Double Helix Ch. 13

I moved around the bed to sit next to her and stroked her head. "What are you feeling?" I asked.

"It's mm-amazing. Warmth. . . a glow, where you were licking me. God, it's spreading. I can feel it moving up my body, but slowly. It's-it's getting stronger."

I think that there was more, but her voice broke into a whine as she began to shake. Tilly's body kept revealing new wonders, due to the inclusion of the hedonic model in her genes. The Don and Donna models had been the subject of a lot of dirty jokes before the Ban, but I knew that their reputation for promiscuity was undeserved. If anything, the model seemed to form deep and abiding emotional bonds with a mate. Was Tilly the same? Was I setting her up for misery by letting this relationship to continue? Would I throw away what I had with Nissi to be with Tilly? The very thought made me feel desolate.

"Are you...ah! Ok-kay, Norm?" Tilly stammered.

"Fine," I said, and stroked her hair again, "just a thought I had. How are you doing?"

"It's pulsing...through me. Warmth. Pleasure. It's..." she gasped. "I want you to...to...um..."

I knew what she wanted. I found her unwillingness to use profanity, even in the throes of passion, to be oddly endearing. I got up and walked around behind her. I knelt on the bed, my legs inside of her legs. Trails of liquid streaked her inner thighs clear down to the bedcovers. My cock was erect, pointing straight at her and as hard as I could ever recall. I put my hands on her rump and pressed forward slowly, reveling in the sensation of slick warmth and gentle resistance.

"Y-yes," she said thinly, her expression racked by pleasure. "Yes!" she repeated, rising an octave as I bottomed out inside her. I withdrew and felt her pussy pulse and clutch at me. She still twitched rhythmically from the strange, slow-moving orgasm I had induced. I began to move slowly in and out of her and she gave a little high-pitched grunt with each thrust. I increased the tempo gradually, wanting to savor every moment of exploration with her.

Those grunts built in pitch and in volume to match my movements until she was wailing in mindless ecstasy. "Oh my God," she whimpered suddenly. "OhmyGod, ohmygo-" She went silent, her mouth wide open in a soundless scream. Gasping a breath, she let it out again in a cry that must surely would have been heard down the hallway. I withdrew from her body and she collapsed sideways on the bed and curled in on herself, shaking and screaming from what looked like unbearable pleasure.

I lay down next to her against her back, holding her as she slowly came down. It must have been minutes before she finally went still in my arms. My cock was still rock hard, nestled between her thighs, and I wanted desperately to resume our lovemaking and reach my own climax, but given what I had just seen, I wasn't sure what that might do with her. I grinned to myself. Plenty of time to find out later. And besides, I had other obligations.

The soft sound of Tilly's measured breathing was my signal to carefully extract myself. I covered her with a blanket and stepped into the bathroom to shower. When I stepped out ten minutes later, Tilly was conscious once more, lying limply on her back and staring up at the ceiling. The blanket still covered her lower half, but my gaze was drawn to the sumptuous curves of her naked breasts. She glanced my way without moving her head.

"How was it?" I asked.

"Almost too much," she said dreamily. "That second orgasm just rode right over top of the first. I don't want to move."

"You can have five more minutes, then we need to get dressed and head back. We've already been gone for almost two hours. I don't want to arouse suspicion."

Her mouth quirked. "It seems that I've already aroused you in other ways."

I looked down to see the towel around my waist tented outwards from my rising cock. "No time for that," I said, with genuine regret, but there was also anticipation. Tilly caught it, of course.

"You're saving yourself for Nissi." She nodded. "Good."

"You said it yourself. It's been four days and she's not happy about it. Then again, you went without for over two weeks."

"Don't think it isn't hard for me, too," she said. "What I can do with my own fingers is exquisite, but there's no substitute for real intimacy. Norm, I know I was in a very dark place when I met you, but I've had time to reflect, to put it all in perspective. You really are the greatest thing to ever happen to me. This...us, it's just right."

I took her hand in my own and kissed it. Her skin was smooth and warm on my lips. Her eyes locked on mine as a shudder went through her. I wanted to be inside her again, and I could see in her half-lidded gaze that she wanted the same. Reason won out over passion. "It's time to go," she said. "They will be wondering about us."

