Chapter 38

Seated behind her laptop in the cafeteria, senior Jasmine Howard pressed the desktop publishing application’s Print button. She rubbed her tired eyes and waited for the color laser printer, carried over from the admin office in Leavitt Hall, to churn out the finished document. A variety of official state and National Guard documents, collected from the admin office and Charmagne’s accordion folder, were stacked on the table next to her. When the document exited the printer, she looked it over, then handed it to Mike.

He first skimmed through the document, then went back and gave it a thorough read-through. Then he read it again. When he was satisfied, he handed it to Charmagne.

Charmagne began to read, but stopped after the first two paragraphs.

“This ain’t gonna work,” she said with a sour look on her face. “It needs to be a demand letter, Mike. Not a fucking how-do-you-do.”

“It’ll work,” he said confidently.

She gave him a skeptical look, but continued reading. When she got toward the bottom, her lips lifted.

“Yeah, this is more like it,” she said under her breath. Finally she reached the end and handed it back.

“Well?” Mike asked.

“Fuck it. Good enough.”

Eric Draper preferred the overnight watch at the mountain observation post, by far. The start time for his shift was chosen randomly, based on a phone app one of the students, Beth Foster, wrote. Sometimes, his shift started at twenty-two forty-seven, sometimes at oh-seventeen, but usually between twenty-three hundred and oh-one hundred hours.

Nothing ever happened down there in the cove. The foothills were dead quiet. No people, no deer, no foxes, no owls, nothing. Nothing but silence. It was that silence that allowed him to hear the soft wet sounds and throat constrictions of Haylee Skansi’s blowjob, and that sound was music to his ears.

This is why I joined the fucking Guard, he thought with a smile.

They’d been fucking for days now, long before she was discharged by Sgt. Sayavong, after he jokingly asked her if she wanted a sponge bath and she said yes. Since then, they’d manned the overnight shift together nearly every day.

Each shift started the same way. They arrived, got a quick sitrep from the outgoing watch, then waited until they disappeared down the mountainside. When they were finally alone, they roshambo’d to see who would take the first thirty minute watch. The winner took off their pants, while the loser settled in between their legs.

Eric loved eating pussy, and Haylee’s pussy was choice. She got so fucking wet, it was crazy. She also rocked a thick, sexy, honey-colored bush. She told him that she’d never shaved it in her life. He loved it.

He usually fingered her while he ate her out. She used to ask him to put a finger in her butt, or to lick her ass, but he always took a hard pass on that. Exit only, he told her. She pouted, but he ate her pussy so well that she never complained too much. She could have three or four orgasms over the course of a single, thirty-minute watch. He was kind of jealous of that.

Then the watch changed, and it was his turn.

When they first started sleeping together, she wasn’t the greatest giver of blowjobs. It wasn’t because she didn’t like it, she told him. She did. A lot. In fact, she said giving head got her insanely wet, and she wished she could do it more often, but she had a super sensitive gag reflex.

He told her to just concentrate on the head, and use her hands for the rest. You would have thought he taught her how to make fire. She was overjoyed that she didn’t have to worry about throwing up, and ever since then, she’d worked diligently to perfect her technique.

She was pretty damn good at it now. She could get him off quickly if she wanted to, but she did her best to prolong it for as much of the thirty-minute shift as possible because, unlike her, multiple orgasms weren’t an option for him.

She also jacked him off sometimes so they could talk, which was just fine with him. He loved talking to her and he loved her hand jobs. She was a rad chick, and they had a lot in common, but he would never have had a shot with a girl like her before the world went to shit.

Haylee was way out of his league. She was hot. Like smoking hot. A totally free-spirited hippie girl who never wore a bra, except a sports bra when she was in uniform. And she had the most amazing tits he’d ever seen. Super soft, beautifully shaped, and just the right size. Big, but not too big. She’d probably be a D-cup, if she wore bras.

It seemed odd to Eric that a girl like her, so natural and carefree, would end up in the National Guard, until she told him her story. Haylee attended UNC-Charlotte to become a bridge builder. A real one. A civil engineer. During the summer between her third and fourth year, however, she took a trip with her best friend to Amsterdam. What started out as a six-week adventure turned into a two-year love affair when she met her then-boyfriend, Neils.

They travelled around Europe together, hitting all the raves and festivals. She did ecstasy and acid and mushrooms, and smoked a ton of pot. She deferred her senior year once, then twice, before finally dropping out. By the time she returned home, heartbroken and overdrawn on her bank account, the thought of returning to the university grind had lost its appeal.

What never left her, though, was her desire to build bridges. After several years working retail and service jobs, she happened upon a National Guard unit helping to repair a washed out bridge after a hurricane. She went online, read about the Engineer Battalion, and signed up a few months later.

Haylee was amazing. She loved the outdoors just as much as Eric did, and she loved to smoke pot almost as much as he did. More than any other thing in the world, however, she loved sex. Like, a lot.

She told him she was a nymphomaniac, which he thought was someone who slept around a lot, but that apparently wasn’t true. In fact, she was super picky about the men she slept with. All it really meant was that she was constantly horny, so she masturbated all the time. Several times a day. She once told him that her ideal life would be to live as a nudist in an off-grid cabin and just masturbate and fuck all day.

She was his dream girl. For real.

“You really think Mike’s fucking the Staff Sergeant?” she asked as she jacked him off.

“Gotta be. He’s stayed overnight a couple times now. What else would they be doing?”

She shook her head. “That just seems too weird to think about.”

