Quaranteam
Chapter 7
That evening, Andy and the girls decided to curl up in bed and watch some television with Niko asleep next to them. At first, Andy was worried that the volume would be high enough to wake up their newest addition, but Aisling assured him nothing was going to stir her from her slumber. Sure enough, despite the volume of the show—a Spanish Netflix crime drama called La Casa De Papel—Niko didn’t budge an inch.
Andy fell asleep with Aisling pressed up against his right side and Lauren pressed up against his left, both of their heads resting against his chest. When he’d first started sleeping with Aisling in his bed, he’d had trouble falling asleep easily. It wasn’t something his body had any regular experience with, so it had to be trained. He’d had similar trepidation when Lauren joined them. But now, having had both of the girls for nearly three weeks, he’d grown comfortable with their bodies nestled against his.
In the middle of the night, he was in the middle of a strange sex dream only to be woken to find Niko bobbing her head up and down on his cock, her lips latched around it firmly. Neither Lauren or Aisling had woken. Andy couldn’t see Niko well in the low light of the wee hours, but her head was feverish, her mouth suctioning on his member until he popped a load against the back of her throat, a thankful, almost vulgar moan coming from the woman, as her tongue lathered over his cock to make sure no droplet remained. She was still spasming in orgasm long after he was done. Once she’d finished licking his dick clean, she crawled back up into the bed, and moved to lay against Lauren’s side, folding one arm over the Aussie.
Andy fell back asleep almost immediately.
When dawn broke, Andy awoke to find Niko straddling his hips, his cock lodged up inside of her snatch. He often woke up with a hard on, but Ash and Lauren had agreed to let him at least wake up in the morning before having a go at him.
Clearly no one had informed Niko.
He didn’t feel bad taking a better look at her now, her tits pressed together between her arms as her hands rest against his chest, while her hips snapped back and forth. Her skin was a deep tan, her nipples a chocolate brown, her hair a jet black. She wasn’t tall, about the same height as Aisling so half a foot shorter than Andy, and a full foot shorter than Lauren. She was muscular, toned, a life of military training having kept her very in shape.
His orgasm wasn’t strong, but it came on quick.
By this point, Andy was a little surprised he wasn’t cumming dust.
As soon as his orgasm hit, she fell forward against his chest, burying her face in the crook of his neck. Aisling and Lauren were both already awake, each with a hand on one of Niko’s thighs affectionately. “God damn, sorry about that, sir,” Niko laughed, breathy and still shaking. “2nd Lieutenant Niko RedWolf, reporting for her new life, sir. I think my head’s finally clear again.”
“Wasn’t it before?” Andy asked.
She shook her head, lifting her head up enough so she could look down and smile at him, her hair threatening to spill out of her ponytail at a moment’s notice. “Would you believe this is the first time it’s actually registered to me what you look like, sir?” She had a mischievous smile and kind brown eyes. “They may have told me your name, but I don’t think it cut through the fog. Who are you?”
Andy blanched. “My name’s Andy Rook. What do you mean, you don’t think it cut through the fog?”
Niko looked over at Lauren, who scooted a little bit to one side, so Niko could slide off of the top of him and in against his side. “I serve on the Air Force base where they were testing the vaccine, and I agreed to be a test candidate. The two men who were injected with it died immediately, but I and the other female officer seemed fine. At first. Within a few days of it, I started feeling, well, pardon my saying so, sir, but I started feeling horny all the time. The other female officer as well.”
Aisling smirked over at Niko. “Permission to swear freely is habitually granted in this home, Airman. In fact, Andy likes a girl with a filthy mouth,” she giggled, slapping his thigh.
He wilted a little bit, but then nodded in confirmation to Niko. “It’s true.”
“Duly noted, sir,” Niko answered. “Anyway, they didn’t know about the side effects during the early testing stages, but it started to become pretty fucking apparent to them when I would continually get all fidgety. I tried to resist as long as I could, but eventually I was jilling off in bathroom stalls every chance I could get. Within a week or two, they had an answer, and the program was born.”
“The Air Force developed the vaccine?”
“You think those morons in private research were going to do it this fast? Hell no.” Niko snuggled in, trying to get as comfortable as possible pressed up against his chest. “So they figured out that they could introduce the vaccine to men by sexual contact with a vaccinated woman, and that it seemed to help quell the insane need to fuck all the time that women given the vaccine were feeling.”
“If you were one of the first people to be given the vaccine, then why weren’t you partnered up with someone immediately?” Lauren asked.
“I wasn’t fond of being subservient to a man, so I told them I wanted someone who would keep me on equal ground. But because the nature of my work with Air Force, I also needed someone who would have Top Secret level clearance.”
Andy’s eyes widened. “I sure as hell don’t have that.”
