Chapter 27: A sexy conference call.
The canned chicken soup tasted like salt and nostalgia, a pale imitation of life before. McKenna washed the bowls in silence, the hum of the bunker’s water recycler a constant backdrop. Jesse was at the map table, a topographic spread pinned under his palms, his eyes tracing the route to the village, to Tally. The silence between them was no longer empty; it was thick with the morning’s exertions, a charged and comfortable quiet.
Then a sharp, digital beep pierced the air, three times in rapid succession. It came from the monitor room.Jesse was moving before the third beep faded, his chair scraping back. McKenna froze, a dish in her hand, water dripping onto the floor. The beep wasn’t an alarm.It was the secure satellite radio.
He stood before the wall of screens, the main plasma display still showing the frozen expanse of the dying village, a few dark smudges that were people huddled around pathetic fires.The radio’s indicator light pulsed a steady, urgent red. He punched a sequence into the console.A dial tone whined, then clicked.
“Jesse.” The voice was female, crisp, familiar.Sasha.
“You’re early,” he said, his voice flat.“Change of plans.I need to talk.Conference setting. Boot up the video.”
Jesse’s jaw tightened.He typed another command. The hum of the bunker seemed to amplify as a second, larger screen flickered to life, resolving into a high-definition feed. For a moment, there was static, then an image solidified.Sasha filled the screen. She was seated in what looked like a command chair similar to his, but the background was softer, lived-in—a shelf with books, a faded rug.She was, as predicted, topless. Her breasts were small, high, and taut, her nipples dark and erect in the cool air of her own bunker.Her red hair was still in that severe, single braid over her shoulder. Her face was all sharp angles and sharper intelligence. Beside her, curled into her side with a casual intimacy that spoke of long practice, was another woman. Light-skinned, with a cloud of blonde curls cascading down her bare shoulders. She was younger, with a softer face and wide, curious eyes. Her breasts were fuller than Sasha’s, rounded and heavy, and she made no attempt to cover them.She watched the screen with a lazy, predatory smile.
“This is Elena,” Sasha said, by way of introduction.Her fingers trailed absently through Elena’s curls.
“Charmed,” Jesse said, his tone devoid of charm.“What’s the crisis?”
“No crisis. An adjustment.” Sasha’s eyes, a cool grey even through the digital medium, held his. “You have the cousin there.McKenna.”
It wasn’t a question. Jesse said nothing.“I’ve been monitoring your audio feeds. The morning was… productive.” A ghost of a smile touched Sasha’s lips. Elena’s smile widened, her hand sliding down to rest on Sasha’s thigh.“The ‘bunker whore’ narrative is compelling. Primal.It’s good for morale. For yours, I mean.”
“Get to the point, Sasha.”
“The point is verification.And morale. Mine.” Sasha leaned forward slightly, the movement causing Elena’s hand to slide higher.“I want to see it. I want to watch you fuck her.Right now.”
Jesse didn’t blink. “You’re getting a little too comfortable on your side of this link.”
“And you’re forgetting who brokered the deal with the Med-Bunker.Who has the tactical overview you lack. This is a simple request, Jesse.A show of good faith.Put her on screen and fuck her. Let us watch.” Her voice dropped, a silken command. “Consider it a remote performance review.”
A long silence stretched, filled only by the low electronic hum.Jesse calculated. Refusal was possible, but costly.Sasha held leverage—information, connections. This was a power play, a reminder that even in his fortress, he was not entirely alone, not entirely in control. It was also, he understood, a test of his commitment to his own ruthless pragmatism.
He turned his head slightly, his voice carrying to the kitchen doorway.“McKenna.In here. Now.”
McKenna appeared a moment later, wiping her hands on her pants, her eyes wide with confusion that morphed into instant, dawning horror as she saw the screen. She saw the two topless women, saw Sasha’s imperious gaze, and her hands flew instinctively to cover her own chest, though she was fully clothed.“What is this?” she whispered.
“They want a show,” Jesse said, his voice stripped of inflection. “They want to watch.”
