Quaranteam - North West Ch. 07

"What, was that supposed to be scary?" Feather spat through her mask. "Our people have been subjected to terror and persecution for generations. Our land stripped from us, our rights as the proper caretakers of this land trampled over and over. You don't scare us with your fancy uniforms and armed soldiers."

"Feather, do you ever know when to shut up?" I asked.

"Fuck you, Black," she said, and pulled down her mask and spat at me.

Miriam moved even faster than I could react. The spittle hit me on the shoulder. Feather hit the ground heavily, slammed there by Miriam as she grabbed Feather in an armbar behind her back. The airmen were around us only a second after, weapons half raised as the crowd of protestors started to react.

"Spitting is considered a form of assault even in normal times, but doing it during a viral pandemic?" the Captain shouted loudly to try and be heard by the protestors as well. "That is considered assault with a deadly weapon."

"Harrison!" Kara said, eyes wide as she watched Feather get manhandled while she struggled on the ground. I wasn't sure what she was expecting from me, this was of their own doing.

One of the airmen took over holding her down and Miriam stood up, brushing off her hands. "You have about thirty seconds to begin dispersing," Miriam told Kara. "Anyone still herewill be arrested."

"Fuck you," Kara said. "Arrest us all then."

"Bet," Miriam said, staring right back at Kara just as hard.

I just pinched the bridge of my nose and sighed deeply.

The trucks came in from both directions down the highway. Military olive green, they were transports that rumbled heavily with their beds covered. The crowd of protestors started getting rowdy when they saw the trucks, then started to panic when more followed and they pulled to a stop thirty yards up the highway in both directions and started spewing out people in hazmat suits.

"National Guard," Miriam said to me and Kara as the roundup started. It was chaos. The national guardsmen were rounding people up at gunpoint and zip-tieing their hands, bunching them up into groups of about ten.

Protestors fled into their vehicles or darted into the trees on either side of the highway. It didn't seem to actually matter to the hazmat-wearing guardsmen, though I wondered if maybe they were having trouble seeing through the big bulky masks they were wearing. Those protestors who got into vehicles had nowhere to go - the ditch of the highway was too deep to drive across, and trying to leave by road would have them driving into their own people just to reach the trucks parked across and blocking the highway. They got pulled out of their vehicles, either voluntarily opening the doors or having their windows busted up forcefully.

Kara tried running down to her people, but one of the airmen grabbed her and arrested her on the spot.

"I didn't want this," I said to her. She turned, part horrified and part desperate, to look at me. "Kara, I didn't want this. I tried to warn you something like this was coming but you wouldn't listen."

"Fuck you," she said. I could tell she was shaken. "This is illegal. You're- I'll- Fuck!"

The arrests only took about twenty minutes. I had to guess about fifty people tried to make a run through the woods. More than a few people tried to fight the national guard with their fists or their protest signs. No one got shot, thank God, though a few got tazed pretty good when they got violent. Kara was one of the last people to get escorted to one of the military trucks. She shouted at me some more, but I just tried to tune it out.

I'd loved her once, and I understood her. Fuck, I understood them all. They just weren't being realistic. Most of them had never left the state, let alone the country.

The world was a big, bad place.

"We're not actually going to charge them," Miriam told me once Kara was gone. "The National Guard will hold them all for a few hours, feed them lunch, then transport them back to the Reserve. That's why we didn't particularly care about the runners."

"That's actually a relief," I said.

"They'll get strict warnings about coming back," the Captain said. "Now they know we mean business and can do what we say."

The construction workers were guffawing, enjoying the show more than I really thought they should, but then they'd had to stay awake all night keeping watch on the protestors. Once the main show was over, I told them they could head back up to the construction camp and they did with grins on their faces.

Once the last of the protesters, or those who didn't flee into the woods, were in the backs of military trucks they all pulled away, and moments later tow trucks were replacing them. There had to be at least thirty of them from multiple companies. Soon thirty protestor vehicles were hitched up and getting hauled away, the rest left under the watch of a good twenty National Guardsmen still on the scene. Just like with the protestors themselves, the vehicles were going to get dropped off at the Rez rather than impounded.

"I'm not here to make things harder on these people," Miriam told me as we started walking back up the driveway. "But we've got a job to do."

