Quaranteam - North West Ch. 01-04

To be honest, I was also a little interested in the sibling scrap because Erica's tits looked fucking great jostling and bouncing around in her tanktop, and a part of me hoped a boob would pop out in the chaos. Unfortunately, I couldn't be so lucky and the duel ended with both of them panting, sitting next to each other, with no boob appearance.

"What are we watching?" Leo asked.

"I dunno, we hadn't picked yet," I said.

"Let's watch this," Erica said, seemingly at random, and selected some sort of a baking show.

"Aw man," Leo said. "These competition shows are always so scripted."

"They make me hungry," I said. "Maybe I should start baking more."

"Yaaas," Erica said. "Now we're watching every season just so you can get more good ideas like that, Harri."

The show was easy to follow and clearly designed like every other Food Porn-style "reality" competition. Other than the deliciously described food, the only thing actually keeping my attention was the host.

"She's hot," Erica said during one of the transition scenes, right after the host had finished showing the TV audience the differences between a mousse and whipped cream. It had involved a lot of whisking very fast.

"Not my type, but I can see it," Leo said. "She's got too much of a Fifties Housewife vibe going on."

"That's just because she's so proper British," Erica said. "Look at her, she's gorgeous. And fuckingstacked under those pretty dresses. What do you think, Harri?"

"I'm with you, I think she's definitely hot," I agreed. "And I really dig the accent."

"I bet she's a fucking freak in bed, too," Erica said.

"No way!" Leo argued with his sister. "Look at her. She's all syrup and sweetness. I bet she's dry as a desert down there, and you couldn't fit anything in due to the stick up her ass."

"Nuh-uh," Erica shook her head. "I'd put money on her having a filthy mouth off-screen. Just swears like a fucking sailor. And, hmmm, I bet she probably says she's straight, but has plenty of experience with girls from her Prep School days."

"Sure," I laughed along. "Makes perfect sense. Anything else?"

"I bet she's got a cum fetish," Erica said. "Look at her eyes when she's talking aboutglazing. She's practically creaming her conservative little dress. And she definitely likes a cheeky finger up the bum to really set her off."

All of us were laughing now, and the conversation faded as we struggled to get control of our giggles. By the time the first episode was over, we were hooked despite the silly concept, and let it play. We got four episodes in before Erica called it quits.

"That's enough for me tonight, boys," she said, yawning and stretching her arms wide. Her right arm rubbed roughly against Leo's face on purpose, just to bug him as he pulled away. "I'm off to bed. Good night!"

She bounced up off the couch and made for the stairs, her hips swivelling in her low-waisted sweats. They'd ridden lower, and she was showing a bit of a whale tail with her lace thong panties peeking over the waistline.

"Dude," Leo said, snapping my vision from his sister as she walked up the stairs.

"Uh," I hummed, and slowly raised both arms in an awkward shrug. "What do you want me to do?"

"Just... don't make it a thing," he sighed, then flopped over onto his side. "She's my sister. You wanna watch Deadpool?"

---Chapter 2: Visitors---

The rumble, sputter and hum of the approaching ATV broke my concentration as it cut through the quiet warbling of my shitty BlueTooth speaker long before Leo pulled around the trail bend. The thick foliage up here in the foothills, far at the back end of my family property, created a weird dampening effect so I hadn't heard him until he was almost on top of me. The rumble cut through the thick greenery now and was followed by the crunching of the tires biting into the dry dirt and gravel of the hill trail.

Leo pulled his ATV to a halt a couple yards from where I had set myself up for my morning painting session, kicked it into park and shut off the engine. He was dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, only a little more than I was wearing myself since I'd gone for just an undershirt. It was hot even for late spring, and the mugginess of the Oregon coastal region had us both sweating before noon.

"Hey," I nodded. "What's up?"

Leo rolled his eyes and dismounted from his ride, stretching his arms high and full-bodied before making a jerk-off gesture and mimicking the sound of a small mechanical device, "Bzzzzt."

I snorted and shook my head with a smirk. "Again?" I asked.

