CHAPTER ONE: OUTBREAK

 

There might have been a host of things in days before that might have clued Elle Bouquet in to the AHS outbreak, but it probably wouldn't have changed much. She hadn't been a very serious person and didn't have much in the way of priorities. She would have just shrugged and gone with the flow.

 

At least that's what she would tell herself later, after everything in those strange weeks transpired. Sometimes, she had lingering doubts that something might have been done... and, knowing the outcome, would she have even changed anything? Probably not. In any case, that was all in her past. Realistically, there was no way to know.

 

The first odd thing she recalled noticing was her mother's hair... this was back when Elle was a he, and he went by Elias.

 

- - - - -

 

It was four weeks from the end of the spring semester at Corona Community College, mid-April. With mid-terms over, Elias was going to visit Melanie. She was his girlfriend of one year - they'd known each other for a few years, had started going out as seniors in high school, and he had no idea what she saw in him because, frankly, Melanie was out of his league: girl-next-door attractive, university-next-town-over smart, and not-quite-rich parents. She and Elias had been getting pretty involved with each other lately, but there was no talk of anything more serious. She still lived with her parents, he lived with his, and their arrangement worked. If she didn't come to her senses, if all went well, they'd discuss getting a little apartment together in a year. That was the plan. But the AHS outbreak changed everything.

 

"Hey mom, I'm going to Melanie's."

 

"You two have fun," his mother said.

 

That response stopped Elias in his tracks. Usually, his mother would tell him something about being 'safe' or 'smart' (translation: have safe sex or none at all). She'd ask him when he was going to be home, tell him to make good choices, and so on. He was sure she knew that he and Melanie had been having sex, but her disapproval about it was mild and predictable in her liberal-ish suburbanite way. Telling him to 'have fun' was not usual behavior. He stopped and examined her closely. She was sitting in her chair, legs locked together with the TV on mute and a slightly dazed smile on her face.

 

"Um... are you okay?" he asked.

 

"What? Oh, yes. I'm just waiting for your father to get home."

 

This was another odd response, but Elias just shrugged. He'd told Melanie he'd be fifteen minutes and didn't want to be late. Any misstep and she might come to her senses about him. But there was something else off about his mother. She looked great - expert cosmetics, like she'd just been to the salon, and she'd even put streaks of blonde in her hair. That had to be it - her graying brown had been dyed chestnut, shot through with dirty blonde streaks.

 

"Did you do something with your hair?" he asked?

 

She twirled a strand and looked at it distractedly. "Hmm? No, I don't think so. Just the usual."

 

Elias shrugged again. It wasn't his business. If his mom wanted to play coy about her hair, she was welcome to it. He left his parents' house and drove his old Accord to Melanie's. The Harmons lived fifteen minutes away, across town on the other side of the valley. But, more pertinently, the elder Harmons were out until tomorrow and her younger brother was at some sort of church function. He and Melanie would have at least a few hours to themselves in the big house and Elias intended to make the best of it. And make the best of it, he did.

 

He let himself in at Melanie's. She wasn't reclining on the white suede sectional in the living room, as she usually was on such occasions, and when he called her name she called back down from upstairs,

 

"Are you going to keep me waiting for you?"

 

Of course he wasn't going to keep her waiting. He wasn't Melanie-level smart, but he wasn't an imbecile. With a sly grin, he headed up to her room, only to gasp when he opened the door. She was dressed in a sexy teddy, its sheer purple fabric hugging her modest breasts and tenting at the nipples. She'd lifted the skirt up and was lazily running a vibrator around her slick snatch. Her room was filled with the musky scent of pussy. To judge from the smell, she'd been at it for hours.

 

"Wow. Oh, wow..." he said. He was already taking his pants off.

 

Melanie tossed the vibrator aside and spread her legs. He could see the wet and glistening folds of her pussy, a little frothy trickle of moisture oozing down the side of her labia, the sparse little hairs of her mostly-shaved pussy already damp from masturbation. Elias was already fully erect, his dick pulsing with need, waggling like a dowsing rod of deep dicking drawing him toward her wet and needy snatch. When he started to roll a condom over his cock, she stopped him.

 

"No," she gasped. "I want to feel you inside me. The real you inside me."

