CHAPTER TWO: QUARANTINE

Elias had acquired hypersexuality syndrome. That was bad-ish. But at least it got him out of the Expo Center and into the big Marchioness Hotel next door. As he passed the threshold into the AHS full-quarantine area, a guard with a weed sprayer hosed him down with a clear, astringent liquid. Then, once a few more unhappy campers wandered into their area, another guard showed them through the pressure-sealed door.

"Is this where all of the AHS people are being kept?" Elias asked their escort.

"Most of you. Why?"

"Um... my girlfriend got infected, too. And my mom, I think. Is there any way I can find them?"

The guard nodded. "Sure. You can't leave the Marchioness, but the front desk has a list of who's where. If they've already been assigned a room, you're free to look them up and negotiate room swaps with whoever they're roomed with. We'd actually prefer that you find people you know because of the... well, you know..."

"The sex?"

"Sure, if you want to understate it. If people can't find folks they know and care about, there tend to be a lot of hallway orgies."

"You've done this before?"

"A few times. I was there in Aurora when 3,500 people got it... I'll eat my hat if this one isn't almost as big."

Three and a half thousand people sounded like a lot, but it impressed upon Elias the relative rarity of AHS. You heard about it a lot on the news because it was titillating, what with people turning into sexed-up nymphomaniacs. But in reality, only a hundred thousand or so people had ever got it in the United States. The global toll was a bit north of a million, which was a lot of people. But it was only about one in every five or six thousand people. On a global or national scale, AHS was actually pretty rare - lucky him!

Elias was led to a line for room assignments. At the end of the line, each of the AHS-positive people wandering in was given a room card and two pills. These pills were PV-981, the drug that decreased the virulence of the AHS Vehicle by something like 99%, effectively stopping the spread within a few days. Elias swallowed the pills and was told to open his mouth so the nurse could make sure he hadn't faked it. Of course he'd swallowed them! Afterward, he looked up Melanie's room (there was no record of her in the system yet) and his mom's number up on the tenth floor.

He got on the elevator and went up to ten. He almost bolted from the elevator when an older couple, late fifties or early sixties if Elias had to guess, got on with him. Both of them displayed the flush of arousal and the sly look of having done something naughty. The woman shifted over toward the man and semi-covertly groped at his crotch. Elias caught himself glancing to the impressive bulge in the man's trousers and instead shifted his attention to the panel display chiming off the floor numbers.

"My husband can never find out," the woman semi-whispered and then giggled.

"Or my wife," the man agreed. He made a long groan of arousal. She gasped. Elias did not want to know what was happening on the other side of the elevator.

When he got off on the tenth floor, the older couple had started disrobing right there in the lift. A turquoise-green blouse dropped next to his foot just as he pushed through the opening elevator doors. The hallway was thankfully empty, save for a pair of suited-up quarantine personnel escorting people to their rooms. One of the personnel noticed Elias and pointed to a sign posted in the hallway: DO NOT OPEN HOTEL WINDOWS.

Elias made his way to room 1016 where his mother was staying. He was about to knock, but the door was already a crack open. Looking down, is was pretty clear why: a frilly lavender bra had fallen between the door and the frame. As quietly as he could, he pushed the door open and stepped inside.

The first thing he noticed was the scent... it smelled like sex. No... it smelled like pussy. He heard a wet slicking sound and little gasps and yips of passion. Peeking around the corner of the little entryway, Elias took in the room and any doubt that he had AHS went right out the window. Not that they were allowed to open the windows.

Lying on the bed, legs spread wide, was his mother. Or at least a very horny version of his mother in the early stages of getting sexed-up by AHS. Her spread legs quivered as she wetly plunged a big dildo into her snatch. Her other hand played with her breasts, slightly larger and perkier than Elias might have suspected. He should have been disgusted to see his mother in such a state, but he wasn't. Almost immediately, he was sporting a full-mast stiffie and part of his brain was telling him to hop right into the fun. Fortunately, that part was small and was soon driven completely away when the bathroom door to the room opened and somebody (a man?) approached the doorframe. Elias gasped and backed out as quickly as he could, tossing the lavender bra into the room before closing the door. Just before he did, he heard the man inside chuckle and say,

"It looks like you're ready for round two."

Fuck.

