The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

The rumble, sputter and hum of the approaching ATV broke my concentration as it cut through the quiet warbling of my shitty BlueTooth speaker long before Leo pulled around the trail bend. The thick foliage up here in the foothills, far at the back end of my family property, created a weird dampening effect so I hadn’t heard him until he was almost on top of me. The rumble cut through the thick greenery now and was followed by the crunching of the tires biting into the dry dirt and gravel of the hill trail.

Leo pulled his ATV to a halt a couple yards from where I had set myself up for my morning painting session, kicked it into park and shut off the engine. He was dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, only a little more than I was wearing myself since I’d gone for just an undershirt. It was hot even for late spring, and the mugginess of the Oregon coastal region had us both sweating before noon.

“Hey,” I nodded. “What’s up?”

Leo rolled his eyes and dismounted from his ride, stretching his arms high and full-bodied before making a jerk-off gesture and mimicking the sound of a small mechanical device, “Bzzzzt.”

I snorted and shook my head with a smirk. “Again?” I asked.

Our solitude and variable work hours on my family land had meant that for the past five years Leo and I had enjoyed our little patch of the Oregon wilds almost at will. Dirt biking and ATVing in the summers, snowmobiling and snowshoeing in the winter. Some archery and occasionally hunting out in the back woods when deer season came around—it really was a little forested wonderland and we made sure to put it to use. We weren’t too isolated from amenities, but the closest neighbour was a seven-minute drive down the highway.

We’d lived in idyllic, bachelor bliss. The only thing we’d been missing were girlfriends. Well, Leo had maintained an online relationship with a girl from Austria for a while, but that fizzled when she turned out to be trying to milk plane tickets out of him to come to the States. I’d told him exactly what sort of a red flag that sounded like, and things had ended poorly.

So everything but our dating lives had seemed perfect, but then the virus cropped up. My sister and her family had moved down south into California to be closer to her husband’s folks way back while I was still in the Service, and they hadn’t wanted to come up north, so Erica had been the only person we’d considered offering shelter to even after things started to begin feeling more permanently stuck in Pandemic mode. Now we were going on month two of full lockdown quarantines in the state, and we had no idea if ‘the worst of it’ had happened yet, or was still to come.

The first weeks before our trip into the city had almost been like a vacation. We got to tour Erica around the property properly, and she got to play with all our toys. We did end up teaching her gun safety, and how just after sunrise you could spot the local deer up in the hills from the back porch (mostly unrelated activities unless it was deer season). Then, after the trip to get her stuff a month ago, things slowed down. We still had fun, but as the world continued to grind more and more to a halt, work started taking up less time and we all fell into a casual state of constant ‘will I accomplish anything today?’

“Yeah, again,” Leo answered my question. He came and stood at my shoulder to look over my watercolour sketchbook. I’d started doing scenery work a few years ago to practice for my freelance concept art contracts—video games and movie productions all usually had a tiny in-house team these days, but they were so overloaded they tended to frequently contract out anyways. A really good background often goes unnoticed in the grand scheme of things but can make all the difference to impressing an art coordinator. Basing my practice on the wilderness around us made the most sense.

“Am I wrong,” I asked Leo, “Or wasn’t she at it last night, too?”

“She was,” he groaned. “And twice during the day. I don’t know what’s gotten into her.” He walked over to where my own ATV was and pulled out my water bottle, lifting it to me with a raised eyebrow to ask if he could have some.

“Go for it,” I said, and picked up the lid to my palette and sealed it over the paint pucks. “And it’s not that big a deal. It’s just…”

“Awkward, I know,” Leo said after finishing his swig of water. “She isn’t exactly quiet about it.”

“Honestly,” I said. “I think she thinks she is. She’s just… not.”

The silence between us stretched, awkward in its own right. After all, we were talking about Erica getting herself off.