McKenna’s face paled.She looked from Jesse’s impassive face to the women on screen. Elena was now idly teasing her own nipple, her eyes fixed on McKenna with open interest. Sasha just waited, a queen awaiting entertainment.“Take off your clothes,” Jesse said.
Tears welled in McKenna’s eyes, but they were not tears of sadness. They were tears of fury, of humiliation, of a terrible, understanding shame. She understood the price, written larger and more public than ever before.Her lower lip trembled. Then, with a force of will that straightened her spine, she let her hands fall to her sides. She stared directly at the camera, at Sasha, as she pulled her shirt over her head, unsnapped her bra, let her pants and underwear pool around her ankles. She stood naked under the sterile lights, her body a magnificent, vulnerable offering to the digital gaze.“Good,” Sasha murmured, approval in her voice. “Now him.”
Jesse didn’t wait for McKenna to move. He unbuckled his belt, shoved his pants and boxers down, his erection already springing free, thick and demanding. He guided McKenna roughly to the edge of the central console, the cool metal pressing into the small of her back.The main plasma screen behind them still displayed the frozen, starving world.
“Hands on the console,” he ordered. She obeyed, spreading her palms flat beside a keyboard, her head bowed.He positioned himself behind her, his hands gripping the full expanse of her hips. He spat into his palm, slicked himself, and without any further preamble, drove into her.
McKenna cried out, a sharp sound that echoed in the tech-filled room. Her body arched, pushed forward by the force.On the screen, Elena gasped, her hand moving faster between Sasha’s legs. Sasha watched, her expression one of detached, analytical hunger.
“Look at them,” Jesse growled in McKenna’s ear, his hips setting a hard, immediate rhythm.“Look at the screen. Let them see you.”
McKenna forced her head up, her eyes swimming with tears she refused to shed.She met Sasha’s gaze. Jesse fucked her with deep, penetrating thrusts, each one jolting her forward, making her breasts sway heavily. The wet, rhythmic slap of skin on skin, the creak of the console under their weight, became the only sound in his world aside from his own ragged breathing.
On the monitor, Sasha’s hand was now between Elena’s legs, fingers working with practiced efficiency. Elena’s head was thrown back, her mouth open in a silent moan, her own hands pinching and pulling at her nipples.
“Tell them what you are,” Jesse commanded, his pace increasing, becoming brutal.
“I’m… I’m your whore!” McKenna choked out, her voice breaking on the word.
“Louder.”
“I’M YOUR WHORE!” she screamed, the declaration ricocheting off the steel walls. “I’m your fat-assed, cocksucking bunker whore!This is all I am!”
Her words seemed to ignite Sasha. On screen, Sasha’s composure cracked. Her breath hitched, her hips bucked against Elena’s hand, her eyes locked on the spectacle of Jesse’s ownership. “Yes,” Sasha hissed, her voice a digital crackle.“Make her say it again. Make her thank you.”
Jesse’s hands tightened, his fingers digging into McKenna’s flesh. He was close, the pressure building in a tight, electric coil at the base of his spine. “Thank me,” he snarled.
“Thank you!” McKenna sobbed, her body convulsing around him as her own climax took her, violent and involuntary.“Thank you for fucking me! Thank you for using my cunt! Thank you for letting me live!”
Her gratitude, raw and desperate, was the final trigger. With a guttural roar, Jesse slammed into her one last time, holding himself deep as he pulsed inside her, his release hot and seemingly endless. He shuddered through it, his vision narrowing to the blurred image on the screen before him.
On the monitor, Sasha was climaxing, her body rigid, a silent scream on her lips. Elena followed, shuddering against her, both women collapsing into a tangled, sweaty heap in the chair.
For a long minute, there was only the sound of strained breathing—in the room, over the speakers. Jesse pulled out slowly.McKenna slumped over the console, utterly spent, her skin gleaming with sweat.
Sasha recovered first, pushing Elena gently aside. She looked into the camera, her face flushed, her expression one of satiated, stark power. “Verification complete,” she said, her voice regaining its cool edge.“Your asset is satisfactory.We’ll talk logistics tomorrow, Jesse. Keep her warm.”