Our solitude and variable work hours on my family land had meant that for the past five years Leo and I had enjoyed our little patch of the Oregon wilds almost at will. Dirt biking and ATVing in the summers, snowmobiling and snowshoeing in the winter. Some archery and occasionally hunting out in the back woods when deer season came around - it really was a little forested wonderland and we made sure to put it to use. We weren't too isolated from amenities, but the closest neighbour was a seven-minute drive down the highway.

We'd lived in idyllic, bachelor bliss. The only thing we'd been missing were girlfriends. Well, Leo had maintained an online relationship with a girl from Austria for a while, but that fizzled when she turned out to be trying to milk plane tickets out of him to come to the States. I'd told him exactly what sort of a red flag that sounded like, and things had ended poorly.

So everything but our dating lives had seemed perfect, but then the virus cropped up. My sister and her family had moved down south into California to be closer to her husband's folks way back while I was still in the Service, and they hadn't wanted to come up north, so Erica had been the only person we'd considered offering shelter to even after things started to begin feeling more permanently stuck in Pandemic mode. Now we were going on month two of full lockdown quarantines in the state, and we had no idea if 'the worst of it' had happened yet, or was still to come.

The first weeks before our trip into the city had almost been like a vacation. We got to tour Erica around the property properly, and she got to play with all our toys. We did end up teaching her gun safety, and how just after sunrise you could spot the local deer up in the hills from the back porch (mostly unrelated activities unless it was deer season). Then, after the trip to get her stuff a month ago, things slowed down. We still had fun, but as the world continued to grind more and more to a halt, work started taking up less time and we all fell into a casual state of constant 'will I accomplishanything today?'

"Yeah, again," Leo answered my question. He came and stood at my shoulder to look over my watercolour sketchbook. I'd started doing scenery work a few years ago to practice for my freelance concept art contracts - video games and movie productions all usually had a tiny in-house team these days, but they were so overloaded they tended to frequently contract out anyways. A really good background often goes unnoticed in the grand scheme of things but can make all the difference to impressing an art coordinator. Basing my practice on the wilderness around us made the most sense.

"Am I wrong," I asked Leo, "Or wasn't she at it last night, too?"

"She was," he groaned. "And twice during the day. I don't know what's gotten into her." He walked over to where my own ATV was and pulled out my water bottle, lifting it to me with a raised eyebrow to ask if he could have some.

"Go for it," I said, and picked up the lid to my palette and sealed it over the paint pucks. "And it's not that big a deal. It's just..."

"Awkward, I know," Leo said after finishing his swig of water. "She isn't exactly quiet about it."

"Honestly," I said. "I think shethinks she is. She's just... not."

The silence between us stretched, awkward in its own right. After all, we were talking about Erica getting herself off.

I had met Leo's twin almost as soon as I'd moved into Leo's condo as a roommate, and we'd been friendly ever since. Her ability to handle the casual crassness I'd developed in the military, and calling her brother on his shit, had made her an instant friend that I could respect for her take-no-shit attitude when it came to her business. I also found her attractive as hell, but she was my roommate-turned-best-friend's sister. She'd been a little more slight when we met, but our late twenties and early thirties had only given her a fuller figure that she knew exactly how to show off without being skanky about it. The main thing, other than the whole sister-of-friend situation, that kept me from ever trying to pursue something was that I was pretty sure she was a lesbian. She'd never said it outright, but over drinks in the city in the 'before times' she was always describing the bodies of her hot tattoo clients to tease me and Leo, talking about big tits and perky asses and shaved pubic mounds. It was also surprising the number of buttholes she claimed to see on a weekly basis.

After our trip back into the city, Erica finally started to feel more at home. Our friendliness since I moved to Portland had always been occasional and at a bit of a distance since we had different social circles, but now she was becoming an actual roommate and not a guest.

Then Leo and I heard thebzzzzzt for the first time.

I'll be honest, we were idiots for about five minutes that first time. We ran into each other as we were wandering the first floor of the house, both wondering what the hell had broken and was making a noise I'd never heard in the house before. It was sometime around when I had been scouring the kitchen for a broken appliance that I realized the sound was coming from above me, and a few more seconds before I realized whose room I was under.

Then the soft, muffled moaning started.

