For most of the drive, Uncle Mike didn't say anything, and I didn't either. The wrecks had all been cleared from the roads, but the closer we got to Atlanta, it seemed like there'd been so many of them that they hadn't had time to haul them all away -- we saw lots of wrecked cars in the ditches on both sides of the highway and in the median, and once we got into the more densely-populated areas there were big piles of wreckage, where you could hardly tell where one squished car left off and another began. I wondered how many of the people who'd been in those cars at the moment of the change had survived, and of them, how many would ever recover from their injuries.
Somewhere around Norcross I said I needed to use the bathroom. Uncle Mike stopped at a gas station and we both went in. We used the men's room -- I felt vaguely guilty about that, but I was too embarrassed to use the ladies' room, and we both still looked male, as long as we had clothes on. I was about to ask Uncle Mike which he thought we should use, but he went into the men's room and I followed him quietly.
There was only one stall; he let me go first. I peed, trying not to look at myself any more than necessary, and went out. Uncle Mike went into the stall while I was washing my hands; after I dried them I went out and looked at the magazines. Or I was going to look at the magazines; the other customer looking at the magazine rack caught my attention first, and I stared at him for several seconds before I remembered that wasn't polite and made myself look away. He had black fur and long, sharp claws; he looked more like a big cat than a wolf, but more like an ape than either. I wondered if my dad looked like that now, and I was trying to work up the nerve to ask him where he'd been last Saturday when it all changed, when Uncle Mike came out of the restroom.
"See anything you want?" he asked.
"Nah," I said. "Let's go."
From there it wasn't far to home; we were well ahead of rush hour, and Uncle Mike said the traffic on I-285 was lighter than usual even for early afternoon. Thirty or forty minutes later we were pulling into my driveway, and I suddenly got really nervous -- I'd been a little nervous all day, but as Uncle Mike turned off the engine it suddenly hit me all at once, and my heart was pounding just as hard as when I realized, last Saturday, what had happened to me.
Uncle Mike started to get out of the car, and then looked at me and said: "Are you okay?"
"Yeah," I said. "Just give me a minute, okay?"
We sat there in the parked car for a while, and then I opened my door and we both got out. I trailed behind Uncle Mike to the door; he rang the bell.
By the time I caught up with Uncle Mike, my dad was already opening the door. I drew in a deep breath when I saw him. He wasn't much like the guy I'd seen at the gas station, though they both had fur and claws. Dad's fur was more yellowy-tan, what you call "tawny" if you see a cat that color, and he had a longer snout -- not as long as a dog or wolf's snout, but enough to make his face barely recognizable. He was just wearing shorts, and I could see how his knees bent the wrong way.
"Jeffrey!" he said, and grabbed me in a big hug, like he hadn't done since I was little -- I mean, he hugged me often enough, but it was years since he picked me up and whirled me around like that. He put me down and said to Uncle Mike, "Come on in."
We did, and there was Mom, lying on her side on the living room sofa. She was wearing a loose T-shirt, and covered with a big blanket from the waist down.
"Jeffrey!" she said, "come here and give me a hug."
I did. From the waist up, she looked a lot more human than Dad. But when I leaned over and hugged her I couldn't help feeling how flat her chest was, and remembering the centaurs I'd seen on CNN, and thinking about what she looked like under the blanket. I stood up and looked at her again. She still looked like herself, her face was hardly changed, but she was so skinny -- almost like a famine victim, with all the mass she could spare rearranged to make the lower torso and hind legs. And when she smiled, you could see, if you were paying attention, that she had herbivore teeth.
"Darlene's still having some trouble walking," Dad said to Uncle Mike. "Have a seat." We all sat around in the other chairs; I sat in the smaller easy chair, next to Mom.
"How are you feeling, sis?" Uncle Mike asked Mom.
"Better," she said. "I've got a little more energy, and I'm a little steadier on my feet, but I'm still hungry all the time. I'm putting on weight, but I still look like I'm anorexic." She had a big salad bowl on the table beside her, and she picked it up and started eating again while we talked.
"There's not many calories in that," Uncle Mike said.
"I know," she said, "but I can't eat a lot of things now. Not meat, or dairy products, or a lot of processed foods, apparently. I get queasy just looking at meat, and the others I look at and know I couldn't digest them. Pavel bought me some organic bread, and that's fine, but I can't eat a lot of store-bought breads, or nachos or potato chips... I need to start making my own bread. What about you and Jeffrey?"
"We're still eating the same things," he said. I thought my appetite was slightly less than before, but not a lot less, not enough to be sure it wasn't just from stress and not part of the changes to my biology.
"You're just eating meat now, Pavel?" Uncle Mike asked.