"You're being more fair than most," I said. "We all know officers who would have thrown the book at them. Fuck, I can name a couple who would have charged them with treason."

"I almost argued for it, actually," the Captain said. "Technically what the leaders were doing could be considered sedition once they were aware they were interfering with a military operation."

"But we didn't," Miriam said. "We've got more important things to do than fuck with the lives of people who feel like they're getting the short end of the stick."

With the business of the protest taken care of, I finally had a chance to talk to Miriam on the walk back up and actually catch up on her life. I'd known way back when I got discharged from the service that she'd gotten a sort of 'golden ticket' with a rank promotion and any posting she wanted as part of the hush-hush cover-up. When we'd met a few years ago in Portland she'd been vague about where she ended up - she was deployed 'overseas.' She was doing 'interesting work.' It was all the sorts of vague language that Erica and Leo had just nodded along to, but I knew was coded to say 'I can't talk about it.'

"Well, obviously I can't tell you details," Miriam said as we hiked back up the gravel road. "What I can say is that I took a transfer to Air Force Intelligence, and started working as a support officer in the SOC for the Pararescue teams."

"Holy shit," I said. "That's super cool. Those guys are pretty gutsy, flying into combat zones to extract the wounded."

"Well, it wasn't just that," Miriam said. "Pararescue takes care of a lot of weird things, but obviously the combat zones were usually the most stressful. So I was there for about six years at Captain and was in line for a promotion to Major and wasn't sure what that was going to mean for my career in terms of the work I'd be doing. Then the pandemic started to get taken seriously in some specific circles and all of a sudden there were big shifts in Air Force command and projects. A whole bunch of women got promoted earlier than expected, and I got jumped an entire rank. Everyone was confused until information about Duo Halo got disseminated more thoroughly across the upper ranks, so it makes more sense now."

"Wait, why does it make more sense? And Duo Whatnow?" I asked.

Miriam lifted a hand in front of her in an obvious expression of frustration as she slowly clenched her fist and breathed deeply.

"Adding it to my notes," the Captain said unprompted.

"Harri, I'm not entirely sure how far I can go into details with you, so I'm going to be vague with details but give you the broad strokes, alright?" Miriam said.

"OK. Don't risk yourself, obviously," I nodded along.

"OK. So this pandemic - there are actually two viruses going on. The first one, the main one everyone in the public sphere has been worried about, that's a respiratory virus. It's like a common cold jacked up on steroids and armed with a machete. But there's another virus that was less publicized and is entirely scarier. Much more deadly, and much more easily contracted. All the pandemic precautions in the world only slowed it down a little. The difference from the first virus is you also add PCP to the first virus and then tell it the human race called its mother a whore.That is the virus you got the test vaccine for, and I'm fucking glad you did because according to reports, it is much more dangerous for men than women."

"So the Air Force pre-promoted female officers to get them deeper into the chain of command as a precaution," I concluded.

"Exactly," she nodded.

"Honestly, I feel a little left out," Captain Bloomberg said. "There's only so many rungs on the Judges' Advocate ladder so I didn't get a rank and pay skip."

"Anyways," Miriam said, rolling her eyes at the Captain. "I got the promotion and was told I was going to be put in charge of a new base up here in the Pacific Northwest, and I thought that was kind of lucky since I could try and get in contact with you again once I was settled to see if you were doing alright. Then I find out my orders got changed by someone way up the chain, and I was getting shunted to coordinate a housing project out in the middle of nowhere.Then I finally arrive in Portland and Captain Bloomberg is the first person under my command, and she runs me through the briefing and whose name is all over my documents?"

"Harrison Black," I smirked.

"So now I'm wondering what kind of karma I racked up to get this assignment, or who pulled strings to put you and I together like this," she said.

I chuckled and scratched the back of my neck. "How much do you know about OGAs?"

The story didn't take long, especially since Miriam and the Captain knew a lot of the back half and background of it. By the time I'd finished talking about my visit from the Agents and the fast progression of everything we were just rounding the bend in the driveway approaching the construction camp and could hear the sound of a large vehicle coming up behind us.