That first time, Leo and my eyes met and it was like we'd locked in and couldn't break contact. It was a case of the ol' Dog-Taking-A-Shit stare, inevitably awkward and magnetically locked in. For a solid minute and a half, we both got redder and redder as we listened to Erica tease and please herself above our heads, up in her room. Eventually, we both silently stepped out of the house and onto the porch. We never said a word about it to each other, and definitely not to Erica.

Apparently, our lack of questions or notice encouraged Erica that she was getting away with her alone time, because now two months on into quarantine, we fully understood what'bzzzt' meant when we warned each other that we might not want to go into the house.

"We should say something," Leo finally said. We'd let the silence between us develop so long it had come back around to something more companionable and less awkward. He was leaning against a tree, looking out at the hills I'd been painting while I packed up my brushes and paint, and then fanned my sketchbook through the air to try and speed up the watercolours drying.

"Hey, you go ahead with that," I said, holding up my hands. "I am definitely not the one who wants to tell a woman that we can hear her every time she wants to relieve some tension. And I amabsolutely not telling Erica, of all people."

"I can handle my sister just fine," Leo scoffed.

"Sure," I said. "but we shouldn't behandling each other at all as roommates, my man."

"Look, Harrison," Leo said. "Are you trying to tell me that my sister jilling off above your head on the daily isn't a little... rude? Or something? At least I can get out of the house to the workshop. That's your home and your place of work at the same time."

"Leo, I-" I started, but got interrupted by a squawk coming from the handheld radios strapped to both Leo's ATV and my own.

"Hey, are you guys in range, over?" Erica asked. She sounded clipped. Almost startled.

"Yeah, sis. What's up? Over." Leo responded.

"Any chance you were expecting a delivery today? Over." Erica asked.

"No," I said into my own walkie talkie. "Why, is someone driving up the lane? Over."

"You guys should really get down here," Erica said. "There's a helicopter landing in the front yard, and I don't think it's some new Amazon delivery system."

I looked at Leo with a furrowed brow. "Uh, say again? Did you say a helicopter?"

"Yes, Harrison. I said a motherfucking helicopter is currently touching down on the front lawn. Can you get down here, please?Now?"

"Five minutes," I said back, already hopping onto the seat of my ride. I dropped my sketchbook and palette into the bin attached to the back of the ATV and latched it closed. "If it's cops or something, just don't let them in the house. Give us five minutes. Out."

***---***---***

There wasn't really a 'fast' way back. The trails that crisscrossed the rocky forest of the property were often little more than deer runs, but Leo and I had spent the last five years exploring and enjoying them. Not to mention my entire childhood when I had the run of the place in between school and chores.

We burned it through a couple of larger clearings, avoided the more dense forest areas, and pushed the ATVs to their limits when we cut around the edge of one of the swampy ponds. In under five minutes, we'd travelled what could sometimes take an entire afternoon hike on the easier and more roundabout paths. We were coming up on the house from behind, and instead of pulling up into the garage lean-to next to the old barn, I rode straight around to the front of the house.

A helicopter really was sitting in the front yard, about thirty yards from the house and centred on the old gravel driveway. Two men and a woman in suits were being flanked by four, armed men in black fatigues. The scene almost felt like a TV show, like some CIA officer had come to pick one of us up to go on a secret mission in the Andes to stop an international terror ring or something.Maybe I'm getting my plots mixed up. It had been a long lockdown, and we'd streamed a lot of shows.

Instead of one of us coming out in a suit ready to go do Bond-like action shit, Erica was standing on the front porch of the ranch house in nothing but a fluffy pink housecoat and thick hiking boots, the old double barrel shotgun we usually kept near the back door for wolf or bear emergencies casually pointed at the helicopter people. The robe barely came down to her mid-thigh showing off her pale legs and the bright tattoos scattered across them, along with both of the full sleeve tattoos on her arms. Her dark brown hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail, revealing the stern look on her face. It was her 'don't fuck with me' face, which often also meant, 'Bitch, Iam the manager and you can talk tome.'

I kicked the ATV into park after skidding to a halt, and I was already dismounting as Leo pulled up behind me. "Jesus Christ, Erica," I said.