 

That was a first. They'd never done it bareback. But he trusted her to know her own cycle, and if she wasn't worried about it, he wasn't going to complain too much. She was the responsible one. Elias lined up with her hole and slid in, moaning at the wet and quivering heat, the shivering animal need of her pussy.

 

He moaned again. Usually, he wasn't vocal at all, but this was way more intense than normal. Something else was different, though. Usually, Melanie needed about twenty minutes of foreplay before they got down to business, but she'd already been diddling herself for at least an hour. She was hot and wet, and the walls of her cunt squeezed him with an incessant need. What had gotten into her? His balls were pulsing and priming for release.

 

His hands roamed across her breasts, nice little handfuls with erect nipples, even as he thrust his cock with increasing intensity, pulling back so far that the head of his cock almost popped out before driving home, the burn of pleasure coursing from the tip of his dick. As he sped up, he grunted, sweat building up on his brow, and Melanie was moaning louder than she'd ever done before. As his thrusting reached a fever pitch, she wrapped her legs completely around his torso and clamped him in. Elias groaned and his eyes rolled back as he came, spurting hot seed deep into her body. Melanie quivered about him, panting and moaning. Then she released her grip from him and Elias stumbled back, pulling out of her with a wet smack.

 

"Holy shit... that was..."

 

"Mmmm," Melanie said. "That was fucking amazing." She ran her hand along her pussy and brought her fingers to her lips, licking his cum off of them with a satisfied moan.

 

"What was that all about?"

 

Melanie shrugged and rolled from her bed, plodding over to her dresser. "I dunno. It must be hormones. I was really fucking horny this evening and... Jesus, El, I'm still kinda horny."

 

Elias patted his softening dick. "The captain needs some downtime."

 

"Maybe in a few hours?"

 

"Yeah. Before Jackson gets home."

 

Melanie sighed and started to put on her bra. Elias took an appreciative look at her jiggling breasts before she slipped them into the cups. Then she frowned, adjusted the strap, and started moving the bra around her tits.

 

"Something wrong?"

 

"It's got to be hormones," she said. "My bra is super tight for some reason."

 

He'd thought her breasts looked bigger and, dare he say, better than usual. Her usual B-cups must have been pushing a proper-handful C-cup. He sat on her bean bag chair and watched as she changed into a sports bra, idly touching his dick. Amazingly, it was already semi-hard again. He stood and approached her, running a hand along the swell of her breast. Then Elias frowned and the color drained from his face.

 

"What's wrong?"

 

"Oh, fuck me. Shit! I'm hard already, Mel. And your tits are bigger..."

 

"Yeah? I thought you'd like that."

 

"My mom was acting weird earlier, and I thought she did something with her hair. It had blonde streaks in it or something. And I..."

 

Melanie gasped. "Oh God! Do you think it's the AHS?"

 

Elias nodded. "It might be. We should call... well... who do you call? 9-1-1? The CDC?"

 

"Start with 9-1-1."

 

9-1-1 was busy. Elias didn't even know 9-1-1 could be busy, but the system sent him right to an automated system:

 

"Due to an unusually high volume of calls, all of our lines are currently busy. Your call has been placed in a queue and will be answered in the order in which it was received," the automated voice said.

 

"It's busy!" he said.

 

"Fuck!" Melanie said. "I do not have time to get AHS..."

 

That was understandable. Melanie wanted to be a physician and, depending on the 'flavor' of AHS, the disease would make that dream more difficult if not outright impossible. If it was AHS, though (and Elias was pretty sure it was) she was well into the initial phases of it. There wasn't much to be done. He wondered whether he should even be in the same room as her. While he waited in the 9-1-1 call queue, she looked up the CDC number and gave it a ring... but she didn't have to wait for anybody to answer because, just then, the CDC and the National Guard showed up.

 

They came in trucks and vans, rumbling into the neighborhood like a 3.5 magnitude earthquake - heavy quarantine trucks, military transports, armored trucks, and ambulances. Most of the medical vehicles were white and red, but some had biohazard symbols on them. A group of people in positive pressure suits got out of one of the quarantine trucks and set up a little amplifier to announce to the neighborhood:

 

"There has been a contagion breach in your municipality. Your lives are not in immediate danger, but you are not to leave your houses. Please wait for officials to screen and interview you. Any immediate questions can be directed to the AHS emergency hotline."

 

"It's fucking AHS," Elias groaned. A moment later, the 9-1-1 operator connected through to him. Better late than never, he supposed.