I had met Leo’s twin almost as soon as I’d moved into Leo’s condo as a roommate, and we’d been friendly ever since. Her ability to handle the casual crassness I’d developed in the military, and calling her brother on his shit, had made her an instant friend that I could respect for her take-no-shit attitude when it came to her business. I also found her attractive as hell, but she was my roommate-turned-best-friend’s sister. She’d been a little more slight when we met, but our late twenties and early thirties had only given her a fuller figure that she knew exactly how to show off without being skanky about it. The main thing, other than the whole sister-of-friend situation, that kept me from ever trying to pursue something was that I was pretty sure she was a lesbian. She’d never said it outright, but over drinks in the city in the ‘before times’ she was always describing the bodies of her hot tattoo clients to tease me and Leo, talking about big tits and perky asses and shaved pubic mounds. It was also surprising the number of buttholes she claimed to see on a weekly basis.

After our trip back into the city, Erica finally started to feel more at home. Our friendliness since I moved to Portland had always been occasional and at a bit of a distance since we had different social circles, but now she was becoming an actual roommate and not a guest.

Then Leo and I heard the bzzzzzt for the first time.

I’ll be honest, we were idiots for about five minutes that first time. We ran into each other as we were wandering the first floor of the house, both wondering what the hell had broken and was making a noise I’d never heard in the house before. It was sometime around when I had been scouring the kitchen for a broken appliance that I realized the sound was coming from above me, and a few more seconds before I realized whose room I was under.

Then the soft, muffled moaning started.

That first time, Leo and my eyes met and it was like we’d locked in and couldn’t break contact. It was a case of the ol’ Dog-Taking-A-Shit stare, inevitably awkward and magnetically locked in. For a solid minute and a half, we both got redder and redder as we listened to Erica tease and please herself above our heads, up in her room. Eventually, we both silently stepped out of the house and onto the porch. We never said a word about it to each other, and definitely not to Erica.

Apparently, our lack of questions or notice encouraged Erica that she was getting away with her alone time, because now two months on into quarantine, we fully understood what ‘bzzzt’ meant when we warned each other that we might not want to go into the house.

“We should say something,” Leo finally said. We’d let the silence between us develop so long it had come back around to something more companionable and less awkward. He was leaning against a tree, looking out at the hills I’d been painting while I packed up my brushes and paint, and then fanned my sketchbook through the air to try and speed up the watercolours drying.

“Hey, you go ahead with that,” I said, holding up my hands. “I am definitely not the one who wants to tell a woman that we can hear her every time she wants to relieve some tension. And I am absolutely not telling Erica, of all people.”

“I can handle my sister just fine,” Leo scoffed.

“Sure,” I said. “but we shouldn’t be handling each other at all as roommates, my man.”

“Look, Harrison,” Leo said. “Are you trying to tell me that my sister jilling off above your head on the daily isn’t a little… rude? Or something? At least I can get out of the house to the workshop. That’s your home and your place of work at the same time.”

“Leo, I—” I started, but got interrupted by a squawk coming from the handheld radios strapped to both Leo’s ATV and my own.

“Hey, are you guys in range, over?” Erica asked. She sounded clipped. Almost startled.

“Yeah, sis. What’s up? Over.” Leo responded.

“Any chance you were expecting a delivery today? Over.” Erica asked.

“No,” I said into my own walkie talkie. “Why, is someone driving up the lane? Over.”

“You guys should really get down here,” Erica said. “There’s a helicopter landing in the front yard, and I don’t think it’s some new Amazon delivery system.”

I looked at Leo with a furrowed brow. “Uh, say again? Did you say a helicopter?”

“Yes, Harrison. I said a motherfucking helicopter is currently touching down on the front lawn. Can you get down here, please? Now?”

“Five minutes,” I said back, already hopping onto the seat of my ride. I dropped my sketchbook and palette into the bin attached to the back of the ATV and latched it closed. “If it’s cops or something, just don’t let them in the house. Give us five minutes. Out.”

There wasn’t really a ‘fast’ way back. The trails that crisscrossed the rocky forest of the property were often little more than deer runs, but Leo and I had spent the last five years exploring and enjoying them. Not to mention my entire childhood when I had the run of the place in between school and chores.

We burned it through a couple of larger clearings, avoided the more dense forest areas, and pushed the ATVs to their limits when we cut around the edge of one of the swampy ponds. In under five minutes, we’d travelled what could sometimes take an entire afternoon hike on the easier and more roundabout paths. We were coming up on the house from behind, and instead of pulling up into the garage lean-to next to the old barn, I rode straight around to the front of the house.

