Apocalypse, Ch. 12
The bubble car rose rapidly into the air and then went hyper-sonic, bringing us over Riverside in fifteen minutes. The viewer showed the entire town layed out, and I found Greg's cabin, with our van parked in front of it. I set the bubble car to land next to the van.
We got my back-pack and our bags from the cargo compartment, and walked back into Greg's cabin.
Walking in, the place still smelled faintly of Greg, even though we had been away for a month. We tossed our bags and my back-pack in a corner, and I was about to bring up going to the lab, when Greg said "Let's go meet my parents, and tell them the good news". I agreed, and we got in the van and we drove to Greg's parents house.
David and Ellen came to the door to greet us. Greg hugged them and said, "Hi mom, hi dad, I'm back from Washington D.C. !"
"Oh, you have to tell us about your trip!", said Ellen.
"Come on in!", said David, and we went in and sat down at the table. Ellen went to the stove and began to make us all bowls of stew.
I noticed that the house smelled strangely of sex. I wondered if Ellen had just gone though her estrus cycle, like I had. After all, wolf mating season had just happened....
Ellen served us while David and Greg talked. Greg recounted our problems in D.C. with the TSA while we ate, and talked about what D.C. was like, and then he popped the big surprise. "Mom, dad, where going to get married!"
David stared at us. Ellen smiled.
"You're going to get married?!", David sputtered. "You only just met!"
"She's pregnant, dad", Greg said enthusiastically, his tail wagging behind the chair.
David stared at me. So did Ellen.
I wanted to bury my face in my hands, and just barely restrained myself.
I took another bite of my stew.
"Greg, we'll talk about this later", he said.
"So what are your plans?", asked Ellen.
"Well", I interrupted them, "we're going to sell the bubble car and move in together in D.C."
"Oh, that sounds nice", said Ellen.
"Your not going to stay in Riverside?", asked David.
"Well, I want electricity and running water and stuff", I replied.
"I see", said David, finishing his stew and getting up. "Son, I want to talk to you. Alone", he said.
Greg nodded, and the two of them headed to the bedroom.
Ellen looked at me and said, "Let's go into the garden while the men-folk talk."
I nodded, and we each took a basket from beside the back door and walked out into their wonderful garden.
Ellen walked to the strawberry patch and started picking berries. I joined her.
"So your pregnant?", she asked.
"Yeah", I replied.
"Are you sure?"
"I took a pregnancy test. It came up positive."
She nodded, then stared at me. "Why didn't you use protection, young lady?"
"I... did. At first", I stammered. "But we kind of got... carried away?"
She sighed. "I see."
We picked a few berries.
"So he's your first? Man, that is?", she asked me.
I thought of the hand-full of girlfriends I had had as a young man, but decided to tell her yes. "He's the first man I ever made love to", I said.
"Do you love him?", she asked.
I sighed: I should have seen that coming. "I'm learning too", I replied. It was the best answer I could come up with. I hoped she wouldn't be angry.
"I see", she said.
"But Greg loves me with all his heart!", I added. "He gave me this necklace...", I said, holding the pendant up in my hand for her to see.
She looked at me, and the necklace.
"It's a pretty necklace", she said.
"It means where engaged", I told her.
She sighed, and then she smiled at me. "So I'm going to be a grandmother?", she asked.
I nodded. Not unless I can get an abortion, I thought.
She stood up from picking berries, and hugged me. "I'm sure you'll make Greg a wonderful wife", she said.
I sighed. "I think he'll make a wonderful husband", I said, and smiled at her.
"So when's the wedding?", she asked.
"I don't know. Greg is doing all the planning", I replied.
She nodded. We went back to picking berries.
She sure is handling this calmly, I thought. Far more calmly than I did.
Then I thought of something I had been meaning to ask Jane the dog-lady. "When you had Greg..., was it hard?"
For some reason, I really _was_curious what giving birth was like for uplifted wolves.
She looked up at me and smiled. "I was in labor for a day and a night. I had him the next morning, at home, with David's help."
"Oh."
Fortunately, if all went well, I wouldn't be going through that. But while I had her on the subject....
"So he went to school here in Riverside?"
"Yes. He was a bright child, and did very well in school. We where very proud of him."
And so we made small talk. She asked me if I had a home picked out yet in D.C., and I said "not yet". She asked us if we would write to her every day, and tell her how the baby was doing. I had to smile at that. "Sure", I said.
"I want you to come and visit me if you can", she said. "I want to see my grandchild. I know the trade routes are kind of slow, and the mail takes forever to get here, but you have that van of yours...."