 

- - - - -

 

It took about an hour for the CDC people to get to Melanie's house, at which point they were screened. In that hour, Melanie had already started to get horny again, absently grinding herself against the living room couch pillow even as worry played across her face. And Elias was getting horny watching her - maybe it was a symptom, and maybe it was just watching his girlfriend and her slightly-bigger tits and her slightly-hotter body getting off on the couch. He was less worried for himself, as acquired hypersexuality syndrome, better known as AHS, was less of a game-changer for men. It affected body shape, libido, and a whole host of other psychological traits, but very few of them were objectionable. He half-hoped that he'd gotten it. For uncertain reasons, the effects on women were more varied and, if not intercepted early on, had a reputation for halving the IQs of the infected women.

 

"They have treatments, you know," Elias said lamely. "For the brain stuff..."

 

Melanie gathered enough focus to shoot him an angry look that quickly lost its edge. "I fucking know that! But... but..." she started to sob just in time for the CDC to show up.

 

The screening was a lot faster and less formal than Elias would have thought. A trio of middle-aged doctors or scientists (Elias wasn't sure which) came in with their containment suits and took all of about five minutes to get them sorted. They checked Melanie's temperature and did something with an electrode on her skin, quickly deciding that she was almost certainly infected. She went in one of the quarantine trucks. They did the same to Elias and deemed his status indeterminate. He was led to a different quarantine truck. He wanted to be there to support Melanie, but if he got onto a quarantine truck with a bunch of people with active AHS, he was probably going to get it, too.

 

The 'indeterminate' quarantine truck was crowded with people from Melanie's neighborhood - unsurprisingly, Elias didn't recognize any of them. They looked scared. Families whispering words of comfort and support to one another, some of them eyeing Elias uncertainly. He sat next to a middle-aged woman who scooted away to put some space between them.

 

"I thought AHS was all over. How do you figure it got into Corona?" the man across from him whispered.

 

"I don't think anybody knows how it happens. They think particles of... whatever causes it. A virus?" the woman next to Elias said.

 

"It's not a virus," Elias said. He'd read an article about it not too long ago - it was too weird of a thing not to titillate. But he also wasn't enough of a science nerd to know much beyond that. "They think it might not even be from Earth."

 

"I don't think it's aliens," the woman said. "But whatever it is, it can live in the atmosphere or in the ground for years. Then somebody just has to breathe it in and it starts spreading. But if they think we're safe, maybe they got it early?"

 

"Maybe," Elias said uncertainly. "I'm pretty sure my mom got it, though, and we live in North Corona like a mile and a half away."

 

The woman scooted even further away from him, her expression somewhere between disapproval and horror. "You don't have any symptoms?"

 

Elias shrugged. "I don't think so."

 

The quarantine truck, understandably, didn't have any windows. It was just two rows of cramped benches, a bulky ventilation system, and a locked off mini-lab just behind the cab. Elias couldn't see where they were going, but he wasn't especially surprised when they unlocked the quarantine truck and ushered everybody into the Corona Metro Expo Center downtown. The whole CMEC had been commandeered by the CDC and the military. Men and women with flashers and amplifiers - all of them in positive pressure containment suits - were directing the incoming trucks in different directions. The arrivals from Elias's truck queued behind about a hundred other people, and within fifteen minutes another few hundred joined in line behind them.

 

"You don't think they're... you know... doing anything to people in there, do you?" the man behind Elias asked.

 

"Like what? Killing the infected?"

 

"Yeah. I mean... I don't trust them."

 

Elias shrugged. "Well plenty of people who had AHS are still around, so I'm pretty sure the CDC isn't going to kill us. My guess is we'll be cooped up until they can tell for sure whether we're infected, and then we'll be moved to wherever the sick people are or let go if we don't have it."

 

"Yeah, I guess that makes sense. We've got to be careful, though."

 

Elias just nodded.

 

The line moved pretty quickly, but he still got a pretty good idea of what was going on beyond their little queue. Their intake line was one of several for people with 'indeterminate' AHS status. Across the barricade to his left, though, was a line of people with the disease. They were getting sprayed down with something as they entered the building, and some of the people in that line were obviously well-along with their symptoms. Then he spotted Melanie and waved.

 

"Melanie! Are you okay?" he shouted.

