Chapter 15

It was the day after exploring the tunnels. The entire group had shrieked with glee to find another tunnel leading off into the darkness beyond the hospital but had been even more excited to find four more rooms, each about the same size, and with the same furnishings, as the holding rooms, minus the dead bodies and blood stains.

With the ability to close the door from this part of the tunnel into the hospital, the whole issue of moisture getting in had been rendered obsolete. The girls quickly made the decision that each of our groups would have one room, and the fourth would be used as a nursery when that became a necessity. The first room wefound, holding one, being closer to the central room - which, in turn, would function as the main living area - would be the hospital. Everyone was happy, and the exploration continued.

For about another fifty feet.

Then the tunnel split into a T junction, and we decided that was a good place to stop for the day. The rest of the afternoon was spent shifting bed frames to whichever room they were needed, taking inventory of the new medical supplies, and then moving them - along with the storage units and lockers to keep them organized - to the new hospital. I lost Ray at some point during the effort to move everyone.

The exploration, slow and tedious as it may have been, had taken up most of the day. The girls decided that we hadn’t really rested at all and announced the following day would be a rest day as well. I wasn’t there for that discussion; Amy had dragged me into the new hospital, closed the door, dropped to her knees, and vigorously thanked me for my hard work. I thanked her for her’s by pumping her mouth full of cum.

A few hours later, Robyn grabbed my hand, dragged me outside, and demanded that I fuck the ever-loving shit out of her. Yes, she used those words. I fucked her hard enough to leave marks on the insides of her thighs, the whole time listening to her screaming about how she was determined to fit me up her ass, but only after I had pumped a baby into her. She did, however, scream herself hoarse and cum like a freight train when I flipped her onto her knees, slammed my cock back into her, and pushed two fingers into her ass. She was so out of it by the time I filled her that a giggling Liz and Hannah had to come to help me move her back inside.

By that point in the late afternoon, I was exhausted. Exploring the caves had not exactly been strenuous labor, but it had been slow going and required an obscene amount of concentration. That was pretty draining on its own. Add in the heavy lifting of steel framed beds, lockers, and medical equipment, then shifting the rescued luggage from the gun emplacement to the rooms they were needed, plus the vigorous fucking of Robyn, and I was spent. Any notion of sneaking off to see Freja, or even waiting until dark to find out what was in those desks - now that I had found the key - simply vanished.

The sun had barely set beyond the western horizon when Hayley, seeing my exhaustion, helped me to my feet, led me to our room, laid me on the ground, mounted me, and rode me softly and gently late into the night. She wouldn’t let me do anything more than lay there. It was soft, it was tender, and it was the first time since the early years of my marriage that I made love to someone I was so captivated by. It was wonderfully beautiful. We reached our climax together, she collapsed onto my chest, and we fell asleep without moving another inch, wrapped in each other’s loving arms and listening to each other’s heartbeats.

In terms of age, the population of the Island was split into three distinct groups. Tom was the youngest at only nineteen. Whereas most people his age were living the high life in the early years of college, his intelligence had catapulted him through his degree at speeds reserved for the most brilliant of prodigies. He had been working as an analyst for the International Oceanic Authority before most people his age had paid their first taxes from their temp bar jobs.

Hayley, Hannah, and Robyn, ranging between twenty-one and twenty-five, made up the rest of what I called “the younger generation.” All of them had finished college. Hayley and Hannah met and became friends during the stewardess training for the airline, and Robyn had only just qualified as a veterinarian.

The next group was all, roughly speaking, the same age as me. Aged between thirty and forty, Katie was only just old enough to fit into that demographic but already had a career as a high school teacher under her belt. I could only imagine the kind of effect her looks would have had on the male population of her classes, not to mention the curious female students. Zoe and Caroline were not much older than Katie, both of them being thirty-one. I had no idea what they did before the crash. Hell, I still couldn’t tell them apart when they were standing right next to each other. Liz, at thirty-six, was only a few months older than me, and Amy, at forty, was the oldest of our group.

Despite this, her maturity, at least compared to the rest of us, and her position as the de facto “mom” of the group often had me thinking of her in the same terms as the older demographic. Louisa, at forty-five, had spent her life as a wife and mother, and, having started young at both, her children were only a year or two younger than Tom. But it was Ray, at fifty-four, who was the grandfather of our expedition, a reality that he groaned loudly to me as he sat on the log next to me after another vigorous session with his apparently insatiable girls.

