The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

In California when the Crash arrived, many people were disbelieving and claimed that it was a government plot to cut the number of entitlements provided by the state and federal government. For a brief shining moment of time there were no problems with keeping people fed in the state either. When the electricity went out in California though, so did the water. In some portions of the state it was no big deal. Hydro-electric dams plus 100” or more of rainfall kept them just fine. In other portions, where the annual rain was less than 20” and irrigation provided water for washing, cooking, and every other purpose it was needed for it was a serious problem. The combination of no water and no electricity made conditions deteriorate rapidly. Those people who had claimed it was a government plot, joined by quite a few others by this time, stormed the farms thinking they would feed themselves. They did, for a brief shining moment, but when the yields dropped dramatically due to lack of water to irrigate the crops they were starving again. Many died but others, once again, tried to storm the areas that were still producing food.

Since the areas in California that had enough rainfall to grow food without irrigation had already seen what happened the last time people stormed the farms, they were ready. This began what many people now call the “Ag wars” (short for agricultural wars). The situation was repeated in many places. In all the states with a decent amount of agricultural production, some of those in the cities who were starving decided to take over the farms and feed themselves. Unfortunately for them, and the farmers they displaced (or killed in many instances), the people now in charge of the farms had no idea how to run them. They would tend to get in one good crop of whatever was in the fields when they got there and then flounder, eventually starving again. Even in the places where the farmers tried to work with them the people just didn’t understand the amount of work necessary to bring in a large crop without petroleum products and electricity and tried to claim that the farmers were using them as slave labor. This normally ended up with the farmer disappearing under his own power or, when they were unable to do so, being used as a scapegoat by everyone else. It was always the farmers’ fault, never those who had showed up on the land with no idea how to work it.

Oregon, California, and the mid-western breadbasket states were all invaded, or at least their agricultural sectors were, by their own inhabitants and those of their neighboring states. Farms and crops were destroyed and even when they weren’t destroyed the farms would end up lying fallow within a year or two due to a lack of knowledge of how to perpetuate a crop. The same situation held, on a smaller scale, anyplace there were orchards, large berry farms, or other sources of edibles. In most cases the food producing areas were left damaged, annihilated, or unable to produce food for some time, if ever again. The Ag wars took place in mid to late 2015, they were over within a year and a half due to starvation.

Strangely enough, the government continued to be able to supply the military with food throughout this time frame. Some people claimed that the military had seized a number of farms in the mid-west and southern states to do so but the rumor was never proven to us in Colorado. It was just whispers and second or third hand testimony that we heard.

What we do know in Colorado is what happened here. The state government contacted the local growers, whether the food they produced was potatoes, grains, apples, beef, or whatever. They offered to post military guards around the areas that were liable to see invaders and they also offered decade long contracts to purchase the output of the growers. The contract included a minimal amount of gasoline (or their choice of petroleum based fuel) for running farming equipment. It offered payment in gold and/or silver for the crops purchased. It also offered ‘volunteer’ workers. Some of the workers were actual volunteers in the beginning. As mentioned previously this devolved to prisoners over time. Although to satisfy the wording of the contract the prisoners were normally sentenced to some nastier punishment and then told that if they ‘volunteered’ for a farm sentence equal to or slightly longer than their other sentence the original punishment would be rescinded.

Front Range Foothills in Colorado; Mid November, 2018:

The thin rays of a late fall dawn in the Rocky Mountains were peeping in through the gaps in the curtains as I got out of bed. I roused Holly, easier than normal since she was also looking forward to work paying in guaranteed cash, and we both got dressed.

Rita had not been in bed with us when we woke up and I could hear someone puttering around in the kitchen so I assumed she was out there. When we went out we got a surprise. Rita and Jessica were both in the kitchen, looking as though they hadn’t slept yet. They were chatting away and gossiping as Jess cooked something on the stove. When we entered the kitchen Jessica saw us:

“Good Morning, I hope you got some good rest. We figured we’d stay up and make breakfast for you since it was almost 4:00 by the time we were ready for bed.”

“Well, thank you but you really should’ve slept some.”

“That’s okay, we figured we’d sleep during the day while the kids were at school and you were gone, I’ll stay up here with Rita and we’ll take turns taking naps and keeping an eye on things.”

“Sounds like a plan, what’s for breakfast?”

“I’ve got some oatmeal on, I used some of your dried apples and a sprinkle of your cinnamon, I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all, we’ve got more cinnamon tucked away, plenty of it in fact.”

As an aside: Cinnamon and quite a few other spices keep with little deterioration in taste if kept vacuum sealed in a root cellar (or other cool, dark space). Heat, light, air, and moisture are the things that will deteriorate spices so keep them vacuum sealed (air and moisture), in the root cellar (heat and light) and they will last a long time. The other point is that if I can’t get a particular spice any more, I’d rather have a slightly stale, weaker version of it than none at all. Going stale and getting slightly weaker are the two most common problems with over-aged spices.

“I also have some bread sliced down to a size to toast up, and I brought up a treat of my own. Down in Denver there are some folks that come in to town with sealed, salted bacon. It lasts several months without refrigeration. I brought some along with us when we moved in so I ran down and grabbed some.”

“You, my dear, are incredible! It has been, literally, months since I’ve had any bacon and the last time I had any it was just a few slices that were on the edge of going bad. No-one keeps pigs in the area so we rarely see bacon, ham, or pork chops around any more.”

“Well, if you ever want to take a trip to Denver, I can arrange to meet with the folks who have it, maybe they’d sell me a suckling pig or two as well and we could get some in the area.”

“Mmmmm... Ham, bacon, pork chops... It sounds heavenly. We’ll even go in halves on a couple of pigs with you if you like.”

“Nope, my treat if we can get them. I’m yours remember, share and share alike.”

From Rita’s lack of reaction to that statement I assumed their late night gossip had included a summary of mine and Jess’ actions yesterday. Rita didn’t seem to have any problems with it, in fact she and Jess seemed to be developing a good friendship from the sounds of their banter before we entered the kitchen.

“All right then, when is breakfast ready?”

“Now that you’re up, I need 10-15 minutes for the bacon and toast and it’ll be set.”

“Good that gives me time for a quick shower and to get cleaned up. Want to join me Holly? No play, just cleaning though.”

Holly gave me a mock pout.

“Awww, no play? I suppose I ought to get clean also.”

Holly and I showered quickly with minimal grabass. I will admit that I cannot look at any of my women’s breasts naked without wanting to play some so I was incorrect in the statement of ‘no play’ but I did keep it to a minimum.

When we got out of the bathroom the scent of frying bacon filled the house. I never realized prior to the crash just how much I’d miss some things that were very common. Bacon was a graphic example of that. If I found some in the market, I’d pay lots more than I should for it. As a matter of fact I had when I got the last batch that was just on the verge of going bad.

Breakfast was wonderful, apple cinnamon oatmeal, hot toast slathered in goat butter, and several strips of bacon on the side.

“Since you broke out the stash of bacon for us, let me return the favor. Do either of you like coffee? Or maybe hot chocolate?”

This was directed at Rita and Jessica. I knew Holly was a coffee addict and that was the reason I had the stash I was about to break out. Once again, prior to the Crash, I had stocked up on coffee. I went about it in a different manner than most others though. Most people I knew had stocked up on jars of instant coffee. I had gone through a clearance warehouse (bulk items sold from bankruptcies, non-fulfilled contracts, etc...) and purchased cases of individual serving packets of instant coffee. I figured they would be a good trade good but by the time we were trading in earnest I had enough other items to trade that I saved the coffee stash for us. We tried to only have 2-3 cups a week each and with the 5,000 individual servings I had purchased (costing over $325 pre-Crash but well worth it) we had enough for fifteen years from the time we had to start using it. Once again it was a little stale but if you like your coffee and it is the only source, it is a hell of a lot better than nothing.

At the same time as I purchased the coffee I had also gotten 1,000 packets of instant hot chocolate as well. I let the kids have a cup on special occasions or when I had to bribe them to do something they particularly didn’t want to.

Jessica piped in with, “You have coffee? Yes, please yes.”

I swear the tones were on par with the ones she made requesting certain things during sex.

“I’ll have a hot chocolate if you’re sure you don’t mind.”

“You are both family, of one sort or another. We’ll have to work out the relationship exactly later on but, no problem, put some water on to boil, at least four cups worth.”

I went and retrieved coffee and hot chocolate from one of the hidden stashes inside the house. The majority of it was in the root cellar with most of the other bulk items we had stored.

Even with the drinks being a bit on the stale side the room was filled with contented sighs as they were consumed. Shortly after we finished our coffee, Holly and I needed to get moving to be down at the market for the dole. I was carrying my shotgun (which would be locked down in Allan’s office) and my .45 pistol. Allan had said it was not only allowed but encouraged by the guards. The more weapons evident and easily accessible, the less likely we would be to have any sort of trouble. More than once the guards had related stories to Allan about people trying to take more than their share by force. Holly had her .38 but she would be sitting and running a laptop (amusingly enough, Colorado had gotten their hands on a fair number of the hand cranked laptops originally made for third world countries and used them heavily in their day to day business outside of the offices in Denver), scanning ID cards, etc... so hers would not be as easily visible. I was reassured that she had it with her though and that she had remembered it on her own with no prompting from me.

We headed down to the market. It was much earlier than I was used to making the trip and this late in the year we were watching our breath frost all the way to the store. When we got there, I was both impressed and amused. The transportation they had advertised was sitting out in front of the store. The best way to describe it is a golf cart on steroids, one that had been taking steroids for quite some time.

Picture a vehicle with the length of a Greyhound bus but the height of a golf cart. Place wheels every fifteen feet along the vehicle and articulate it next to each set of wheels in the middle of the bus. Now put what looks like a Plexiglas bubble on top of it with a .50 caliber machine gun turret mounted to rotate 360 degrees. You’ll be close to what I was seeing. The tractor trailer that had delivered the dole was to one side of the building and the ramp leading to its roof told me that they transported the ‘bus’ on top of the tractor trailer. There was a cord connecting the bus to an electrical outlet running from a solar generator atop the trailer. I could also see that there was some sort of combustion engine in the front section of the bus. I assumed that was the natural gas engine they had talked about. Several boxes on top of the bus proper were, I assume, solar cubes so the bus could ‘fuel’ itself as it drove if there was any sun. All in all I was fairly impressed although it did look a little funny compared to the vehicles I used to see on the road before the Crash.

