Quaranteam: Phil's Tale - Ch. 22 (Patreon)

Chapter 22

            November 15th, 2020

Phil was more than a little surprised when he took a look at Maya Summer Steele, because she certainly wasn’t what he would’ve thought of as ‘Andy’s type.’ Oh sure, she was plenty attractive, but the general look and demeanor wasn’t exactly what Andy would go for normally. She was fit and muscular, but the dyed hair and the shaved undercut was much more punk that Andy typically went in for, but Quaranteam was making strange bedfellows and there wasn’t much that it wouldn’t overcome in terms of unusual pairings.

Once Phil looked at the notations, he understood why the pairing had occurred, and the more he read, the more compatible Andy and Maya seemed like they’d be. He remembered why he hadn’t caused more of a fuss when the request had been initially processed. Maya was Emily’s friend, and they’d still run her through the Oracle system. Score had come back a little lower than typical for Andy’s luck – 81% – but it was more than high enough that Andy would be fine. Most of the conflict pain points weren’t with Andy, but interTeam dynamics would be more complicated with some of his existing members.

There were some conflicting dynamics between Maya and some of the more willful members Andy had already added, but Andy had already built strong emotional connections with some of the members who’d been there the longest, and Andy’s old college flame Fiona had shown up yesterday, so it didn’t come as any surprise to Phil that there were some strong emotional thread running through Andy’s new family.

Maya’s journey had been more than a little complicated and had involved more than a few jumps to get her back stateside. Unlike literally everyone else on Andy’s list, Maya had been overseas when the lockdown hit, visiting her cousins in Jerusalem. As such, she’d been trapped in Israel for most of a year, and living with her extended family. When the rumors of the Quaranteam serum had begun to make their ways throughout Israel, obviously Maya was a woman turned out to be in relatively high demand.

She’d declined getting the serum and being paired twice before the proposal from Andy (with the accompanying note from Emily to help it all make sense) had pierced through her heart and she’d decided to take a chance with the Rooks, mostly based on her trust in Em, although Andy’s note hadn’t hurt much either.

That meant she needed to be relocated, and while there were Love Buses doing overseas pickups, the ones coming from the eastern side of the Atlantic had to make several stops along the way, collecting people from a variety of countries. Thankfully, they’d been consolidating in the last few months, so that a Love Bus would only make two, maybe three stops before heading back to the States, instead of a dozen or so.

Jerusalem had been in relatively bad shape, simply because the requests to quarantine had gone unheeded by so many people on both sides of the conflict, and trying to get the corpses disposed of, much less properly buried, had only served to amplify the problem. Many of those in Maya’s parents’ neighborhood had stopped going out for walks, and Maya simply wanted everyone in her family to be safe, and part of her acceptance of Andy’s proposal was contingent on her mother getting dosed back in New York, and her cousins getting some of the Israeli doses of Quaranteam as soon as possible.

Maya’s mother, it turned out, had been paired up nearly a month earlier but hadn’t told her daughter (as she’d been instructed not to) and her cousins (one male and one female) had gone under the radar until that moment and were immediately put into Israel’s program. Apparently Lev, her male cousin, had been assumed dead, since he wasn’t in his apartment, and had been staying with Maya’s female cousin, Alona, without telling anyone, figuring if they quarantined together, it would make things easier on them both. As it turned out, that might have saved Lev’s life, as his entire apartment building had died over two months ago, and he simply hadn’t heard about it.

He’d never been close to the neighbors.

It was Maya’s transport from Jerusalem to New Eden that Phil was interested in, however, because somewhere along the way from there, Maya had picked up the Orange Variant, and then somehow spread it to the rest of the entire wave. Spreading it to the entire wave wasn’t too surprising – when the Air Force was at the airfield, they weren’t worried too much about DuoHalo jumping from woman to woman, as they were all scheduled to be vaccinated and paired within 24-48 hours anyway. It was where Maya had contracted it in the first place that was concerning.

Maya had been completely DuoHalo free when she had been picked up in Jerusalem, but by the time the plane had arrived, not only did she have it, so did everyone else on her plane, which went against what all the protocols said could or should have happened in the path.

