by Holly Ardent
Down Time
In a Fallen Future #4
(Post-Apocalyptic MILF Erotica)
Holly Ardent
Text copyright © 2016, Holly Ardent
All Rights Reserved
Find Holly's other stories on her Amazon Author Page:
Holly Ardent's Amazon Author Page
The Dow Jones stayed anemic for quite some time after the initial crash. It still hadn't topped 5500 again by the end of the first quarter of the next year. Hyperinflation reared its ugly head, primarily for necessities. Take, for example, grocery costs. They were averaging two hundred and fifty to three hundred percent higher than the previous year.
Simultaneously, non-necessities like luxury goods were experiencing severe deflation, if they sold at all. Gas fluctuated between eight and nine dollars a gallon and the cost of living had doubled, tripled, or risen even higher depending on where you lived. For most people, there just wasn't money for anything but food, shelter, and gas for your car (if you still had a car and a reason to use it, such as one of the rare remaining jobs).
Some people considered this to be the official start of the government food dole. New all time participation rates for food stamp, excuse me... Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participation were set in the year before the first stock market crash. Just under sixty million people received assistance by the last month of the year. This meant that more than one in five Americans used the program. The first quarter of the following year saw that number increase even more, up to eighty million. One in four US citizens were on the dole in the form of food stamps that quarter.
The other 'safety nets' saw equal increases in use and the constantly rising financial burden on the US Government was mirrored by an equivalent constantly rising burden on the few remaining tax payers. The Federal Reserve's printing presses went into overdrive. The US dollar performed poorly, and several countries that held large sums of US debt attempted to secretively unload it. The vicious circle of raising taxes, followed by losing more taxpayers so taxes needed to be raised again continued the financial death spiral of the USA.
Roadside produce stands and farmer's markets became a common sight during this time frame. I spoke to one of the farmers selling at a produce stand and found out that the grocery stores, while charging two to three times as much as they used to for the same items, were still only offering him the same rates as a year earlier.
The stores weren't using this difference to increase their profits (much), but the government had started some form of shadow tax, as best as he could tell. His guess was that they were taking additional revenue from all the retail sales of major businesses, but nobody had any solid proof or documentation of it. It might have been a form of corporate taxation, but you'd think the corporations would scream bloody hell loud enough for everyone to hear if that was the case.
The end result was that he could sell his produce on his own and even if he only sold half as much as he did to the stores, he still made twice as much money since the government took a much smaller chunk out of individual sales than corporate sales. What that meant for the farmer I spoke to was that, with prices soaring, he was just less in the hole than he would've been by selling to the stores.
Every now and then a story talking about 'Shadow Taxes' would spring up on the internet. Unless you were quick or lucky when you tried to read it you'd get a '404' error. Caches of the pages were available for as long as twenty-four hours a couple of times, but then they disappeared as well.
One enterprising individual managed to get himself in serious trouble by printing out some of the original stories he'd saved to his system. Then he scanned the printouts back into his computer and loaded the resulting photos on a web page as jpg picture files.
He thought that the government had bots scanning the net for articles like that so they could be censored, and that posting them as jpgs would hide them from the bots. The page he created for his project was up for almost a month before it started returning a '404' error. Word got out from some of his friends when he disappeared. They were never sure if he went into hiding or got taken away, and there was no way to tell for sure.
A short time later the internet started getting sketchy. Web pages started taking much longer to load than they used to. Everything online started slowing down, and things that were once reliable might work or not, it was hit or miss each time you tried. There was no proof, but I'll let you make your own guess as to the cause. I wasn't going to mention my own government censorship theory, even if the problems could all be explained by the government going with a lowest-bid contract for net-wide surveillance software.
And so...
* * *
“Did you make dinner yet?” I asked Molly, with a sideways look at Sandra.
Molly shook her head.
“Okay, you take Sandra into the bathroom. Give her a bath, or a shower, whichever she prefers. I'll start cooking dinner. It'll take about an hour probably, so she has some time.”
I grabbed one of my preparations similar to the vacuum sealed dehydrated soups. With the addition of some thickener (oatmeal in this case) and using a little less water than with the soup, the same process created a decent stew. I popped a loaf of bread, from the market, into the oven to warm while the soup re-hydrated and heated.
Sandra came back out and sat down quietly. I could hear the water running in the bathroom so she must've chosen a bath over a shower. She looked at me and her face ran through a gamut of emotions. She seemed to be thinking something over so I didn't interrupt her.
Finally, she broke the silence.
“Are you sure it's okay for me to be here?” she asked. “I had some ideas, but things are different from what I thought they'd be like here.”
“You're welcome to stay as long as you like,” I said. “We might ask you to help out with some things, but...”
Her face settled into a bitter look.
“Yeah, I know. It's work or die nowadays, I heard my dad say it enough,” Sandra said.