From what Elias understood, arousal in the early stages of AHS came and went in waves. The infected could expect longer periods of slightly-increased arousal interspersed with hour-long bursts of completely overpowering horniness, colloquially called 'the hornies'. Researchers thought this was the result of the AHS vehicle fine-tuning its attack on the brain's arousal and pleasure centers. He wondered when he'd get his first spike.

He decided to check his own room out, a bit worried that his roommate or roommates, whoever those might be, would already be there and up to more in flagrante delicto than he was prepared to deal with. As he made his way to the seventh floor, he checked his phone.

His social media was blowing up. There were worried people, excited people, people trying to get in touch with loved ones, and more than a few racy videos. One of his high school friends had even created a #AHSchangelog site where people could document their changes and experiences. Elias considered that he might participate, but he hadn't really changed much. Not yet. And his experiences so far were mostly ones that he didn't want to share on social media. Then again, that might change over the course of AHS as his sexual inhibitions crumbled. He ran a hand along his crotch and then up his shirt, gasping at the sensation when his fingers brushed by a nipple. He did it again, relishing in the sensation. That was different! He hadn't heard about increased nipple sensitivity as a male symptom, but that was hardly surprising. Most guys looked forward to the more stereotypical effects: a doubling of erect penis volume, three and a half inches in height, and twenty five pounds of mostly muscle. It varied from man to man, but those were the averages. Elias couldn't wait to have eight solid inches to plunge into Melanie...

"Please proceed to your room," the quarantine guard said.

Elias had just been standing there in the hallway, casually stroking at his crotch and shirt. He'd been completely out of it! He fumbled for his room card and swiped himself in.

- - - - -

Elias was assaulted almost the moment he entered his room. Sexually assaulted, that is. At first, he thought he was being actually assaulted because somebody dashed out of the dim room lighting and leapt at him. But whoever it was wrapped her legs around him and smothered him with kisses, almost pulling him down right there in the entryway. He was half-way to the bed before he realized, with a little relief, that it was Melanie!

"Why did you take so long?" she muttered between kisses. "I've been here forever!"

"H-how?"

He laid her down on the hotel bed. The sheets were already rumpled and slightly sweaty - it looked like she'd been up to mischief by her lonesome. The room's only illumination was the little emergency light in the entryway and a crack of light coming from under the bathroom door. Melanie smiled up at him and beckoned him with her finger. She was in her bra and panties and that was it. The bra struggled to contain breasts that had to be a full cup size bigger than usual and her panties had a conspicuous wet spot at the crotch. He could smell her arousal.

"They let us do requests at the front. I told them to pair me with you if you were coming."

"Wow," Elias said.

He could hear thumping and moaning through the wall from the room next to theirs. And the other room next to theirs. No mystery about what was going on there. He ran his finger along the slick moisture of Melanie's panties, rubbing at her lubed-up snatch. She arched her back and spread her legs slightly to grant him better access.

"You're horny?" he asked.

"Aren't you?" She moaned. With a lazy reach, she clutched at his crotch and gave it a gentle but insistent squeeze. "I've just been sort of simmering since I got here a few hours ago, but it's been ticking up since just before you got here, El. I'm about to blow a fucking gasket if I don't cum. I think I'm about to spike again."

"I haven't had any spikes yet," Elias said. "I wonder when..."

He was going to say he wondered when they were going to start. He didn't have to wonder much longer. His heart rate went up, his body went warm, and a pleasurable pulsing started thumping away at his crotch. Elias was getting the hornies, and what a wonderful time for it.

He and Melanie fucked. They didn't have sex, make love, or even screw. It was a primal, rutting fuck with lots of thumping, moaning, and wet sounds. Whatever thumping and moaning was happening through the walls was completely drowned out by their noises. Melanie's cunt was deliciously wet, pulsing and hot around his cock. And despite how glorious it felt, he didn't blow his load early. He thrust without mercy, sucking on her breasts, her nipples deep pink and erect like raspberries. Her legs were spread as far as they could go and her hands gripped at the headboard to brace against his thrusts. Her dark hair was a lustrous halo about her, and her breasts jiggled with each thrust. When Elias looked into her eyes, he saw pure animal need and was sure she saw the same thing in him. As she approached her first orgasm, Melanie's legs locked around his torso and drew him in, her rough but feminine grunts urging him forward. And whenever he hit just the right spot, her pussy gave a little spasm that made both of them moan. It must have been close to fifteen minutes and four or five shrieking orgasms from Melanie before Elias felt the searing white pleasure of the best orgasm in his life. It started at the tip of his cock, but radiated throughout his body, hot like a cauldron at his dick, warm and tight around his balls, and shivering up his spine and across his body. His hips bucked like mad and Melanie sprayed all over his torso even as he was shooting gob after gob of thick cum into her. The shrill keening of her shriek left his ears ringing, and he bellowed back, finally pulling out with a great sticky smack. He rolled off of her and onto the bed, panting from the exertion.