We stepped off to the side and found a couple of large yellow buses coming up. The first one blew past us, packed to the gills with construction workers and surveyors, but the second one rolled to a stop and opened the door, letting Vanessa step out. The construction workers inside started cheering and banging on the windows at me, and more than a few wolf whistles cut through the noise as the guys got a look at Miriam and the Captain in their dress uniforms.

"Shut up, you gorillas!" Vanessa yelled back up the steps at them, and there was a round of good-natured laughter from inside. "We've got a fuckload of work to do to catch up for our deadlines. Put your peckers back in your pockets and get to work." She slapped the side of the bus and the driver shut the door and pulled away.

"Vanessa," I said as she turned to us. "This is Lieutenant Colonel Abarbanel and Captain Bloomberg of the Air Force. Officers, this is Vanessa Peters, the primary forewoman on the site."

"Nice to meet you, Miss Peters," Miriam offered her hand.

Vanessa shook it. "Yeah, you too. I'll be honest, you're a little above my paygrade to be dealing with. You probably want to meet with my dad Brent?"

"No, actually," Miriam said. "Now that the hiccup has been dealt with, we need to be heading back to Portland. There's going to be a hell of a lot of paperwork to wade through for this."

"I'm already doing some stretches," the Captain said, flexing her writing hand.

"Oh, I figured you'd at least want a full tour," I said. "I thought Erica and I could give you a walking tour to see some of the best spots of the property."

"I'd love to, Harri," Miriam said. "And I'll take you and her up on it next time. But everything is moving very quickly right now and I just can't afford to take the rest of the morning off."

"No, I get it," I said. "It's just nice to see you."

"You too," she smiled. "Look, here. Take this," she pulled a card out of the inside pocket of her uniform jacket and got a pen from the Captain. She quickly scribbled on the back of the card and handed it to me. "That's my direct line just in case there's an emergency you think I need to know about right away. But I'll be on site as soon as there are proper facilities available for me and my staff and I'm sure I can carve out some social time."

"There are fifteen minutes three months from next Tuesday still open," Captain Bloomberg quipped.

"OK," I said, tapping the card against the thumb of my other hand. "But I'm holding you to it, even if it's just one beer three months from now."

"What, are you going lightweight on me, Black?" Miriam smirked. "We can do at least three in fifteen minutes, can't we?"

Vanessa and I walked with Miriam and the Captain back up to the construction site proper - Vanessa stopping to tell me she was going to want an explanation for the big blue explosion on the side of the portable - and then it was a quick and formal goodbye as the Air Force headed back through the bustling crowd of construction workers towards their helicopter.

"You know she's got a crush on you, right?" Vanessa said as we watched them walk away.

"What?" I asked. "No. Miriam and I met a long time ago during a tough part of both our lives. If anything we're just a little trauma bonded."

"Did you two fuck back then?" Vanessa asked.

"No, that would have been way inappropriate," I said.

Vanessa snorted and shook her head. "You know, for a guy as old as you, you're really bad at reading women."

* * * * *

Things moved quickly and in a week the space where my house had once stood was entirely unrecognisable. More portables went up, including more networked offices, but so did the first of the worker barracks and most of the second one. Soon Leo, the girls and I weren't the only people living on the property around the clock, and we even got word to expect the site to start getting some flood lights brought in and noise to go around the clock. Deadlines weren't getting pushed back as things got more complicated, they were actually getting moved up.

It was mid-June and the summer heat was coming on in full. Other than doing the occasional property tour for new groups of surveyors getting onboarded my involvement in the operation had declined significantly. The reverse was that I'd actually gotten a contract emailed to me by Captain Bloomberg, backdated as they'd planned, hiring me as a security consultant. So I did what I figured was good consulting and patrolled the camp a few times in the evening when there were fewer people around, and occasionally did some ATV tours to check the further-flung corners of the property to make sure there wasn't anything fishy going on anywhere. Taking Erica or Ivy with me, and us spending some personal time out in the woods, was just a perk of the 'job.'

We'd fallen into a bit of a routine amongst the five of us. So far we hadn't needed to move our compound again, though Vanessa had let us know we would be soon when the second Barracks was close to getting finished in a couple of days since people would be able to see over our 'walls' into the 'yard.' She'd already marked out where we could move to next and one of the tree-clearing crews working on pathing out where roads were going to start getting laid in was going to be retasked tomorrow to get our new spot cleared for us.