“No, it's not that. I was going to say that even if we ask you, you don't need to help. It might be good for you though and take your mind off things. We'd be disappointed if you didn't and kept not helping, but I'd give you quite a bit of time to get over things before doing anything about it. The first thing I'd do would be to talk to you, not just kick you out or anything.”
Her eyes widened a bit.
“Really? You aren't just shitting me?”
“Sandra, we're fairly well off here. We can afford to support someone while they get their feet under them again. But we wouldn't be able to do it indefinitely. I mean, we could in terms of provisions and the like, but I can't set that example for my daughters. That would be a bad idea.”
Her face ran through a series of emotions again, too fast for me to identify most of them. The ones I could identify were grief and fear. When she spoke, her face was a mask of fear and her voice was almost a monotone.
“I thought you should know,” she said. “It was the Angel's that killed my parents. I heard them talking right above me, talking about how they were going to be raiding a lot more in Colorado in the near future.”
“Azrael's Angels?” I asked.
She nodded.
Azrael's Angels was a religious group, or at least they were before the Crash. Their preacher interpreted the Crash as God's way of informing man that they were making too much use of technology. Now Azrael's Angels destroyed any of the surviving technology that they could find, at least any of if that ran on electricity.
Once they had a goal, the destruction of all electrical based technology, they started recruiting. By this point they had thousands of members and had been responsible for destroying several pockets of survivors who'd been generating their
own electricity.
Colorado was their boogeyman. Since the state was still generating electrical power, the Angels considered it to be the spawn of Satan, and all of us living here to be his worshipers. They'd been raiding around the edges of the state, destroying solar installations that they came across, for more than a year now. Evidently they'd finally worked up the courage to raid deeper in.
“Well, shit!” I cursed.
Sandra pursed her lips tightly and stood.
“I thought I should tell you as soon as I could,” she said, then went back to the bathroom.
I puttered around for a little while, putting away the remaining leftover stock from the market and thinking about her news. By the time I finished with that, dinner was ready. I told Molly and she said she'd get Sandra out of the tub. Then I went to get Rita and the girls. I had another shock added in to my day when I went into the girls' room and all three of them had books in hand.
Not surprisingly, Rita had one of my permaculture books, 'Gaia's Garden'. The surprise was that Becky, my youngest, was holding one of my foraging books, 'Edible and Medicinal Plants of the Rockies' (she'd never before shown an interest in the annual gardening, permaculture, or foraging books I had collected). Kate had another of my permaculture books and it looked like she and Rita were comparing notes between the two books.
I told them dinner was ready and they shelved the books. As we set the table I discovered that Becky, after hearing a censored version of the things that happened to Rita, had determined that she needed to learn how to feed herself, 'just in case' as she put it. That explained the foraging book she'd been reading.
In a display of logic that astonished me coming from an eight year old she told me that she wanted to learn foraging because I already knew permaculture and her Mom and I both knew annual gardening. She said she'd learn those eventually, but that if she needed to find her own food before she did, she probably wasn't going to be here at home where gardening could make a difference.
I shook my head in bewilderment that my eight year old thought of such things, then in dismay that she had good reason to think of such things. When I asked what made her think of that she told me that a combination of what Rita had said and some lessons she'd recently learned in school about the Crash had her thinking along those lines.
By the time I'd gotten all that out of her the table was set and dinner was ready, so we sat down to eat.
Immediately after dinner we showed Sandra to her room. We had several guest bedrooms in the house. Our two daughters had started sleeping with us during the Crash, but we didn't allow that to last after things settled down a little.
Kate's room had bunk beds so now the two of them shared the room by their own choice. That left us with a total of three actual bedrooms we could use for guests and a few other rooms that could be used to sleep in, but weren't actual bedrooms.
“This will be your room for as long you're staying with us,” Molly said. “Unless you'd prefer one of the others.”
Sandra shook her head wearily.
“No, this will be fine,” she said. “Thank you.”
She glanced at Molly, took a slightly longer look at me, then entered the room and closed the door.
I turned to Molly and told her what Sandra had said about Azrael's Angels.
“You've got to be kidding me,” she said. “That's just what we need.”
Molly tended towards sarcasm when she got scared, it was her way of dealing with fear.
“I hope she's wrong, but Sandra said she heard them talking about it.”
Molly sighed and headed back towards the kitchen where Rita and the children were cleaning up from dinner.
The remaining five of us had some time to kill until Becky's bedtime. I had already told Molly that we'd talk after the kids were in bed. I could see curiosity eating her up, but she was biding her time, albeit impatiently, so we let Becky choose a game we could all play. After several rousing hands of Uno it was Becky's bedtime and we shuffled her off to bed. From all appearances Kate was ready to go to sleep also so she got tucked in as well. Then the three of us that were still awake settled down in front of the fire to talk.
I related what had gone on in the market that afternoon with Mary losing it and having to be restrained and/or sedated. Then I went on to Allan asking if I could help because he thought I was good with women. When I attempted to gloss over the sexual portion with a brief “Then I had sex with her to relieve the stress buildup from lack of sex and give her a new stress baseline to start from.” Molly stopped me.
