Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2006 16:17:01 EST
From: Tommyhawk1@aol.com
Subject: Not With a Whimper

			    NOT WITH A WHIMPER
			   By Tommyhawk1@AOL.COM
		      WWW.TOMMYHAWKSFANTASYWORLD.COM
			WWW.TOMMYHAWKSROGUEMOON.COM

     The metal skeleton made up his mind for him. A huge metal box of
girders, the walls all gone, the wires a memory, the people who had been
there less than that.
     He was in a town. Definitely a town, for the first time in nearly a
year. Not just a building or two, but an actual town. How big a town? No
way to tell now, he'd had enough trouble, what with the moss and vines and
overgrowth and even small trees distorting the rubble, to even figure out
this much!
     He sighed. Nature was taking over everything again. Maybe that was why
it had all happened, to let the animals recover and the lands wash
themselves clean and the oceans purge themselves.
     Why it had happened was his favorite way of wasting time while his
legs pumped up and down, carrying him along, when nothing much was going
on. He'd been working as a plumber for God's sake, on the day it had all
begun. Down inside some old lady's cellar working on her hot water heater,
surrounded by her shelves of preserves, when the entire damned world went
ka-blooey!
     Whatever had happened had trapped him inside that small space, a four
foot by ten foot square of cement. He'd had air (or he wouldn't be here
now!) from somewhere, and he'd had food and liquid (if a sticky sort) with
the preserves the old lady had put up. And he had had his tool box, which
held a small saw and a hammer. He began to work on the blockage, working to
clear the rubble away, to free himself when it became clear nobody was
coming by to free him.
     Getting out of there took him nearly a month, near as he could
tell. During most of that time, he had listened to the sounds from
outside. The first day had been non-stop explosions, small and large, near
and far. Sounded like a fucking battle going on outside. The next days were
nearly as bad, but it had slowed down a little at a time, until, about the
mid-point, they had nearly stopped altogether. He'd heard a few gunshots
one day, a couple of men shouting another day, and after two days of
silence, had heard a child crying forlornly for hours and hours. The child
had stopped, and had not resumed. That had been his last human sound.
     But that last week, he'd heard nothing but the sounds of animals. A
cat meowing. A dog barking. Birds singing. That had been the sounds to
which he had broken out and viewed the new world.
     Desolation, as far as he could see. Everything that had once been a
fair-sized town was now piles of rubble. Some of it was smoking, but that
was it. And the only people around him were dead, and had been for some
time. Bloating, decaying bodies, they stank like hell!
     He had stayed around only long enough to forage through the ruins of
the nearby Kwik-Stop, gathered up enough food to live on, and got the heck
out of there! He wasn't sure what had killed everyone for one thing, and
for another, dead people carry disease and he wasn't up to burying them
all.
     Thus had started his new life. A lonely one. Whatever had destroyed
the towns and killed the people hadn't even scratched anything else. He
foraged in the remains of houses and stores for what he needed, hunted and
fished for fresh food, scavenged for everything else.
     It had been eight years now. He had spent the last four of those
traveling. Was he the last man on Earth? It was beginning to look that
way. He hadn't even seen signs of anyone living past those few weeks. What
had happened? What the fuck had happened?
     What had happened to the world?
     He still didn't have an answer to that. And from the looks of things,
he never would, he'd just live out the rest of his life alone, grow old,
and die. Like the poem said, the end of the human race would be not with a
bang, but a whimper.
     And he got to do the whimper.
     It had been so long, that when the voice called to him, at first, he
didn't understand it.
     "Ho, there!" came the call again.
     Jeff's head went up like a dog questing after pheasant. "Hello!"
     "Stay where you are!" came the call. "You are trespassing on the
territory of the Pacific States of America."
     Pacific States of America? Shit, he had stumbled over an entire nation
of people! He knew they had to be out here somewhere, he knew it!
     "Lay down your weapons and advance slowly with your hands up." came
the instruction.
     Jeff put down his rifle as ordered and did as ordered.
     "State your name, and your intention in visiting our country."
     Jeff began to have some second thoughts. Saying he was a lone
straggler was asking them to turn him into their slave or lock him away or
just plain kill him. "My name is... I am Major Jeffrey McDonald from the
Confederation of Midwestern America." If he had never heard of the Pacific
States, odds were they wouldn't find it odd to not have heard of a
Confederation a thousand miles away. "We learned of your existence and I
was sent here as an emissary to learn more about you and to discuss setting
up trade." That ought to get the politicians interested in him. From there,
he could bluff his way into a comfortable existence in the Pacific States
of America's capital city, while they waited for the rest of his people to
show up...which they never would, of course.