A helicopter really was sitting in the front yard, about thirty yards from the house and centred on the old gravel driveway. Two men and a woman in suits were being flanked by four, armed men in black fatigues. The scene almost felt like a TV show, like some CIA officer had come to pick one of us up to go on a secret mission in the Andes to stop an international terror ring or something. Maybe I’m getting my plots mixed up. It had been a long lockdown, and we’d streamed a lot of shows.

Instead of one of us coming out in a suit ready to go do Bond-like action shit, Erica was standing on the front porch of the ranch house in nothing but a fluffy pink housecoat and thick hiking boots, the old double barrel shotgun we usually kept near the back door for wolf or bear emergencies casually pointed at the helicopter people. The robe barely came down to her mid-thigh showing off her pale legs and the bright tattoos scattered across them, along with both of the full sleeve tattoos on her arms. Her dark brown hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail, revealing the stern look on her face. It was her ‘don’t fuck with me’ face, which often also meant, ‘Bitch, I am the manager and you can talk to me.’

I kicked the ATV into park after skidding to a halt, and I was already dismounting as Leo pulled up behind me. “Jesus Christ, Erica,” I said.

“Mister Black,” called one of the suited men. He was perfectly calm about it, despite the shotgun levelled at him. To be fair, he probably didn’t know we kept it loaded with slugs since birdshot could just make a bear angry. From the current distance, birdshot wouldn’t be too dangerous. Slugs could still tear him apart.

“Hold on,” I said sternly. The man who had called out was the older of the two, grey-haired with the look of a veteran Suit and the voice of casual command that only came from years of experience giving orders. I didn’t really give a shit.

“What?” Erica asked as I stomped up the porch steps. “You said don’t let them in the house.”

“For fuck’s sake,” I said. Erica gave me a look, like a disapproving kindergarten teacher with a cocked eyebrow asking me to dare explain myself, and I managed not to flick my eyes down to the considerable cleavage that was bundled into her robe. I’d known that she had the robe with her, but I’d never actually seen her in it before except for brief flashes of her walking down the upstairs hallway to the washroom and back to her room. It was definitely as revealing as I had imagined.

After a brief stare down between us, Erica broke and rolled her eyes, pursed her lips, and handed me the shotgun. “You should know better than to point a fucking firearm at people if you don’t mean to use it,” I said.

“Harri,” she scoffed. “They pointed their rifles at me first. I was showing them I meant business, too.”

I think she regretted telling me that. It’s hard for me to know exactly what my face does, but in the past people had described my ‘angry face’ as a rolling stormcloud. I spun on my heels and stomped right back down the porch steps and towards the Suits. I had the shotgun gripped by the wooden stock, my hands away from the trigger and the barrels pointed down but I could still see a couple of the Uniforms were gripping their own firearms with the nervous energy of someone on alert. I also clearly noticed that while their fatigues had US Flag patches, they were lacking any other identification for a branch of service or personal ID, which was in a real grey area of legality if they were active service.

“You’re trespassing, and you’re breaking our quarantine,” I said as I stopped about six feet in front of the Suit who had spoken. He was older, probably in his late fifties, and had the craggy features of a man who had been there and done that. His hair was still thick on his head despite having gone white, and he wore a chunky moustache that Tom Selleck would have been proud of. “Don’t dance around. Who are you, what do you want, and why the fuck do you think I should listen to you at all after your goons pointed their weapons at my guest?”

The old Suit flicked his eyes up and down me for a moment, clearly taking a judgment, while the woman Suit scoffed under her breath. She was the kind of person who looked like they were constantly catching a whiff of dog shit, sour-faced and permanently disgusted.

“And I want her, and whichever of you fuckers couldn’t keep muzzle discipline, back on your fucking helicopter,” I added.

“Done,” said the old Suit.

“What? Greerson, you can’t—” the woman Suit started.