The Love Buses were supposed to follow a very strict regimen. They were to pick up all the women from a given location, isolate them within their own tents in the cargo area of the plane and then keep them there until they reached the airfield within the US where they would be divvied up for pass on to the injection facilities and then on to their eventual partners. The containers were divided for a reason – while it was true everyone would get vaccinated in the end, and the serum should be able to handle any version of DuoHalo that it came across, the idea of an outbreak needed to be repelled by a division wasn’t one they were fond of.

And there was always the even scarier thought that maybe some day they would come across a variant of DuoHalo that wasn’t put down by the Quaranteam serum. Hadn’t happened yet; didn’t mean it was impossible.

There was always a darker possibility around the corner, if you only knew where to look.

Maya was waiting for them in the decontamination room, although at this point, there wasn’t a whole lot of reason to it. They were going to inject her and send her over to Andy tomorrow one way or another, and when she imprinted on Andy, the Orange Variant of DuoHalo that was running through her system would be purged out immediately. But at this point, Phil was hoping he could figure out how she’d gotten it, and why it was so strong when she’d arrived.

She’d clearly been in the room a bit, because she’d let her two Pomeranians, Stan and Ollie, out of their crate, and they were happily skipping around the room, eager to have a bit of space to run and play. The two dogs seemed incredibly well behaved, but they were also dogs and given any space to sprint around a bit and get the zoomies out, they were going to take it.

Pet transportation had been something they’d been lenient on, simply because people were reluctant to leave their pets behind, but they’d recently restricted the number of pets for transport to just two after one woman insisted on bringing six cats along. It was a tough thing to ask of some people to leave some of their pets, but there was only so much the Air Force could do.

Hell, a couple of women had been seriously annoyed the Air Force wouldn’t transport their horses for them, but that was a beast too far.

As soon as Phil and Linda entered the opposite side of the screen, i.e. the safe part of the decontamination room, Maya seemed to perk up a bit. “Hey,” she said to them. “You folks going to get us out of here any time soon?”

“You’ll be processed and sent on to your partner tomorrow, Miss Steele,” Phil said. “I’m Dr. Marcos. I’m actually a friend of Andy’s. I promise you, we won’t keep you longer than necessary, to ensure you’re okay and nothing’s wrong. I want to talk to you a little bit about your trip here. Something went wrong somewhere along the way, and I want to figure out where it was.”

“I’m going to be okay, yeah?”

“You’re going to be fine,” Phil stressed. “You caught a variant of DuoHalo being referred to as the Orange Variant, which is one of most easily treated strains of it. If you’ve read all the literature we’ve given you about DuoHalo and the Quaranteam serum, you’ll be pleased to know that QT has a 99.4% success rate against the Orange Variant. Even those cases we have minor flutters with, eventually get solved, just through repeated dosing.”

“Dosing, as in a second shot of the serum, or dosing, as in multiple fuckings?”

“The latter,” Phil said with a slight smile. “There’s some other minor adjustments you’ll need to know about. For the next few months, you’ll have a shorter redosing period than most of the rest of your other partners.”

“How much shorter?”

“The average woman can go about seven to nine days before she needs to be redos—”

“Dr. Marcos, can you please just say ‘fucked’?”

“Only if you call me Phil.”

Maya smirked, tilting her head to one side. “Fine. Phil, can you please stop treating me like a baby and talk to me like an adult?”

“Fine,” he said. “You’re gonna need to be fucked about once a week, at least for the first few months. After a few months’ time, that should hopefully spread out a little bit more, up to the ten days or so that we like to have, but it’s something we’ll keep an eye on with you. So far, about 15% of the women who fought off the Orange Variant need to be fucked once a week instead of once every ten days, but it’s way too early for us to tell if that’s a concern for you or not.”

“Anything else?”

“One other thing, although with any luck it should be something you never have to be concerned with.”

Maya frowned. “That sounds like something I should definitely be concerned with, then.”

“So you’ve seen the video about how unpaired semen will necrotize your flesh?”

“Pretty hard to forget that one, Phil,” Maya grumbled. “It like was my own personal Clive Barker film, tailored just for women. Why’d you build the serum to do that, by the way?”

“It’s an unwanted side effect we’ve been working to prune out of the serum, but haven’t had any luck removing yet.”

“I’d say that’s a pretty big side effect.”

“You and me both, sister,” Linda chimed in.

“Sorry,” Phil said. “Miss Steele, this is Captain Linda Evans, my head of security and one of my partners.”

“Charmed.”