I could not hide my own regret."I don't want to." I released her hand, my desire fading into longing. "But you're right."

Ten minutes later, we were back in the truck and on our way home. It was nearing dark when we pulled into the farm's dusty road. "Can you get the doors?" I asked, pointing at the barn.

Tilly jumped out and ran up ahead to the barn's big double doors. She undid the latch and flung the doors open with a casual motion that belied their weight and the stubbornness of their hinges. This would be the first time I had stowed Sasha's truck in here. There was a workbench and a rusty old tractor that I needed to get out of the way before the Ford would fit.

Tilly closed the big doors behind me after I drove inside and met me as I got out with a long, slow kiss. "Let's try to do this again," she said. "Maybe in a week?"

"Yeah, I would like that."

We took the smaller side door to get back to the house, and nearly stopped dead on seeing Nock, maybe twenty feet away, staring at us. We hadn't seen him upon driving up because he had been hidden behind the barn. "Hi," I said, forcibly nonchalant.

"What are you two planning to do again in a week?" Nock asked, his hard expression at odds with the lightness of his tone.

"Drive into town," Tilly said brightly, striding for the house. "Our new contact invited me to go dancing."

Nock just grunted and turned away, walking north towards the creek. Had he just happened to be walking by? If he had, shouldn't Tilly have been able to hear his steps on the gravel? Shaking off my disquiet, I jogged to catch up to her..

We found Nissi deep into her newest composition, with several papers full of notes and carefully drawn musical staves. Was this an orchestral piece? I had no idea that Nissi's range went that far afield.

"It's an anthem," she said. "Simple lyrics in rhyming couplets. What are you two up to?"

"Well," Tilly said, "I don't know about Norm, but I'm going to grab a screwdriver and get these new plates on my truck."

"Your truck?" Nissi asked, quirking an eyebrow at her.

Tilly shrugged and grinned. "I'm the one who stole it. See you in a bit."

"That girl is trouble," Nissi said, shaking her head in amusement.

"Funny you should mention that," I said, stepping closer to her. "You are in trouble, you know. It has been days, slave."

"Oh?" Nissi said. A smile crept into her face. "Oh, really?" Her demeanor changed, the confidence and assertiveness seeming to drain out of her. Her eyes cast to the floor and her voice went meek. "But Master, I'm trying to finish a composition right now, and-"

I spoke right over her. "You will come and serve me, slave. Now."

"Yes, Master."

I allowed myself a smile as I turned and led her up the stairs.

An hour later, I lay on my side, Nissi's thin frame pressed into me. We had foregone restraints this time, but I had given her ass a good paddling and brought her to orgasm five times. I had gotten myself off in there once too, and had been enjoying my post-coital bliss as Nissi slept.

Carefully, I raised myself up on one arm to look at her. She was a vision even in sleep. A thrill rose in my chest, so powerful that it very nearly brought me to tears. I loved her so much. She was all that I needed, more than I could ask for. The right thing to do was to confess my indiscretions and break it off with Tilly. Nissi would be angry, but I was certain she would forgive me.

I actually reached to wake her, but held back as a wave of dread overtook me. I thought of Tilly, so happy and fulfilled after our lovemaking, so vulnerable in the face of coming back here and pretending that none of it were real. I did not want to lose her, but it was the thought of taking what we had away from her that held me back. For things to change, I would have to hurt one of them. I was well and truly stuck. "I wish things could be different for all of us," I murmured.

"Hmm?" Nissi said. I held my breath, waiting, and after several seconds, her deep, even breathing resumed.

Tilly went dancing with Greg the following weekend, with me as nervous chaperone. I sat at a table to watch them, sipping my synthetic, artificially-flavored cocktail. I needn't have worried, as she somehow towed the line between platonic and flirtatious. She picked up the steps as fast as Greg could show them to her, and by the end of the night, between the alcohol and the vigorous dancing, he was exhausted and ready to take a cab home, which probably helped to avoid any awkward propositioning. The Oregon driver's license she got out of the deal looked and felt genuine, and I knew that we would be coming back for more of the same when we had the chance.