"That was... wow..." Melanie said. She giggled and ran a finger along her labia. She brought up a finger coated in their mixed juices and ran it along her other lips, rolling the tip of her pink tongue around it. "It even tastes better. Shit, El... and I'm still horny."

So was he. The AHS hornies didn't play around - during those roughly hour-long bouts of spiked libido, there wasn't much you could do but fuck. Or at least there wasn't much you wanted to do beyond that. From sensitivity to sensation to stamina, everything was cranked up to eleven. It took all of about two minutes for Elias to go from sated and post-orgasmic to pulsing, ramrod-straight, and eager to fuck again.

"I want to taste it," Melanie said, and she maneuvered him beneath her with a rolling motion.

Elias wasn't going to argue. Her hot mouth engulfed him, her tongue flitting about the head of his cock with an exquisite talent he was fairly certain she'd never displayed before. As she sucked him with aplomb, her own slick and musky crotch lowered toward him bit by bit with the little thrusts of her hips. Part of Elias's mind told him that he should be put off by the prospect of performing cunnilingus on Melanie as his own pearl-white ejaculate oozed out of her. But, somehow, it didn't seem so bad. He licked along her slick lips and flicked his tongue along the engorged nubbin of her clit and enjoyed every second of the creamy, musky experience. All the while Melanie bobbed happily up and down his shaft, moaning whenever she liked what he'd done with his tongue and sending incredible vibrations through his cock that made it hard to think. He wondered whether AHS patients took a hit to their IQ because the experience was literally mind-blowing. But he knew that probably wasn't it, or else there was no way he wasn't becoming a drooling idiot. When Melanie came, she arched her back and released his cock long enough for a full-throated moan before plunging back down and finishing him off with an expert suck and swirl. She came so wetly that he had to keep lapping to save himself from drowning in her slick juices. She, on the other hand, sucked everything down. The only moisture on her face was from what had been deposited around his groin from the swampy wetness of their first coupling.

Melanie smacked her lips, shivering. "It's sooooo good," she said.

Elias smacked his lips, too. "Yeah. Holy shit." And already, impossibly, he was starting to get hard again.

- - - - -

They continued along in a pattern for a while. Their hornies came in tandem, and they would fuck and suck each other for as long as that lasted. Perhaps somebody was listening in on them because the CDC personnel would only come in to check up on them between bouts of sex. Or maybe it was just that in their blissed-out oblivion the couldn't hear the polite knocking as they coupled.

The CDC people would come in with their containment gear and take measurements. They'd measure temperature and skin conductance, take little cheek swabs, have them step on the scale, and dispense more PV-981 anti-virulence pills. They also brought water and electrolyte beverages to keep them hydrated and boxes of slightly-stale chocolate chip cookies and power bars to keep their energy up. Elias and Melanie went right through them - it wasn't unusual for AHS patients to burn through ten thousand calories a day between the sex and the physical changes.

"What are you measuring?" Elias asked the medical technician on one of their check-ups.

She gave him a curious look. "Your weight?"

He was standing on the scale - obviously, his weight. He weighed 165 pounds... two pounds down from the last measurement. When was he going to start packing on muscle?

"No, not my weight," he said. "I mean with the cheek swabs."

"Oh," the technician chuckled. "Titre levels. How much vehicle is in your saliva. We don't have a good way to get it out of your blood, not even with dialysis machines, but the PV-981 interferes with secretion into other bodily fluids so you won't be contagious unless you bleed all over somebody."

"What are those books?" Melanie asked, lazily pointing with her bare foot. She was wearing a terrycloth robe and nothing underneath it. Her breasts had swelled up another half a cup size and she had a small but distinct line of cleavage. Elias felt the faint pulse of incipient hornies and Melanie shot him a sultry look. She was feeling it, too.

The technician clearly noticed the look and started putting her things away. "Those are workbooks for cognitive exercises so you can keep your brains from turning to mush," she said. "A case worker will be by later to explain during-AHS care, but the books are pretty straightforward."