We knocked on the front door and Allan let us in. The interior of the store had been rearranged, or at least half of it had, to set up for the dole. There was a large, squared off ‘U’ of tables in one section. A laptop and a chair were set at the center of the cross bar of the ‘U’. There were positions for two guards at the tip of the two arms of the ‘U’ and well back behind were stacks and stacks of provisions.

Holly had the relatively easy job of running an ID card through a scanner (just like an old credit card). If the magnetic strip was worn off, she could punch in the numbers by hand. She’d then verify that the card holder had not received a dole allotment this month, print a receipt on the mini printer (using that god awful shiny heat paper), and have the recipient(s) sign for their allotment. She’d tell me the allotment amount (1, 1.5, 2, etc...) depending on the family unit and I would carry it up to the table for them. Families were allowed to collect their allotment as a group, to make it easier for them to figure out how they were going to carry it all, but otherwise it was one at a time only. The individuals had to be present to collect their allotment if they were of age sixteen or older, either parent could collect the allotment for a child under sixteen and the child did not need to be present. The one drawback to Holly’s job was that she was the one in contact, and closest to, the individuals.

My job was mainly brute strength, pick up an allotment, carry it to the table, repeat as necessary. Be present, visible, and an additional guard (although since the guards provided were armed with M-16 A4 rifles I don’t know that my presence, or my .45, was going to be any additional deterrent).

Allan, in the office, had the machine that could produce new ID cards. Anyone whose magnetic strip was worn out, or anyone whose child had just hit sixteen and needed their own card would have one made by him. It was a quick process, only 5-10 minutes per card. Multiple cards could be worked on at once. In an eight hour day, with a one hour break, he could run as many as one hundred and forty cards if he was working them non-stop. From what he had said before, the most he had ever had to run in a single month’s dole was around a hundred though so he wouldn’t be constantly busy.

Additional guards were out front of the store and there was one more guard on the far side of the store from where we were working as well. The state evidently took security at the dole sessions very seriously. There were a total of ten guards and the bus driver doubled as a guard as well, bringing the total to eleven. Three were stationed on the bus (one in the turret and two on the bus proper with their rifles), plus the driver, four were stationed out front of the store and the final three were inside the store. I didn’t know the location of Allan’s regular two guards but I bet they were keeping an eye on things as well.

“Hey Allan, how’s it going?”

“Not bad, although we might be busier than I thought. With the announcement of providing transport I got a lot more people registering to pick up their allotment on Thursday and Friday. I don’t even want to think about what Saturday will be like for those who haven’t registered in the area yet. The supervisor is saying they may have to run a couple of additional truckloads of supplies up if it is as busy as we think.”

“Well, that’s good then, isn’t it?”

“Except instead of processing the thousand or so people I had originally anticipated, we could be running at fifteen hundred or more!”

“Five hundred a day isn’t so bad, is it? I haven’t done this end of a dole before so I don’t know.”

“At five hundred a day, we’d need to process more than seventy an hour. Or we’ll have to expand hours and be available for ten hours with a one hour break instead of eight hours with a one hour break. Then at least we’d only need to do only about fifty five an hour. That’s at least vaguely possible.”

“Well, if you don’t care and the guards don’t, let’s just run until we clear the line for each day. As long as it’s under twelve hours I’m okay with it, I bet Holly will be also.”

“Let me talk to the guards. You know, it’s nice to work with someone else who thinks you should just work until you’re done and isn’t too worried about how long it takes.”

“Yeah, well ask me at the end of the day and I might change my mind... I do recommend that if we have to run that long we take a second break at dinner time though.”

“Works for me, let me run it past the guards.”

I went over and told Holly what was up.

“At $20 silver a day, I’ll happily put in ten to twelve hours of work, no problem. If Jessica is staying with Sandra until we are home I’m a little less worried about the kids also, so no big deal.”

“Cool, I told Allan I thought that would be your take on it but wanted to let you know.”

A few minutes later Allan came over and told me the guards were up for it also. They were technically on duty 24/7 while out on dole runs so it didn’t make a lot of difference to them how long any particular day was.

The day ran uneventfully up to lunch time. Some of the folks in line groused about us taking a break for lunch but I wasn’t listening. By my figures when the day was over I’d have moved nearly 15,000 pounds of foodstuffs so I was taking the chance to relax on my break. Allan had Mary prepare a light lunch, enough to fill us up but not enough to make it harder to be lifting thirty pounds repeatedly. By the time we got to dinner time, I was getting sore. There were less than fifty people in line so I suggested to Allan that we skip the dinner break and just run the rest of them through. He agreed so we worked through three quarters of the dinner hour and had everyone done.

Holly and I went up to Allan’s office right after we were done, I needed his nice, soft couch to ease my back a little. We left the day laborers to do what cleanup was needed and to restock the piles of food for tomorrow’s run.

“I see why they pay so well. I thought I worked hard at home during the harvest season but this is harder on me, uses different muscle groups than harvesting and the ones it uses, it hits hard.”

Holly came over to me:

“Lie down on your stomach.”

She started massaging my back a little, paying close attention to the muscles that were obviously tense and knotted. I just laid there and enjoyed some of the tension flowing out of my back.

“May I cut in?”, I heard Mary ask.

Holly’s hands were removed and replaced by Mary’s. Amazingly, she got right into the worse muscles and started working the knots out. I began to groan with pleasure as I overheard her talking to Holly.

“Before I was married, I was a massage therapist for a couple of years. It’s like riding a bike, some things you just don’t forget.”, said Mary.

“I’m jealous, I’ll have to get you to show me some tricks. I can normally get most of his knots out but I certainly don’t get groans like that from just massaging him.”

“Well, the groans just tell me I’m doing my job right.”

“Me too, just not when I’m massaging him.”

The door opened and I could hear Allan walking in.

“Well, quite a day. We ran 563 people through. 497 adult allotments and 66 child allotments. That’s about 200 more than we’ve ever done in a single day before. I think we’re getting a lot more people in from the outskirts due to the bus.”

“So”, I groaned from his couch, “I hauled almost 16,000 pounds of food today. Good thing it’s only about thirty feet per load or I might not be moving now as opposed to just sore.”

“Yeah, and I made up about eighty replacement cards and another thirty in new cards for kids turning sixteen, so I broke my record on the cards as well. I think they are going to have to get those extra loads of food up here.”

Mary’s continued efforts on my back were having a wonderful effect, I felt like I could probably even sit up without pain but was reveling in her massage skills too much to consider it yet.

“So, we expecting the same on the next two days?”

“Probably close to the same tomorrow. Who knows for Saturday though. With the new folks coming up this way recently we’ll be busier on Saturday than normal. Most of them won’t have registered for the area yet so they can’t get their allotment until then. Normally the non-registered day is only about four hundred people but between the bus and the new folks up here it could be as busy as, or busier than, it was today.”

Holly knelt next to the couch and whispered in my ear. I pondered for a moment, thought ‘what the hell’ and grunted an affirmative to her. Then I waited for Mary to pause and rolled over.

“Want to get the front some? My back is feeling much better.”

“Sure, I can do that.”

Holly had walked over to where Allan was working at his desk and dropped to her knees. She bared her chest and then grabbed his chair and swiveled him to face her. I had made sure to swivel my head to watch and gestured for Mary to do the same. The look on his face when she spun him around was priceless. She grasped his hands and brought them to her breasts. At his touch, her nipples jumped to attention with the attendant hardening of her areolae as well. As his hands seemed to take over on auto-pilot, from the look on his face his brain still hadn’t caught up, she reached for his pants, unfastening them and lowering his zipper. Grasping his hardening cock, she pulled it out and slowly licked the length of it. Much like her nipples had, his cock sprang immediately to attention.

“If you’d like your hands to continue with what they were doing you’ll need to lie down on the floor.”

Allan complied hastily. Holly straddled her legs to either side of his face and leaned forward to slowly suck his cock into her mouth. Allan, presented with her breasts at an appropriate level, leaned his head forward, drew one breast back to his mouth (Them being able to reach his mouth was a bonus from the stretching her breasts had received in pregnancy and nursing) and moved his hand back to the one that he wasn’t sucking on.

I looked at Mary and was relieved. There was no jealously there, but there was some lust. Leaning up, I whispered into her ear and in a moment she was stripping. My own clothes joined hers in a pile on the floor and when I sat back on the couch, she lowered herself onto my cock, both of us watching the show on the floor next to Allan’s desk. She was only slightly moist but loose enough that it wasn’t a barrier to penetration. I reached around her to fondle her breasts with one hand and stroke her clit with the other.

“Mary”, I whispered into her ear, “Would you like to be taken by two men at once? I’m guessing that even after Holly sucks him off he’ll be able to get hard again if you tell him you want him to fuck your pussy while I take your ass.”

Her pussy convulsing around my cock let me know that she thought it was a good plan.

“Would you like to watch Holly take both of us first?”

“Only if I get to play also.”

“Tell you what, let’s go over there and you can claim that breast that Allan’s hand is on to suck, I’ll remove her pants and fuck her cunt and ass. You can be both involved and watch her take us both.”

Mary immediately slid off of my cock. We crossed the room together and she dropped to the floor to push Allan’s hand away and begin to suck on Holly’s free breast.

I leaned over Holly’s head and told her I was going to finish stripping her and then fuck her cunt and ass while she sucked Allan off. She mumbled something that sounded like agreement around his cock, so I proceeded with my plan. It is more difficult than you might think to strip a woman’s pants while she is straddling your friend’s head. At least it is if you’d prefer she not slip and land on his head. With a little work we managed it though. Allan noticed what was going on despite avidly staring at Mary sucking on Holly’s breast. Even with a look on his face that reminded me of a little boy on Christmas morning he managed to use both his hands to support part of Holly’s weight as I removed her clothing.