“I feel like I’m dead,” he moaned as he stretched and then curled his legs. “They’ve killed me. I’m dead, aren’t I? Do I look dead?”

“Yup. What a way to go, though.” I shrugged as I laid back and watched the clouds drifting by.

“Fucked to death by two stunners about half my age,” he said with a smiling huff and flopped back next to me. “I think I’m winning at life.”

“Well, not anymore. You’re dead, remember?”

“Oh. Yeah, never mind, then. How are things going with your girls?”

“I, too, am dead, or at least aching in places I didn’t know I had.”

“Ah. The trials of island life.”

Tom took that moment to wander over to us, rubbing the side of his hip as he leaned against one of the walls of the bunker. “Hey, Tom,” I called over to him. “How are you doing?”

“Mmmm, am doing good,” he half-smiled while not really making eye contact. “How are you?”

“Dead,” Ray answered.

Tom looked confused, “Ignore him; he’s in a mood.” I chuckled. “I’m not too bad, Tom, thank you, just a bit tired and aching. What’s wrong with your leg?”

“Louisa bounced too hard.”

Ray and I looked at each other and snorted into laughter. Tom looked offended. “I’m sorry, Tom. We aren’t laughing at you, buddy, I promise. But here we are, three guys who would never have anything close to this amount of luck with girls this hot at home, and we are all complaining about it.”

Tom thought about it for a moment, his eyes locked onto the ground close to me, then he smiled. His smile turned into a chuckle, and before long, we were all laughing at the absurdity of our complaints.

“Tom,” I wiped away the tears of laughter from my eyes. “If your leg is hurting that much, you might want to see Amy. She might have something in the new medical supplies to help you out.”

“Mmm, can’t,” he said calmly. “She is checking the others.”

“The others?” Ray sat himself up. “Who?”

“All of them,” Tom shrugged. “They want to know if they are pregnant yet. They told me to tell you to leave them alone for a few hours. Doctor’s orders.”

“Oh, thank God,” Ray huffed jokingly, “then I am going to sleep. Maybe I will be less dead when I wake up.”

Tom smiled. “I want to unpack the luggage. More organized,” He said, almost to himself, and was already turning back toward the bunker before I could answer.

“Okay, well, good luck. I am going to ... do stuff, too,” I chuckled. I pulled myself to my feet, tucked them into my sandals, grabbed a fresh bottle of water from the pile, and immediately started walking.

The bunker - or at least the only entrance we had discovered so far - was on the outer side of the eastern rim of the volcanic crater. The western rim, where I explored with Liz a few days earlier, had dropped away into the sea, the southern side overlooked our landing beach, and the northern side loomed over the expanse of the island. But this side overlooked a small strip of land before a set of high cliffs fell into the ocean. If we walked in a straight line, as opposed to following the river when we climbed up the path next to the waterfall, our path would have led us to these wide, mostly empty grasslands.

A few clumps of trees, invariably filled with birds, were the only things that broke up this perfectly flat and wide open landscape as it swept around the crater and north to the rest of the island. If given a choice, I would rather have avoided the whole area, primarily because, even from this distance, the plains were tinted an almost pinkish-red color from the sea of those red flowers that could easily be seen, even against the almost endless green of the tall grass.

If Dr. Walker was correct, the pollen from those flowers was the source of Mother’s control. Looking out over the field of green and red, I momentarily wondered if there was a way to kill off all those flowers or a way to immunize oneself against the effects of its pollen. Perhaps the answers lay in the locked desk drawers, but that, like so many other things, would have to wait until I was able to spend time alone in the comms room. This opportunity to visit Freja alone might not come around again for weeks.

My legs, thankfully, started propelling me up the mountain and back toward the caldera.

There was something refreshing about being away from the group. I would never have called myself anti-social, even before the crash, but I was a man who enjoyed having the odd moment of time to myself. Whereas some people avoided the solitude that came with being on your own, I liked it. Time to think, time to process, time with your own thoughts, time to de-stress, time with no obligations, no conversation, and no commitments. None of those were anything I resented having in such abundance now, but it was nice to have an hour where I didn’t have to think about them. There was only me, the grass beneath my feet, the endless sky above my head, the soft wind at my back, and the path that lay ahead. For a brief part of my day, nothing else needed to matter.