“Get your shit together, Maggie,” said the younger Suit next to them. If the older suit was a veteran, then this one was the slick up-and-comer. “And learn to read a fucking room.” He snapped at two of the Uniforms and pointed towards the helicopter, and both of them went without a word. Maggie looked like she wanted to say something else but looked back to Greerson, the old Suit, and found that he hadn’t even bothered to turn and look at her. She spun and gave her best storming-off exit, which wasn’t very effective considering she was navigating a grass lawn in heels.

“Any other demands before we get started?” Greerson asked. He had a voice like Tommy Lee Jones, that cracking southern drawl that immediately made you think of a tough and sarcastic grandfather.

“Go ahead,” I said.

“Good, cause I don’t like taking demands, kid. I’m Agent Greerson, this is Agent Walters. We represent an ongoing federal task force tackling some of the issues of the pandemic and quarantine.” Both men flashed open silver and gold badges from leather wallets they pulled out of their inner jacket pockets. “That’s who we are, and why you should listen to us. And we’re here to make you filthy rich in exchange for your land.”

I gritted my teeth and could feel my initial hot anger turn cold to match the lifelong, generational grudge that had been ingrained in me since I was a kid. “Let me guess,” I said. “OGA. Other Government Agency.”

Greerson smirked. “Something like that, kid.”

“And what, quarantine doesn’t mean anything to you guys? You couldn’t fucking call ahead and warn us you were coming?”

“That’s not how we work. Look, Black, why don’t we step inside and discuss this? Ain’t no reason for a showdown out here in the yard,” Greerson said. “Show of good faith. Hit the chopper, boys.” Immediately the other two Uniforms headed back to the helicopter.

It was my turn to eye the old Suit up and down. I sighed and shook my head ruefully. “Fine. Come on up.”

I turned and handed the shotgun to Leo, who took it carefully with both hands. “Put that back where it belongs,” I said, and as I walked back towards the house I looked at Erica. “You should probably go get dressed, E. Sounds like we’ve got company.”

Erica stopped me with a hand on my shoulder as I mounted the porch steps. She still looked concerned, and she squeezed my shoulder lightly. “Are you sure about this?” she asked in a whisper. “You’ve mentioned things, but never like this.”

“Never been quite this out there,” I said. “but I’m not about to shoot some CIA spook in my front yard before I even hear what he has to say.”

“Fuck. Is he really a spook?” she asked.

“Guess we’ll find out.”

The five of us were sitting down in the living room. Walters, along with Erica who had thrown on a sundress underneath a long knit sweater, and Leo were all drinking freshly brewed coffee while Agent Greerson and I sat across the main coffee table from each other. I was letting my emotions get the best of me, sitting forward in my seat and occasionally fidgeting with a couple of paint stains on my pant leg. Greerson sat back like he was as comfortable as he’d ever been. I knew I was giving myself away, my investigation and interrogation training had given me better instincts than this, but it had been seven years since I put them to actual use. I was getting soft.

“Well,” I said. “How about we start at the top, Agent? What exactly does the government want with my land in the middle of a pandemic, and why show up completely unannounced?”

Greerson gave a soft smile and nodded to himself as if he’d confirmed a thought. “Son, I know a lot about you, because for the past week there has been a team of backroom analysts digging up everything they could about you, your family and this property. The one thing we can’t know for certain is how much you know about what’s been going on in our country. So the first thing I want you to know, upfront before we talk about anything else, is that we are abso-fucking-lutely caught between a stampeding bull and the rodeo arena wall.”

“I’d have gone with clogged sewer drain and an industrial fan, myself,” Walters put in.

“Same impending shitshow, but it misses the feeling of uncontrollable careening danger,” Greerson said.

Walters shrugged. “That’s fair.”

“Yeah, alright, we know the world is fucked right now,” Leo said, annoyed with the banter. “We’ve been stuck in quarantine for months already.”

“No, kid. You don’t know,” Greerson said to Leo. “Not really. You check news sites and social media more than your two friends here, but even you don’t fucking know.” He turned back to me and met my eye. “It’s bad, and it’s getting worse. Projections are not pretty on this, and people like me are picking up the backup plans to the emergency backup plans. We’re talking the kind of shit the conspiracy theory nuts couldn’t have dreamed up ahead of time if they had a month-long conference to put their heads together.”