I took a good look, watching my wife suck Allan’s cock. The minor twinge of jealously I felt was smothered by the fact that I was going to be using her cunt and ass while he had her mouth. The fact that I had already had Mary’s cunt briefly and would have her ass afterwards also helped. There really wasn’t that much jealously to begin with, something about having five women ranging in age from sixteen to forty-eight at my beck and call for sex pretty much whenever I wanted negated any jealousy I might feel.

I slowly eased myself into Holly’s cunt, feeling her tighten herself up a bit as I penetrated deeply. I began to slowly slide in and out of her at the same speed she was using to suck Allan’s cock. I made it a game, when she sped up or slowed down I tried to match it as quickly as possible. After a few minutes of that, I slide out of her and pressed my cock up so it was riding through the outside of her slit instead of into her hole. The head of my cock would brush heavily against her clit each time I slid it forward and that quickly had her breath speeding up (which interrupted her cock sucking a little but... oh well). As she became more excited and was nearing orgasm I slammed my cock back into her cunt, bottoming out on the first stroke. That was enough to send her over the edge and she began to come, and squirt. I hadn’t thought to warn Allan that she was a squirter so he caught part of it on his face. He took it with aplomb though, and simply used his fingers to push her come into his mouth.

Once Holly was done with her orgasm and back to sucking Allan’s cock, I slid out of her cunt and into her ass. With her newly enforced enjoyment of anal sex I was unsure if I’d be interrupting her cock sucking again so I slowly slid in as deeply as I could and just rested there. Every now and again I’d twitch my cock or slide it in and out just a tiny bit. She redoubled her cock sucking efforts and within a minute or two Allan warned her that he was about to come. She sucked him hard and swallowed his load like the (exquisitely) good cock sucker she was. Leaning over I told Holly that it was Mary’s turn next and that she should come over and pay some attention to Mary while we did her since she had done so for Holly.

I helped Mary back to a standing position and led her to the couch. After I sat down I had her lower herself down on me with my cock in her cunt again. She was soaking wet with excitement by now so after a few strokes I shifted her so my cock was buried in her ass.

Holly came over and joined us, stroking Mary’s breasts and leaning in, from the side, to french kiss her. Allan was watching with interest so I whispered in Mary’s ear that she should invite him over to fuck her cunt. She broke off the kiss for a moment:

“Allan honey, if you get yourself hard again you can fuck my cunt while Tim is in my ass. I’d like that a lot, since Holly just got both of you at once.”

The reaction on Tim’s part was a visible straightening of his cock which had been slowly softening. He quickly joined us, removing his shirt on the way over. He slid in around Holly and leaned forward to bury his cock in Mary. Holly, to his side, continued to stroke one of Mary’s breasts and french kiss her while leaning over so her own breasts were brushing against Allan. Mary had been almost coming before Allan entered her. Once his cock was in her cunt, and brushing against mine through her inner walls, she began to come hard. I was content to just be buried in her ass, moving in and out only a little bit but when she started to come her ass put the squeeze on my cock and I wasn’t moving any more. I moved one of my hands to Mary’s free breast, moved the other hand around Mary’s body to get one of Holly’s breasts in my grip and just held on for a while.

Mary’s convulsions just didn’t stop, after a minute or two of her orgasming almost continually I started focusing on nipples, squeezing, pinching, and pulling on them to distract myself from the massage Mary’s ass was giving my cock. It kept me distracted long enough that when Allan started coming in her cunt I was surprised. The convulsion I could feel through Mary’s inner walls triggered my orgasm as well.

When the four of us were finally done coming (evidently Mary had though Holly was being left out and had gotten a hand onto her clit so she could come with the rest of us) we were in a tangled pile of bodies, half on the couch and half off. We sorted ourselves out and began to get dressed again.

“Surprise.” I said, “Holly had mentioned that I might need to get some help when I mock complained about having too many women. She asked if she could give you a try and see if you’d be a good ‘help’ in that manner.”

“Too many women? Two is too many, or three if you count Mary?”

“No.”, I blushed, “five if you count Mary.”

“Five, what the hell? Just a couple of days ago it was three!”

“Well, you remember Jessica?”

“The goth chick that bought the house next to you?”

“Yeah, she’d be number four. Number five isn’t for sharing though, I’m almost embarrassed about that one.”

“Who is number five?”

Holly jumped into the conversation:

“Well, I promised Sandra that she could have her dad sexually for her 17th birthday. She jumped the gun, and him, a bit.”

I just continued blushing and kept my mouth shut.

“Damn, they were right. You sly dog you...”

“Oh come on Allan, it wasn’t my idea but was I supposed to say no?”

“No, I’m just jealous.”

“Well, she isn’t going to be one of my regular lovers and isn’t on the list to share, unless you can get her interested on your own.”

“So Holly, do I qualify as a good ‘help’ in that manner?”

“I don’t know, I might need some more testing before making that call. Tim said he’d only consider someone for help that he liked and had some degree of respect for and you’re the only other male I know around here that qualifies under his conditions so you’re certainly the front runner.”

“Oh, I don’t know if I can handle more testing.”, Tim said in a mock nervous tone, the grin on his face showing his obvious sarcasm.

“I think you can. I’ll have to compare notes with Mary and we’ll have to see what Rita and Jess think also.”

“And you’re okay with this?”, Tim directed at me.

“Allan, I almost killed myself yesterday when all four other than Mary wanted to be done. That’s an exaggeration and what a way to go if it weren’t. But seriously, with this many women to go around, any of whom I can pretty much have whenever I want? It isn’t a problem.”

With that, the matter was settled. Since we had run over time and they were available, Tim asked the driver if the ‘bus’ could give us a ride home. When the driver found out that the drive would be less than five minutes either way and that I had been a solar enthusiast before the Crash and the new style solar cubes came out he agreed. We chatted about the differences in the solar panels on the way home. Since it was all uphill and one section a bit steep I got to feel the boost the natural gas engine gave the bus when it kicked in.

From what the driver said, the entire bus (unloaded) weighed under a ton, even with the .50 caliber machine gun mounted on top. The bus was as low slung as it was, with wider tires than I was used to seeing, to allow it to not be blown over, or sideways, in high winds. He said the tires cut the distance available on a full charge but that future models were going to come with two tires where each one was now. There would be a narrower tire for non-windy conditions and then a switch that would lower the wider tires and raise the narrow ones. It also made for a good way to not have to carry spare tires since it would be controlled individually per axle and if you blew one type you could just switch to the other and change out the tire when you got back to base. Technically each set of tires was attached to a separate axle and when you switched them out you would be changing all the rest of the things attached to that axle as well, providing more redundancy for problems with the axle itself or the machinery controlling it. It was over my head, never having been a mechanic, but sounded like a solid idea.

We arrived home to find the outside lights on. When we went inside, we found that Rita had been getting a bit nervous since we were running late. Jessica had stayed with her but begged off to head home as soon as we got back. We explained that we were busier than anticipated and had stayed to finish off the crowds on the first day. We also mentioned that the next couple of days might be later than anticipated also because the crowds were larger than normal due to the government providing some transportation. We stayed up for a little while and chatted with Rita, Sandra, and Susan. When we put Susan to bed, we also went to bed though. I anticipated another early morning and another long day. Lifting thirty pounds at a time and hauling it twenty to thirty feet isn’t much, even when it uses muscles groups you don’t use frequently, until you do more than five hundred repetitions of it in a single day. Fortunately Mary’s massage had helped un-tense my back muscles immensely so sleep was not difficult to achieve.

Friday passed in a similar fashion, except midway through the day the truck headed back down the hill to pick up another load since we were going to run out of provisions due to the larger than normal number of recipients. The second day’s totals were 623 allotments, 547 adult’s and 76 children’s allotments. It was a good thing the truck headed back down for more provisions since they had only sent enough for 1200 people and we had run through that on the pre-registered days. Tomorrow would probably be a madhouse if the percentages stayed true, We ran about 33% more than normal on Thursday, over 50% more than normal on Friday, but Saturday (for those who hadn’t pre-registered for their dole) tended to be the busiest day. When I found they had shipped enough provisions for another one thousand people up I did some quick math and realized that we could well be running a fourteen hour day tomorrow if enough people showed up to claim all of it. Allan was estimating between 700 and 800 people for tomorrow, that would put us around fourteen hours for Saturday (with a one hour break) if we kept up with our 55-60 per hour that we had been handling so far.

Once again we were home late, Rita pointed out that we (our entire family, including Jess) had yet to pick up our own dole allotments so probably we should all go down on Saturday. I told them that would work but it had better be an early night if they wanted to come down with us in the morning. I also told Jess, before she headed back to her house, that she might want to tell Steven and Pamela to go down for their dole tomorrow as well. Jess told me she hadn’t seen Steven in two days and that Pamela had been moping around, doing nothing as usual, because of it. I shrugged it off at the moment, too tired to care much. Jess said she’d be up though and she’d remind Pamela that free food was hers for the taking with just a short walk. She thought that might be enough to get her sister moving.

Saturday morning arrived and it was a madhouse. By the time we got down, an hour before opening up, there was already a line with well over a hundred people in it. With that as a portent for the day, I asked Allan if all my family could pick up their allotments first and store them in his office until we were leaving later on. I was actually afraid that we might run out of food even with just over a thousand allotments remaining. He said that was fine so even before we opened we scanned all our cards (including Rita’s new replacement) and tucked the food into what would be the sewing room. Since Rita, Susan, Sandra, and Jess could stay in there they figured the food could stay with them. Mary was going to draft them to help get some more things set up in there in preparation for her equipment coming up from her old house next week.

“Oh, hey.”, said Allan, “These came up with the second batch of allotments.”

He handed us each an envelope with our name on it.

“If it is similar to what was in mine, you’ll be very happy when you open it. The day laborers that were doing the unloading got some as well.”