“Likewise,” Maya shot back. “Now, back to the necrotizing flesh effect?”

“Right,” Phil continued. “It will be less damaging for you because of your exposure to the Orange Variant. You’ll have about a 50-60% efficacy in resisting the damage, meaning it’ll still hurt you, but not as badly and not as quickly. This should give you, or whoever’s around you more likely, the chance to get it off your skin as soon as possible with lessened damage.”

“That’s… good, right?”

“Well, yes and no.”

“Okay, why no?”

“Because in addition to your resistance to the necrotizing effect, you’ll also experience a sort of ‘blind rage,’ causing you to attack anyone shy of the person you’re paired to. So you really won’t be in a clear mind to get it wiped off your skin.”

“Other partners won’t be safe?”

“I’m afraid they will not, although your imprinted partner will, and hopefully they’re close enough to be able to remove the contaminant.”

“Helluva drug you fellas developed over here,” Maya sighed. “So full of great twists and turns.”

“We’re keeping people alive, Miss Steele,” Phil said, returning Maya’s downbeat tone with one of his own. “That’s the best we can do at this point, I promise you. I’m trying my best to mitigate all the other side effects, and to allow people to repair, but right now, there’s only so much I can do. I’m still trying to find a way to get the serum to work on gays and trans folks, in addition to solving for the relinking problem.”

“Sounds like a lot of balls to keep up in the air.”

“Figuratively and literally,” Phil chuckled. “But we do what we can. Anyway, I want you to walk me through your journey from Israel to here, just so I can spot where this particular flap might have occurred.”

“Oh, if you mean moments when we weren’t in the bubbles on the plane, that’s easy – there were two,” she said. After a second, she took notice of his expression. “I’m guessing there weren’t supposed to be any.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, there were. There were two. There was one where I allowed to get off the plane to sleep in a barracks in Cyprus, and then we were allowed to stop and get some air when we touched down in Reykjavik for our last pickups.”

“I wasn’t even aware we were doing trades with Iceland,” Linda said.

“Not a lot,” Phil replied, “but there were a handful of high value opportunities for Operation: Funnel Cake, so the government took them, but gave Iceland tremendous exchange rate for men. They were also keen to widen their DNA pool a bit. You know there’s an Icelandic app people use to make sure they aren’t too closely related to someone they might be dating? So yeah, Iceland had their own mess to deal with, even before this. We even let them have their pick from the available options, so while they didn’t get any Nobel Prize winners, they got some decent men out of the trade, unlike some of the other countries, who mostly just got breeding stock.”

“Ouch,” Maya laughed. “Do I even want to know?”

“Probably not, but you’ll hear eventually since you’re partnered up with Andy,” Phil said. “Parts of this are coming out in the 60 Minutes story in a few days anyway, on top of that. We’ve been trading… less desirable men for more desirable women and access to the serum with other countries.  That’s why we’ve got these giant planes flying around, picking people up and dropping people off. They’re doing what they can to get people to where they need to go, but they aren’t supposed to be any points where the people get off the plane once they’re on it, other at the end point. Tell me about these two stops you all made.”

“Well, the first one in Cyprus certainly wasn’t planned,” Maya said. “We had engine trouble about half an hour outside of Cyprus, so the captain of the flight said it was going to turn from a quick turn around to an overnighter while they did the repairs, and they wanted us to be able to sleep, so we were moved off the plane and into an unoccupied bunker. Said something about a busted fuel line or something, and they wanted to be sure the repair took. They sent an additional two girls to join us since we were there and headed back to the States anyway, and they brought some pizza with them, but other than that, we didn’t see anyone there until they loaded us back onto the plane the next day.”

“Same plane or different plane?”

“Same plane,” Maya said. “They told us to leave our things on it, and they were all just where we left them, although I could see a few things had been moved around, I assume while mechanics were working on the plane.”

“Possible,” Phil said. “Do you remember the names of the two women who joined up with you there in Cyprus?”

“I’m afraid I don’t,” she said. “One was a very Greek looking girl, the other looked like she was probably northern African or Egyptian maybe? Tan skin, but not too dark. Wavy hair down to her shoulders. There were too many of us for me to remember names.”

“How many of you were there in your plane?”