     "It is good to learn that others have survived outside of the P.S.A."
came the answer. And now the man showed himself. Whatever the nature of his
country, this man looked a lot like Jeff. Bedraggled, wearing odds and ends
of salvaged materials, he had cut a pair of shoes into something like
sandals and bound leggings made from a sweater sleeve above that with a
length of cloth. Was that a woman's dress above it, heavily patched, or
just some fabric sewn inexpertly together to make a sort of tunic to cover
him from neck to mid-thigh? It gave him a vaguely barbarian appearance,
that of a Viking warrior or of a Roman soldier minus armor. Above the
hodgepodge of clothing was a head of red-brown hair cut poorly by a knife
and a beard that no officer of any armed forces would permit on even his
kindest day.
     He wasn't making such a good impression himself. The man stared at
Jeff's feather, he had stuck it in his head scarf when he found it while
crossing the desert of Arizona, that head scarf had helped him during more
than one dusty, windy day. "What's with the feather?" came the question.
     "It's the mark of a Major of the C.M.A. of course." Jeff was glad he
remembered the name he'd just made up, enough to turn it into
easier-to-remember initials! "Now, can we go to meet with the rest of your
people?"
     "Not yet." the man said. "Have to be sure you aren't carrying the
fever. A straggler brought it in a couple years ago and a lot of people
died."
     "Can't spare any of those these days." Jeff agreed. God, this guy was
real! Another human! He wanted to just reach out and hug this guy and never
let him go, ever! He wasn't alone anymore! Just a damned shame he had to
pretend and lie. But until he knew more, better to be safe. "So...how did
you survive what happened?"
     "Had a job as a night watchman." he explained. "My office was down in
the basement. By the time I dug myself out, it was all over. How about
you?"
     "About the same." Jeff said. "So, what do you know about what
happened?"
     "What do you know?" came the response.
     Jeff realized that in an entire "country" of people, someone would
know something. "I'm not authorized to reveal that information." he said.
     "Neither am I." the man said.
     "Can you tell me your name, anyway?" Jeff said, and a plaintive note
crept into his voice when he said it.
     The man smiled. "Kurt. Kurt Chapman."
     "Kurt." Jeff said and that tone held in it wonder. "Kurt."
     "Yeah." Kurt said. "And your name is...Major Jeffrey McDonald."
     "Call me Jeff."
     "Jeff." And Kurt's voice held that same tone of wonder.
     Jeff's hand reached up to Kurt's face, noticing that the eyes were a
beautiful steel-gray color, not blue like he'd first thought. Gray. "Kurt."
he said as his hand touched that face, the hairs of the beard weren't
bristly at all, they were too long, they were soft as they could be.
     And Kurt's head didn't flinch from the touch, he nuzzled Jeff's palm
instead. His eyes closed as his face registered raw ecstasy and then the
eyes opened again, and a mist of tears were in them. Or were those in
Jeff's own?
     "Jeff." Kurt's voice purred at him, and then those strong arms went
around Jeff, and his went around Kurt's! They held each other tightly, too
tightly for passion, too tightly for affection, this was the simple, raw
desire to hold another person, to hold them until the body believe it, that
they were real, they were real!
     "Oh, God!" Jeff sobbed. "Oh, God!"
     "Yeah, man! Yeah, man!" Kurt said in his turn.
     "It's been so fucking long, so fucking long!"
     "I know, I know, me, too, me, too!"
     "All this time, all this time!"
     "Alone, all alone, yeah, all this time alone!"
     Jeff realized what he'd said to Kurt, and what Kurt had said in
return. He didn't quite let go, but his hands were all he held on with now
as he pulled back, and Kurt let him go. Maybe he figured it out,
too. "You're all alone, too?"
     "Yeah." Kurt admitted.
     "And all that stuff about the Pacific States of America?"
     "A population of one. I've been all over the West Coast." Kurt
admitted. "I couldn't find anybody."
     "Me, either, I started west from just outside St. Louis, and the
Mississippi River." Jeff said. "If there's anybody else left alive in the
USA, they've got to be in either New York City or Miami. Or in another
country, I guess. If there's anybody else at all to even find."
     "Yeah." Kurt's answer said he knew all about it, all the time alone,
wondering, worrying, why did it happen, where were all the other people,
was he all alone?
     No longer. "At least I found you." Jeff said. "Shit, that's a hell of
a lot right there."
     "You mean I found you." Kurt said.
     "We found each other." Jeff compromised.