I opened my thick paper envelope (fine paper making was not anyone’s priority nowadays so the paper we had tended towards being much thicker and rougher than we used to have) to find a sheet of paper (also thick) folded up inside, around something. When I unfolded the paper I found a short note. There was a stamp on the top reading “Colorado Dept of Resource Distribution” with its address in Denver. A short note read:

It has come to our attention that the food allotment distributions in your area was thoroughly underestimated. We’ve had reports that your team is putting in extra hours with no complaints. As a result, we are providing this bonus for your additional efforts. Consider it overtime pay. Sincerely... MJT

One corner on the bottom of the sheet of paper had been folded into a small pocket and a hint of yellow peeked out the opening. When I pulled it out it was a small gold coin the size of a dime, stamped “$20”. Hell, the overtime payment was like getting another day’s pay, and in gold at that. Looking at Holly, I saw her holding a similar coin. Allan was smiling at us.

“The day laborer’ got an extra $5 silver, I got an extra $20 gold like you two did. Like I said, they’ve got a hell of a carrot, even if the stick sucks. Unless I’m needed upstairs to do some card work, I’ll be helping you on the floor today. Mostly on Saturdays I only do four or five cards. That might be as high as ten to fifteen if we are super busy today but I can still probably get us up to an average of 80 or more allotments per hour and get us finished by dark.”

The day was more than hectic but my ladies came through for us in a novel manner. Even before we had opened they had already taken care of helping Mary with what she wanted. After asking Allan if they could; Jess, Rita, and Sandra started heading out to the line and bringing in any children whose parents wanted them looked after. This brought the confusion level in the outside line down significantly from where it would’ve been otherwise. The ladies took turns with two of them and Susan in the back room on the ground floor watching the children and keeping them occupied. The third of the older women would be out near the table with us and when parents whose children were in back would come through whichever of them was at the tables would go back and bring out the appropriate children. Every half hour one of the three would go out to the line to bring in any more children that had arrived. Amazingly, some of the kids just didn’t want to leave after they had had time playing with lots of other children. There was a much higher percentage of children with their parents on this day than there had been on the previous ones. It made sense when I thought about it, if you have children that require supervision it makes it much harder to come in to pre-register for the first two days of the dole.

In order to keep myself occupied, I let my mind wander some while I was hauling goods. I chatted with Sandra a bit and mentioned that it might be a profitable venture if she (or Jess, Rita or any combination of the three) wanted to set up a daycare style thing for the regular markets. I thought that it might bring more people in to the market itself if they had a guaranteed chance to not have their children attached for several hours. She seemed vaguely interested at first but when Jess was out again on her turn at table duty I found out that Sandra had very much liked the concept and, while giving me credit for the idea, was going to try to run with it on her own, maybe enlisting Rita to assist since she had jumped at the idea of doing something directly profitable. Jess said that she might be interested also, at least until she got the livestock idea running profitably. I pointed out that they would have to deal with Allan to get a space allotment for it and that maybe Sandra ought to do so herself if she wanted to claim it as ‘her’ business. Jess shared a conspiratorial grin with me at that and then we were separated again as I went to grab another load of goods to deliver to their new owner.

Between Allan’s assistance in hauling and the children being out from underfoot we were flying through 90 or more allotments per hour. It would’ve been faster except for the occasional problems like the gentleman who insisted that he always picked up both his and his wife’s allotments without her there. That particular problem persisted until a guard escorted the individual outside, none too gently, and confiscated his alleged wife’s card. He was told she could pick it up on any market day from the manager of the store, so long as she matched the picture. As far as I know, Allan never did have someone come to claim that card.

We ran through 1158 more allotments that day. With the breakdown between adults and children at about five adult allotments for each one child’s allotment there were only 24 full allotments left at the end of the day. Someone had gauged demand pretty damn well when they decided what to ship up on the second load. The supervisor with the dole told us to split that up however we wanted or create some sort of food bank with it since their policy was to not reload unless they had 50 or more allotments remaining. Sounded a little wasteful to me but since I was going to benefit from it I didn’t argue. The supervisor did suggest that we give each of the ladies that had been doing childcare an extra kid’s size allotment as payment for the childcare and he was going to suggest setting up something similar at other sites to both the home office and the individual dole distributors as it had sped up the process considerably.

Finally we were finished up and could head home. We collected our regular pay and, along with the bonuses, that gave us a considerable influx of hard cash to our household finances. The bus driver came along and asked if we wanted to get another ride home. It was snowing out, which I hadn’t realized since I was inside and away from the windows all day, and there were several inches on the ground already. The allotment team had been radioed and told to stay overnight if possible so the driver had some spare time. Since we had a rather large amount of goods between us we accepted (six people and a combined weight of 225 pounds of goods to get home after the bonus for the ladies doing daycare). We told Allan that we would pick up some portion of the remaining allotments after the next market if he decided that we should split them up and climbed onto the bus.

Surprisingly the bus had little problem with the snow since it was light weight and the weight was distributed over quite a few drive wheels. In addition the torque on the wheels was low enough that spinning them out was difficult in the snow. The driver did mention that ice was an entirely different story though, the bus got little to no traction on ice. He figured that was why they were told to stay put, the road through the canyon leading back towards Denver iced up quickly in this kind of weather but around noon tomorrow should be mostly melted off already unless we got more than six inches of snow.

He dropped us off with a friendly wave, evidently he had appreciated the interest I showed in his vehicle earlier on and had wanted to be able to chat about it (read that as brag about it) some more. I guess he loved his job or something, I know he loved that bus like a child.

Jess headed down towards her house, carrying her allotment and a half. Pamela never had shown up for hers that I saw although she might well have gone through without me noticing with the speed we had been processing people earlier in the day.

We went inside and tried to find storage space for 180 pounds of provisions (an allotment for me, one for Holly, one and a half for Rita, a full plus a half for Sandra, and a half and a half for Susan). Much of it was just left on the floor in the kitchen to get moved into the root cellar/storage area tomorrow. We stoked the fire until it was burning nicely and just sat back to relax and try to unwind from the past few days. Susan was allowed to stay up a bit later than normal since she had helped watching the kids all day and might need some relaxation herself.

Around 10:30 we sent Susan off to bed and I broke out a jug of applejack, I figured a drink or two would help my own muscles relax some and Holly and Sandra were amenable to a few drinks as well. When I mentioned why I was breaking it out, the two of them started to tag team massage me. One working until her fingers started to get tired then swapping off with the other. They had me very nearly totally relaxed when the normal silence of the neighborhood evening was interrupted, first by the ‘blat’ of an air horn (the guards carried these to alert the neighborhood to potential problems that might affect the neighborhood as a whole), and then by the distinctive sound of small arms fire. I’ll tell you, I was tense again in an instant.

I jumped up and, mindful of the snow, ran to my closet to grab my snow boots. As I was doing so I yelled for Holly to get my .45 and shotgun and a box of ammo for each. After I had my boots on I headed back for the door and grabbed my heavy weight camouflage jacket, (a relic of an ROTC course I took in college. With its liner it was still one of the warmest jackets I had). Tossing it on and securing it, I grabbed fingerless gloves, a kiss from each of the ladies, my weapons, a small first aid kit that fit in my pocket, and then I headed out the door. When I got outside I could tell the gunfire was coming from the eastern edge of the neighborhood. It was about a quarter mile away from where I was but the general meaning of the air horn was “grab your weapons and get up here for support, we have a large problem”.

As I trotted/slid up the street I could see a few other individuals coming out of their houses, equipped with anything from just handguns to heavy caliber rifles and most things in between. I chose my shotgun and pistol because my rifles were not heavy caliber and if we had to fight they would be of less use in the dark than those I was bringing. In the daylight I could aim well enough that the rifles would still be effective against people even with their smaller caliber but not at night.

I checked to ensure both weapons were loaded with their safeties on. I couldn’t decide which would be more embarrassing, falling in the snow and shooting myself or going to fire at an intruder and finding the weapon empty. It’s strange what passes through your mind when you know you’re about to be in a firefight.

I slowed when I got close to the area I could hear the gunfire in. I went off the side of the road and into the trees to get a look. It appeared that the guards and some of the residents closer to this end of the neighborhood had taken positions in our foxholes.

As an aside: Once a year, everyone in the neighborhood that was capable of doing so took the time to clean out and tidy up the foxholes we had lined the edges of the area with several years back. Then we covered them with half inch plywood to conceal them and keep them from filling in and then we forgot about them for another year, except for situations like this which was why we had dug them in the first place. They were emplaced on the western, eastern, and southern approaches to the neighborhood in areas we thought likely to see problems if someone tried to attack us.

Several of the houses in the area had floodlights on and pointed out into the woods. Two of the people in the foxholes had portable halogen floods that they had positioned to illuminate the area. I could see the distinctive flashes of light from guns firing out in the woods and in the illuminated area there were several immobile bodies visible. After hearing a few rounds get a bit too close to me, not aimed but I was behind the defenders from where the attackers were firing, I decided discretion was the better part of valor and started a low scuttle towards the closest foxhole.

The foxhole I entered was empty and I had to push the plywood out of the way to get in. The foxholes were marked with light colored strips of cloth on the side closer to the neighborhood just so you could find them in minimal light. I pushed the plywood just enough to slide in and once I was in I started to push the cover totally off so I could move around in the foxhole. Unfortunately it caught on something, the areas they slid into were supposed to be clear but the maintenance cycle took place in the summer so it had been a while and evidently something had fallen in to block it.

I flipped the plywood up and over to clear the foxhole and a hail of bullets tore it from my hand. I dropped flat on my back as the plywood sailed over the hole and, due to some severe time dilation, I would swear I could see the moon (just shy of full) through some of the holes that were appearing in the board. To me, the split second it took for the board to be shot out of my hands and go sailing away seemed to last a year or two. If my adrenaline hadn’t been pumping at full prior to that, it certainly was after.

I got up into a crouch and looked out over the edge of the foxhole. A slithering noise behind me had me spinning around, shotgun ready to fire. I felt both foolish and relieved when I went to pull the trigger and realized the safety was still on since a moment later I recognized Steven sliding into the hole. He had some small caliber piece of crap handgun that I didn’t recognize but at least he was here.

I turned back to the front of the foxhole and, looking out, I guessed that the attackers were spread anywhere from fifty to a hundred yards out into the woods. The closest ones, at fifty yards, were on the outer edges with those further away forming the point of a ‘V’. I couldn’t make an estimate of how many were out there but there were quite a few bullets flying our way so either there were a lot or they had full auto weapons.