“Apocalyptic,” Walters said.

“Not… quite,” Greerson disagreed. “But definitely world-changing”

“This isn’t real,” Erica whispered from her seat. “This is fucked.”

“Fucked is the right word for it,” Greerson nodded. “But I’m being very real with you. Quarantine isn’t going to work. Our society isn’t built to handle it, people screw up constantly. Politicians think they can use it to their advantage, or ignore it. That’s why organizations like those that Walters and I work for have measures in place to operate without oversight, and very quickly, in these sorts of emergencies.”

“So, if this is all true, what exactly do you want?” I asked.

“We want your land,” Greerson said. “All of it. A big part of the success strategy on some of our backup plans includes building brand new quarantine settlement facilities for the vaccinated, and your property was flagged as prime real estate for the purpose in this region. You’re remote, but not too remote—twenty minutes from the nearest town and an hour and a half from the nearest city. It borders onto a significant enough water source with the river to the west, and basic services can be expanded on without too much difficulty.”

Walters leaned forward, his mug of coffee cupped in both hands. “Mr Black, in effect, the government wants to purchase all 560 acres of your land from you and put a whole bunch of healthy people on it to make sure we don’t all fucking die.”

“No,” I said. Greerson didn’t blink.

“You haven’t even heard our offer yet,” Walters said.

“He doesn’t need to,” Greerson told his partner, then turned back to me as he talked, staring me down. “This is generational property. MMrBlack’s great-great-great-grandfather purchased this land with cash he raised as a bounty hunter back in the days of Cowboys and the California Gold Rush. And ever since, the Black family has had to fight all comers to keep it. He could be absolutely destitute, dying of hunger, with famine and a draught in full swing and a forest fire on his doorstep, and I bet Mr Black here would tell you to fuck right off with an offer.”

“Something like that,” I said. I was a little surprised by even the sparse details Greerson was saying about my family history, but not as spooked as Leo and Erica seemed to be. They’d heard the stories from me, sitting around the campfire pit out back with beers in our hands, but I wasn’t the only source for the family history. Local court records were probably full of sordid details going back decades, if not over a century. He might have dug up details of events that didn’t get passed down verbally through the family tree—based on the dark shit I did know about, I couldn’t imagine what might have gotten left out.

Greerson finally sat forward, meeting me energy-to-energy as he kept my gaze locked in. “And yet, here we are, Mr Black. We can either come up with a deal, or I swear to Christ and all the Saints that the government will seize this land for eminent domain under the emergency provisions of the pandemic and you won’t be able to do a fucking thing about it.”

“Sell, or die,” I said. “So you can build a ‘resettlement camp?’ Jesus Christ, yourself. If you know so much about my family history, you know building a fucking ‘camp’ of any sort on this land would be the absolute last thing I would bend over for.”

“I didn’t say ‘camp.’” Greerson said. “No matter what your Native, and Japanese, forebears had to go through, listen to me—this is the farthest thing from that.”

I was 1/32nd native from my father’s side and 1/16th Japanese from my mother’s side. Again, not the hardest thing to dig up, but while I had the black hair of both those ancestries, I mostly just looked like a tall white guy with a pretty generic last name. No one ever assumed I was anything else in passing.

“What does that even mean?” Erica asked.

“It means we aren’t building concentration camps,” Greerson said, glancing over at her. “We aren’t building a reservation, or an internment camp, or any of the other shitty things our and other governments have done to people.” He looked back at me again. “We’re going to develop this land into a neighbourhood. The God damned fanciest kind of gated community you can think of. Big houses, big properties, for people who do or did important work to settle in safety and stability as we try to survive this shitshow virus.”

“None of this answers why,” I said. “Why should I agree to this? Why shouldn’t I make it so fucking annoying that you go find a different patch of land and leave me alone?”

