Chapter 32

Linda could no longer deny the obvious truth. Kristin was dying.

After throwing up on the bedroom carpet, her condition rapidly deteriorated. First a fever and chills, then confusion. Both her heartrate and breathing were elevated, and she winced and grimaced in pain anytime Linda tried to move her.

When Linda saw the fresh bruises, her heart sank, but she still held out hope of a recovery. Perhaps she was still suffering the initial effects of radiation exposure, or maybe she’d developed a secondary illness.

It was the hair that chilled Linda to the bone, when it began to fall out in clumps.

She’d seen all of these symptoms in the girls at the clinic. Kali said it was probably sepsis from damage to the intestinal lining, allowing bacteria to enter the bloodstream. The alopecia was a sure sign that the acute radiation syndrome had reached a critical phase.

Kali’s prognosis for girls suffering these symptoms was dire. Death within days or weeks, with no hope of recovery barring a miracle.

“What’s wrong with me?” Kristin asked in a weak voice as Linda spoon fed her a packet of stew from one of the MRE packs.

“You’re sick, honey,” Linda said, fighting back tears and trying to keep her voice from trembling. “You have an infection, but I’m going to take care of you.”

Kristin pushed the spoon away. “Don’t. I’m not hungry.”

“You need to eat, Kristin. Please, baby. Just one more bite.”

She couldn’t prevent the tears from spilling down her cheeks. She sounded desperate. Kristin shook her head.

“Tell me what’s happening with Mike.”

Linda set the spoon down and sighed. “I didn’t realize that Kali started doing regular inventories of the medicine. She discovered some of it missing. The stuff I was getting for you. Now she has it locked up in a cabinet, and she holds the only key. I thought I could sneak in there during my shift, but one of the other changes she made was using the students as orderlies, which means that she and Renata are in the nurse’s office most of the time.”

“What are you going to do?”

Linda smiled. “I already did it. I banned the students from working in the clinic and instituted a bunch of new rules. I’ve got them all running around, pulling their hair out and doing extra work. Now Kali and Renata are forced to be out with the patients most of the time. I just need to learn the new shift patterns, wait until it’s busy, and see if I can break into that cabinet. Or I need to get a hold of the key somehow.”

Kristin flashed her a weak smile. “Wow. You’re a diabolical bitch, aren’t you, mommy?” she said with a raspy laugh.

“Mommy always knows what’s best,” she said with a smirk before it quickly faded, replaced with a scowl. “I’m going to get that son of a bitch, one way or another.”

Mike recruited several students to help with the installation of the solar panel array and battery bank, including Michelle Hsi and Madison Anderson from the Robotics Club. A job made orders of magnitude easier by utilizing the winch at the end of the digger derrick’s telescoping boom arm to hoist the panels onto the gym roof.

Even with maximum protection, the people working on the solar array were going to get a large dose of UV light, especially as the sun climbed higher in the sky. For that reason, the installation would take several days to complete. They would work until mid-morning, then resume again in the early evening and work into the night using lights powered by one of the generators.

While Eric managed the solar array installation, Mike focused his attention on the battery bank. They chose to install it in the cafeteria, adjacent to the utility closet. Actually more of a utility room rather than a closet, given the size of the electromechanical systems necessary for a building the size of Overton House.

Thanks to the high-end components scavenged from the luxury mountain home, the system’s final configuration would turn out to be considerably more elaborate than originally conceived. As daylight bathed the solar array, the generated DC power would be converted to high-voltage AC and transmitted from the gymnasium to the dormitory through the transmission line Eric and Charmagne brought with them, doubled up to improve its efficiency.

An automatic transfer switch would enable the system to fluidly transition between sourcing power directly from the array and drawing upon the stored energy within the battery bank, ensuring that during periods of ample sunlight, devices would utilize solar power directly. At night, the system would smoothly transition to battery usage, maintaining a consistent and reliable power supply to the house.

The system was originally designed to power low-wattage lights and outlets to charge personal electronic devices. Overton’s eighty interior light bulbs had been switched to LEDs years ago. With the upgraded system, they might also be able to run the washing machine, coffee maker, and Marcus’s powerful PC workstation, but not the HVAC or electric water heaters. In fact, no high-load systems of any kind. Still, after more than two weeks of blackout conditions, having the lights back on, machine-washed clothes, and power to charge laptops, would be the height of luxury.