I knew my shotgun was fairly accurate to fifty yards but I hoped to hell that some of the large caliber rifles I was hearing were on our side because the attackers at a hundred yards were well out of my reliable range. I remembered to remove the safety this time and waited for a flash from one of the attackers that were closer in. When I saw it I fired, no clue if I hit anyone or not but I kept watching the area.

I continued to fire at any flashes I saw in the fifty to sixty yard range. That range was where I knew my shotgun was accurate and I could reliably hit targets when practicing. Either someone hit them or they fell back because after a few minutes the closest flashes from firing were out to about seventy-five yards or so. I stopped firing to conserve ammo and took a look around. Steven had a slightly panicked look on his face and was crouching in the hole, watching the forest.

“Steven, you okay man? You look a little green around the gills.”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Just not a situation I had ever imagined myself in. How the hell can you be so calm?”

“You think I’m calm? I must be putting on a good show then because I feel like I’m about to piss myself, felt that way ever since the cover to this foxhole got shot out of my hand.”

“Yeah but you’re up there firing away whenever you have a target.”

“If I don’t do it, I can’t ask my neighbors to. If they don’t do it, I’ve no chance of protecting my family all alone so... It has to be done and I can do it, so I am. Damned if I know if I’m hitting anything though, even with the moonlight I’m just firing at their flashes.”

I looked back towards the attackers just in time to see a steady rain of fire start up from those towards the back.

“Shit, keep an eye out. I think they are trying to make us keep our heads down while they move people in closer.”

“Doing a damn good job of it to.”, said Steven as he ducked below the edge of the hole, bullets whistling overhead.

I wasn’t too ashamed that I was right down there with him because there were a lot of bullets flying by over our heads. I made sure I had the safety off on the .45 and that there was one in the pipe. I was worried that if we stayed down too long we’d find company coming in over the edge. All the sudden the concentrated firing stopped.

“Oh shit, here comes company!”

I dropped the shotgun on the ground and slid my head up over the edge. There, about ten yards in front of the foxhole, was a group of three headed our way. You read about people popping up from cover to fire, to hell with that. I eased up just enough to get my .45 in action and started firing. One of the figures dropped with my first shot and then there was lead in the air all around me again. I heard a gun off to my side as Steven started firing as well. Firing again I saw a figure spin but not drop and I rapidly fell into the mode I’d practiced firing in. As I recovered my wits I started firing two bullet groups, one aimed for the chest and a second for the head. The ‘double tap’ wasn’t quite designed to be used this way but it was an ingrained habit that took over and let me keep firing. Either Steven or I got another one of the three that had been coming our way and then the third was on top of us, still firing. I felt a burning sensation in my arm and figured he’d winged me. As he tried to come over the edge of the hole I fired the last bullet from my pistol. I’d shot two singles and four double taps so this was the last shot I had from my ten in the clip and one in the pipe. I sighed with relief as his leap into the hole ended with him sprawled on the floor, not moving. Just in case I kicked his gun away from him, over towards Steven.

“Steven, pick that one up. Might be a better choice for the situation if he has more ammo on him.”

When I got no reply, I looked over and saw Steven also lying on the floor of the foxhole, crumpled into a heap. I checked on the attacker first, feeling his neck for a pulse. If he had one, I wasn’t finding it. Then I headed over to Steven and knelt down. He had a pulse although it was kind of irregular. I looked him over and saw a big chunk of rock, about a quarter the size of my first, driven into his ribs. It looked like it had penetrated his skin and lodged an inch or two in, not far enough to threaten internal organs but I was betting that the ribs surrounding it were staved in as the reason it hadn’t penetrated further was that it had hit the ribs. I pulled the rock out and stopped the bleeding as best I could with the contents of my first aid kit. It wasn’t really intended for something like this but it was better than nothing.

Meanwhile the firefight was continuing in other sections. I had done what I could for Steven and checked the attacker without putting my head out of the hole. Now I leaned up again and saw that the fire flashes were much closer in than they had been, the furthest ones out were about at the maximum effective range of my shotgun. I holstered the .45 and picked my shotgun back up. I quickly brushed off what dirt I could and hoped that none had made it into the firing mechanism. I reloaded the tube on the pump action and jacked one into the chamber. Leaning out just far enough to see I started firing at the flashes once more. After about the third shot, I started taking fire from the side, evidently some of the folks they had sent in had killed defenders and taken their foxholes. Now they were using them for crossfire on our other defenders. I didn’t dare shoot towards them, not knowing who might still be alive on the other side so I dropped into cover. I would pop up at random and if I saw a fire flash out in the woods within a couple seconds I’d target it and fire off a round. After a few shots like that I started taking fire again. They must have left someone watching this side ready to fire whenever they saw a flash.

I was more hesitant to lean out and fire now when I was guaranteed someone would be popping a round off at me whenever I did. I waited a minute or two, peeking out and seeing that the firing in the forest was growing closer and closer. Finally I couldn’t stand it and popped another shot out at a flash I saw less than 40 yards away. I should’ve skipped that shot as the crossfire managed to nail me in the arm. It hurt like a son of a bitch but I was pretty sure there were no bones broken. It was my left arm that got hit so I could still use the .45 but if I tried to fire the shotgun more I was going to be in a world of hurt. I dropped to the floor again and gingerly reloaded the clip on my .45, adding an extra round in the pipe to give me eleven shots. I decided I wouldn’t be making a target of myself again and that I was reloading the pistol for when they tried to enter my foxhole.

The entire area was suddenly bathed in additional light and I heard a large caliber machine gun opening up a world of hurt on the attackers. Mixed in with the rapid retorts of the machine gun were what sounded like three round bursts from battle rifles as well. They were coming from the road in the neighborhood so I risked poking my head up to see what was happening. The bus, with its .50 cal machine gun mounted in a turret on top, had shown up. It had spotlights illuminating the battlefield and the guards from the allotment shipment were moving in a cautious fashion towards one of the foxholes that had been taken, it wasn’t providing any more crossfire so I was guessing it was no longer a threat. The .50 cal was spraying the woods out where I had seen flashes of weapons firing. There weren’t so many firing now and I could see some dark figures sprinting away from our area.

Relieved I collapsed onto my butt and tried to stop the bleeding from my left arm. I could still use it so I was pretty sure the wound wasn’t too serious but it sure hurt like hell. I finally looked at my other arm where I had felt the burning sensation and saw a long, but shallow, jagged cut. It looked like the rock that had taken Steven out had touched base with me first. I was still trying to get that wound bandaged with inadequate supplies when a voice called out,

“Hello the foxhole, anyone in there?”

I recognized the voice of one of the guards I had worked with for the past three days.

“Yeah, I’m in here. It’s Tim, you happen to have a bandage with you or something? I’m bleeding all over my coat.”

A head popped over the edge and took in the scene.

“He’s ours.” I said, pointing at Steven, “That, on the other hand, is trash.”, pointing towards the dead attacker.

“I don’t know what’s up with me but I’m not feeling too good”, were the last things out of my mouth before I found myself bent over and retching onto the ground. When I was done I fell backwards, away from my vomit, and the cold ground felt as comfortable as the softest mattress. My vision faded to black and I didn’t remember anything else for a couple of hours.

They told me later that I appeared perfectly conscious and kept a conversation going with the guards, but when they tried to put me on the bus I resisted, saying I didn’t want to bloody it up. This despite several other individuals who were obviously wounded and bleeding having already been loaded onto it. They eventually talked me into getting on by having me ‘help’ carry Steven on and just pushed me into a seat and sat on me, literally, once I was on the bus. They took the entire lot of us down to the market where the local ‘doctor’ had arrived already when we got there. They had radioed Allan in advance and he sent one of his guards to get the doc whether or not the doc wanted to come.

I wasn’t nearly the worst wounded of our survivors. There were questions as to whether two of them would make it through the night or not. We had five men dead back in the foxholes and another two dead on the field in front of them. On the other hand, there were at least thirty-five of the attackers dead. The guards had gone through some of the bodies and determined that this was one of the groups of Azrael’s Angels that were wandering the state. It was painful for us but we had driven them off. We probably wouldn’t have without the help of the allotment guards though.

My own memories of what happened started up again with the doctor working on my left arm. The right one had already been bandaged by that point but the doctor was working with some tools and water to try to get some dirt out of the wound that passed through the fleshy part of my left arm. It hurt like the dickens and the first moment I can remember about it was myself letting out a scream as he rooted inside the wound. Eventually he got it cleaned out, flushed, disinfected, and bandaged. As he finished working on it I realized that I had to get home since Holly, Rita, and the rest would have no idea what had happened. The gunfire had stopped quite some time back and I was pretty sure they’d be worried by now. Although the doctor tried to get me to stay in the market for the rest of the night, I bundled back up (with a hole in the left sleeve of my coat and a rip down the right it was no longer as warm as it had been) and headed home. The guards had brought in my weapons and gave them to me at my request. I was hurting bad but felt the need to get back home. As I left one of the guards yelled something about not forgetting to claim my share of ‘salvage’ from the bodies of the attackers.

When I walked in the door, I was mobbed by four women. Jess had come back up to find out what was happening. When the four of them all tried to hug me at once, both wounds were being jostled and I let out a cross between a yelp and a scream that had them all jumping back. As I slid my coat off and they could see the bandages, apologies filled the air followed immediately by requests to know what happened, both to me and in general.

I told them what had happened as I remembered it. My memories weren’t exactly clear and even when I was in the middle of the firefight everything had seemed kind of confused. I did get to reassure them that the attackers that hadn’t been killed had run away. I had good and bad news for Jess, telling her that I had seen Steven but that he had been wounded in the fight.

After my brief account of what had occurred I begged off to drink about a half gallon of water and go to sleep. I distinctly remember climbing into bed and nothing after that until I woke up in the, very late, morning. I had feared maybe having nightmares over what had happened but that night, at least, I slept like a baby. When I woke up in the morning, I was sore and stiff but well rested.