“Twenty-five? Thirty? Something like that. There were a good number of us being picked up from Jerusalem, mostly US citizens getting a ride home, I think,” Maya said. “It was something like fifteen of us from Israel, the two we picked up at Cyprus, and the somewhere between eight and twelve we added from Reykjavik, I didn’t get a good count at that point, because we were mostly in our personal compartments when they were loading up there.”

“But you all got off the airplane again at some point?”

“Yeah, there was some kind of electrical short in the back, caught fire on one of the girls’ blankets,” Maya said. “About four or five pods over from me, so I couldn’t see too well. Don’t think it was the plane, so it was probably something someone brought with them. Maybe one of the girls tried to smoke or something and an ember sparked off a blanket or something. But they were worried about it spreading, so they gave the plane a total evac until the fire was contained.” She sat down on the cot and picked up one of her dogs, setting him on her lap so she could pet him, while the other curled up around her feet. “Once that was done, they declared that pod lost, although the girl had gotten all her shit out of it. They set her up in a new pod, loaded us all back onto the plane, finished refueling and then we were on our way. They let us get some fresh air while they were getting a replacement pod set up, telling us we should all be okay anyway, since we’d all been screened, and even if we hadn’t, our next stop would be getting the serum, so it should be fine. Are you saying I’m not fine?”

“You will be fine, Maya,” Phil said, raising a hand to calm her. “No need to worry about that, I promise you. I’m just trying to figure out where you could’ve picked up this variant, how it slipped by testing and how I prevent it from happening again. And unfortunately, this still leaves three possible places there could’ve been a mistake – Jerusalem, Cyprus or Reykjavik, although based on what you’re telling me, I’m betting it was Cyprus.”

“Why do you say that, babe?” Linda asked him.

“Well, it sounds like they just sort of snuck two girls onto the roster to get them back to the states, and that probably means they didn’t go through an actual screening process – they were probably due for a on-boarder to screen them first before being sent to the states for pairing,” Phil said. “We’ve been getting shit like that now that we’re basically in full swing of things, people trying to get things done faster for sake of expedience, not understanding that the rules are there and in place for a reason, to avoid more complications than we know what to do with. Everyone thinks they’re outside of the rules, and I keep having to tell them they aren’t.”

“At least you know Maya wasn’t trying to bring it in intentionally.”

“Wait, you thought I was trying to bring a strain of DuoHalo in intentionally?” Maya asked in shock. “Why the hell would I try and bring something like that into the country intentionally?”

Phil laughed softly and offered a little shrug in return. “We’re still trying to figure out what causes it and one of the working theories is that someone’s trying to artificially alter the DuoHalo virus, in attempts to make it do other things. Count yourself lucky you didn’t get one of the weird ones.”

“Weird ones?”

“One of them makes your hair fall out and then regrow, like, super-fast,” Linda said.

“There one of’em that makes my tits bigger?” Maya said with a smirk.

“Not yet,” Phil chuckled, “but give it time. Who knows what kind of crazy shit is on the horizon. Still, bigger tits, bigger dicks… all that seems like much smaller concerns than, y’know, staying alive, so I’m going to keep working on that first and foremost.”

“Fair enough, I suppose,” Maya said as her dog hopped off her lap. “You said you’re a friend of this Andy that I’m getting paired up with?”

“Long time friends,” Phil told her. “You talked to him a bit via Zoom before accepting his offer, I hope? Or are you just trusting your friend’s opinion?”

“I trust Emily for a lot of things, but I definitely did my own research on the guy first,” Maya said calmly. “He seems like a decent enough guy, but I figured I’d like to hear about him from someone who calls himself his friend.”

“Heh,” Phil said with a slight smile. “You want an Andy Rook story? I swear, the more you ask about him, the more you’re gonna realize everyone’s got at least one. But, sure, I can tell you one that’ll tell you everything you need to know in just a couple of minutes.”

“I’d like that, if you can spare a few.”