I nodded. She was, I realized, actually making me feel kind of good about being pregnant, and having a baby. It was a strange feeling, but I guess it was mostly hormones. All women must feel this way when they talk about their kids, men too, I thought.
We finished picking berries and headed back to the house.
We could hear an argument going on inside. Ellen opened the door, and the talking stopped.
David and Greg looked up at us. I wondered what I had interrupted.
"We... have to get going", I said. "We have a lot of stuff to do", I told them.
David nodded, and Greg got up from his chair.
"Well, I'll be seeing you dad", he told David, and then he hugged Ellen. "Mom", he added.
They saw us to the door, and waved good-bye as we got into the van.
I started the van, backed out onto the road, and headed back to Greg's cabin.
"So what was the argument with David about?", I asked.
"You", Greg replied. "My father thinks you're a dangerous loner, and he's mad I got you pregnant."
Well, that made two of us.
I changed the subject. "Your mother likes me", I said, putting my hand on his leg and rubbing is fur.
He smiled at that. "What did she tell you?"
"Well", I said, "I think she's happy to be a grandmother."
Greg smiled at me. "I'm happy to be a father", he said.
And that made one of us. I wasn't at all happy to be a mother.
We arrived at Greg's place, and went in. "Greg", I told him, "we need to go back to the lab and use it's computer". I went to my pack and pulled out the sim-stick.
"I was planning on going to the church and talking to the pastor", he said.
"Well, we can do both", I replied.
"I don't want you going alone", was his answer. "I'll come with you, then we'll go meet the pastor."
So we got back in the van, and I drove the twenty kilometers to the lab.
It hadn't changed since the last time we had been there.
I keyed the door with the red access card, and we went in. I went into the admin room, into the executive suit, and sat down behind the desk. I plugged the sim-stick into the computer.
Here goes nothing, I thought, and opened a file window and did a directory search on the sim-stick. I found the 'crxe' program, and ran it.
It opened a window asking me for file names to decrypt. I dragged an encrypted file from the document window into it, and dropped it. It was the log file, because the first thing I wanted to know was what happened here.
The program began to work, but slowly. It told me it would take all day to decrypt the file. So I started dragging and dropping more files for it to decrypt, deciding to come back tomorrow and see how it was doing.
Then we got back into the van and drove back to Riverside. By now it was almost evening.
"Let's go to the church", Greg said. So I asked him for directions, and soon we where at a huge, nicely white painted building with a steeple, and sign out front that said "Church of God".
No way to tell what denomination it was. I wondered if they even _had_different denominations in the future.
We got out, and walked up to it. Greg opened the doors, and we walked in. Inside, it looked like any church I had ever seen before, only much bigger. I looked like it could seat hundreds. We walked past the pews, up to the podium, but nobody was around.
"I guess he's not in", I said.
Greg walked up to a side door and knocked on it. "Just a moment", came a voice, and in a few seconds an eight foot tall disfigured mutant man in a black suit came out.
"How can I help you, Greg?", he smiled.
Greg waged his tail. "I'm here to be married, father!", he said.
The priest beamed. "That's wonderful! Is this your wife to be?", he asked, looking at me.
I nodded. "Samatha", I said, putting out my hand.
"Father Belthor", he said, shaking my hand.
Greg asked him how soon we could have the ceremony, and Father Belthor said "In two weeks time. How about the Sunday after next, right after services?"
Greg agreed, and for the next few minutes we talked about catering, and where to go to get clothes made. Father Belthor led us into his office, and he wrote down the address of the tailor he always used.
We agreed to talk to the tailor the next day. Then we left.
I was kind of hungry, so I asked Greg where we could stop and eat. The town had a nice BBQ, he said, and so we stopped there and ate before heading back to Greg's cabin.
Once inside, Greg asked me what I wanted to do next. I couldn't think of anything, and told him so. "We're getting married!", he said with a kiss. "Let's celebrate!", and he took out his moonshine from his locker and poured two cups, then dug out his corn-cob pipe and stuffed it with pot.
I took my cup and sipped it. "Don't drink more than one", he told me, "you're pregnant, after all."
Right. He didn't need to remind me of that.
Greg lit the pipe, puffed, and passed it. I took a drag, savoring the texture of the weed.
Soon, we where pleasantly buzzed. Then we started to make out. Finally, we took each others clothes off and Greg led me to bed, stopping only to grab the vibrator from our bags.