     And he reached up to kiss Kurt.
     Before it had happened, before the endless days of being and living
alone, he wouldn't have thought about kissing another man. He had dated
women, slept with more than a few of them, even lived with a couple of
them, once for six months, once for three. He was even thinking it was time
to pick one and settle down...and then it happened. The world blew up and
didn't take him along with it. Leaving him all alone...except now there was
Kurt.
     Men in prisons had sex with each other. Men marooned on desert island
had sex with each other. It happened, when men were cut off from women,
they would turn to each other.
     And the privation those men in jail or on that island suffered, it
wasn't a speck on the isolation of years Jeff had been through. And Kurt,
he supposed.
     So he kissed Kurt and Kurt kissed him right back. Their hands
tightened around each other again, and this time, the desire was to do more
than just hold the other. Kurt's hands went down to Jeff's buttocks and
cupped them and pulled him hard against Kurt's body and Jeff felt the hard
shaft under that thick woolen tunic stab at him, slide over his trousers
and seek out its partner beneath to beg it to come out and join the fun.
     Jeff groaned and reached between them and under that tunic, to find
the cock and balls unencumbered under the shift. Cotton was so quick to
decompose, especially with wear, Jeff had spent many months without
underwear himself before chance would let him happen upon a pair that
either had avoided the depredations of insects or had remained safe within
its plastic wrapping. Those were the best, but with the destruction, they
were hard to come by. All too often, he would find a clothing shop, and
find that a multitude of moths and beetles had beat him to it. This past
couple of years, he was having increasing trouble staying clothed, another
few years, it would be animal furs or nothing.
     So Jeff had nothing to prevent him from grabbing that impudent dong
and fondle the turgid shaft, and Kurt groaned with an ecstasy that made
Jeff think for a second that he was going to shoot then and there!
     Not that he would blame Kurt if he did. Finding another human being
alive was all the sexual stimulation you needed. He had tried to comfort
himself with pictures and magazines after the destruction, but they hadn't
done anything but remind him how alone he was. His masturbation fantasies
had been confined for years to what he'd do when he found someone at
last. Now, he had found someone, and it was young and handsome and strong
and eager. Hell, yeah, he'd take it. Let this stud shoot that come all over
his hand, he'd lift his hand up and lick it off if he did!
     But Kurt fought off the passion, fumbled for his tunic fastening. He'd
put a small tie at the throat and undid it so he could pull the entire
thing off his head more easily. He had somehow made this thing himself,
might have even woven the cloth for himself! It had a rough feel to it.
     Kurt threw the tunic to one side and was now bare down to his
leggings. Now his hands turned to Jeff, the shirt he almost ripped off
Jeff, and then the trousers, which were too large around for Jeff, he undid
the belt and the pants sagged down.
     "Shit, you have underwear?" Kurt marveled.
     "My last pair." Jeff gasped.
     "Take them off." Kurt said.
     Jeff understood, the material was getting worn, and was none too
clean, either. He released Kurt and put his hands to his waist, and shucked
the feeble elastic down his hips.
     When he did, Kurt was on his knees and Jeff found his newly freed pud
being sucked into Kurt's hungry maw with a powerful suction, Kurt wasn't
adept but he was eager, he was starved for it, he was practically pulling
it out by the roots! Jeff moaned and his fingers wove their way into the
thatch of red hair on Kurt's head and Jeff hunched at Kurt's mouth roughly,
his desire driving that dong deeper into the depths of Kurt's throat, and
Jeff groaned and humped his red-haired new-found lover, companion, fellow
traveler, another HUMAN!
     "Here, here, wait." Kurt said to him as he held Jeff's dong and bodily
forced Jeff to stop ramming that horny dick into him. "You were about to
cream, man."
     "I know, I know." Jeff grunted. "It's like I got eight years worth of
jizz stored up here and I got to get it out of me, now, here, now!" And he
hunched again at Kurt, only this time Kurt's hand rode with him, denying
him the pleasure.
     "You ready to stick this in me proper?" Kurt asked him.
     Jeff looked down at Kurt through a haze of lust, red-rimmed and
fringed with violence, and the sense of what he had said got through that
minefield somehow and reached his cognition. He nodded, his throat too
constricted to speak for him.
     Kurt knelt down on all fours and said, "Now push it in gentle, it's
been eight years since I.... Ughhhhh!"
     Jeff had nearly pounced on Kurt, he got his prick up against Kurt's
asshole and he shoved it into the man. Kurt howled as Jeff crammed it into
him, but he didn't fight Jeff off, and only a fight would have slowed Jeff
down. As it was, Kurt just yowled like an alley cat as Jeff worked that
stiff pud into him, and he yelped as Jeff got it in deep, and then began to
pull it out again.