Usually in the morning I would get woken up by the smell of coffee. Ivy had quickly learned Erica's preferred method of brewing - strong and fragrant - and I would generally roll out of our bed in the back of the RV and make my way to the front. Ivy liked to prance around naked in the morning, but this morning it had been Erica up front wearing one of her ripped band tees and a thong.

I'd kissed her and she'd hummed happily as she made sure the brewing coffee was finished and poured us both a mug while I stood behind her and kissed her neck and fondled her magnificent breasts through her shirt. Then we sat at the Murphey table and she pulled her thong to the side and sat down on my hard cock, sitting sideways in my lap as we drank our coffee and laughed quietly about the antics of a couple of the construction workers the day before, and how horny Ivy had been last night, and how we both wondered if Leo would get another match like we had with Ivy. Erica wasn't sure her brother would be able to handle a second woman.

Then, when the first cups of coffee for the day were nearly finished, Erica had casually lifted off my cock and repositioned to face me fully, and we fucked properly with her arms around my neck so we could make out while she slowly bounced on my cock. It was a wonderful, lazy Saturday morning fuck that ended in me coming inside of her as she quivered on my lap while I palmed her ass cheeks and hugged her close.

"Mmm, I love watching you two together," Ivy said, coming out from the back of the RV. She was slowly diddling her clit and was completely naked except for her tattoos.

"You could have come out earlier," Erica laughed, still sitting on my cock.

"No, that was so sweet," Ivy smiled, going over to pour her own cup of coffee. Unlike Erica and I, she was a milk and sugar girl. "Plus, now we have all day for me to take a turn as well, yes? So there is no rush to interrupt you two."

"Come here," Erica said, waving Ivy over. As the younger woman did, Erica stood up from my half-hard cock and urged Ivy down towards it. "Get your real wake-up juice before your coffee, babe."

"Mmm, yes please," Ivy grinned, going down to her knees as she took my cum-covered cock in her mouth. She let Erica take her coffee mug from her as she settled in a little closer, putting her hands on my thighs. She looked up at me through her long lashes as she slowly took me deeper and deeper into her mouth.

"Fuck, Ivy," I groaned happily, feeling my cock coming back to full attention again quickly.

The banging on the RV door about five feet away startled me and Ivy ended up choking for a second and gagging as my slight lurch forced my cock against the back of her throat.

"Fuck," I said, pulling it out of her mouth as she coughed again, blinking rapidly.

"Who the fuck is that?" Erica wondered to herself. "Didn't Vanessa say this was supposed to be her first day off since work started?"

"She did," I said, rubbing Ivy's back as she assured me she was fine.

Erica went to the door and, almost as an afterthought, made sure to adjust the gusset of her thong to fully cover her pussy before she used the little tab to slide the blinds built into the door window a little way open to peek out. "Well, it's her," she said, then closed the blind and opened the door.

"Hey Vanessa, you're looking hot today. What's up?" Erica asked.

"Hey," I heard Vanessa say from outside. "Thanks. Um, do you think I can come in?"

"Ummm," Erica said, glancing over at Ivy and I. Ivy was still sitting on the floor between my legs, stroking my cock with one hand as she took a sip of her coffee with the other. She shrugged, but of course she would. Ivy had almost no sense of shame about her body or sexuality. "I don't want to almost traumatize you again."

"Are Harri and Ivy going at it in the back again?" Vanessa asked.

"Not exactly?" Erica said. "Are you comfortable seeing a live blowjob?"

"We can get dressed," I said with a snort. Ivy made an annoyed groan.

"No, it's- It's fine, just let me in," Vanessa said.

I didn't even have a chance to cover myself with anything before Erica moved aside, pulling the door open more, and Vanessa stepped in blinking rapidly to get adjusted to the darker lighting inside the RV. She was dressed down, or maybe up, depending on your perspective. Gone were the long sleeve, ratty and worn shirts and thick jeans she usually wore on site for work. Instead, she had on a simple white tank top underneath a purple and grey flannel shirt that hung open, and a pair of black skinny jeans that had that manufactured-distressed look with all the holes through which I could see her pale skin and the colourful flairs of her tattoos. Funnily, she still wore her steel-toe work boots and had her hair up and back in a controlled but loose bun like she usually did under a hard hat.