Greg gave me oral until I couldn't take it anymore, then masturbated me with the vibrator while sucking my tits until I came, then he fucked me until I came again. Then we cuddled up together and slept.
The next morning we went shopping in Riverside's open market for food, using the last of our money, and came back to home to make breakfast. We decided then to pull all of our money from the First Bank of Solarville, so we had something to spend on the wedding. So we drove to Solarville, pulled our gold out, and drove back to Riverside, to the tailor that Father Belthor had suggested.
We had our measurements taken, paid the tailor in advance, and was told our garments would be ready within the week.
Then we went to the Church of God, and paid the good father to arrange for catering and the wedding ceremony. We where told that about half the congregation would be there to witness the wedding, so we where looking at about two hundred people, if past weddings where any guide.
We locked the rest of our gold in the bubble car, and drove back to the lab in the van. We went to the computer in the executive suit, and found that it had decrypted the log file, and was working on the other documents I had given it. I had it print out the log file, and then ordered it to decrypt _all_the files on the computer.
According to the progress report it was giving me, that would take a month.
So we drove back to the cabin, and Greg made dinner while I went over the log file.
It was entitled Project Morpheus, was property of the Indianapolis Army of the Resistance (IAR), and was labeled Classified.
Indianapolis was right down the road, past the lab, I remembered. But wasn't it supposed to be inhabited by devolved cannibalistic mutants? That's what Greg had told me.
Extremely curious, I read it from beginning to end. It seemed a scout had found this base, abandoned since World War Four, and the IAR had moved in to do it's genetic experiments. They brought in ten "corpsicles", people who had been medically frozen, and injected them all with the same serum DNA from a mutant female wolf that was resistant to radiation and could regenerate.
Some, it seemed, had died during their transformation. I was the last one on the list. Then Homeland Securities' clairvoyant spies found the base, and began to assault the research team telepathically. So they evacuated immediately by gravity vehicle, leaving me behind.
After that, I guessed, everyone lost interest in the base.
That told me a lot, but it didn't tell me everything. I was sure there was more to the story in the rest of the encrypted files, such as why I was chosen, and how to get in contact with the IAR. I also had a burning curiosity as to who the other test subjects where, and how to get in contact with them.
Maybe I could just fly to Indianapolis? Naw, it sounded too dangerous, especially without guns.
Finally, it grew too dark to read comfortably, even with wolf night-vision, and Greg and I stripped for bed. We made love, and slept.
And that's how the next two weeks went. Greg and I fished in the mornings, sold our catch in Solarville, did our shopping, and made love every night. I would occasionally make the trip to the lab to get new decryped papers and read them, but they where all technical notes on di-genetics.
And I really started to think about Greg. I had never had a girlfriend who didn't argue with me back when I had been a man, but Greg and I never argued. We seemed to perfectly compliment each other. And I thought about how lucky I was to have run into him in the bar that night. I was, I thought, really starting to like the guy. But I didn't love him....
And I thought about how much he loved me, and that we where going to get married, and I didn't know what to think about that. I mean, to me it was just a ceremony, something I had to do. But to Greg it was everything.
Would getting married be a life-changing event for me? I didn't think so - my life, I thought, would carry on as it had, being all weird and futury. And it wasn't like I could say no - I was, after all, pregnant with his child. Unless I could get an abortion somehow....
After a week, we went and picked up our wedding garb. I put the white dress and shoes on, trying it out while Greg tried his suit and shoes. They fit well. We complimented each other on how we looked, and took them back off.
That Sunday, Greg asked me if I wanted to come to church with him. I complained that I had nothing to wear, but he insisted the dress I had and my regular shoes would be fine. So we got dressed into our newest clothes, and brought a ham for the pot-luck dinner after the sermon.
The Church of God was packed with mutants and uplifted animals, hundred's of people. We gave our ham away at the door, signed the guest-book, and found a place to sit. The church had solar panels, so the interior was air-conditioned. It seemed like half the town was their, with their kid's, some mutants on crutches or in wheelchairs. Women nursed their babies.
We sang hymns, there was organ music, and the sermon was a reading from the Gospel of Luke. I liked it, but it wasn't anything I hadn't heard before a hundred times.
At the end of services, the minister announced our wedding. "Greg Brenner and Samantha Davidson, please stand up", he said, and we did. Everyone applauded us.
It was kind of embarrassing.
Then we all filed out of the church into the park, and had a cook-out while the children played.
Then we went home, and went back to our regular routine.
Then finally, the day for the wedding came.