“Tell me about it.”

“What about the Sergeant? She’s over there a lot too.”

“I don’t know. I could see him fucking one or the other, but both at the same time?”

Haylee shrugged and said, “I’d fuck him with another chick.”

His face fell. “Really?”

“Sure, why not? He’s hot. Super hot.”

Eric was quiet for a while. For him, being with Haylee was about more than just sex. Sure, the sex was fucking awesome, but that was only part of it. He felt connected to her in an almost spiritual way. The thought of her fucking Mike made his stomach churn and his throat dry.

“What about the whole, you know ... kid thing?” he asked, feeling like a scum bag for bringing that up.

In truth, he was almost certain it didn’t happen the way Linda said. He knew Mike pretty well now, and it seemed totally out of character for him. Plus, all his other co-workers swore up and down that it was those girls who raped him, not the other way around. It seemed unlikely that all of them would lie for him.

Haylee jacked him off for a while and thought about it. Take your time, Eric thought. No need to rush. Finally, she shrugged.

“I’m not sure. Part of me thinks it’s icky, but another part of me thinks it’s kind of hot.”

His heart sank. Was she serious?

“But, he’s a pedo ... maybe.”

Even as he said it, he inwardly cringed at how insecure he sounded. But he couldn’t help himself. The last thing in the world he wanted was to lose Haylee to Mike. Mike could get any woman he wanted. He didn’t need the hottest girl Eric had ever dated too.

“No ... I think it’s called something else. Hemophilia or something. Anyway, I’m just trying to put myself in their shoes, you know? Like, if he was my teacher, I’d totally want to fuck him too.”

The onset of panic made his chest tighten. Now she was actively thinking about fucking him. Why did he ever bring him up? He needed to change the subject, quick. What else could they talk about? Anything but Mike.

“Really? But he’s so old. He’s like, I don’t know, in his forties or something.”

She narrowed her eyes a bit and flashed him a wicked grin. “I know, right? “ she said, jacking him off faster. “God, I love hot older guys. I’d definitely call him daddy.”

Is she thinking about him while she’s jacking me off? he worried. Is she imagining that it’s Mike’s dick in her hand? She practically confirmed his worst fears when she closed her eyes and licked her lips, then moaned softly. Oh my god, she’s thinking about fucking him, right now!

“He abuses women, you know,” he said hastily.

Why the fuck did you just tell her that? Stop talking about him! To his great relief, however, Haylee opened her eyes and slowed her hand.

“What?” she asked, her tone slightly acidic.

“Yeah. For real.”

She furrowed her brow and pursed her lips. “Oh man. That’s disappointing. Where’d you hear that?”

Eric sighed with relief and said, “I overhead a couple of the girls talking about it. Apparently, there’s some videos of him floating around the Internet. Well, back when there was an Internet.”

“What kind of videos?” she asked, her eyebrows crowding even closer together.

“Some kind of creepy S&M shit. Like, really twisted dungeon stuff. He’d tie up these women. Real young. Like your age. Then he’d do all kinds of sick shit to them.”

“What kind of things?” she asked cautiously.

“Like choke and gag them with his dick, or slap them around and call them sluts and whores. Stuff like that. Oh! Here’s the most fucked up part. Apparently, he had all of these, like, fucking machines or something. You know, like with dildos and stuff. And he’d fuck them with it. Like, even in their butts and stuff.”

Haylee’s hand moved faster and faster the longer he spoke, until she was jerking him off with both hands as fast as she could. He gripped the arm rest of the deck chair as her eyelids drifted shut and her mouth opened.

“Slow down,” he said. “Haylee!”

She bit her lip and moaned loudly. In no time at all, his climax surged and a line of cum shot into the air and landed on her hands. She slowed and tightened her grip, using his cum as lubricant until his body twitched from the intense sensation. Finally, she opened her eyes and smiled at him.

“Who, exactly, were you talking to about those videos?”

Sgt. Fulton Chapman turned into the FreshVale Foods distribution center’s west entrance and proceeded at a slow crawl down the wide concrete road leading around the south side of the property, to the tractor-trailer parking lot at the rear of the facility. As he approached the logistics and dispatch center, he began to slow, and Cpl. Ibarra swiveled the machine gun turret to keep it trained on the offices. The brakes on the HMMWV squealed as he came to a slow stop, directly in front of the windows, with the powerful diesel motor glugging loudly.

From behind the tinted glass, Fulton saw movement. Vertical blinds parting, then swinging. The people inside were aware of their presence. Fulton cracked open the armored driver’s side door and dropped a clear Tupperware container onto the cement, then shut the door and slowly drove away, exiting through the facility’s east entrance.

From atop a ridge, a mile south of the distribution center, Staff Sgt. Charmagne Pollard kept watch over the operation. She didn’t like putting Chapman and Ibarra in such close proximity to a dozen armed squatters, but it was a calculated risk. A show of force and confidence.

If they came out immediately to retrieve the container, she would be concerned, because that would be a show of confidence on their part. But they didn’t, and she had no reason to expect they would. Instead, it took them nearly thirty minutes to work up the courage to finally send someone out to retrieve it.

The man first poked his head out of the door, assessed the distance, then sprinted across the parking lot to the container. He hesitated before touching it, looked back over his shoulder to the safety of the dispatch center, then squatted to examine the package. He could clearly see the two items inside, neither of which should have posed an unreasonable risk. Assured of his safety, the man grabbed the container and sprinted back to the offices.