 

She waved back. "Yeah, but I'm scared," she called back. None of the officials did anything to discourage them. "Some people are... they're farther along!"

 

As if to prove her point, two of the people further up in line started making out with one another - two women, actually, moaning, kissing, and dry-humping against one another. A man near them panicked at the sight and started to run, and soon seven or eight people bolted out of line and away from the CMEC. National Guard people with stun guns intercepted them and put them down with practiced efficiency before spraying them down with a slimy decontaminant and dragging the still-stunned people into the center. When Elias scanned back through the slowly-reforming line, Melanie was nowhere to be seen.

 

"Melanie! Melanie!"

 

"Your girl got dragged inside," the man behind him said. "What chemicals do you figure they sprayed them with? Fluoride?"

 

"It's not fluoride," Elias said. His heart was still racing.

 

Elias's line moved along, and soon they passed through the gates and into the Expo Center, thankfully unsprayed. Inside, the CDC had turned the whole place into one big quarantine box. His group was filed into a mid-sized multi-purpose room with about two hundred other people. As they entered, each of them was given a purple ticket with a number on it and every minute or so a number was announced over the room's sound system. Each announced number interrupted the audio of a video playing on the big screen at the front of the room. It was an educational video about AHS. Elias vaguely recalled having watched it in middle school, but that had been years ago. Watching the squirrelly, scared people around Elias was making him anxious, too, so he focused on the film. It refreshed his memory on the disease:

 

AHS was first identified in Russia in the late 1990s and was initially assumed to be some sort of environmental contamination or perhaps a new STD, though it soon became clear that it wasn't either of those things. It was initially thought to be a virus because of the distinct particles it created: strange, small objects about the size of viral particles that increased in number in the infected person's bloodstream before dropping off to barely-detectable levels after the disease completed its course (but never quite going away). But a virus couldn't change a person's entire body and genome like that, and it certainly couldn't have such specific psychological effects. The particles appeared to constitute swarms of tiny machines, or possibly nanoscopic organisms - but nobody could say where they came from. Scientists called these tiny particles the AHS Vehicle. AHS had different strains or 'flavors' that weren't determined by the vehicle, but by its interaction with the host's genes. The most basic flavors just oversexualized the infected person's body and spiked their libido, but there were dozens of variants where one or more aspects was emphasized. While no cure or remediation had been found for AHS yet, the IQ drop seen in most patients - about ten percent in men and a whopping fifty percent in women - was completely avoidable if patients were given regular cognitive therapy during the infection. But the increase in libido and sexual characteristics could only be reduced by therapies that were much more unpleasant than the symptoms themselves, and AHS had evolved over time to become resistant to the hormone therapies that had initially shown promise. But, the educational video assured them, the survivors of AHS could go on to lead happy, healthy, productive lives. The video closed with a happy couple at a restaurant - the man's frame was just a bit too muscular, his facial features a bit too rugged, and his dark stubble a bit too thick to be unremarkable. The woman's breasts were just a bit too big and perky, her complexion just a bit too flawless, and her happy smile just a bit too lush to be unremarkable. But they were conversing happily over nouveau cuisine and not, Elias noted, fucking the shit out of one another like rutting animals. That was hopeful.

 

"It might be worth it to get AHS if I could look like that," a rather plain-looking girl said. Plain Jane, Elias dubbed her, was maybe fifteen and rail-thin with dirty-blonde hair.

 

"It seems like an ok deal," another girl, a slightly-older brunette, said, "but sometimes you still get a lot dumber. That's what I heard. Not always but, like, sometimes. And some of the strains are bad. I heard about this one girl who got it and she became like some six foot ten amazon with boobs bigger than basketballs. She was on The Stance promoting some kind of fitness thing..."

 

"Valkyrie Fitness?" Plain Jane said, a bit excited.

 

"Sure, I guess. And if that sounds like a good thing to you, pretty much the opposite can happen, also. Bigger, smaller, stronger, weaker, pale and goth-y or blonde and bronzed. The only constant is you get big breasts and way hornier. At least that's what I heard."

 

"You also have to go onto some kind of database," Elias said. Plain Jane shot him an angry look for eavesdropping on their conversation. But it wasn't his fault they'd been loud. "Yeah, there's a registry that anybody can look up to see if AHS people are living near you. And you legally have to tell all of your sexual partners if you've had it since some of the AHS Vehicles are still in your bloodstream forever. They don't know if it can pass that way or not."