"Mister Black," called one of the suited men. He was perfectly calm about it, despite the shotgun levelled at him. To be fair, he probably didn't know we kept it loaded with slugs since birdshot could just make a bear angry. From the current distance, birdshot wouldn't betoo dangerous. Slugs could still tear him apart.

"Hold on," I said sternly. The man who had called out was the older of the two, grey-haired with the look of a veteran Suit and the voice of casual command that only came from years of experience giving orders. I didn't really give a shit.

"What?" Erica asked as I stomped up the porch steps. "You said don't let them in the house."

"For fuck's sake," I said. Erica gave me a look, like a disapproving kindergarten teacher with a cocked eyebrow asking me to dare explain myself, and I managed not to flick my eyes down to the considerable cleavage that was bundled into her robe. I'd known that she had the robe with her, but I'd never actually seen her in it before except for brief flashes of her walking down the upstairs hallway to the washroom and back to her room. It was definitely as revealing as I had imagined.

After a brief stare down between us, Erica broke and rolled her eyes, pursed her lips, and handed me the shotgun. "You should know better than to point a fucking firearm at people if you don't mean to use it," I said.

"Harri," she scoffed. "They pointed their rifles at me first. I was showing them I meant business, too."

I think she regretted telling me that. It's hard for me to know exactly what my face does, but in the past people had described my 'angry face' as a rolling stormcloud. I spun on my heels and stomped right back down the porch steps and towards the Suits. I had the shotgun gripped by the wooden stock, my hands away from the trigger and the barrels pointed down but I could still see a couple of the Uniforms were gripping their own firearms with the nervous energy of someone on alert. I also clearly noticed that while their fatigues had US Flag patches, they were lacking any other identification for a branch of service or personal ID, which was in a real grey area of legality if they were active service.

"You're trespassing, and you're breaking our quarantine," I said as I stopped about six feet in front of the Suit who had spoken. He was older, probably in his late fifties, and had the craggy features of a man who had been there and done that. His hair was still thick on his head despite having gone white, and he wore a chunky moustache that Tom Selleck would have been proud of. "Don't dance around. Who are you, what do you want, and why the fuck do you think I should listen to you at all after your goons pointed their weapons at my guest?"

The old Suit flicked his eyes up and down me for a moment, clearly taking a judgment, while the woman Suit scoffed under her breath. She was the kind of person who looked like they were constantly catching a whiff of dog shit, sour-faced and permanently disgusted.

"And I want her, and whichever of you fuckers couldn't keep muzzle discipline, back on your fucking helicopter," I added.

"Done," said the old Suit.

"What? Greerson, you can't-" the woman Suit started.

"Get your shit together, Maggie," said the younger Suit next to them. If the older suit was a veteran, then this one was the slick up-and-comer. "And learn to read a fucking room." He snapped at two of the Uniforms and pointed towards the helicopter, and both of them went without a word. Maggie looked like she wanted to say something else but looked back to Greerson, the old Suit, and found that he hadn't even bothered to turn and look at her. She spun and gave her best storming-off exit, which wasn't very effective considering she was navigating a grass lawn in heels.

"Any other demands before we get started?" Greerson asked. He had a voice like Tommy Lee Jones, that cracking southern drawl that immediately made you think of a tough and sarcastic grandfather.

"Go ahead," I said.

"Good, cause I don't like taking demands, kid. I'm Agent Greerson, this is Agent Walters. We represent an ongoing federal task force tackling some of the issues of the pandemic and quarantine." Both men flashed open silver and gold badges from leather wallets they pulled out of their inner jacket pockets. "That's who we are, and why you should listen to us. And we're here to make you filthy rich in exchange for your land."

I gritted my teeth and could feel my initial hot anger turn cold to match the lifelong, generational grudge that had been ingrained in me since I was a kid. "Let me guess," I said. "OGA. Other Government Agency."

Greerson smirked. "Something like that, kid."

"And what, quarantine doesn't mean anything to you guys? You couldn't fucking call ahead and warn us you were coming?"

"That's not how we work. Look, Black, why don't we step inside and discuss this? Ain't no reason for a showdown out here in the yard," Greerson said. "Show of good faith. Hit the chopper, boys." Immediately the other two Uniforms headed back to the helicopter.