Chapter 4

Blake Green was beginning to blush, overcome by a powerful sensation of guilt as he confronted his wife outside their tent. Suddenly those feelings of guilt and shame vanished however, instantly replaced by anger and dismay as he stared as his disheveled spouse. He clenched his teeth, biting off the words of pain and rage which welled up automatically into his throat.

Evelyn's hair was tangled and badly in need of brushing, although it had been quite neat when she left the camp to look for water. Worse yet were her clothes, all muddy and still damp from her tumble into the lake. All the buttons were missing from her cotton blouse and the tails of that garment were now tied in a crude knot at her waist, in such a manner that the blouse gaped open in front, revealing the inner swell of each creamy breast. Her face was flushed, and she seemed unable or unwilling to meet her husband's gaze directly, preferring to keep her eyes angled toward the ground.

Blake knew, with that certainty which can only possess an outraged husband, that Evelyn and Tiny had found far more than water on their extended hike to the lake. He was sorely tempted to lash out at her, or to fling himself upon the towering cyclist in a fit of rage, and his memory of his own adulterous behavior with Myrna was totally swept away in the heat of that moment of recognition. He had actually taken the first cautious step into that attack movement when several events happened to forestall his action. First, Luke, the gang leader, was stepping swiftly to intercept Blake, his hand sliding toward the butt of his gun, and then, unnoticed and unexpected, the children returned to camp from the woods.

Blake had not seen his children approaching the camp site, but he looked them over now with a cautious eye, anxious for their safety after his own experience and what had apparently befallen Evelyn. He could see no obvious marks of assault on either Tod or Marsha, and both were still dressed in their skimpy swimsuits, but they seemed unusually quiet and somber, keeping their eyes strangely downcast in a manner reminiscent of Evelyn's own behavior. A nagging, indefinable alarm bell began clanging in the back of Blake's mind, interrupted by the harsh voice of the cyclist called Luke.

"Hey," the biker was saying, "Everybody looks awful uptight to me. This is supposed to be a vacation, right? What we all need is some relaxation . . . like a little swim, maybe."

The other cyclists murmured and nodded their agreement to Luke's unexpected suggestion, and a voice at Blake's elbow chiming in with the chorus told him that Myrna had dressed herself and come out of the tent. Evelyn seemed not to have noticed, keeping her eyes downcast all the while.

Blake saw that there was no point in trying to resist the majority rule enforced by Luke's half-concealed gun. "We'll have to change," he said woodenly. "Our suits are here in the tent."

"Get to it man," Luke ordered good-naturedly, gesturing toward the tent with one hand in almost imperial fashion.

Evelyn brushed past Blake and into the tent. He followed her closely and pulled the door flaps shut behind them, loosely knotting the tie-thongs which held the flaps in place. When he turned back into the tent he saw that Evelyn had already begun to undress, shedding her blouse and slacks with numb, leaden motions.

"What the hell happened down there at the lake?" Blake demanded, his voice a harsh, grating whisper. "Where's your bra? What happened!? ! "

"There was nothing I could do, Blake," she said softly, her voice tearful, eyes still averted as she wriggled into her two-piece swimsuit. "I'm sorry Blake, but there was just nothing I could do."

He cursed softly and fluently, balling his own clothing up in wadded heaps and flinging the articles across the narrow tent in a rage. He said nothing more to her as he slid into his own swim trunks, unable to find the words within himself to either comfort or forgive her after she had let the giant biker named Tiny use her body for his own lustful purposes.

When the couple had finished dressing, each draped a towel about their shoulders and then they emerged into the sunlight once more outside the tent. Tod and Marsha instinctively moved closer to their parents in defensive reaction, while the five cyclists stood in a rough semicircle and eyed them with varying degrees of interest, passing hushed comments among themselves about this or that portion of Blake's or Evelyn's anatomy. Then they were moving down across the meadow in a group, with the bikers still circling and herding the Green family along, edging them on to greater speed on their way to the cool lake.

The cluster of people emerged onto the lake shore at a point some thirty yards away from where Evelyn had been forced into unwilling sexual compliance by the towering Tiny. Evelyn was secretly glad that they were not at that place, both for the still-painful memories it inspired, and for the fact that she had been unable to locate her bra after he flung it aside into the underbrush, and she did not want either her husband or one of her children to stumble upon that token of her adultery.

The Greens were herded sheep-like to the water's edge, and were gingerly entering that cool expanse when the bikers began to undress as if on cue. They stripped rapidly out of their tattered vests and faded blue jeans, then doffed their underwear as it became all too apparent that none of them had or intended to wear swimsuits. Only Luke remained dressed and on guard, while even Lena and Myrna, the two biker women, quickly stripped themselves totally naked and dashed giggling into the peaceful lake water.

Blake and his family followed them only reluctantly, after Luke scowled and gestured insistently with his pistol. Secretly, Blake was glad for the chance to enter the water, for the sight of

Myrna's nude body had instantly rekindled the flames of lust in his loins, and he hoped that the cool depths of the lake would either quench those unbidden fires or at least hide the evidence of his budding erection. In the moment before they were partially submerged, he noticed that Tod seemed to be experiencing a similar erotic reaction, while his eyes strayed back and forth from Lena to Myrna, and then back again.

The naked bikers leaped and cavorted about in the lake like some malignant sort of water sprites. Their loud cries and ribald laughter drifted across the water and echoed back again from the screen of trees lining the distant opposite shore. Tiny and the one called Zeke were engaged in an energetic water fight, but Blake noticed that the women and the other cyclist, the one named Breed, seemed more intent on watching and lingering around the members of his family. Again, a warning voice sounded in the rear of his brain, and Blake sensed that the situation about him was rapidly getting out of control. He was tense, on edge, but there seemed to be nothing which he could do to salvage their precarious position.

Blake noticed Lena starting to drift slowly toward his own position, her conical breasts hobbling slightly with the motion of the lake water, but his eyes were forced away from that spectacle of nudity toward the man, Breed, who was even then edging