It was fortunate that I had already completed most of the pre-winter things that needed to be done since the doctor had told me I should keep myself to light duty/lifting for at least a week and preferably two. Since there were a fair number of easy, but monotonous, things that needed to be done I could still keep busy while I healed. I figured I’d tell Jess to go ahead and bring Pamela up if she still wanted my help with getting her nightmares to stop.

Allan and Mary showed up a little before noon (less than an hour after I had woken up). I had totally forgotten our plans to have them over for lunch and dinner. Allan brought with him a gift of a few pounds of mid-grade beef cuts he had had stashed in a freezer. He pointed out that we could have some today and rather pointedly mentioned that beef was a good thing to eat to help counteract blood loss.

Allan also told me that the guards had gone through the attacker’s bodies and brought everything worth keeping down to the market. They were divvying it up into lots, one for each defender (including the neighborhood guards, themselves, and the others like me who had shown up to fight) and the lots could be claimed on the next market day.

The day passed quickly, Allan and Mary being good company. Allan told us that the guards were going to be staying for a week and that they were actually sending a few more men up from Denver so that they could try to track the remaining Angels in the fresh snow. He also let us know that the doctor expected Stephen to pull through but that he’d be quite limited in what he could do for a month or more. Allan was trying to figure out something he could hire Steven to do that wouldn’t be make-work and asked Jess what she knew about his skill set.

Aside from having both arms as sore as hell, the day passed pleasantly. We had a good barbecue with some of the beef for dinner and kind of a buffet lunch, just putting plates of this and that around the kitchen.

Jess left for the night shortly after Allan did, telling me that she’d try to bring Pamela up tomorrow. Evidently Pamela had just been moping around the house, doing nothing but sleeping for the last few days. Jess said it was more disconcerting to be doing something while wide awake and hear Pamela wake up screaming than it was to be woken out of a sound sleep by the same thing so she was spending as much time up here as she could.

I spent some time that evening after Mary and Allan left trying to plan a light load for the next few markets until Rita pointed out that either she or Holly would be going down with me each time and they could probably push the cart, even with a heavy load. I blushed and set that plan aside.

The next day was Monday and since there was no market that day I puttered around the house again. Since we had started getting cold and snow I decided to set up some of my indoor vegetables that I grew throughout the winter (in the middle of December it was always very welcome to be able to pull a tomato, radish, or lettuce for a salad from the plants inside). When I knew for certain that we were headed for the Crash I had obtained a large number of translucent clamshell packages of the type you used to be able to purchase gourmet salad greens in. I used these, now, as an indoor growing pot for lettuces, the containers doubling as seed starters. If I started one every few days for two weeks, within three to four weeks we could be having small side salads with fresh lettuce and other veggies throughout the winter. The process was fairly simply so I ran through it quickly, bringing Rita along to show her what I was doing since I thought she might be interested.

The first time I had used them I had used a knife to put 6-8 slashes in the bottom of each of them. So now I just put two inches of combined soil (from our garden) and compost (a 50-50 mix), pre-moistened, into the bottom of them. I then used a pinch of leaf lettuce (not head lettuce) seeds (in the 20-30 seed range) across the top. I filled the rest of my clamshells with soil as well and would plant another batch every third day for the next two weeks. Propping them in my southwestern facing window I put the cover over the one I had planted. When the greens sprouted, I’d take the cover off and use it as a base below the container. I just had to fill the base with water whenever it dried out and in less than a month I could clip lettuce leaves. As long as I left the base of the lettuce plants and only clipped the leaves (leaving the growing crown intact) I could count on getting a harvest of lettuce every two weeks from each clamshell and eventually (if it survived the whole winter) transplanting it into the garden come spring. Every couple of weeks, right after clipping lettuce, I’d add another sprinkle of compost or worm castings to keep the soil fertile.

I helped the plants along with something else I had stocked up on. I used a pair of desk lamps with 6500k CFL bulbs (which came close to duplicating daylight) in the sockets. They were far longer lasting than grow lights and much cheaper as well, even if I did have to use two to light the same area one grow light would. I’d purchased a bulk box of 25 of the bulbs back in the days when I still could.

Then I checked on another of my indoor winter growing plants. An indeterminate cherry tomato in a five gallon pot. A ten gallon pot would’ve been better but I had to use what I had available. I could keep this one in the same window as the lettuce and provide it with a stout trellis to climb.

I explained to Rita that I had started the plant from the healthiest indeterminate tomato I had in the garden when we were a couple of weeks before the first frost. I clipped a branch off the base of the plant, sectioned it into cuttings, stripped them so there was only one leaf on the top of each cutting and then soaked them in water on a windowsill until they showed roots. Then I potted them up and put them outside until danger of frost, when they’d get brought back in and placed in the window I used for the lettuce also. Every other week I’d feed the tomato with a liquid mix made from soaking worm castings and compost in water. The tomatoes were heavy feeders and this was adequate to keep them going. Come spring I could once again get a jump start on the output of my garden by transplanting these tomatoes 2-3 weeks after our last frost.

I told Rita that doing it this way saved me from using up additional seed and saved me a month to a month and a half waiting for the seeds to sprout and grow far enough to yield tomatoes. The daylight duplicating bulbs, combined with the sun from the window allowed it enough light to grow and, although the person I got the method from told me they could get a pint of cherry tomatoes every other day off their plant, I’d be able to harvest about two pints of cherry tomatoes a week off of it. Combined with other small plants that would grow well indoors (curled cress, radishes in a small heat box, kale, and some edible flowers for color) they’d provide us all with fresh vegetables throughout the winter. Not daily but at least a couple of times a week.

Puttering around with the plants had killed the morning for me so Rita and I made lunch. After we had all eaten I sat back for a while in a comfortable armchair near the fire and ended up drifting off into a nap. I was woken up by a knock on the door. When I answered it Jess and Pamela were standing there. Pamela looked a mess, like she hadn’t been eating well in addition to not sleeping well. I could tell from the odor that she hadn’t showered in a while either. Grimacing inside my head I invited them in.

“So Pamela, Jess tells me that you haven’t been sleeping well due to nightmares. Did she tell you how I did it?”

“Yes, she said you used hypnotism like a psychiatrist used to before the Crash.”

“Would you like me to try the same with you?”

“Yes, I can’t take not sleeping well any more, it has me unable to do almost anything.”

I kept the snide comment I thought about not doing anything even if she could sleep to myself.

“Alright then. If you give me a few minutes to get myself ready I’ll give it a shot. Sit down in the chair over there and just get as comfortable as you can, OK?”

Pamela sat down in the chair and Jess followed me as I went into the kitchen.

“Are you alright yourself?”, she asked, “you look a little out of it.”

“I was napping when you knocked. I made the mistake of sitting down in a comfortable chair and drifted off. Let me grab something to eat and I’ll be fine in a few minutes.”

I grabbed some leftover cornbread and barbecued beef from the day before and gobbled it down as quickly as I could. A quick glass of water and I was good to go.

I had been having such good luck with Elman’s inductions that I decided to go for it with the same style I had been using. I couldn’t really think of any variations I’d need here as she wanted to be hypnotized and she wanted me to have, at least, enough control to stop her dreams. Because of those two things I decided a straight out standard induction was called for. I was worried that since she wasn’t well rested it might be an issue but if I got her under, the first thing I’d do was make her feel well rested. Then I’d plant a trigger phrase, bring her out of it and put her right back under after she realized she was feeling rested. From there I figured it would be relatively easy to do a similar avoidance of her nightmares as I had for Jessica.

Pamela went under quickly and easily. As I had guessed, having her feel well rested when I brought her out of the quick first trance allowed me to get her much deeper in trance the second time under. As I worked with her to get her deeper and deeper into trance I realized that she might well be the most suggestionable person I had ever hypnotized. Whether it was due to her resistance being already drained from the nightmares or just a natural thing for her I wasn’t sure and I didn’t think it really mattered either. I quickly got her deep enough in trance to work on the nightmares.

“Pamela, are you having trouble sleeping?”

“Yes”

“Why are you having trouble sleeping?”

“I have nightmares.”

“When I tell you to, describe these nightmares for me, not as you see them in your head when you dream but with yourself detached. Describe them as though you are watching them on television, not as though you are experiencing them.”

I thought that this was necessary because if they were as bad as Jess suggested I might snap her out of trance if she experienced them.

“Now describe them for me.”

“I see a very pretty blond girl with a reddish tint to her hair. She’s working on something that uses a lot of flowers, an open flame, and some other equipment.”

I guessed that she was describing herself in this portion.

“The flame begins to falter and she bends over and picks up a fuel tank off a rack of them beneath the table. She goes over and removes the current tank, then fastens the new one on. When she tries to light the flame it doesn’t ignite. In a fit of pique she knocks all the flowers and some of the equipment off of the table top and storms out of the room. It looks like the room is a small utility shed, or something of the sort, that has been cleared out to use as a workroom.

She storms out of the shed and crosses a short stretch of yard into a house. Inside the house, she pauses to get a cool drink, lingers over it for a few minutes and then calls out. In a few minutes she is animatedly talking to a tall, attractive brunette. Her arms and hands make jabs out towards the back yard where the shed is located and she appears to be complaining that the stove setup won’t light with the new tank in place.

The scene jumps ahead a few minutes and the brunette, a disgusted look on her face, is heading out towards the shed. A minute later there is a loud noise, loud enough to vibrate the floor and rattle the windows. When the blond peers out the back window she sees that the shed is gone, there is just a crater in the ground where it was, and the back of the house is on fire.

The blond leaves through the front door and strides quickly down the street. She isn’t quite running, not wanting to attract attention to herself. There are several people headed in the opposite direction from here, towards the house that is now totally engulfed in flame but she ignores them and keeps her rapid pace steady.

The next scene is in a different room and an auburn haired girl is confessing that she is afraid the fire might spread to the house and that they should get their stuff and leave. The blond tries to talk her down but the auburn haired girl wins the argument when a brown-haired man backs her up and tells the blond that they are in danger if they stay.

The dream skips to several days in the future as the blond is walking through a makeshift morgue, trying to identify corpses. At least two of her friends lie burned and dead in the lines of corpses but she doesn’t see the body of the brunette anywhere and even those that are too charred to identify don’t seem to have the correct build or height.”