I took delivery on our food order from Andy a few days later. I met him just north of Corvallis on a back road many miles from Dan's farm. I showed up early to find Andy's van already parked in the empty field. Casey lounged in the front seat of an old blue Camaro nearby, chewing gum and reading a book. She looked up, blew a bubble and gave me a little wave as I pulled in. Eric was nowhere to be found, but I assumed that he was hidden near the highway to keep watch. I helped Andy load the four bins of food into Tilly's truck, reminded once more of their weight and the fact that she had carried two of these for miles.

It was a relief to finally have the food in hand. Our stores had begun to run low again, and Andy was our only lifeline at the moment. I had been worried about him taking the highway this far south to meet us after my own run-in with a federal checkpoint, and told him so.

"Checkpoints are easy," he said with a grunt, as we set the last bin down in the truck bed. "If they were really serious about catching us, they would deploy across all the highways and service roads running out of Portland at once. That's where most of the contraband comes in. Instead, they put up here and there, all random."

"But they'll still catch some bootleggers," I said. "Enough to serve as a deterrent."

Andy scoffed. "The stupid ones, maybe. Now what do you think I've got Casey there for?"

I shrugged. "Extra protection? More help if you need it?"

He shrugged. "And why is she driving my old Chevy?"

I thought about it for a moment. Why would they bring two vehicles if they only needed the van to deliver? I had it when I spotted the handset of the CB clipped into place near the rear-view mirror. It reminded me of that old movie with Jerold Reed and Jackie Gleason. "Of course. So, she drives ahead and scouts the way for you. If there's a checkpoint, she radios back to let you know."

"Easy as Corn Flakes," he agreed. "The feds leave holes in their net you could literally drive a truck through. Listen, the fact is that the black market is necessary to make up the shortfalls in domestic production and imports. The food I'm getting comes from places like Korea and Cambodia that never signed the Berlin Accords or the Oxford Treaty. We can't import from them legally, but if we weren't getting it, we'd have another three to four hundred thousand-that's five zeroes-dying a year in the States. So they pretend to be tough on smuggling, but it's all political theater. Just another way to keep the proles in line. Of course, the system encourages quite a bit of waste in the form of bribes demanded by certain customs officials and police. I have to keep cash on hand at all times for that shit."

I nodded at Andy's rant, but i found his explanation for how he avoided checkpoints to be far more interesting. Now that we had two vehicles, we could employ similar tactics if we ever needed to move or otherwise transport members of the household long distance.

"Come on," he said. "Let's look at your other merchandise." In the back of his van was what looked like a large metal toolbox, five feet long. He removed a padlock and the top opened in two halves that swung out and down. He reached in and carefully extracted an all-black rifle. "You know how to use one of these?" he asked, checking that the safety was on and that the chamber was empty before handing it to me, pointed skyward.

I took the gun from him. It was solid, but not as heavy as I expected. I set to it my shoulder and pointed it at a distant tree, sighting down the barrel. "I've only used a pistol up until now," I admitted.

Andy chuckled. "Yeah, I can see that." He stepped up next to me and made some adjustments to my grip and stance. "These are knockoffs of the Colt model, understand, but they're just as good. It's what Casey and Eric use. It doesn't have a ton of stopping power, but enough. And it's plenty accurate. Best part is that the recoil is like a lover's tap. I've got two of these for you, two mags each and five hundred rounds of ammo. It'll only cost you three thousand, five hundred if you buy it today."

I lowered the gun and sucked in a breath dramatically. "Wow, that's pretty steep. Any way I can talk you down to two thousand?"

We haggled for about a minute, settling on a price closer to three thousand, coming in just under what we had budgeted for this purchase. I would have liked to test-fire them, but the highway was only a few hundred yards away, behind a thin screen of trees. Besides, I felt like I could trust him not to screw us over.

Andy hopped into the back of his van and brought back one more item, a box of blank cardboard about half a meter square. "They didn't tell me what was in this one," he said, setting it down on the truck's tailgate. "Overseas friends of yours, I understand."

I used a key to cut the packing tape and opened the top, already guessing what I would find. Under the foam inserts was a piece of equipment, light gray plastic with buttons and a hatch near the front. "Perfect," I said. "You got payment for it already?"

"Yeah, deposited yesterday. They paid me more to deliver this than I'm charging you for all that food. What the hell is that thing?"