 

"Well, why not just give it to everybody and have it over with?" Plain Jane said.

 

The brunette girl sighed. "Because then it would be out of control. There aren't enough CDC people and doctors to deal with it, so the whole thing would just be chaos and people humping in the streets. Plus, I don't want boobs as big as my head, thanks." She sneezed.

 

"Too bad!" Plain Jane giggled.

 

"Sneezing isn't a symptom, stupid," she said, but she didn't sound too sure of herself. She sneezed again.

 

The educational video was replaying itself on a ten-minute loop, so no new information there. He messaged Melanie, his mother, and his father, none of whom answered. He did get in touch with his older brother, Nolan, but he wasn't even in town. He was a senior at Sierra Grande University, presumably far from the AHS outbreak.

 

<There are maybe ten thousand people here in the Corona Expo Center

<It's fucked, he texted Nolan.

 

Nolan texted back a minute later:

<Yeah, no joke!

<It's all over the news

<Are you infected?

<Am I gonna have a hulking muscular younger brother?

<Haha joking hope you're safe

 

Elias texted back:

<Haha

<No, I don't think so

<I have to wait for an exam to make it official

<People are scared, but it seems like everything is fine

 

<Cool, Nolan responded.

<Good to know

<Any idea if mom and dad are ok?

 

Elias wondered that, himself.

<No. I texted but no answer

<But I'm pretty sure mom has it

<She had some symptoms I think before she left

<Idk about dad

 

Before Nolan could process that and respond, Elias's ticket number was called. He was shown into a makeshift examination room - one of about fifty cordoned off in the area that usually served as the Expo Center's food court. He was attended by a nurse and a technician. The technician was geared up in the same bulky containment gear that almost everybody else from the CDC and National Guard had. The nurse, though, only had a gauzy face mask. It was easy to guess why - because, Hello Nurse! Between her glossy mass of red hair in a great big bun, her piercing emerald eyes, the overgenerous bust, and rounded rear barely contained by her ostensibly unappealing scrubs, the nurse was clearly an AHS girl. That made her safe from the outbreak - you couldn't get it twice.

 

"Do I have to wear the mask?" she whispered, lifting it from her face to reveal plump, ruby-red lips.

 

The woman in the containment gear shrugged. "Policy says you do."

 

Hello Nurse huffed and leaned over Elias to check his pupils. He shifted in his seat to conceal his growing erection. He could feel the heat coming off her body. She was gentle and proficient when she drew a blood sample, barely eliciting a sting. And holy fuck did she smell good. She smelled like horny wildflowers, if that made any sense. When Hello Nurse leaned into him, he could feel the soft warmth of her canteloupe-sized breasts enveloping half his arm.

 

"Fifty-seven," she said.

 

"Wha?" Elias shook his head to refocus his thoughts. His pants were awfully tight.

 

The technician checked her tablet. "His incoming documents said Fifty-two. That's outside the margin of error. What's the pupillary response?"

 

"Definitely dilated, but... well..."

 

"What?"

 

Hello Nurse giggled. "I kinda have that effect on guys."

 

"What's body temp?"

 

"Ninety-nine point six," she said.

 

"That's up from the previous reading, too. I'm calling it."

 

That didn't sound good. "What... what's that mean?"

 

"Don't feel bad, honey," Hello Nurse said, running a French-tipped finger down his chest. "I had AHS, too, and look how I turned out!"

 

She bent over with what had to be deliberate exhibitionism, backing the plump curve of her ass until it was inches from his face. The cheeks were clearly delineated against her pink scrub pants. Round and firm and perfect. Then she stood, giggled again, and handed him a slip of paper with a bar code and an AHS+ tag on it.

 

"What's this?"

 

"Sorry, son," the technician said. "You and our red-haired friend now have one more thing in common. AHS, if you weren't clear on it. Report to the AHS perimeter at the end of the hallway and you'll be directed to your digs for the next few days."

 

"Is there a chance I don't have it? You didn't sound so sure a minute ago."

 

"There's a chance, sure. But if I'm wrong, then you're the first false positive I've ever tagged. Condolences or congratulations. End of the hallway, please. Nurse Vance and I have a hundred more people to screen."

 

+++++

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