Greerson frowned, though I had the feeling he’d been planning this from the start. He wanted me to work to peel back the layers of information, to earn the answers because that would make me believe them more. It would tick off boxes in my psychology and experience. The fucking problem was even though I knew he was doing it, it was also working. “Because you’d be saving lives,” Greerson answered. “Our pilot development down in California is called New Eden—the place is only two-thirds built to starting specs, and we’re already out of room on the next five phases of development once it’s opened. Now it’s my job to set up the next locations and get them rolling because our current projections are that within the next six months, the death toll is only going to skyrocket. We can’t even get a grasp on what the numbers might reasonably be because the range is so fucking staggering. Millions is the easy number, Mr Black.”

It was my turn to say it. “Fuck.”

“Now, you’re not going to hear that on the TV,” Walters said. “You won’t hear it from the CDC, or the other health agencies. The only reason we are cleared to tell you this is because folks in our circles have developed the preference to work with reasonable people when they are useful. And also, who would fucking believe you?”

“Here’s our offer,” Greerson said, pulling out a slip of folded paper from inside his suit jacket and putting it on the coffee table. “That’s the hard cash number we’ve designated for this deal. No taxes. Straight transfer from us to you. There will also be other perks, including homes inside the settlement for you and Mr Lacosta. Things are about to get really weird in the world. Have you heard anything about the Tier system?”

“Nothing,” I said, but Leo spoke up.

“I saw some rumours. It’s supposed to be some kind of a terrifying triage, right?” he asked. “Who’s the most worthy kind of shit. People started protesting, but I thought it got debunked.”

Greerson nodded. “Oh, we stopped the protests, but it’s all too real. I won’t hide it—I find the entire thing absolutely unamerican. It’s the kind of shit the Chinese government operates, but it is what it is.”

Walters drained the last of his coffee and set the mug onto the coaster on the coffee table politely. “Suffice it to say, it’s a sort of social karma system. The more important you are to society, the more protections and comforts you’re afforded as we roll out our limited resources on quarantine defences. There’s 5 tiers, one being the lowest and five the highest. Most of society will land in the 1’s and 2’s, including all three of you. This development we’ll be building is mostly going to house 3’s and 4’s. As part of the deal, we’ll place Leo at tier 3 for resettlement purposes, and you Harrison would be placed at tier 4 despite your lack of qualification in the matter.”

This entire conversation felt like I was running downhill trying to keep up with an avalanche. “That sounds an awful lot like a really great way to set up for corruption,” I said. “A fucking caste society? Really?”

“It’s already done,” Greerson said. “Believe me, there were a lot of in-the-know people against the idea. But it’s the only idea that works in this situation. We’ve gamed it out to the Nth degree. Leo, your description is pretty much the best that we were able to make internally. We’re triaging society to make sure it stays together and can weather this hurricane.”

“What would we tier at without this?” Leo asked.

“Leo Lacosta,” Greerson said, talking as if he were reading directly off of a portfolio even though he rattled it off without referencing anything. “Positives: Early thirties age bracket, relatively fit and healthy. Low-to-Mid career path—carpentry skills of moderate qualification. No criminal record. Negatives: No community investment. Likely rating: Tier 1.”

“Harrison Black,” he continued. “Positives: Early thirties age bracket, relatively fit and healthy. Former military service including Military Police service, honourable discharge at the rank of MP Investigations Special Agent, no known psychological impacts. No criminal record. Negatives: No community investment, null-rank career—freelance artist. Likely rating: Tier 1.”

“To be fair, there is a big question mark on your file that we couldn’t fill,” Walters said. “Your honourable discharge happened mid-tour, without any reported incidents or injuries. It’s surprising you haven’t been called back into at least reserve service with the Emergencies Acts. A decent answer would probably bump you up to tier two.”

“I can’t talk about it,” I said.

Erica snorted and rolled her eyes, and both men looked at her.

“Erica,” I warned her.

“What?” she demanded. “They just called you ‘low tier,’ Harri. If you’re not going to tell them then I will.”

“I can’t talk about it,” I said again.

“Harrison knocked out an Air Force bigwig when he was an MP and stationed in Germany,” Leo cut in. “The guy was abusing and trying to blackmail a female subordinate into sex. The only reason we know is because she tracked Harri down a few years ago and we met her in a bar in Portland.”