The screen went dark, plunging the monitor room into a sudden, oppressive silence, broken only by the hum of machines and McKenna’s shaky, muffled cries against the metal console.
Jesse stepped back, pulling his pants up, his mind already coldly compartmentalizing the event.It was a transaction.A necessary one. He looked at McKenna’s shaking form, at the feeds of the dying village on the other screens.The performance was over. The audience was satisfied.Now, the real work could truly begin. He had a village to visit, a choice to deliver, and the vivid, searing memory of being watched now burned into his strategy, another variable in the cold equation of survival.
The hum of the monitors was the only sound, a thin electronic whine underscoring McKenna’s shaky breaths. She still leaned against the console, her body slack, the sweat cooling on her skin. Jesse zipped his pants, the act methodical, his face a mask of reassembled composure. The digital ghost of Sasha’s satisfied gaze seemed to linger in the air, a new layer of frost on the already frozen world.
“Get up,” he said, his voice not unkind, but devoid of comfort. It was a command to rejoin the living, to resume function.She pushed herself upright, turning to face him. The tears were gone, burned away by a different fire. Her eyes, red-rimmed, held not sadness but a hard, defiant glare.“They got their fucking show,” she muttered, her voice hoarse from screaming. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, a gesture somehow more vulgar than anything that had preceded it.“They did. And you performed.” He walked to a storage locker, pulling out a fresh towel.He tossed it to her.The casualness of the act was its own insult. “It served a purpose.”
“What purpose?” she shot back, catching the towel but not using it.She stood naked, challenging, her body a testament to the purpose.“To get her wet? To make her girlfriend come? That’s our grand strategy?”
“It’s a thread,” Jesse said, turning back to the main screen, to the village feed.“A thread I can pull. Sasha just handed me a little more slack. That’s all any of this is.” His finger tapped the glass, pointing at a faint smudge of smoke from a hovel. “Out there, they’re burning books for warmth.In here, we trade different fuel. It’s not complicated.”
McKenna stared at his back, at the casual power in his posture. The humiliation curdled inside her, fermenting into something darker, more potent. A need to reclaim some shred of the transaction, to pollute the clinical evaluation with something authentically filthy. The towel dropped from her hand, pooling on the floor.
“They’re probably still watching,” she said, her tone shifting, becoming low and deliberate.“Aren’t they? Systems like this, they have record functions.Echoes.”
Jesse glanced over his shoulder. “Possibly.”
“Then let’s give them an echo worth fucking replaying.” She moved toward him, her gait different now—not a retreat, but an advance.“You got hard again already. I can see it.” Her eyes dropped to the pronounced bulge in his trousers.“All that talk about threads and slack. It’s bullshit. You’re hard because you own me, and you just proved it to someone else.That’s your fuel.”
He didn’t deny it. A flicker in his cold blue eyes acknowledged the truth.The calculation remained, but it was heated now, molten.
“On the floor,” she commanded, a perverse echo of his own earlier orders. “Sit.I want to ride you. I want to look at them while I do it.” She jerked her chin toward the dark monitor where Sasha’s image had been.
A slow, deliberate smile touched Jesse’s lips.He didn’t sit. He walked to the reinforced command chair bolted before the main console, the one from which he watched the world die. He sat, the leather creaking under his weight. He unfastened his pants, freeing his erection, which stood thick and ready against his stomach.“Here,” he said. “So you can see it all.”
McKenna climbed onto him, straddling his lap but facing away, her back to his chest. Reverse cowgirl. She lowered herself slowly, guiding him inside with one hand, her other bracing on the armrest.The inch-by-inch descent was a silent, stretched-out agony of stretch and fullness. She sank down until her ass met his thighs, sheathed completely, a soft, choked gasp escaping her as her body adjusted to the deep, claiming penetration.Then she began to move. Not a grind, but a bounce. She used the strength in her powerful thighs and ass to lift herself almost entirely off his cock, then let gravity drop her back down, taking him deep with a wet, punishing slap.Each impact jolted through both of them, the chair groaning in protest. Jesse’s hands gripped her hips, not to guide, but to feel the kinetic force, the powerful slap of her flesh against his.
