Here's a sequence from a Science Fiction book, The Wanderer, by Fritz Leiber:
p. 29-30
Colonel Mabel Wallingford studied [General Spike
Stevens] covertly, knitting together her long, strong fingers. Someone had once
told her that she had strangler's hands, and she never looked at the general
without remembering that. ...
p. 165-167
[ Mabel and the
General are in a bunker/control center at least 200 feet underground. Abnormally
high tides have flooded the surface above them. The bunker is nearly full of water,
but a sort of equilibrium has been reached with the water about 18 inches below the
ceiling. Until Mabel makes a mistake... ]
She reached up and poked a finger through the nearest hole in the ventilator, then snatched it quickly away as a stream of water spurted straight down ... [ she has broken the equilibrium ]
The general grabbed her by the shoulder. "You goddamn stupid bitch," he snarled. Then he looked her in the face and he slid his fingers inside her collar, and took hold of it to tear it down. "Yes," he said harshly, nodding once. "Whether you like it or not."
He hesitated, then said apologetically but very stubbornly, "There's nowhere else to escape to, is there, except into each other."
She grinned with her teeth at him. "Let's do this right, you big brass bastard," she told him. Her eyes narrowed. "We're finished," she said thoughtfully, hitting each syllable as if she stepped on stones, "but if we could work it so that we hit the climax just as we drowned ... We'll have to wait till the water's over us—**It mustn't be too soon...**"
"My Christ, you've got it, Mab!" the general said loudly, grinning down at her like a blocky death's-head.
She frowned. "Not all of it," she said, just loudly enough for him to hear her over the sizzling water-spurts—there were three of them now. "There's something else. But it's enough to start on, and I'll think of the other thing after a while."
She unbuttoned her soaking coat and shirt and unhooked her brassiere. ... He entered her, and they got to work.
"Take it slow now, you old bastard," she told him.
...
When the water was an inch from the top of the cabinet they paused for a while.
"Like rats in a trap," she said to him fondly.
"You got quite a tail, Mrs. Rat," he said to her. "I always thought you were a Lesbian."
"I am," she told him, "but that's not all I am."
He said, "About that black tiger we thought we saw—"
"We saw it," she said. Then her face broke into a smile. "Strangling is a very quiet death," she said. She dabbled her hand in the water, as if she were on her back in a canoe—and, for a moment, she was. "That's from _The Duchess of Malfi_, General. Duke Ferdinand. Nice, don't you think?" When he frowned speculatively, she said, still smiling tranquilly: "I've read in more than one place that a hanged man always has a climax—and strangling's like hanging. I don't know if it's true of women, but it could be, and my sex always has to take the chances. At least it ought to help the water a little, and if we could make the three things come together... Enjoy killing a woman, General? I'm a Lesbian, General, and I've slept with girls you never got. Remember the little redhead in Statistics who used to twitch her left eye when you barked at her?"
Just then the water came rilling over the cabinet top, and the ventilator tore loose, and a great inorganic sobbing began as, alternately, a log of water shot down the hole and a log of air escaped up it, rhythmically. The cabinet shook.
The general and Colonel Mab got to work again.
"I won't squeeze so hard right away, you goddamn girl-defiling bitch," he shouted in her ear. "I'll remember you're the woman."
"You think so?" she shouted back, and her long-fingered, strong-fingered strangler's hands came up between his arms and closed around his neck.
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