“The bigwig was politically protected and nothing happened in the end,” Erica said. “At least, that’s what she said. He got shuffled around, and Harrison got the boot.”

“I got an honourable discharge instead of a court martial for striking a very superior officer of a different branch,” I said. “And part of that deal was that I not talk about it.”

“Well that explains some things,” Greerson said. “It wouldn’t change anything though. If you were doing something more useful with your life than painting little pictures, you might have made tier two or three without this offer.”

“Says you,” Erica scoffed. “Art is useful. And important!”

Greerson pursed his lips slightly. “Erica Lacosta. Not an official resident of the property, but I know enough. Positives: Early thirties age bracket, relatively fit and healthy. Negatives: Criminal record, including battery, two counts of public drunkenness, and public urination. No community investment. Null rank career—tattoo artist. Likely rating: Tier 1.”

“Hey, fuck you too,” Erica said, and pointed her middle finger at Greerson, along with a scowl to go with it. Honestly, none of that was surprising news about Erica for me except for the Battery charge, I definitely needed to get that story out of her.

“OK, we get it,” I said, interrupting what I had a feeling was about to become a degenerating path of conversation. “You know about us. You do realize this is all a little much, right? It comes across as insane.”

“Of course it does,” Greerson sighed. “But a year ago, only bored analysts tripping on LSD were asked to think about these kinds of situations. Now we’re in it, right in the damned middle of the clusterfuck.”

“You should really look at the offer,” Walters said, gesturing to the folded paper I hadn’t looked into yet. It sat on the coffee table like an accusing finger pointed at me by my father, and his father before him. How dare I even consider this?

“So it’s a buttload of cash,” I said, still not opening the paper. “And we get treated like what, royalty? And in exchange, I lose my family legacy.”

“Royalty is a stretch—you’re selling us land, not curing cancer. We’ll take care of you like valued members of society. You’ll also get early access to the vaccine,” Greerson said.

“There’s a vaccine?” Leo immediately asked. “Social media has been wild with rumours but—”

“It’s still experimental,” Walters said. “And undergoing trials. But it’s functioning, with some unconventional side effects. They’re still doing long-term tests down in California, but we’re going to start rolling it out down there any day now once the doctors are happy with the plan. That’s how bad we need it, FDA bullshit be damned.”

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Flipside, stick. If I don’t cut a deal, you’ll use the might of the US government to bend me over and rip my family legacy right out of my ass.”

“You got it. But like I said, we prefer working with people. There’s always a silver lining to making friends,” Walters said.

“Fuck,” I said again. Then I flipped one half of the paper open and looked at the number written on the inside. There were a damn lot of zeros. “I need to call my sister,” I said. “But pending her approval, I’ll lease it to you. All 560 acres, for a hundred years less a day—that’s what people do, right? And Leo and I get to pick where our houses are built.”

“That’s not how this works,” Walters said.

“It’s my counter offer,” I said.

“Hold on,” Greerson said, raising a hand to his partner. He narrowed his eyes as he looked me over again. He was a man who made judgment calls on the fly, despite his ability to reel off memorized facts like he’d been living with them for years. I could practically see the rusty old gears turning behind his grizzled facade. “Fuck it,” he finally said. “We need to survive the next six months, year, five years and decade before anyone will be worrying about next century. Make your call.”

“You’re really doing this?” Leo asked me as I stood up and fished in my pocket for my cell.

“My family has had to defend this land from everything and everyone except the federal government,” I said. “Up until now, they might be the only people who haven’t thought they had some claim to it. Obviously, this will all need to be in writing before I make a final agreement, but look at the news—everything they’re saying makes some sort of terrible sense. And I’d rather get the carrot than a stick so far up my ass it’s tickling my brain stem.”

I went outside to the porch to make the call to Valerie, my older sister. It was quicker than I thought it would be—Val and her husband Brad were hearing horror stories from their nursing friends in the local hospitals, and she immediately understood the position we were in. We hadn’t always gotten along the best growing up, but if Val had one thing it was a practical head on her shoulders. When I came back inside, I nodded to Greerson. “Add in another house for my sister and her family, and we’ve got a deal.”