When the installation was finished, that is. They still had a ton of work to do, and Mike was so tired he could barely see straight. Despite her promise to let him sleep, Charmagne kept him up all night, fucking his brains out and pouring honey into his ear about having sex with the girls of Overton House.

On its face, her reasoning seemed sound. If two people wanted to have sex with each other, then nothing should stand in their way. It couldn’t be more clear cut and obvious than that, really. The more he thought about it, though, the more it began to fray at the edges. Would the others ever go along with it? Could they learn to accept something that flew in the face of social convention? A strong aversion to older men having sex with younger girls was one of the most strongly held moral convictions that most people shared. Teenage pussy must be protected at all cost.

Admittedly, these moral and ethical standards had only developed recently, in a modern, industrialized world where agency and autonomy could be stripped away from teenagers without a hue and cry from the adult population. After all, if it was done in the name of protecting the children, then not only could it never be wrong, it must always be right. And when control needed to be expanded, all they had to do was shift the goalposts and redefine what it meant to be a child.

Of course, no one bothered to ask those having their rights systematically taken away what they thought about it.

Besides, Mike was having more sex now, with more women simultaneously, than at any other point in his life. Did he really have the time, let alone the endurance, to add several young girls to the mix? Also, why was Charmagne so insistent that it be he, and not one of the other young men at the school like Eric, or Fulton, or Adrián? Hell, even Marcus was still in his twenties.

She told him it was because of his age, and not despite it, that he was the ideal partner for those girls. It’s ‘cause you got the experience, Mike, she told him. You got wisdom. Patience. He wasn’t so sure about that, but according to Charmagne at least, there was a line of girls out the door and around the block who were eagerly waiting to fuck him.

How much had she been talking to those girls, anyway? he wondered.

She was certainly right about one thing. Any laws preventing it no longer applied. And even if someone argued that those old laws were still valid as some kind of common law or social contract, there was no one around to enforce them. Asterius had made the world a far freer place, even as it also made it far, far more dangerous.

Emmett Caldwell was having more sex now, with more women simultaneously, than at any other point in his life.

He wasn’t particularly good looking, nor did he have a big dick. His demeanor wasn’t very pleasant either. In fact, he could be a foul-tempered bastard most of the time, if he was being honest. No one would ever accuse him of being an intellectual, though he considered himself more intelligent than the criminals he normally associated with. He never managed to accumulate much wealth in his life, spending what he earned just as fast as he made it. In fact, before the blackout, there was nothing about Emmett that would have attracted so many women to him all at once.

After the blackout, however, he had the one thing every woman wanted for themselves and their children, above any other thing in the world. Food. He had it, they didn’t, and the women of Morgan Creek paid dearly to get it.

Although he had no problem gouging his customers, and all prices were subject to change at a moment’s notice, he prided himself on being an honest merchant. His prices were written on paper, and he always kept his word. A handjob got you five hundred calories of food. A blowjob, seven-fifty. If you swallowed, you got an extra fifty. Pussy fucking got you a thousand calories, and ass fucking got you twelve-hundred.

The math was simple. A childless woman could just about scrape by if she gave up her ass once a day. For a mom with two hungry young children, however, things were a little tougher. Hard choices had to be made because she needed a minimum of thirty-two hundred calories every day to keep herself and her kids from starving to death.

She could offer up a mix of vaginal and anal sex, three times a day, every day, but that would only work so long as Emmett was in the mood for that much sex with the same woman, which he never was. For those hard luck cases, Emmett offered a special deal. If her kids watched, then the payout increased fifty percent. If they joined in, then it tripled.

Desperate, starving mothers were his favorite customers, and business was booming.

To accommodate his growing clientele, Emmett fucked multiple women at a time. There was a separate price list for girl on girl action. Pussy eating, ass eating, fisting, cum swapping - everything was on the menu. Although the payouts were smaller for these acts, eating two or three creampies out of other women’s asses could net a hungry woman a hearty meal.

His newfound wealth came by way of an unexpected inheritance from his late father, Calum Caldwell. Recently deceased on account of acute radiation exposure, the elder Caldwell had been a paranoid, anti-government, doomsday prepper. It was ironic that his two sons found his rotting corpse inside the very basement warehousing his horde. The old man had accumulated several years’ worth of dried beans, rice, and canned food, not to mention an arsenal of weapons and ammunition.