Jess tapped me on the shoulder after Pamela fell silent for more than a minute. She motioned towards the kitchen and I told Pamela to just stay relaxed and rested. Then I followed Jessica.

Jessica was shaking with rage and had to struggle to keep her voice down.

“That bitch, if I’m not mistaken we just got a bird’s eye view of the start of the fire down in Denver that chased us up this way. A friend of hers by name of Amy fit the tall brunette description and that’s the one she never could find when looking through bodies after the fire. If she was in an explosion that took out an entire shed I could see where there might not be much body left to find.”

“I’d like to say you’re jumping to conclusions but I agree with you. Your nightmares were from fear of fire, her nightmares seem to originate with guilt. Damn it, what the hell do I do? I sure as hell don’t want to absolve her of her guilt over a fire that killed so many people. I can’t think of another way to get rid of the nightmares though, can you?”

“Well yeah, I can actually. But not things I’d want done to my sister. I mean, you could wipe a lot more than her nightmares, right? You could practically reprogram her however you wanted?”

“Not unless there is at least a seed of desire to be that way already existing in there. If there were I could encourage it and get it to bloom and take over but if she has no desire whatsoever for something like that even if I could do it, it would eventually fall apart.”

“Well, then you could help warp a few desires that are in there to help out, no? I mean tell her something like ‘The nightmares will be held at bay if you work at doing this or that. If you stop they’ll return full force.’ Something like that might be able to help without totally absolving her? I agree that if it is what we think that they shouldn’t just be taken away.”

“I could maybe do something like that. It’s probably even something she’d understand well and be able to work with, it seems kind of her style. But what the hell conditions do I put in as a counterbalance to take the nightmares out of play? Much like just taking them away I don’t really want to make it something like she has to behave herself or be even tempered or something similar. Maybe make the punishment fit the crime? Force her to help other people? I think that might go too much against her nature for that one to work very well. I just don’t know her well enough to know what I should do here. I’m thinking asking some more questions of her might help some.”

“Let’s give it a shot, I thought I knew her well enough to know what might work but... I never would’ve guessed she started the fire by fucking up a hose connection. She was probably being lazy when she was supposed to be learning how to do it and messed up as a result. I realize it could’ve just been a faulty hose or something but from the description of her nightmares they were past testing the equipment so I’m thinking it wasn’t equipment failure.”

We went back in and began to ask some questions. Before we did so, I set the little lie detector trick on her that I had done in some previous sessions with other people. It was amazing, she lied as easily as she talked. As we questioned her we built up the profile of a totally amoral woman, one who lied, cheated and stole to get whatever she wanted. One who was unwilling to do the slightest bit of work if she could avoid it and... One who had intentionally mis-connected the hose in an attempt to get her friend to decide that she shouldn’t be doing manual work on the project. The project, incidentally, was an attempt to make perfumes, of all things, that they thought they could easily make and sell to support themselves.

As we got into some different areas of questions, Pamela pretty much sealed her fate as to whatever I felt was right to do with her when she answered a question about her family with:

“The only one left is my stupid whore of a sister. She thinks I didn’t know she was fucking for money to keep us in food. Why the hell anyone would pay for her I don’t know but she’s nothing but a stinking whore. Steven left because I kept harping on him to get our own house so we wouldn’t have to be dependent on the one she bought with her body. As soon as I can find another man, I’m leaving. I don’t want to be associated with that type of person. I’m pretty sure she is starting the same thing up again with our new neighbor. Besides that, I’ve caught Steven eying her several times.”

Jessica stormed out of the room at that answer, quietly but quite obviously in a fury. I didn’t blame her. I didn’t think she had whored herself out because she wanted to, but more to provide for her, ungrateful wretch of a, sister. Now to have it thrown in her face had to be the final straw. I’ll admit that Jess was a better person about it than I would’ve been, I would’ve popped her out of trance and beat the living shit out of her. Hell, I was thinking about doing so anyhow.

Finally I resolved to give her a couple of nightmare free nights while I decided what to do with her. Let her get rested up a little bit before sentencing as it were. I told her that the nightmares would be contained, that for 48 hours they would be blocked out and leave her alone but that unless she came back and asked me to hypnotize her again and work on it further that they would return after those 48 hours. I also made sure that she would be consciously aware that she would have to have further work done to continue to prevent the nightmares. It was a brute force approach that I wouldn’t have trusted to work in the long run but for a couple of days I thought it would be sufficient.

It really was an issue that would take multiple sessions to work on, unless I set it to a self-reinforcing deal like I had with Jess. I didn’t think that the self-reinforcement would be sufficient to keep this one in check though since I was pretty sure her guilt would find a way to sabotage anything I set her to doing on her own to fix the problem.

I brought Pamela up out of trance and told her to go home and get some sleep. That I’d work on a way to permanently solve her problem but that I had given her a temporary reprieve for now. Pamela left and I went looking for Jess. I found her in our bedroom, being held by Holly and sobbing into her shoulder. In between sobs came out a few intelligible words that ended up forming a concept.

Her parents had died years back, right after the Crash while things were still pretty wild. She had a brother, somewhere, that had left Denver to try to find his own way in the world since he felt he had been dragging his parents and sisters down by not being able to help as much as he thought he should. She didn’t know if he was alive or not. The only family she knew was still alive was Pamela and now she was no longer thinking of Pamela as family. The phrase “that stupid bitch”, frequently sprinkled with adjectives such as “stuck-up”, “snotty”, “arrogant”, and “self-centered”, featured frequently in the intelligible portions.

I tried logic, pointing out that Pamela was a hypocrite and had been whoring herself out to Steven and was now looking for a new John. It didn’t seem to help at all, I don’t even know if she heard me. Holly had though, and shot me a glare that shut me up. I ended up just sitting down and wrapping my tired, sore arms around the two of them. After a brief whispered conversation with Holly we eventually calmed Jessica down by telling her that she had a family indeed, they just weren’t related by blood. I was pretty sure all five of us (Holly, myself, Rita, Sandra, and Susan) were all fond enough of Jessica already that they certainly wouldn’t mind being considered her family. If they did have a problem with that they were just going to have to learn to act really well since when Holly and I both decided something together, the others had to deal with it.

After a while Jessica managed to get her sobs under control. She seemed to make an internal decision and asked if she could stay the night after running down to her own place for a few minutes. We, of course, answered yes although I did add the caveat that I wasn’t up for anything sexual for at least another day or two, blood loss being one to put a damper on the physical end of things even if the mental portion is willing. While there were things I could certainly do without an erection, my body might well try to get one anyhow and I really didn’t like feeling light-headed or passing out.

Jessica asked if she could borrow my cart. When I told her yes she headed out to the shed I kept it in and immediately headed down to her house with it. Half an hour later she was back. In the cart she had placed all of the food from her house and a small strongbox which I was guessing held her money.

“I’d like to keep this here until we get the situation with Pamela resolved. I don’t trust her not to try to steal the cash or food any more.”

“Certainly, we don’t have cabinet space but unless there are perishables we can find some room easily enough.”

We tucked her foodstuffs away in a corner of our room that normally held mops and brooms but had some spare room. Her perishables managed to fit in the refrigerator since there weren’t many of them. Her cash went into a hole in the wall (hidden behind a full length mirror that appeared tightly fastened to said wall) with the majority of our own. After that it was about time for dinner and I used a pack of my soup mix which I fleshed out with a few stored potatoes, some carrots, and some more of the leftover barbecued beef (since each soup pack was only designed to serve four).

It was an early night for me. Despite having a nap earlier in the day I was still exhausted. Sleeping arrangements were rather tight that night as well. Jessica desperately wanted to sleep curled up with me but Rita made it clear that she wanted to be near me as well. Holly, being the love of my life and my senior wife, was guaranteed a place in our bed so four of us slept together in it. All I can say is that it was a good thing we had sprung for a king size bed back before the Crash. It was warm, comfy, slightly crowded, and I was only woken up once by someone rolling on one of my injured arms.

In the morning we started putting stuff together for market. It was Rita’s turn to go down with me and Jessica requested to go as well. She wanted to have the chicken farmer start those chicks for her ASAP. Part of her hesitation before had been due to Pamela complaining about having chickens in the garage and what the smell would be like, and the mess, etc... Since she no longer considered that an issue she wanted to get up and running with them as soon as she could.

When I went out to get the cart I saw that the greenhouse door was open. No-one had been in it yesterday so I immediately went to check it out. When I entered the greenhouse I saw that quite a few oranges that had been almost ripe were missing. I quickly checked to make sure that the trees hadn’t gotten a fatal dose of cold air and closed the door with myself inside. I grabbed a few bricks that we kept out in the greenhouse for times when it was supposed to be bitterly cold and one at a time, due to my arms, placed them in the cart. When I left the greenhouse I made sure the door was closed and wheeled the cart inside the house. I laid the bricks out along the top of the fireplace insert in order to heat up and asked Holly if she would take care of moving them to the greenhouse when they were hot since we had had an intruder in there who had carelessly left the door open. As I said the last I was looking at Jessica and I could see that she came to the same conclusion I had.

I asked Rita to load up the cart and apologized that we would be a little late leaving for market. When I headed for the door Jessica was waiting for me. We left the house together and headed for her house.

“Is she really this stupid and ungrateful?”

“I would have said no, but I’m thinking I might have been wrong.”

When we got to Jessica’s house she unlocked the door and we went in. The smell of citrus was strong in the air. We followed the scent to the kitchen where we found Pamela sitting in a chair, the peels of several oranges on the table in front of her, a pair of unpeeled oranges sitting there as well.

Pamela looked up as we entered:

“See, you thought you were so smart taking all the food. I can forage for myself though.”

“It isn’t foraging if you’re stealing it from someone else. Especially someone trying to help you. I get you a good night’s sleep and you thank me by stealing my fruit that I’m growing in a greenhouse, and you call it foraging?”

Pamela really didn’t seem to get it. With the combined occurrences and revelations of the past few days on my mind and being incredibly sore. I just snapped. I spoke Pamela’s trigger phrase and she dropped into a trance. I instructed her to put on her coat and follow us. Then Jessica and I left and headed back for my house. When we got there, Pamela followed us inside.