"Do you have, like, a phone app?" Melanie asked. Elias had been wondering the same thing. Workbooks seemed so fourth grade.

"Sure, if you prefer that, I think there are a few. I can't vouch for them, but maybe the case worker can tell you. The workbooks are from the NIMH and have been shown to reduce cognitive decline by upwards of eighty percent."

Melanie frowned, the arousal momentarily draining from her face. "Upwards of eighty percent? You mean we still might get dumber?"

The technician shrugged. "It depends on the flavor. Some people even get smarter, or so I've heard. Most people don't notice anything if they follow the plan. My guess is that most of that drop is from people who half-assed the plan and wound up the worse for it. But that's a question for the case worker. I'll, uh, leave you two to... you know. It."

She packed up her things and left, and within five minutes Melanie and Elias were humping and howling like Serengeti baboons. They carried on in this pattern for maybe a day before the case worker arrived. They'd fuck when the hornies hit and between that, they'd cuddle up to sleep on their increasingly damp hotel bed, devour cookies and power bars with utter abandon, get checked on by Beth Saunders (their floor's medical tech), or maintain their reasoning skills with the workbook or with the phone apps - which both of them vastly preferred. In the few moments between those things, Elias and Melanie checked their phones for news. One headline read:

CORONA CALIFORNIA EXPOSED TO AHS

UPWARDS OF 4,000 FEARED INFECTED

GOVERNOR DECLARES STATE OF EMERGENCY

There were lots of messages to answer to, as well. His mother finally texted back - albeit without the lurid details of what was going down in her own room. Elias's father, who had been at work when the quarantine hit, was back at their recently-decontaminated home, having been cleared himself. How only one of them having AHS would affect their marriage, Elias could only guess. Grandma Bouquet in Illinois was texting him, too. She could barely even text, but she was shooting off a storm of old school SMS messages, including a handful of nutritious calorie-rich recipes to see them through AHS.

<We don't have an oven or a grocery in the hotel room, granny, he texted her.

<That's okay, hon! It's for when you go back home in a few days!, she responded.

Thank god his grandparents didn't live in Corona. He didn't know what he'd do if they got AHS. Especially Grandma Olsen... good lord. All in all, having AHS wasn't an altogether unpleasant experience. The sex was mind-bendingly great and the rest was tolerable. Elias thought he might ride AHS out happily. But as the physical and mental effects of AHS slowly asserted themselves, he worried whether something might be wrong. Wrong beyond regular AHS, that is. His suspicion was confirmed during that second day, when the case worker finally got to the Marchioness's seventh floor and turned Elias's world upside down.

- - - - - 

Their case worker introduced herself as Dr. Frances Turcott. She saw herself into the room exactly ten minutes after Elias and Melanie's latest bout of vigorous sex. The room reeked of fucking and sweat at that point and every cubic millimeter of the bedroom was soiled. There was no way that mattress was getting used by anybody else ever again.

Dr. Turcott wasn't wearing a containment suit and, while less obviously transformed than Hello Nurse had been, she had all the trademarks of an AHS person. It was hard to say how old she was - she looked to be about thirty, but AHS had a reputation for being generous in preserving looks, so she was probably a decade or more older. Her hair was straight and dirty blonde, pulled back into a long, low ponytail that hung past a slim waist. Her breasts were well-concealed in a loose but stylish sweater, but looked to be high and round like generous grapefruits smuggled under the soft wool - perhaps two cups larger than Melanie's now almost-D cups. Indeed, the name tag on her little lab coat rested upon the slope of her chest like a bosomy shelf. Her dark skirt fell a bit below the knee, so it was hard to gage her lower body aside from that her lower legs were lithe and smooth. And her face was pleasant to look upon: her eyes were smoky, her cheekbones a bit high, her nose a bit flat, and her lips a bit wide, giving her a slightly feline look. But even without cosmetics on - she looked to be going without - Elias could easily imagine her face glamored up and on the pages of a fashion magazine. As things were, though, she looked like an acceptably modest and professional (if unambiguously MILFy) doctor. Perhaps noticing Elias's appraising look, she blushed slightly.

"Miss Harmon and Mister Bouquet? Are first names okay?"

"Melanie," Melanie said. She giggled and nudged Elias. "And mister flustered here goes by Elias or El."

"It's a pleasure to meet you. I'm Doctor Frances Turcott, but you can call me Fran or Frankie, whichever you like. I'm your AHS case worker... or at least I am for the moment."