I closed my eyes, then looked up into the sky and took in a deep breath, letting my legs carry me to wherever we were heading.

I promptly tripped over a rock and landed flat on my face.

A soft giggle echoed through my mind. “Oh, hah hah,” I smirked to myself. “I hope you enjoyed that one.”

“Very much so, my love. I am leading you to me, but the walking part is down to you.”

“Good to know. Thanks. If I am injured, I’m telling Amy it was your fault.”

Another giggle filtered through the wind of the leaves as I crossed the peak of the ridge and started my descent into the crater.

It took me a little while to realize that I wasn’t being led back to the pillbox, as I had been on my first visit to see the Goddess of lust and sexual desire, but was, instead, being taken toward the river. Close to the area our group had first used as a base when we traveled up from the beach. The tall, waist-high grasses tickled the sides of my shorts and abdomen; I hadn’t bothered to put on a shirt in my quick exodus from the bunker.

“Well, that is quite a sight,” the stunning, ephemeral voice drifted from the water as it came into view.

I looked down at my bare chest and blushed a little. I couldn’t help it; I was literally being praised by a deity, and it was going to have an effect. I hadn’t even laid eyes on her yet.

But when I did, my jaw fell off the bottom of my skull.

Lounging in the shallow waters was possibly the most exquisite vision of beauty ever to have graced the surface of this or any other planet. Her flawless skin seemed to flirt with the very light itself and caress the water droplets that rolled over it. Her breasts, perfectly sized and proportioned to the rest of her body, bounced slightly as another heavenly giggle rippled from her plump, rose-colored lips. Her golden hair looked a little darker when wet, but it clung possessively to her shoulders before flowing down her back. There was not a single thing about her that I could pinpoint as more beautiful than the normal human. Her eyes were no more vibrant than Hayley’s, her breasts no more perfect than Liz’s, and her hip flare no more enticing than Hannahs’s, but the combination of all of them, the entire vision in front of me, the sum of the many parts came together to form something far too perfect to be human. “That’s ... umm...” I cleared my throat and adjusted the instant tent in my shorts, “ ... something, something, wow.”

I had run out of words. Sue me.

“Something, something, wow,” Freja laughed again. “I have had men and women writing poetry to me, fawning over me, carving sculptures of me, and praising me for eons. But that has to be the most flattering first impression of my nakedness that I have ever heard. To truly take a man’s breath away ... your ladies are very lucky to have been washed ashore with you.”

I felt myself beaming at the compliment, my mind swimming in the presence of such beauty. I found myself feeling very small and insignificant next to a creature of such enormous and indescribable beauty, yet she looked at me as if I was an equal.

“I ... Umm...” I frowned at myself. “ ... I have the ability to talk, honest. I have been doing it for years. It’s just ... wow.”

She giggled again, rising from the shallows and sashaying seductively toward me. She took my hand and, with a wave of her hand, my shorts puddled at my feet. I stepped out of them and let myself be led into the water. She sat me down, the water barely deep enough to reach my navel, with my back against a smooth rock warmed by the pleasant afternoon sun and my legs stretched out before me. Without letting her eyes leave mine, she hooked a leg over my waist to straddle me and slowly, gently, lovingly lowered herself onto me. “Oh gods, that feels good. It has been too long,” she moaned out softly.

I, once again, became mute.

Freja didn’t move, she just sat there looking deeply into my barely focused eyes, yet it felt like a thousand tongues and fingers were caressing my shaft. Not working to bring me to climax, just gently loving and caressing my granite-hard pole.

“You have questions,” she finally said after a few minutes of blissful sensation. My mind suddenly snapped back to perfect focus.

“I know about Mother,” I said after pausing to consider my words carefully. “And about the people who were here before us.”

I could see the impact of that knowledge on her face. The glow that had been so bright before dimmed a little. A sadness washed over her features. “Would you mind if I ask how you know?”

Dr. Walker was right; either she didn’t have access to my memories, or she was a fantastic actress. “Simon Walker,” I finally replied. “He found a way to leave information for people to find when they were lucid.”

“Simon,” she said wistfully with a smile, her eyes wandering a little in memory. “He was so clever. I knew he would figure it out. I wish he had let me in, but by the time he realized I was trying to help, it was too late. He was such a wonderful man; he never stopped trying to save the others, not until the very end. You remind me of him in a lot of ways.” She finished, her eyes raising back to mine.