“Oh no, Mister. You don't get out of it that easily,” she said.
“I thought you said as long as you got done two or three times a week, you didn't care?” I asked nervously.
Molly laughed at me.
“It isn't that, you just aren't getting off the hook that easily. Give me a play by play of what you did with her.”
Meanwhile Rita had kind of leaned back and was trying to become part of the wall. Her face was flushed heavily from a massive blush.
“Rita, is something wrong? Are we making you uncomfortable? Tell me,” I said.
“Tim, I'm sitting here listening to Molly ask you for details about having sex with someone you'd never even met before today. That she's never met either. Sorry, but that's a little out of my comfort zone right now.”
“Well Rita, that same description would fit someone else a few days back. We certainly didn't know each other before then, did we? It appears that mostly good things are coming from that. Mary really needed to get laid and, while Allan is a nice guy, he doesn't normally worry about satisfying his partner. I've known him for years and he's a stereotypical guy that way. I hope he'll be better about it with Mary if he gets up the nerve to press for something steady.”
I paused a moment while I got my thoughts in order.
“She was asking for sex, admittedly only after she was stoned, but even before that she'd beat around the bush about it. Remember what I said about her edging towards the guard? She said she wanted a man around. Why do you think she'd say that? I interpreted it as a politically correct way of saying she wanted sex on a regular basis. You may not be old enough to remember political correctness very well, but the death of PC in the aftermath of the Crash is probably the best thing about the Crash in my mind. Political correctness was a way of using different words and phrases to sugarcoat things that some people didn't like.”
“You mean like vertically challenged for short people, or intellectually challenged for stupid people?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Also, she showed interest in me, or at least brightened up when she saw my erection. That told me that she thought I'd be a suitable lover for her. She wouldn't cheer up if she made someone she wasn't interested in get an erection, now would she?”
I paused to decide how to phrase the next part.
“Finally, she seemed like a steamy woman and if I'd gone three years without any sex like she had, I'd probably be just as nuts, if not worse off. So I took a chance. I thought I could enjoy myself while helping her out. Trust me, she didn't mind at all, quite the opposite in fact. I'm sorry if that bothers you. Is it talking about it or the fact that it happened that's disturbing you?”
“It's the discussion. I'm ambiguous on the actual act, but talking about it aloud, in a group, is kind of freaking me out.”
“Well, stop and think about it for a minute. If Molly and I didn't talk about things like this where would you be right now?”
I turned back to Molly and gave her the play by play she asked for. I knew it was getting to her since her fair face flushed and the room began to acquire the particular odor that told me she was hot and bothered.
There was an unfamiliar spicy overtone to the scent though. That was explained when I looked over at Rita and saw her rubbing herself through her jeans. Evidently, she'd taken what I said to heart, although I was surprised that she'd get horny about something that had just been making her uncomforta
ble.
Actually, that shouldn't surprise me at all, I thought. I bet it was making her uncomfortable because it was making her horny. Lots of people get uncomfortable when they get horny over something they think shouldn't turn them on.
At that point I was sure I needed to start eating more and sleeping better, because both ladies appeared that they'd have a need for me shortly, despite my multiple performances earlier in the day.
On second thought I don't need to worry about sleeping better. If they keep going like this all the time, I'll be sure to sleep well since I've always slept best after sex.
When I had finished with my play by play we moved back to the bedroom by mutual consent. Once the door was closed, clothes flew from the women like a blizzard of cloth.
“You both want to be done badly, don't you?” I asked.
Their mutual yes was quite enthusiastic.
“Well, I've only got one cock so why don't the two of you lie down on the edge of the bed, backs on the mattress, legs spread, with you hanging over the edge. I'll see about giving you both a quickie to take the edge off and then we can work from there.”
Molly and Rita both immediately complied. It was a wonderful sight, a table set for my preferences with their consent. I dug in immediately.
I used my tongue on Molly's pussy while one of my hands wandered up to her breasts to play with her erect nipples. My second hand slid up Rita's thigh to find the treasure at the juncture of her legs. I gently stroked Rita's labia with the occasional trip upwards to her clitoris and soon she was sighing contentedly.
Meanwhile Molly was enjoying my efforts as well. I penetrated her with my tongue, twisted its tip around inside of her, then withdrew it to gently caress the smooth skin along the side of her slit. I moved back and forth along the skin, creating a slight pressure with my tongue. Every now and again I would either penetrate her, or gently rub her clit, with my tongue.
She got impatient with me and her hand came down on top of my hand that was playing with her nipples. She pinched my fingers together to trap her nipple and then pulled my hand away from her chest. This made her nipple stretch to an insane length. It turned me on to no end whenever I watched her nipple and areola stretch out a good four or five inches and she knew it. This was also her signal to me that she wanted it rough.