“Holly, this bitch is going to be crashing here all day to stay out of trouble. I’ll make sure that she doesn’t wake up but keep an eye on her anyway, just in case.”

“I assume this is the thief? As well as the other transgressions Jessica mentioned yesterday?”

Holly was being careful as Susan, Sandra, and Rita were in earshot and, as far as I knew, unaware that it was Pamela that had caused the recent fire in Denver.

“Yes, she claimed it was foraging and didn’t get it when I pointed out it was theft. So, I’m going to do something about it, but I haven’t decided what yet. I’ll do it after market. In the meanwhile, since she hasn’t been getting enough sleep, I’ll have her sleep all day.”

“Yes dear, I’ll watch her.”

Holly knew that when I was riled up, like I was now, the best thing to do was just acquiesce if the request wasn’t totally insane. I could tell she was reading me correctly so I figured I’d make it a little more interesting for her.

“You can help, if you like. Try to figure out an appropriate punishment for her. I’ll even instruct her to answer any questions you ask throughout the day so you can research it a little if you like.”

“Pamela, you have been having problems sleeping so I’m going to help you with that. You are going to sleep all day until you hear my voice telling you to wake up. You will, in your sleep and without waking up, truthfully answer any questions that you are asked while asleep today. Do you understand and will you obey?”

“Yes”

She might be even more susceptible to suggestion than I had thought. If that were the case, the range of punishments opened up considerably since I would not have to adhere quite as closely to things that she would normally do. On that thought it was time to leave for market.

Market day was a roller coaster. After the recent fight there were quite a few people that were in mourning because they had lost a family member or good friend. On the other side there were the people that weren’t immediately touched by the fatalities who wanted to congratulate and/or thank those of us who had fought. Even though it was a little chilly in the market today I had to remove my coat after the third guy who just had to slap my shoulder made me wince by abruptly jostling my arms. After I removed my coat so the bandages were visible they limited themselves to handshakes or the occasional back slap.

Business was booming, at least for me and a couple of other fellows who had participated in the firefight. I figure it was ‘support your local guy who was stupid/unlucky enough to get involved in the gunfight’ day. Okay, so I was being a little cynical but I knew half these folks had weapons and could’ve been out there themselves but weren’t.

One bright spot of that market day was when one of the guards came over to my table. It was the leader of the squad that had been here with the bus for the dole. He, tentatively, asked if I were interested in joining the military. When I pointed out that a soldier who passes out at the end of the fight isn’t necessarily the best pick. He pointed out that I was wounded twice and still managed to stay alert until relieved. I told him that no I wasn’t interested I had family here in the area to tend to and had to explain that Rita wasn’t a third daughter but a second wife (since he had seen her at the dole). The discussion went all over the place after that. Fortunately he wasn’t a die hard, must be monogamous, etc... type. He was more envious about my having two wives than anything else. I didn’t point out that there was serious potential for a third coming up.

An hour or so after our chat, he came back with a military medic. I asked Jess to watch the table for a bit, she was still looking for the chicken guy she had negotiated with, while the medic looked me over.

“It’s a good thing he asked me to check you out. This wound in your left arm appears to be infected. I’ve got an antibiotic and a sulfa powder that should take care of it. Do you have any allergies you are aware of?”

“Only hay fever and pollen, no medicines.”

“OK then, I’m going to give you some antibiotic pills, then dust the wound and re-bandage it. I’ve also got a few painkillers I’ll give you in case the wounds end up hurting a lot. Normally they don’t allow us medics to use our stock on civilians but the squad leader over there says you definitely accounted for five kills, possibly more, and you held the right flank on the attack you folks had recently. So since he asked me to take care of you I’ve got carte blanche here. I’m going to take care of a few other things for you. I hate to have people I’ve worked on potentially die from something easily preventable.”

I hadn’t known the total of how many I killed and probably would’ve been happier without it. I was pretty sure the two right in front of the foxhole had died from my shots and maybe the third of that group also. Evidently I had hit with the shotgun a few times as well.

“Well, I just did what had to be done. I just thought of my family I was protecting and knew if I didn’t kill those guys that they’d probably do a lot more than just kill my ladies. It was enough to get me through. I bet he didn’t mention that I fainted after the fight though.”

“No, he didn’t. He said you passed out from blood loss.”

I blushed and stayed silent as he treated my wound and gave me a small bottle of about ten pills in case of severe pain, he also gave me a larger bottle with twenty antibiotic pills that I was to take twice a day until they were gone. After he gave me the pills he pulled out the biggest needle I’d ever seen and gave me a jab, then he told me that all my basic shots were updated, or at least the ones they had the boosters for. He also told me not to start the antibiotics until the next day so they wouldn’t interact with the booster shots and that it shouldn’t be a problem waiting a day since the sulfa powder would be working in the meanwhile.

I made nearly double my normal take that market day and Jess managed to find her source for chickens in the last hour. When I asked him about the extra feed he told me not to worry about it, he’d make sure she had enough to get through mid-summer at least.

In between customers over the course of the day, I thought about a solution for Pamela. Jessica wasn’t helping much as most of her comments on the matter were along the lines of “that bitch”. Finally I realized that Jessica might actually have hit on something valid. Pamela wanted to be fed and taken care of. She wanted to not have to do a lot of work. What she wanted, essentially, was the same thing that was given to pets. So I was thinking she might become the household pet. We could even call her ‘bitch’ (I thought Jess might get a kick out of that).

Now some pets are just household pets and some pets are working pets. I was thinking that if I could get Pamela to agree, in trance, that what she wanted was about the same thing that a pet wanted that she would become my household’s well trained working pet. She would obey any verbal command given by someone that I declared ‘family’. She could work at light stuff around the house, she could be used sexually however the person giving the command desired, and could do all the general scut and slut work. Rita was doing quite a bit of the scut work currently and would probably be happy to get out of it and have more time to research permaculture.

When we were packing up, Allan came by and reminded me that there was some loot I was entitled to. I went along with him and found that I now owned two AK-47 clones and five hundred rounds of ammo for each. I thought that maybe I could train the women on them and one of them could use one and I could use the other.

On the way home I ran the ‘bitch’ idea past Jessica and Rita. Jessica seemed to dislike the idea for just a moment but then grinned and decided that it would work well. Rita had waited for Jess to make her decision and then chimed in backing her up.

When we arrived home I ran the idea past Holly who, none too surprisingly, had come up with a very similar plan. She hadn’t thought of it in terms of ‘pet’ but in terms of ‘bar slut’ as she put it, meaning the barmaids who served drinks, did cleaning, and had sex with the customers. She appreciated my take on the matter with calling Pamela ‘bitch’ instead of her name and said she liked my idea just that little bit better than her own.

While Pamela was still asleep I asked her a few questions. Yes, she wanted to be taken care of. Yes, she wanted to be fed. No, she didn’t want to do hard work. Finally the show stopper... Yes, she would do absolutely anything to be rid of the nightmares. Finally I woke her and told her I could give her at least a part of what she wanted and get rid of the nightmares. I asked her if she wanted me to do so. With no questions, she answered yes. I dropped her back into trance.

“Pamela, listen to me closely. You will no longer answer to the name Pamela unless instructed otherwise. You will answer to bitch, slut, whore, or girl. You will follow any command given to you by myself or anyone I tell you is my family. You are only a pet but you are a well trained pet. You follow all commands to the best of your ability. You answer all questions asked of you as truthfully and fully as you can. You keep yourself clean and attractive. You will be taken care of and fed. If you follow all of these commands you will no longer have nightmares. You will not remember the nightmares. You will not remember anything that could cause conflict with any of these instructions unless specifically told to by me. Repeat these commands back to me.”

She repeated the commands back to me verbatim.

“Remember, so long as you obey all of these commands, you will not have nightmares. Now I want you to repeat the commands again, over and over. You will end each repetition with a number, counting from 1 to 100 so that you will repeat these commands 100 times. Do you understand me?”

“Yes”

“Begin repeating.”

“...I will not remember anything that could cause conflict with any of these instructions unless specifically told to by you. 100”

“Bitch”

“Yes?”

“What would you do currently if I told you to strip of all of your clothes.”

“I would remove my clothing.”

“If I brought you out of trance first, what would you do if I told you to remove all of your clothes.”

“I would remove my clothing.”

“Good girl.”

I brought Pamela out of trance.

“Bitch, remove your clothing.”

Pamela stripped down quickly. She had a nice looking body, if a bit scrawny for my taste. She still hadn’t cleaned herself up recently though.

“Slut, take your clothes and put them in the washing machine. If you know how to operate it, add soap and run them through. If you don’t know how to operate it, tell me and I’ll instruct you.”

“I don’t know how to run it.”

I led her into the bathroom and showed her how to run the washing machine and dryer. She started her clothes washing.

“Whore, take a shower and get yourself clean. When you are finished in the shower, get dry and come back to my bedroom and kneel in front of me. Make the shower as quick as you can while still getting fully clean.”

I went back to my bedroom and waited. Within five minutes Pamela was back there. She looked much more attractive now that she was clean although she still needed to add some weight. I stood her up and walked around her, inspecting the merchandise as it were. Then I sat back down, opened my zipper and pulled out my dick.

“Girl, kneel down and suck my cock.”

Pamela didn’t immediately do as I told her and the look on her face showed me that she was fighting the suggestions I implanted. I immediately spoke her trigger phrase. As she fell into trance, her face smoothed out.

“Girl, every morning when you wake up, you will repeat your commands to yourself silently. Any time you have a problem with obeying the commands, you will repeat them to yourself silently. Any time you refuse to obey a direct command from myself or someone I declare family you will immediately, and silently, flash back into your nightmare whether you are awake or asleep. You will know that the only way to get rid of the nightmare is to follow the command you were given without fighting against it. Do you understand and accept this?”

“Yes.”

I brought her out of trance again.

“Girl, kneel down and suck my cock.”

Once again she hesitated but this time a look of horror came over her face and she opened her mouth to scream. She found herself unable to scream and within seconds had docilely lowered that open mouth to my cock.