"Yes," Dad said. "Cooked or raw, either way's fine. But I can't eat in the same room with Darlene, of course."
"Tell me again how it happened," I said. "It was so staticky when we could finally reach you on the phone --"
"All right," Dad said. "So we went out to lunch last Saturday -- we were going to have our romantic Valentine's Day dinner in the evening, we had reservations, but then the hospital called and wanted Darlene to fill in for someone on the evening shift. I said go ahead, we could have dinner at lunchtime; the restaurant wouldn't be as crowded and we might not need a reservation. And we didn't. We'd been seated and had our appetizers served when it happened."
*When it happened.* Uncle Mike and I had been using that phrase, and so had some of the other people we'd talked to in Athens. It was easier than saying exactly what had happened, and of course everyone knew anyway.
"I felt queasy for a moment," Mom said, "and then numb -- I couldn't feel my body at all, and I fell out of my chair, but I couldn't feel myself hit the floor. I was numb for several seconds, and I heard people screaming -- then just as I was starting to worry enough to scream myself, I could feel my body again, and it felt strange. I tried to sit up, but it was awkward -- my arms were skinny and weak, and my legs weren't much stronger, and there were too many of them. But I didn't realize that at first, I just knew I felt strange."
"I went numb for a few moments too," Dad said, "only not as long as your mother. It didn't last long enough for me to fall out of my chair. But I saw her fall over, and I was near panicking, seeing her like that and unable to move. I sort of saw other people at other tables changing, out of the corner of my eye, but I didn't focus on it or consciously think about it until later, I was so worried about her. Then I could move, and I got up to go help her. Only I didn't realize how my legs had changed, the knees working the other way around, and I fell flat on my face."
"He was fine, really," Mom reassured us; "he learned to walk on those legs in just a few minutes. I still haven't got the hang of these, and they're still weak. He crawled over to me, and I'm afraid I didn't recognize him --"
"No reason you should," Dad said.
"I screamed and tried to back away, but I was too weak to move. He reached out to me, and I slapped his hand away -- and I realized then how skinny my arms were. And he seemed to notice his hand, too."
"Yeah," Dad said, "I hadn't realized what had happened to me -- when I saw my hand I looked at my other hand, and then felt my face, and I said, 'Darlene, it's me, Pavel.' And I was just taking it in, how Darlene had changed -- she was wearing a long dress, but it couldn't cover much of her new hind legs. She was better off than the people wearing pants in that half of the restaurant; they were mostly naked from the waist down."
The zigzaggy boundary between what we later called the Marietta centaurs change-region and the Smyrna wolves change-region ran right down the middle of that restaurant, and right through the table my Mom and Dad were sitting at. The people on one side, most of the customers and whatever waiters were serving them, turned into centaurs like Mom, and the people on the other side, the other customers and most of the waiters and all the kitchen staff, were suddenly like Dad -- fur, claws, a carnivore's long teeth and short digestive tract.
Why, we didn't know and still don't.
They told us how they got home -- it took hours, first with Dad being unsteady on his feet, and then with so many wrecks blocking the roads, every centaur driver and most of the wolves having lost control of their cars. Dad got one of the waiters to help him carry Mom out to the car and help her get into the back seat; she was too weak and wobbly to walk, and she couldn't fit into the front seat anymore. Still, they were better off than the families who were all centaurs; their arms were mostly too weak to handle a steering wheel even if their car was spacious enough for their new body shape to fit in the driver's seat. They tried to call me and Uncle Mike, as we tried to call them a little later, but the phone networks were jammed with everybody who'd survived the changes trying to call everybody they knew at once.
They ate at home -- that was when they first realized how their teeth and digestions had changed. They turned on the news, and found out stuff like that was happening everywhere, and they kept trying to call people they knew, me and Uncle Mike twice as often as anyone else, but it was days before we got to talk, and then on a bad, staticky line. (Uncle Mike lost his Internet connection a few hours after the change and didn't get it back for several days.) Dad's a paramedic; they needed him badly, with all the wrecks and other accidents, so after he got Mom situated on the sofa with plenty of things to eat in arm's reach, he went to work. They needed Mom at the hospital even more than when they'd asked her to fill in on the evening shift, but she couldn't go in to work in her condition.
"What about y'all?" Mom asked us. Uncle Mike and I looked at each other -- I'm not sure about him but I was too embarrassed to say anything at first. Uncle Mike had already told them basically what happened, on the phone, but still...
-----
For us in Athens, that queasy feeling Mom had mentioned was worse, and the numbness she said affected her whole body hit us -- the men, anyway -- just in one spot. I didn't even realize what had happened to me until -- wait, let me start with the moment it happened.