I shook my head. "If the didn't tell you, you probably don't want to know." It had to be the DNA sequencer from our associates in Dublin. Just possessing one of these outside of a crime lab or a state-sponsored research lab was a class A criminal felony. If Andy had been caught with this, he could have faced life imprisonment. Not that smuggling food was much less severe of an offense.

I went to the cab of the truck and pulled out an envelope stuffed with large bills, removing a large stack equal to the price of the food and guns. Andy took it without counting them and shook my hand. "A pleasure doing business with you. Are we still on for that big delivery in July?"

I nodded. "Sure are. The parts are being manufactured as we speak. I just need your crew to get it down here to us." We were paying Andy and his family another nine thousand dollars to move goods that were completely legal. It was up to him to get the means to load, unload, and transport the materials that we would need to construct the greenhouse.

Andy shook my hand again. "Norm, I don't know who you are or what you're into, but you've been a blessing to me and mine."

I smiled. "Likewise. We'll see you in a few weeks."

Tilly wasted no time in using the DNA sequencer to analyze her genome. She took a blood sample, prepped it herself, and began the analysis. After a few hours, the results were in, and she transmitted the file out to all of the universities. The lack of fanfare or recognition did not take away from the seriousness of the act and what it represented.

Summer brought new challenges and opportunities. The first of the fruit in the orchards, the apricot crop, was coming ripe and would need to be picked at intervals up until the fall. Dan had warned us that his parents would want to help with the harvest, but he managed to convince them to let him hire a few workers instead. He just didn't tell us that we would be those workers. It was hard work, but everyone, even Nonna, helped, and it only took a single weekend to pick what Dan and his parents usually needed an entire week to get.

I was astounded by how much there was. Dan brought a heavy-duty pickup pulling a fifteen-foot trailer. We filled the trailer to the top and the bed of the truck to a few inches below the sides with apricots. The trailer held more than half of our efforts, and Dan informed us bitterly that all of that was going to the government. Still, there would be another good crop to collect in a few weeks, and he would falsify his report to conveniently exclude most of that. He promised to bring us back plenty of preserves in a few weeks after they had finished canning them all.

I rented a backhoe to begin excavation at the construction site for the greenhouse. A twelve-foot square underground utility room and a pit for a cistern needed to be dug before our materials arrived if we were to make our later deadlines. Our construction skills had continued to improve since my early efforts in Sasha's basement, and we finished everything that we could and returned the earth mover ahead of schedule. The dirt we moved was piled into a two-foot berm that ran along the southern edge of our construction zone.

Two large semi-trucks with flatbed trailers trundled up to the farm one day in late July, trailed by a blue Camaro. Wendy, Dan, and Dan's son Zach were waiting for them by the barn, shouting, cheering and waving as they went by. Glass panels had been padded and stacked vertically down the entire length of one truck, while the other held steel girders,, PVC pipes, ducting and boxes of large equipment. The trucks continued on past the end of the driveway and into the empty field beyond, coming to a stop just shy of the newly constructed berm.

Andy and his wife each got out of a truck and went to unchain the forklift that sat at the end of one of them while me, Stan, Stansy, and Nock worked to set up the ramps that we would need to unload everything. Allowing Andy to know the location of the farm and letting him see the others had been a calculated risk. I'm sure that he suspected that at least some of us were genemods, but I had told Nissi to stay inside and out of sight just in case. It didn't even like to think about how much of a monetary incentive the combined bounty was on all of them.

It took most of the day to get everything offloaded and open it up for inspection to ensure that none of the components had been damaged in transport, but we did have time to place the pumps and the water and air filtration systems in the utility room before sunset.

The rest of the work consumed the next few months, when we weren't out picking fruit, and when Tilly, Stan, and Nock weren't hard at work on the network. The cistern was first, a series of 3000 gallon plastic monstrosities that we buried just beyond the northern edge of the greenhouse proper. Then we built the walls of the utility room from steel beams and cinder block. Once the utility room was enclosed, we poured the concrete foundation for the greenhouse. Steel girders went up next, forming a set of sixteen large rooms each about the size of a tennis court in two rows of eight with a central corridor running down the middle. The glass-actually polycarbonate-panels, each one ten feet tall by four feet wide, were clamped to the structure and bonded together with an airtight sealant compound. The ventilation system would maintain a slight positive pressure inside each room at all times, both to prevent spores migrating inside and to allow the rapid detection of leaks.