together they’d watch government television and eat burritos and hold hands.
Fifteen days until Mayday.
Zadie curled at the foot of the bed, draped in blankets and sheets. “So what’s gonna happen, baby? On Mayday?”
Zach paced the room with the energy of a caged dog. “I don’t know much, doll. Nobody knows much. My comrades in Boulder showed me a map.”
“I’ve seen the map.” She’d actually been in the room with him. She loved him but he could be stubbornly tunnel-visioned.
“Of course you have, you were there. You remember that at the center of the map was Cheyenne Mountain?”
“I do. NORAD. From back in the Cold War.”
“Exactly. They drew a circle around Cheyenne Mountain. 150-mile radius. They sent out, like, 200 hundred of us, each with receivers. We’re posting receivers in a circle around NORAD. We don’t need to plant them all. If 100 of us can get operational, it might be enough.”
“Enough for what?” She knew the answer. She liked to hear him say it.
“Triangulation.” Zach stopped pacing. “So the forces inside NORAD can measure the force of the blast. The word on the street is, anti-Fed rebels took control of Cheyenne Mountain. The cool part: NORAD was built in the 60s. Before the internet. WAY before the Overlay. The infrastructure is still mostly analog. AI can’t get inside analog signals. The rebels think they can use it to blow a hole in the Overlay. On Mayday. Take down the Big Eye. Push those motherfuckers back behind the Rocky Mountains.”
“Will it work?”
“Who knows, doll? It might work. That’s enough for me. The possibility.”
He flipped onto the bed, next to her. His eyes were alight with the fire of his cause. She hadn’t seen him like this in weeks.
“Kiss me, darling,” she told him.
She rolled down on the bed and positioned herself at his feet. “You know, I’ve been thinking about our rope play.” She snaked her tongue around his big toe and sucked on it.
“Baby….” His head flopped back on the bed.
“And I think we need a new plan.” Her hands left his foot and began to work their way up his calf. “You’ve been doing all the work, sugar.” Her hands were at his thigh. “My poor baby. I think someone else needs to take the wheel.”
With the tip of her tongue, she reached out and licked at the underside of his balls. As her finger worked its way between his ass cheeks, she sucked one of his balls into her mouth. Zach groaned; his legs stiffened. She quit sucking, letting his ball drop from her mouth. She made unbroken eye contact, whispering, “You’ve been in control for so long. Why don’t you relax and let someone else take care of things.” Her tongue lashed out to the base of his cock; her finger worked its way to the rim of his ass.
She cooed, ”Do you want that baby? Do you want me to take control?” She explored the shaft of his cock. “Do you want me to suck your thick, hard, beautiful cock? Do you want me to suck you until you shoot all your hot cum into the back of my throat?”
“Mmm….”
“Fill my mouth with cum and watch it drip out? Is that what you want baby? Do you want to see me lick up your cum and swallow it again? Do you want me to be your little cum slut? Tell me, baby. Tell me you want me to be your dirty little cum slut. Just tell me.”
He could, of course, say nothing. He was lost in sensation, spread eagled on the bed now, easily seduced, effortlessly captured.
She took his cock deep in her mouth as her finger worked its way forward, two knuckles deep into his ass.
#
Zadie found the kitty ears two days later.
Thirteen days until Mayday.
She’d been cleaning. She hated cleaning, but the room was overwhelmed with their chaos. Open suitcases. Dirty clothes. Burrito wrappers. Fanta bottles. And the sheets—the whole room, actually—reeked of sex.
After Zach left for the Sinclair, Zadie stripped the bed, balling the sheets up with the dirty clothes in her arms and carrying the whole mess to the laundromat. The machines there took actual quarters. She marveled at the perfectly round, shiny coins, George Washington stamped on the front. Possessing these was a felony now.
Fucking Feds.
While the sheets and clothes were tumbling in the washer, Zadie started cleaning the desks and drawers of the room. She found the kitty ears stuffed in the far corner of one of the drawers, leftover from a kid, or some previous couple. A little torn, a little bent out of shape.
She put them on.
Twenty minutes later, when Zach walked through the door, she met him wordlessly, kneeling at the door naked, a loop of rope around her neck as a makeshift leash and collar, leash held in her mouth, kitty ears worn like a crown askew.
She offered him the leash. He took it, and she watched him grow instantly hard under the fabric of his jeans.
She pressed her face against his cock and purred, rubbing against him.
“My kitten,” he whispered.
She whimpered in response.