Brothers Emmett and Harlan weren’t quite as foresighted as their pop. Profligate would be a better descriptor for the two boys. After twenty-year careers in the military, the two men returned home to North Carolia and took up with a local gang of hillbillies and good ol’ boys who called themselves the Appalachian Mafia. Just like their wop brethren, the syndicate made its money running a variety of illegal operations, from prostitution to gambling to extortion. Their biggest money maker by far, however, was drugs. Specifically, opioids and methamphetamine.

Because of their extensive military experience, Emmett and Harlan quickly found themselves employed as security specialists. Their duties ranged from the mundane; scouting and securing locations for meth labs and brothels, which is precisely how the two men happened to find themselves deep inside a cave network when the Russians dropped the bomb, personal security, route planning, and running background checks on new members; to the highly technical aspects of intelligence and counterintelligence operations. That included not just keeping tabs on law enforcement, but also using a combination of bribes and blackmail to keep them off the syndicate’s back.

Reggie Buchanan had been one of the pigs on their payroll. Actually, for a pig, Reggie wasn’t too bad. In fact, he once told Emmett that if he’d washed out of the police academy, he planned to become a criminal. He also wasn’t as greedy as some of the other small town pigs they paid off. At least, not until the day he tried to kidnap sixty teenage virgins from Scirewood Academy; a private, all girls boarding school located at the top of Morgan Creek Road in Copper Cove.

Emmett pieced the story together from what the hungry sluts he fucked on a daily basis told him. Some dumbfuck came to town with three hot pieces of ass in his car, but got stopped at the checkpoint. They took his car, and the ass, and left him to die in the blazing sun.

Why they didn’t just shoot his dumb ass right then and there, no one will ever know, but it was a mistake that cost the town dearly, because that dumbfuck must have somehow run three miles uphill to warn the National Guardsmen who’d taken up residence at the school.

Exactly what happened after Reggie got to the school that day is a matter of speculation, but some of the sluts swore they heard machine gun fire coming from the direction of the vale. The final outcome, of course, sat rotting on the side of the road near the underpass. The next day, a squad of six soldiers, led by a ruthless Staff Sergeant named Charmagne Pollard, rolled into town with machine guns blazing to rescue the three girls and get their revenge. Including Reggie and his men, the soldiers slaughtered twenty-seven people, wiping out most of the militia in the process, and took all the town’s weapons and ammo back with them.

It was no wonder the town had been so easy to take over. Emmett and Harlan recruited and lightly armed a half dozen men to act as a security force, and then the two brothers availed themselves of the town’s many desperate housewives and their children. Despite the near constant ass Emmett was getting, however, the treasure sitting at the top of the hill called to him.

Hundreds of military and civilian weapons, including at least two machine guns. Tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition. An up armored HMMWV with a turret, and a venerable old M35A2 six-by-six Deuce and a Half. A pharmacy’s worth of antibiotics and painkillers. And sixty tight, virgin, teenaged pussies and assholes to stick his cock into.

He just had to find a way to take that school.

Under the shade of a dense grove of beech trees, near the grassy bank of a shallow brook lined with tiny pebbles, Endora and Grace shared their passions and their bodies. Using her fingers to pull Grace’s beautiful flower open, Endora glided her tongue through the pink gap between her delicate petals, while Grace licked and kissed and sucked on Endora’s sensitive clit. The two girls had fallen headlong into that wonderful phase of every fledgling relationship, where they couldn’t keep their hands, or their mouths, off of each other.

Endora approached the exploration of Grace’s honeyed pussy with the enthusiasm and wonder of an intrepid young adventurer, bursting with excitement, and determined to unlock all of its wondrous mysteries. Her expansive knowledge of the campus and surrounding forests yielded a multitude of hidden nooks where they could meet up for extended interludes, two, sometimes three times a day, for either tender lovemaking or heated, vigorous fucking. By mutual consent, this was of the former variety.

The last couple of days had been an awakening for Endora. To share such intimacy with a kind, thoughtful, and drop dead gorgeous girl like Grace was a gift she’d only ever fantasized about. They talked for hours and bared their souls to each other. They shared their joys, their tragedies, their hopes and dreams and fears. They held hands and kissed. They undressed each other, and partook of the feminine gifts each of them had to offer.