“In exchange for the Lease, and the extra house,” Walters said, “We’re going to need your help in identifying the landscape. I assume you know it fairly well—we’ll want you to walk our surveyors through to show any odd landscape elements, seasonal issues like flood areas, that sort of thing.”

“Done, as long as I can point out the shit they shouldn’t fuck with and they actually listen,” I said. “There are some pretty big old growth trees out there that would be a fucking shame to cut down.”

“I understand your concerns, son,” Greerson said, as he stood and offered his hand. “But believe me when I say this—we aren’t looking to build any high rises or pave over the place. These developments are for people important to society for one reason or another, and that means we’re making sure to give them the best we can. Landscape included.”

One last deep breath and I reached out and hovered my own hand near his. “In writing before it’s official.”

“The contract will be done by this afternoon and we’ll email it over. Our lawyers work on our timeline, not their own,” he said and grasped my hand in his. We both had larger hands than most, but I could immediately tell he had the grip of a man made from the iron bones of a hard life. I’d like to think he felt the same in my grip, but I had a feeling he’d shaken hands with much harder and scarier people than me.

“When can we get vaccinated?” Leo asked. “If we’re going to be working with surveyors and shit, shouldn’t we all be as safe as we can?”

“We have a testing site opening up in Portland as we speak, so it can get done as soon as possible,” Walters said. “Though, as I mentioned, things are a little bit unorthodox right now. Harrison and Leo, you’ll need these codes. Get online this afternoon, go to the website and fill out the questionnaire. It’s extremely important you are entirely truthful. Your answers will affect how your tier ranking will play out for you as we roll it out over the next few months across the west coast.” He pulled out two business cards from a pocket, each with their names, an URL and a twenty-five-digit passcode, and handed them to Leo and I.

“What about me?” Erica asked.

“Vaccination side effects and implementation are different between men and women,” Greerson said. “Just like the virus is overly affecting men, the vaccine has different effects. If you want your vaccine immediately, Miss Lacosta, you’re going to need to fly with us back up to Portland and attend the information session this afternoon that some of our volunteer human guinea pigs are doing. Then, if you agree to the risks and side effects, we can have you immunized as soon as tomorrow morning.”

Things moved quickly after that. Erica went to pack an overnight bag and put on her ‘going out into the world’ gear that she usually wore for grocery trips into town—she’d be put up in a quarantine hotel while in Portland for the night before she returned the next day. Within ten minutes she was ready to go and Walters was escorting her out, and the helicopter was warming up its rotors with a whining humm in the front yard.

“I’m glad you agreed to the deal,” Greerson said, offering his hand to me again, which I shook. “You may not fully understand what you’ve agreed to yet, but when you do I expect a more enthusiastic thank you. I get that the cash wasn’t the important factor with you, son. I grew up on a ranch in North Dakota, I know what family land means. This place is going to do a lot of good for people.”

“Are you managing the development?” I asked, raising my voice to be heard over the rising thrum of the helicopter.

“Not a chance,” he said. “It’ll be managed by the Air Force, they’ve been spearheading with the CDC on all these efforts. I’m just the pre-show, but I’ll be around to check in on the progress every once in a while, and do the problem solving other people can’t handle.”

“What does that look like?” I asked.

“Any way it needs to,” he grinned, and I saw the look that all veteran soldiers had. An acceptance that violence could come easily into the life of a person, and that they knew how to handle it when it came. “And don’t be alarmed, but we’ve already had a crew starting to widen your driveway down at the highway. They’ll work through the night and probably make it up here by tomorrow morning.”

“What’s the rush?” I asked.

Greerson barked a laugh as he started backing away from me towards the open helicopter door. Sour-puss lady was leaning out, holding onto the door and looking like she was about to try and scold Greerson for keeping them waiting. “Kid, in two weeks’ time there’s going to be well over a thousand lumberjacks, construction workers, surveyors and architects up here. Government moves slow, but OGA’s were designed to do the opposite. Your life is about to get a little crazy, I’d strap in.”

I had too many questions to even start one as Greerson hopped into the dark interior of the helicopter. The door slammed, the motor whined at a higher pitch, and it leapt into the sky and started heading north.