“No, you don’t, but you’d mostly been vetted for it Your friend Phil Pak has been trying to get you to come and work with him for a long while, so they’d done all the legwork, and decided to call it good enough.”
“I also happen to have a mess of partners, Niko. Are you sure that’s going to be okay?”
“It’s all been taken care of, otherwise they wouldn’t have sent me here.” Niko’s eyes suddenly widened. “Oh my god, I haven’t even introduced myself to your other partners.”
Aisling winked at her. “You had hard fucking to do, love. I’m Aisling Blake, I’m from Dublin originally. Everyone around here calls me Ash. I do graphic design.” She shook Niko’s hand, but Niko pulled her over Andy’s head and pressed a kiss against Aisling’s lips above him, one which Ash was perfectly happy to reciprocate.
“And who’s the giantess surfer behind me?” Niko said, pulling back and turning around.
“Lauren Herron. I’m a personal trainer for the ’49ers.”
“An Irish girl and an Aussie. About time you got some American blood in this mix.”
Andy laughed. “That’s what my roommate’s partner Lily said.”
“Where are you from, Niko?”
“The Rosebud reservation in South Dakota. I’m half Lakota, one quarter Mexican and one quarter Japanese. I know, it’s quite the cocktail, but we’ve all got stories.”
It was nearly noon when they all got out of bed.
Niko was the the youngest of all of them, only twenty-two. Ash was twenty-seven, Lauren thirty-five and Andy himself just shy of forty. Andy was worried that Niko might consider him too old, but Niko assured him that his age was not a concern for her. As a matter of fact, she liked older men. She found younger men too emotionally volatile for her tastes.
She’d actually read one of his books, but the problem was that it was “The Trouble With Were-Bears,” the book he was least proud of. She’d said she found the main character interesting, but the plot rather confusing. He assured her the other ones were better, and she seemed eager to read them.
The fuck lust, as Niko described it, would be with the girls for the rest of their lives. The longer they went without reconnecting with Andy, the more their judgment would be compromised, the harder it would be to think clearly. They would become like junkies in need of a fix. They would be easily agitated, quick tempered and even violent if they felt it would get them back to their pusher—Andy.
When Niko had arrived at Andy’s condo, she had been so out of it that even now she couldn’t recall the events he related back to her. Her first memory in weeks had been being in bed with him this morning, even as she crawled atop of him. She knew that he was her mate. She wasn’t sure how she knew that, but she could feel it, sense it. And when he’d had his third orgasm inside of her within less than a day, the imprinting had finally settled in and peeled back the cloud from her consciousness.
While Lauren was on leave until the pandemic had receded, Niko would be working from the condo. Although she was a qualified pilot, her service in the Air Force was as a data analyst, and a secure connection was being set up on site for her to use.
Until then, she had a bit of a break.
It was a Saturday, and the girls decided they wanted to work on their tans. The condo had a small back yard that was fenced off. While the neighbors in the condos on either side would be able to peer down and see them, the girls had decided to sunbathe topless. Lily had even decided to join them, although she bitched about the heat, which was pushing over a hundred.
Andy spent the afternoon filling Eric in on all the information he’d gotten over the last two days—what Phil had told him, what Niko had told him, all of it. Eric, in return, had filled in Andy with what he’d learned from work over the last few weeks.
While Lily, Andy and Eric all knew who Eric worked for, they’d been a little bit vague with the girls, always joking that Eric worked for a think tank that didn’t do anything interesting, but soon they were going to have to fill them in.
Eric worked for a company called Long Thought Research and Development, but the truth of the matter was that they were a remote analyst cell for the CIA. Long Thought handled problems that were overwhelming in the abstract and deadly in application—they were responsible for terrorist profiling, weapons migration modeling, political theater simulations and a whole lot more.
Over the last few weeks, they’d been working on building a new model, one which had Eric worried. Theoretically, every member of Long Thought was supposed to be sectioned off, working on only a singular aspect of the problem so that no one analyst could get an idea of what the simulation was intended to determine. It was supposedly to avoid confirmation bias, but Eric had considered that explanation bullshit as of late. So he’d done a little bit of data gathering from his coworkers on the sly, and come up with a working theory.
The model was designed to see how the world’s new normal would pan out if 37.5% of the male population of Earth died out to a pandemic.
This pandemic.
Niko had wandered in before the rest of the girls, while Andy and Eric stood in the kitchen, staring at one another. Then she’d offered her own information, to help talk Andy out of what he’d been thinking about.
Because Andy had been thinking about going to the press.