He grasped his end of the leash and jerked her head upward. She pressed against his body, rolling and mewing as he took control of her. He tethered her to the desk chair with her leash and pushed her roughly into it. With a flourish he strapped her wrists to the back.
She was trussed against the chair, naked and shivering, her entire body alive with possibility. Zach shucked off his jeans and stood with his cock inches away from her face.
“Open your mouth, my little fuck kitten.”
The words blew through her body like something electric. He lightly slapped her face with his cock, then laid it on her tongue.
The laundry could wait.
#
The kitty ears lasted a good five days, and Zadie wore them the entire time. She barely spoke. She purred and slept and fucked. She howled like a wildcat. She scratched and bit. She coiled around his body, spreading her scent.
Around the end of the sixth day the ears broke. The wires buckled when he grabbed her by the hair, and the kitty-ear shape refused to hold. He threw them to the ground as he fucked her.
Eight days until Mayday.
Zach stepped outside for his daily run to the Sinclair. He saw the drone almost immediately. It floated down from the sky lazily, making no attempt to hide. A slightly flattened sphere, perhaps two feet wide, one tiny part of the Big Eye. The reflections off the surfaces of the sphere did not match its actual surroundings but instead presented an idealized version of the world: airbrushed and optimized for mass consumption.
He was already outside. Slinking back into the room would only rouse suspicion. He strode into the sunlight, mimicking confidence.
The drone followed him all the way to the Sinclair. He bought every frozen burrito in the place, along with some Fanta and several bags of Munchos.
The drone was gone by the time he walked out of the station. If the drone had flagged him he’d have seen action by now. Helicopters. Police cars. Black SUVs. They were safe for the time being.
Zach slammed the motel door behind him. “They’re closing in, doll.”
She sat upright in bed. “Do we need to bolt?”
“No. That’s the last thing we want to do.” He sat down next to her. “It’ll tell them we’re scared, and on the run. Fuck that. We make a stand. We’ll do what we said we’d do. Stay low until Mayday and plant the device.”
“But they’ve seen us.”
“They aren’t at the door yet.”
“So we stick to the plan?”
“Yeah. Stay in the room and don’t go outside until the day before Mayday.”
She lay her head on his shoulder. She spoke slowly, pronouncing each word carefully. “What happens after this? After Mayday?”
“Well maybe we succeed. Maybe we drive the Overlay back thousands of miles.”
“Not that. Us. What happens to us?”
Silence. Zach dropped his head. “I don’t know.”
“The world is in chaos. After Mayday it’s only going to get worse. Win or lose. What are we going to do?”
“I’ve got to go where they tell me to go, doll.”
“I do too, baby. And I will. But what if we’re sent to different places?”
“Then we say good-bye to each other and go.”
“So the next ten days might just be our last days together?”
Zach did not answer. He put his arms around her.
#
Six days until Mayday. Five days. Four.
The knock on the door they’d been expecting for weeks came in the middle of the night.
Three black SUVs surrounded the front door, headlights on, silhouetting Zach as he swung the door open. Two officers stood at the door, guns drawn. A drone dropped from the clouds and hovered over the scene. Zadie blinked in the unforgiving light. She noted that while Zach was not holding his gun, it lay on top of his bedtable, mere feet away from his hand.
“Are you Zachary Taylor?” asked one of the faceless men at the door.
No response.
“Zachary J. Taylor?”
No response other than Zach’s glance toward the gun. It was too far away to be of any use to him, Zadie knew. Armed officers stood in front of him, with more waiting in the cars outside. Think.
“Zachary J. Taylor, we have reason to believe you are—”
Zadie stepped out of the shadows, Zach’s gun in her hand, buying time. Think.
“Officers. Step aside, please.” She held the gun at arm’s length, ready to fire. “Remember, I’m a dangerous public enemy. I suggest you back away from the door.”
The officers did as told. Zadie desperately searched her mind for a solution. If she shot an officer, they’d both be dead in a shower of gunfire. Think!
“Ma’am, you do understand that we are required to—"
Zadie jerked up the gun and shot at the drone.
Bullseye.
The drone dropped onto the middle SUV in a veil of sparks and squealing servos. The two officers at the door leapt away, while the officer inside the middle car cowered at the noise and light above him. The other two drivers huddled inside their own vehicles, hesitant to exit until the sparks cleared.
“We gotta run, doll.”
Zadie did not run. She stood her ground and took aim and fired a careful shot at the leg of one of the officers at the door. Zach rushed to Zadie, sheltering her under his arm.
“Now, baby! Go!”