     Those bright red noises fed Jeff's brain, he grunt-roared in his turn,
his hips were fired by primal, unconscionable lust, he began to fuck Kurt
and Kurt keened in his pain and passion while Jeff grumbled in male heat
above him.
     Jeff shuddered as his passion rose toward its peak, he leaned over and
took Kurt's body in his hands, his palms covered and squeezed Kurt's
breasts, and Kurt hollered all the louder for the pain in his nipples, and
as Kurt's sounds came close to screams, Jeff reached his climax and he
roared out a bellowing triumph that drowned out Kurt's sounds entirely.
     He ejaculated with a volley of come that lent credence to his claim
that he had saved up this load for eight full years, eight lonely years,
eight deprived years, all of that ended and his body celebrated by pouring
every ounce of juice that lived in his body into that ejaculation, he
unleashed a massive volume of spunk that belted its way up into Kurt's
body, and more that squelched out around Jeff's cock to drip down onto
Kurt's balls and from there onto the grass beneath them. Hot jism flew in
every direction, Jeff felt it splatter his own stomach and bright pearls of
jizz dotted the dark crevice of Kurt's buttocks.
     And Kurt screamed again, this time as his own orgasm struck, his butt
clenched onto Jeff's cock with a fury that Kurt hadn't shown before, Jeff
was more than caught, he was tortured in the last dregs of his climax by
the constriction upon his cock, and his sperm boiled in frustration as it
was balked, and more pushed behind it, and some escaped but more was caught
yet again, and then the constriction was over, and Jeff moaned and a last
gush of his man-juice poured out of him without force, just oozed into
Kurt's butt and joined its brethren there, to form a seething pool of male
passion that bathed the both of them.
     The two men fell in a puddle onto the grass and Jeff could only pant
as he feebly held onto Kurt even now, loathe to let this man go for a
second now that he had found him, he was no longer alone and he wasn't
letting go of it!
     "Oh, man, oh, man." Kurt panted.
     "Yeah, shit, yeah, shit, yeah." Jeff crooned. "Man, that was
good. I've been close to busting a nut for years, shit!"
     "God, you fucker, I wanted you to take it easy!" Kurt moaned, but that
moan didn't hold pain, only a frustration. "Shit, you practically tore me a
new hole!"
     "Sorry." Jeff said insincerely. "I got carried away."
     "We both did." Kurt agreed. "Too many years all alone. It can get to a
guy. I thought for a while I was going crazy. Hell, maybe I did sometimes,
how can I tell?"
     "Pacific States of America." Jeff reminded him.
     "You had the Confederacy of Mid-America." Kurt returned.
     "Is that what I called it?"
     "Isn't it?"
     "I don't remember. Shit." Jeff rolled onto his back and rested the
fingers of one hand on his forehead and cheeks, his hand like a huge spider
standing there. "You had me worried about what I was getting myself into."
     "Well, now you know." Kurt said. "It good enough for you?"
     "More than good." Jeff said, grinning and hugging the red-haired man
to him. "Though even if you'd been eighty years old, I still would have
fucked you. I was ready for anybody."
     "I'll try to keep your appetites satisfied." Kurt said. "If you don't
mind taking one up the ass now and then yourself."
     Jeff hesitated, but only for a second or two. "Yeah, sure." he
said. "I guess that's fair if it's going to be only you and me."
     "Yeah, you and me." Kurt said. "You make me wonder if there's anyone
else left out there. I spent the last eight years searching all of
California, Nevada, Oregon and Washington. Unless I missed someone in the
mountains, they're all empty."
     "I feel the same way about everything west of the Mississippi and
south of St. Louis." Jeff said. "If I missed someone in the desert, maybe,
but they would have had to hide. I was figuring on checking out California
myself."
     "Just a hell of a lot of bones there now." Kurt said. "So now what do
we do?"
     "The other side of the Mississippi, I guess." Jeff said. "After that,
we flip a coin to search Canada or Mexico after that. I think that's about
as far as we are going to be able to search."
     "Maybe we are the last two left alive." Kurt said.
     "Maybe." Jeff allowed. "But one thing's different now."
     "What's that?"
     "The human race isn't going out with a whimper." Jeff said and kissed
his new lover to show what he meant. "We'll go out with a bang."
     "Yeah." And Kurt moved to encircle Jeff with his hands. They still had
a few hours before they'd have to set up camp for the night.

				  THE END
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