She stared straight ahead at the massive plasma screen, at the high-definition doom of the village.A child’s figure, pixel-small, scuttled between ruins. “Look at that,” she panted, driving down onto him, her voice ragged. “Look at them… freezing… fucking… dying.” She bounced harder, faster, her words punctuated by the wet impacts. “And I’m here… bouncing on a cock… in a chair… that’s warmer than their entire fucking lives.”
Her obscenity was absolute, a vile poetry of contrast. “Sasha’s probably… replaying us right now… getting her cunt fingered again… watching this ass… swallow you.” She reached back, spreading her own cheeks wider with one hand, giving the imagined camera a lewd, graphic view of where their bodies joined. “You like that? You like them… watching your property… get used?”
Jesse’s breath came in sharp grunts now, his control fraying. The visual was too potent—the vast, gray, starving landscape on screen, and the fierce, carnal life in his lap, offering itself to a phantom audience.“Yes,” he snarled, his fingers biting into her hips.
“They see this… they know,” McKenna screamed, her bouncing becoming a frantic, slamming rhythm. “They know I’m your perfect… filthy… survival cunt! And that village… is just… dead people… waiting to fall over!” She threw her head back, her body tightening around him as a violent climax ripped through her, convulsing her in mid-air before she collapsed down onto him, milking him.It tore the orgasm from him. He bucked upwards, thrusting deep as he came, a raw shout torn from his throat as he emptied himself inside her again, a final, territorial claim witnessed by ghosts and a dying world.
Silence descended, broken only by their heaving lungs and the eternal, indifferent hum of the machines.The village on the screen remained unchanged. McKenna slumped back against his chest, spent, a sheen of sweat making her skin glow in the monitor light.After a long while, Jesse shifted beneath her. He looked past her limp form, out at the frozen waste. “Get dressed,” he said, his voice quiet, restored to its pragmatic calm.“Pack the negotiation bag. The one with the protein bars and the antibiotics.”
She slowly, stiffly, lifted herself off him. “Now?”
“Now.” He stood, fastening his pants, his eyes already scanning the topographic map on an adjacent screen, tracing the route he would take at first light.The transaction was complete.The performance was logged. A new variable, the specter of Sasha’s voyeuristic interest, was now neatly filed in his mind. It was time to go to the source, to see Tally, to deliver the choice that would either end her or bind her to him in a different, colder way.
The raw, shouted truths McKenna had carved into the air still hung there, but for Jesse, they were just more data.The village was indeed full of dead people waiting to fall over. And he was going to walk right in, and see if one of them was worth saving.
And he was going to walk right in, and see if one of them was worth saving.
The silence after Sasha’s screen went black had a different quality now, dense and electric. McKenna’s breathing slowed from ragged gasps to something deeper, more exhausted. She watched Jesse, his back to her as he studied the village feed with renewed focus, as if the pixels held a secret only violence could decode. She felt used, hollowed out, a vessel drained for an audience of ghosts.
“You’re really going to her,” McKenna said.It wasn’t a question.
“The offer stands,” Jesse replied, not turning.His voice was matter-of-fact, a mechanic discussing torque. “One spot.She knows the stakes. Today is the day she decides.”
A cold knot tightened in McKenna’s stomach, colder than the artificial air on her skin. The performance for Sasha had been a grotesque parody, but this was the real transaction. Her cousin, her own flesh and blood, was now the live competition. The morning’s fucking, the vile declarations, the humiliation over the console—it was all just a down payment. “What if she says yes?”
“Then you have a roommate.” He finally turned. His eyes were clear, calculative, utterly devoid of the heat that had been there minutes before. “Or you don’t.”
The implication hung, more frigid than any winter outside.One spot.He would let them fight it out. He would probably watch.McKenna pushed herself away from the console, her legs unsteady. She felt his spend beginning to seep down her inner thigh. “I need to shower.”
“Make it quick.” He was already moving toward the locker where his field gear was stored. “I want to be moving within the hour. The light’s already shit.”