Melanie's brow knit. "What the hell does that mean? Sorry, Fran, but I'm a little worried here..."

Dr. Turcott smiled amiably. "Well... I deal with special cases. Every case of AHS is, of course, unique, but some more so than others. Melanie, yours appears to be a pretty typical case. My guess is type HT-02 or HF-01, which are some of the more frequent 'flavors'. Their common names, I believe, are 'Sporty' and 'Basic Bombshell'. I was HT-02, myself, though I'm afraid I've let myself go a bit."

If this was Fran Turcott after she'd let herself go, Elias wondered what she'd looked like before. She looked plenty with it now. Why, she... a chill ran down Elias's spine as the broader implications of Dr. Turcott's statement became evident.

"That doesn't sound too bad," Melanie said with a little sigh, followed by an eep of surprise. "That means that the special case..."

"That means the special case is me," Elias said.

Dr. Turcott nodded. "I'm afraid so. Should we discuss this privately?"

He looked to Melanie and she gave him a little nod of approval. "Whatever you've got to say, Mel deserves to hear it, too."

"All right, then." The doctor tapped on her tablet, mumbled to herself a bit, and then set the tab down for them to see. It showed a series of medical charts arrayed in a little grid. She tapped on one of them and it expanded onto the screen. A graph of Elias's weight over time. He was down to 161 pounds as of the last checkup.

"Your weight's down ten pounds since you came in. If you hadn't been eating regularly, that would be understandable. You're burning a lot of calories. But I take it you've also been eating your fair share."

"Um, yeah. That's fair to say."

"That piqued Mrs. Saunders's interest. Our policy is to not bother AHS patients with little anomalies - enough stress as it is, right? But I ordered some follow-up tests, including some blood tests." She scrolled to a different graph. "This first graph is standard vehicle titre. It shows blood levels spiking and saliva levels way down thanks to the PV-981. That's normal. This, though..."

She showed them a graph with a red line and a green line. The red line was gradually curving downward while the green line curved up in equal measure. The two lines were just about to cross at the end of the graph. "These are your blood hormone levels. Testosterone metabolites and estrogen metabolites, actually. Your starting testosterone was barely above normal, and we'd expect to see it inch upward during AHS. The ending level is usually three to four times the normal level, which helps maintain musculature. And the estrogen should stay at its low baseline, but it's way up."

"Um... that sounds bad," Elias said. "Do you know why?"

Dr. Turcott nodded. "I think so. Like I said, I deal with unusual cases. I've seen hundreds."

"You said special cases," Melanie said.

"Either or," the doctor shrugged. "When I saw these hormone levels, I ran a screen from your salivary sample to look at karyotype. That means your chromosomes. And what we found was a very rare but completely benign condition: double-X male syndrome."

"What does that mean?"

"Well, just what it sounds like. Usually biological men have XY sex chromosomes and biological women have XX, but you're a biological male with XX. It's rare, but it can happen if a bit of DNA called the SRY gene hops from Y to X. It has a few implications for health, but we pretty much don't know how many people have this condition because it's almost completely asymptomatic. Except with AHS that's not true. The AHS Vehicle somehow registers sex chromosomes and uses that to make its differentiation for 'flavor' and overall change... which means..." she looked to them pointedly.

Elias was too shocked by the news to do to much thinking. "What does it mean?" he mumbled.

Melanie gasped. "It means you're turning into a girl... well, a woman, El! That makes so much sense!"

Now that it was made clear to him, it did make sense. He'd wondered when the changes were going to happen to him, but the changes had seemed to be, if anything, going in the wrong direction. He'd mostly noticed the drop in body and facial hair, but he'd also thought his limbs looked more slender and his dick was a bit smaller. He'd justified it to himself by saying he was losing fat before muscle... or something like that. The changes had been pretty subtle, but they all pointed toward the increasingly feminine. In hindsight, it was obvious.

"How... how long?" is all he managed to say. He knew very well that there was no known way to stop AHS and almost nothing to even slow it down.

"As you might have guessed from the graph, things have been speeding up. The vehicle multiplies in your body exponentially and picks up steam as it goes. You're about a day away from maximum titer and things will proceed pretty quickly from there. Ten days to two weeks."

Melanie rubbed his shoulder. "I'm so sorry, El," she whispered.

All he could mumble was a defeated, "fuck."