She’d explained to him that for the time being, all of the information had to remain secret, or a nationwide panic would ensue. The vaccine that the Air Force had developed was starting to be deployed to major metropolitan areas on a very specific basis. And when a mayor, a governor, a representative or a senator had put up a fuss, Niko hinted that that particular politican had been exposed to the virus and then offered a choice—they could take the vaccine, and be mated for life to one (or in some cases many) person, or they could deny the vaccine worked, and would be allowed to die.
Only one governor had chosen to decline the vaccine, and while the Air Force had respected their wishes, they didn’t allow the governor to tell anyone about the vaccine and its side effects.
They did allow the governor to die, though.
Niko explained to the two men that there were probably only a hundred or so people in the country with the full picture of what was going on, and that was by design, because already the virus was starting to take its toll on other countries. While some countries had done excellent jobs at containing the spread of it, others were on the verge of collapse.
And the CIA was debating on what countries were worth saving and which weren’t.
England, Ireland and Australia were already in the process of being brought up to speed about the vaccine, but the complete details were only being given to them on an as-needed basis. The pairing program had been confirmed to the outside world, but the side effects of the vaccine had been kept hush hush.
On some level, the Air Force was convinced that foreign governments would laugh themselves at being told that the vaccine had crazy sexual side effects until they had gotten a chance to experience them for themselves.
“Shit,” Andy grumbled. “The ex-journalist in me feel like I’m sitting on the story of the century here, and I can’t tell anybody.”
Niko squeezed his hand softly. “You’re a good man, Andy Rook, which is why I’m happy to be mated to you, but you have to consider the ramifications of what would happen if you revealed all of this to the public.”
“The whole goddamn world would explode,” Eric sighed. “I know. I’ve seen the data. And that’s not the worst of it.”
“What’s the worst of it then?” Andy asked.
“The worst of it is that we’re going to have to let a billion men die off for the planet to stabilize. It’s going to be the biggest culling since World War Two, and even that wasn’t a drop in the bucket compared to what this is.”
The three stood in silence for a long time.
“How does anyone make these kinds of decisions?” Andy whispered.
“You don’t have to. WE don’t have to,” Niko said, wrapping an arm around him. “You can’t save the whole world, Andy, but you can save us. Hell, you’ve already saved those two amazing women out there. And they’ve been so nice to me, even though I apparently fucked you at your desk before even introducing myself.” She blushed a little. “I still don’t remember that. Did you watch, Eric?”
Eric laughed, lifting the Collins glass full of scotch to his lips. “Are you kidding? Lily would’ve kicked the shit out of me if I did.”
“Oh, I dunno,” Andy chuckled. “If you asked, she might let you watch.”
“Well, I don’t intend to ask. She already has me waking up sore most mornings.”
“That’s just the exercise from all the fucking you’re doing,” Andy said. “You’re out of practice, just like me, and hell, I’ve got three women to satisfy.”
“Soon to be four,” Niko giggled. “I’m sure it’s every man’s dream.”
“I’m just waiting for the first big fight to occur, because I know it’s coming sooner or later.”
“That’s future Andy’s problem,” Niko said, turning his face down so she could kiss him for a moment. “Besides, Ash made it pretty clear just because you’re tired of giving me my medicine doesn’t mean you get to skimp out on your promise to her.”
Andy groaned playfully. “I’m going to be running dry in a few days at this rate.”
“Oh I wouldn’t worry too much about that, Andy,” Eric said with a laugh. “The fall will probably kill you.”
“Yeah, well, you just keep thinking, Butch,” Andy countered. “That’s what you’re good at.”
“What are the cats’ names?”
“The Russian blue is Muninn, and the black one is Huginn.”
“Odd names.”
“It’s the name for Odin’s two ravens, thought and wisdom,” Eric said. “We were on a Norse mythology kick when we got them as kittens.”
“They friendly?”
“Oh sure,” Andy said. “They’re just getting used to this many people being in the house at one time. If you put out their food enough times, they’ll start cuddling up to you any chance they get. Ash decided she was going to befriend them right after she got here, and Muninn’ll hop up into her lap when she’s working at the table some days and just settle there. That’s why Eric built her the foot rest, so she can put her legs up and Muninn’ll sit there quietly.”
Niko looked back and forth between the two men for a minute. “How the hell were you two single before any of us showed up?”
“Women don’t like nerds,” Eric grumbled.
Andy raised a finger, arguing the point. “No, they like nerds alright, but they don’t seem to understand that nerds like aggressive women and are terrible at making the first move. So nerds don’t get the love they deserve.”
Niko looked out into the back yard, where the girls were gathering up their things, wrapping towels around their waists. “I dunno. You two seem to have done pretty well for yourselves at this point.”
Andy smirked, cocking his head to one side. “Sure, but luck is like the weather. Wait a few minutes and it’ll change.”
A storm of bad luck was, indeed, just over the horizon.