They ran. Gunfire rang behind them. The Toyota was parked in the shadows, just behind the registration cabin. Zadie pointed to Mr. Ames at the window; he’d been waiting. He motioned to a large maple tree to the side of the cabin, and then pointed to the truck and made steering wheel motions.
The maple tree exploded in flame, a diversion. By this time, two of the black SUVs had pulled out and were wheeling across the parking lot toward Zach and Zadie, but the sudden tree of flame stopped them. As they slammed on their brakes, Zach fired up the Toyota and shot out of the shadows. The truck bounced onto the asphalt of the parking lot and careened toward the highway.
Zadie pointed ahead of them. “They’ve got 87 blocked off. Two SUVs down there. I bet they’ve got road spikes laid out.”
Zach turned to Zadie. “Trust me, doll?”
She took his hand. “I trust you, baby.”
“Fuck the Feds,” cried Zach as he twisted the wheel hard. The old Toyota shot off the roadway onto the high desert scrub of New Mexico. The dark bulk of Capulin volcano crater lay directly in front of them. With no roads to follow, Zach aimed the truck straight at the rock.
They expected a car chase all the way to the crater, but it turned out those modern, decked-out SUVs were no match for an ancient Toyota 4x4. Two of the police cars bottomed out immediately as their undercarriages caught on hard volcanic rock, and the others were lost in a chaos of flat tires and broken suspensions.
Within an hour they could see nothing in the rearview but pinyon pine and volcanic plateau. A waning crescent moon rose in the sky above the crater. Stars tumbled overhead like bright pebbles.
When the axle broke the truck shuddered to an abrupt halt. Zach and Zadie took a moment to say goodbye to their old friend. They unpacked the Mayday device from the back of the truck. It wasn’t much to look at: a pole about ten feet long, self-leveling legs on one end, a simple metal plate at the other. Thankfully, the contraption was fairly lightweight. They put it over their shoulders and marched toward Capulin.
They made love in the desert on top of a sleeping bag, just before dawn. There was no way to know where events would lead, or what would become of them. No future. No past. All that remained was the vocabulary of the here and now, the shortgrass prairie surrounding them, the smell of sage, the mule deer, the chattering wrens and meadowlarks. No ropes. No cat ears. No motel chairs. No games. Naked. He entered her simply and she took him inside her, as the stars turned in the night and the moon fell to earth and the first rays of morning reached past the horizon toward a wide-open sky.
They spent all morning dragging the device up the slope of the volcano. Planting the thing was simple. They stuck it into the ground and hit a switch: the legs at the bottom unfurled, the plate at the top opened like a beach umbrella.
Mayday had arrived.
Zach counted down on a pocket watch. Three. Two. One.
The pole shuddered and swayed. The umbrella fell off the top and landed with a sigh. Silence.
“Well, that was a little anti-climactic.” Zadie attempted a laugh. “Is that it?”
“I don’t know, doll.” He hung his head. “Did it work? Who’s ever gonna know?”
“Eventually we’ll know.”
“Will we? There’s no one to ask anymore.”
Zach began to cry, finally, twenty-one days after his best friend died.
Zadie put her arms around him, letting his grief pierce her skin. They did not move for a very long time. After Zach’s tears had dried they remained in each other’s arms. They had nowhere to go to.
Then, without any fuss or warning, a drone dropped from the sky like a dark comet and landed with a violent thud about twenty feet away, all sparks and chittering gears.
They walked over to examine the thing. Zach knelt down in front of it. “Looks like it just…quit working.”
“But it might mean…?”
“It might mean nothing, doll.”
The next drone fell about a hundred feet away, trailing fire, shattering against hard rock in a cloud of sparking metal. And then a third one fell, and a fourth, and suddenly Zach and Zadie were running down the slope of the volcano, scared shitless but laughing like little kids as they scrambled for shelter. They dived behind a crag of rock and cowered.
“They eye is falling!” cried Zadie.
“Maybe.”
“Maybe? Look up! The Big Eye is going blind.”
Zach looked up to see fiery lines of debris drop from the sky like lifelines thrown from the heavens. The earth trembled as the damned things struck the ground. Plumes of dust rose from the impacts.
“It’s beautiful, doll,” he said at last.
“It’s the future, baby.” She kissed him.
When the drones quit falling, Zach and Zadie picked their way down the steep volcanic flow. The day was sunny, a gentle wind blew at their backs, and birdsong filled the air. They had no map to follow, no truck to drive. They chose their steps carefully through the high desert scrub, hand in hand, looking for a new way home.
