indeed,” Doc answered, smiling.
“What was it like?”
“It was gloriously wonderful,” Doc said, looking out the window at the falls. “My dear sweet Emily and I went on a riverboat ride down the mighty Mississippi. While I knew that she was a lovely woman, I had no idea regarding the depths of her charms. She was warm, vibrant and loving, and even though the word hadn’t been in common usage, if people knew about my Emily, the word sexy might have been in common parlance long before the turn of century.”
“You mean 1900?”
“That’s the year.”
“So men and women spend a lot of time having sex on their honeymoon?”
“Well, now, yes they do.” Doc had turned away from the window and was a little unsure if it was his place to talk about such things with Dean.
“Why is that?”
“It is a tradition that goes back hundreds of years.” Doc pulled up a chair next to the bed Dean was stretched out on and sat. He stared out the window again and continued talking. “Honeymoon comes from the term ‘honey month.’ You see, even though people had always gotten married, they weren’t always faithful to each other. So, when a man and a woman married, they went off for their honey month, in which they drank an alcoholic beverage called mead, a sort of beerlike drink that was made partly from honey. The alcohol helped them…well, have sex, and it lasted a month because it allowed the woman to complete an entire reproductive cycle. This insured that the woman’s first child was undoubtedly the offspring of her husband, since no other man could have had an opportunity to mate with his wife during the honey month.
“Over time the ritual became unnecessary as there was less and less likelihood of a woman’s infidelity. However, the honeymoon still served as an opportunity for a newly wed man and woman to become intimate with each other, so it was maintained as a symbolic bonding period between two soul mates.”
Doc looked over at Dean and saw that the boy was already sound asleep. He pulled a sheet over him, then went to the other bed to lie down.
“Honey month, honeymoon,” he muttered under his breath as he prepared his bed and made himself comfortable on it. “Honey month, honeymoon.”
Minutes later Doc was asleep, dreaming of Emily and the Mississippi nights in which he’d thought he’d found a little piece of heaven on earth.
MILDRED WAS in the bathroom of the room she would be sharing with J.B. She’d taken a clean washcloth from the pile of clean towels she’d found in the bathroom and with a few splashes of water from her canteen, she was now giving herself a quick freshening up before bed.
“How long has it been, John?” she asked, looking at herself in the mirror.
“Too long,” the Armorer said between bites of a pear. He’d eaten several of them since they’d arrived in the room and was just starting to feel full.
Mildred drew her hands up over her stomach, marveling at how tight and toned the muscles had become since she’d arrived in the Deathlands. Although she was stockily built, her body had become hard and shapely. She cupped her full breasts in her hands, pleased that they had become firmer, and if she said so herself, more attractive, than they’d ever been in predark times.
“Too long is right,” she said over her shoulder. “I can’t even remember the last time.” Mildred waited for an answer, but there was none. “John?”
“Yes.”
“I said, it’s been so long, I can’t remember when we did it last.”
“I don’t remember, either,” J.B. commented, “but I do know that it was great.”
Mildred smiled. “Such a romantic.”
She finished up in the bathroom and gave herself one last look in the mirror, putting her hands on her hips and twisting her body from side to side. “You’re definitely in for a treat, John Barrymore Dix,” she whispered.
She left the bathroom and found J.B. stretched out on the bed closest to the window. His eyes were closed and a half-eaten pear was in his right hand, hanging over the edge of the bed and poised to fall to the floor at any moment.
Mildred hurried to J.B.’s side. “Are you asleep, John?” she asked.
No answer.
“John?” She shook his arm, and the pear fell from his fingers. “Are you all right?”
“Huh? What?”
Mildred stood, hands on hips again and doing her best to look indignant. “I can’t believe you’d fall asleep when you knew you had this to look forward to.”
J.B. smiled and shook his head. “I can’t believe it either.” He pulled himself into a sitting position and took one of Mildred’s chocolate-brown nipples between his lips. At the same time he let his left hand slide down between her legs, gently feeling the invitingly warm and moist folds of flesh that beckoned for more than the touch of his fingers.
“Are you going to get out of your clothes, John?” Mildred asked. “Or am I going to have to strip you down like a blaster?”
“That would be, uh, interesting,” J.B. said as Mildred began to work on his belt.
“More than just interesting, Mr. Dix.” She leaned in close, whispering in J.B.’s ear. “I’m going to oil your blaster and pull your trigger. Only in this dream, it’s going to fire…round after round, until you’re all but out of ammo.”
J.B. pulled Mildred close to him, loving her long into the night until they were both spent.
JAK GOT THE MOST comfortable chair he could find and brought it out into the hall. After positioning it in front of the only open doorway to the second floor, he sat down and had a peach.
Down the hall he could hear Doc snoring like someone’s grandfather and wondered how Dean was able to sleep with so much noise.
He looked at his wrist chron. Just another hour to go before he could wake J.B. and get some rest himself.
The soft noises continued to resound along the hallway.
One hour was going to seem more like two.
SEC CHIEF GRUNWOLD pulled back the frame of the door so the rest of his sec men could enter the hotel without a sound. They tread lightly over the broken glass strewed about the lobby, their boots making slight crunching sounds as they walked.
“Fillinger,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.
“Sir.”
“Do a recce of the hotel, find out where they are and report back to me.”
Fillinger was gone without a word, treading silently down the first-floor hallway on his way to the stairs.
“I want at least one man on each of the stairwells, and two outside on either side of the hotel. I don’t want these outlanders slipping away.”
The sec men scattered,