Under the blistering hot spray, McKenna scrubbed her skin until it was pink and raw. She couldn’t scrub away the feeling of Sasha’s eyes, or the phantom sensation of Jesse’s ownership. She toweled off mechanically, her mind a static buzz. When she returned to the main living area, dressed in clean clothes, Jesse was already kitted out.
He stood by the airlock inner door, a figure transformed from the man who had fucked her on the floor. He wore the reinforced tactical vest, its pockets bulging with magazines and field supplies. The rifle was slung across his chest, its black polymer and cold steel a stark contrast to the bunker’s soft lighting.A heavy backpack leaned against his leg. He was checking the charge on a compact handheld radio, his movements efficient, ritualistic.
“You look like a goddamn soldier,” she said, leaning against the doorway.
“I’m a resource manager,” he corrected, glancing up. “This is just the uniform for hostile territory.” He slid the radio into a vest pocket.“The perimeter is armed.The protocols are on screen two. You see anything that isn’t a snow hare on the feeds, you lock it down and you don’t open up for anyone.Not even me. I’ll use the correct code.”
“What if you’re hurt?”
“Then I’ll use the correct code,” he repeated, his tone leaving no room for romantic notions. He hoisted the backpack onto one shoulder with a grunt, adjusting the strap.“This visit isn’t about charity, McKenna. It’s an audit. I’m assessing a remaining asset.”
“Tally.”
“Tally,” he confirmed.He walked to the food prep area and pulled a single protein bar from a drawer. He held it up, the silver wrapper gleaming.“This is the bait. This, and the promise of what’s behind me.” He gestured vaguely at the warm, lit room, at her. “She’s smart. She’ll know the promise is also a threat.”
McKenna watched him, this ruthless pragmatist she’d let inside her, who was now laden with the tools of control.A dark, desperate thought flowered. “When you see her… tell her I’m sorry.” The words tasted like ash.
Jesse looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time since they’d finished.A faint, humorless smirk touched his lips. “No. I won’t.” He turned and palmed the control for the heavy inner airlock door.A hydraulic sigh filled the room as it unsealed.“Sorry is a luxury. It implies there was another way. We both know there wasn’t.”
The door slid open, revealing the stark, gray reinforced tube of the airlock itself, and the massive, gear-shaped outer door beyond.A wave of bitter cold spilled in, making McKenna hug herself. Jesse didn’t hesitate.He stepped into the lock, his boots echoing on the metal grating.
“Wait,” she said, the word escaping before she could stop it.
He paused, half-turned, a silhouette against the industrial gray.She had nothing to offer, no bargaining chip left. All she had was the raw, ugly truth.“If she comes back… I’ll fight for it.For this. I’ll fight dirty.”
Jesse nodded, once.Acknowledgment.Approval, even. “Good.That’s what I’m counting on.” He hit the interior control. The inner door began to grind shut, sealing her in the warmth and light, sealing him out in the deliberate,吞咽ing cold.Through the thick polymer window, she saw him turn to face the outer door. He activated the final sequence.
With a deep, shuddering clunk of disengaging locks, the outer door swung open. Daylight, weak and gray, flooded the airlock, outlining him in a halo of fine, swirling snow. For a second, he was just a man-shaped void against the blinding white of the dead world.
Then he stepped through, and the door began its slow, inexorable swing closed behind him, cutting off the light, the wind, the view of his back as he walked into the frozen teeth of the village.Inside the bunker, the silence was absolute. McKenna stood frozen, listening to the locks re-engage with a final, deafening thud. He was gone.The village feeds on the monitor showed only the endless, patient white. Somewhere out there, in that monochrome hell, he was walking toward her cousin, a protein bar in one pocket and a brutal calculus in his head. And she was alone with the ghost of his scent, the ache between her legs, and the terrifying understanding that her fight for survival had only just begun.
She wrapped her arms tight around her body, but the chill was inside now, permanent. Her eyes stayed fixed on the screen, searching the snow-blown static for a moving dot that would be him, a harbinger of the choice that was coming for them all.