“After all the shit you’ve been through, Maya, I can definitely spare you that,” Phil said, taking a seat in the chair on the other side. “Now, one thing you may not realize about the Bay Area is that anyone who’s not originally from here typically goes somewhere else for Christmas, but sometimes we local kids do that too. So this would’ve been… 2017, and I’d been in Japan for a fighting game tournament, and originally I was supposed to be home in time for Christmas Eve, but my flight got cancelled and I had to try and get booked onto the next flight I could. So I’m stuck in Tokyo airport, and all my plans on how I get home are starting to fall apart. All the flights in and out of all three major airports near San Francisco are completely sold out. I can get a flight from Tokyo to Seattle and from Seattle to Sacramento, but that’s as far as I can get. So I send out a message on the group Discord and ask if there’s anyone who can get me from Sacramento to home, because I didn’t trust myself to drive home from there, and nearly everyone’s with family or out of town, but a message comes through from Andy saying, ‘What time will you get there?’ I tell him 8 pm on Christmas Day and he tells me if I can hang out until about 9 or so, he can pick me up and drive us back to the Bay area. I tell him sure and get on my flight to Seattle, get through customs, check in that everything’s cool, Andy messages back saying it is, and so I meet up with him in Sacramento, and he looks about as I felt, but he had a bottle of Orange Vanilla Coke with him, and a half eaten bag of Dot’s Pretzels, and he tells me to hop in and we start driving back. He even loaded my stuff into the trunk because he said it was too crowded for anyone else but him to know how it would fit. Now, Sacramento Airport to San Carlos is a good two-and-a-half-hour drive, and we chat during the trip, but it’s clear we’re both pretty exhausted, so I just let the music play and I actually fell asleep after about fifteen minutes. I don’t even wake up when he stops to get gas. Next thing I know, I’m outside my home and Andy’s shaking my shoulder to wake me up. It was about forty minutes’ drive from where I lived then to where Andy lived then, so I ask him if he wants to come in and nap for a bit before heading home, and he tells me thanks but no, the cats have been without human contact for a couple of days now, so he wants to get home and check on them, so he heads off. What I find out later from Andy’s then-roommate Eric was that when I’d asked about someone coming to pick me up, Andy had been sitting in Denver airport, also waylaid in his travel home. So Andy had spent the night in Denver airport on Christmas Eve, flown out on Christmas Day, landed at 6 pm, driven straight up to Sacramento to pick me up, driven straight back with me in tow, and dropped me off without so much as a word of complaint. I asked him about it later, and he said it was no big deal. Didn’t even ask me to pay for gas money. That’s the kind of guy Andy Rook is. He will bend over backwards to make someone he cares about’s life just a little bit easier, no matter what the cost is to himself. I’m more worried about you not being good enough for him than the other way around, no offense.”

“Wow,” Maya said. “Hell of a story. And you say everyone’s got one like that?”

“Most people have a handful,” Phil chuckled. “Andy left his own birthday party to drive someone to the hospital, because he said he wouldn’t be able to enjoy it until he knew his friend was going to be okay. I bet you Ari’s still telling that one from time to time. He does bad shit from time to time too, but mostly it’s just his temper getting the better of him.”

“Got a bad temper, does he?”

“Sort of,” Phil said with a grin. “Andy takes forever to get ticked off, but once he does, it’s pretty terrifying. And the man can hold a grudge like nobody I’ve ever seen. I mean blood deep. But it’s very, very frightening thing to witness, because once you’re dead to him, you’re dead to him. He won’t answer your calls, he won’t open your mail, he won’t answer the door if you’re at it. But you’ve got to be a real shithead to get that level of treatment.”

“What’s ever warranted that?”

“Someone stole a couple hundred bucks from him once. Used to be part of our friend group, and we exiled their ass hard,” Phil said. “Long, long time ago, though. Almost a decade ago. I don’t think he’s got any other grudges since then. It takes quite a lot to truly piss him off. I know. I love to tease the fuck out of him. But I guess I also know when to back off.”

“Anyway, we should let you rest,” Linda said. “We’ll have you over to Andy tomorrow. The Orange Variant occasionally causes some allergic reactions in people, and we’re mostly just keeping tabs on you until the serum settles in your system, which’ll be close to two in the morning, so best to just wait until tomorrow to get you over there.”

“Yeah, I get that,” Maya said. “Can someone send in some food, though? I’m fucking starving.”

“As soon as I walk out of here,” Phil said, “I’ll have someone send some food down.”

“Thanks Phil,” Maya said. “I’ll just watch yet another few flicks on my iPad.”

“Home stretch, Maya; home stretch.”

Phil and Linda walked out of the room and he immediately called to have food sent down for Maya, stressing that the strictest protocols needed to be followed, as she still had the Orange Variant in her system, and would until she paired up with Andy.

Then he sat down to make a phone call to Cyprus and see just how much of someone’s ass he could chew off.