I'd gone to spend the weekend with Uncle Mike at his apartment in Athens so Mom and Dad could have a quiet Valentine's Day together. Uncle Mike and I had slept late that Saturday morning. He got up earlier than me, but not very early, and fixed pancakes. I'd just eaten five or six pancakes, and we'd talked about what we might do before the concert we were going to that night; after breakfast we sat down and played video games for a while. Uncle Mike has a great collection of old video game systems; their graphics are terrible, but some of them have better gameplay than you'd expect, and even the ones that just aren't as good as modern games are interesting to play once in a while. A little after noon Uncle Mike said he was going to the bathroom, and left me alone in the living room. I was going through his Intellivision and Atari 2600 cartridges, looking for a one-player game I hadn't played before, when I suddenly felt nauseous; and before I could run to the bathroom or kitchen, or even turn my face away from Uncle Mike's antique game systems, I threw up my five or six pancakes all over them. I got a lot of vomit on my clothes and my arms and the carpet, but what I was panicking about, enough to not notice the weird feeling in my crotch, was that I'd probably ruined those irreplaceable games. I started frantically trying to clean it up -- I ran into the kitchen and got a couple of towels, soaked one and wrung it out, then went back to the living room and kept trying to clean the vomit off the game systems and cartridges. I figured I could clean myself up later.
I was so engrossed with that task that I didn't consciously realize that Uncle Mike was taking a long time in the bathroom. Then I heard the shower running.
A few minutes later, Uncle Mike came out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist -- that was unusual, he usually took his change of clothes into the bathroom with him, at least when I was staying with him. And even weirder, he didn't go straight to his room to get dressed; he came into the living room, and saw me cleaning up the vomit.
"You got sick too?"
"Yeah," I said, and then hurried to say, "I think I've got all the sick off the cartridges and the consoles, I haven't tested the Intellivision yet but the Atari still seems to work fine --"
"Never mind," he said, and that worried me. "Go clean yourself up -- I'll take care of the rest of this."
So I went and washed my hands, then got a change of clothes from my suitcase and went to the bathroom. I turned on the shower and started taking off my vomit-soaked clothes -- and that's when I realized my dick was gone.
I sat on the edge of the tub, numb with shock, for a while. I poked around down there a little bit, but not much. I'd never seen a girl naked, and the pictures of naked women I'd seen mostly didn't show their crotch close up, so I thought what I had there was normal for a girl, and it scared me. I wondered if I was fixing to start growing breasts, too, and I felt around my chest, but it didn't feel any different. I finally showered and got dressed.
When I came out of the bathroom, Uncle Mike had gotten dressed and finished cleaning the game consoles and was working on the carpet. He had the TV on, but when I came out he turned the sound off. He looked up at me and said, "Did it happen to you too?"
"Do you mean..." I couldn't make myself say it.
"Let me tell you what happened to me, and you tell me if the same kind of thing happened to you." I could tell he was trying really hard to speak calmly, but his voice trembled a little anyway. "I was standing at the toilet, peeing, when I suddenly felt sick, and almost threw up -- not quite, though. At the same time I lost feeling in my penis, but with the hand I was aiming with I felt it pull back inside my pants. I couldn't stop peeing, something was wrong with my sphincter muscle, and I soaked my underwear and pants.
"I sat down on the edge of the tub and pulled them off, and then I realized it was gone -- penis and testicles both. I have something that looks kind of like a girl's vulva, but not exactly. I showered and came out and saw you'd been sick, and then I figured it might have happened to you too, if you got nauseated at the same moment I did."
"Yeah," I said, "I guess so. Only I didn't realize it was gone until I took off my clothes to shower. I guess I was too busy cleaning up the mess to notice how my crotch felt different."
"Listen to this," he said, and he turned on the sound on the TV.
It was CNN, and they were talking about how weird changes were happening to people all over the world. I'm not going to go into detail about that; you know it as well as I do. After a few minutes Uncle Mike turned the sound down and said, "Let's try to get some local news." He got out his laptop and tried to connect to some local Athens news sites and blogs. Some of them were down, but on one of them there was a post from five minutes ago, the blogger saying the same thing that happened to us had happened to him and some guys who were hanging out with him. Their girlfriends reported feeling sick at the same time as the men's penises vanished, but didn't feel any different afterward. It wasn't until a couple of days later that we found out how much women were affected by the Athens change.
Athens didn't have anywhere near as many car wrecks as a lot of other places, so it seemed safe enough to go out, but we found out, when we went downtown, that the Sound Tribe Sector Nine concert Uncle Mike had gotten us tickets for had been canceled.
We were hearing worrying things about Marietta, how the car accidents were worse there than most other places, and we were worried about my Mom and Dad, but every time we tried to call them we got busy signals or worse. We did manage to exchange IM messages with my Aunt Karen and Uncle Dave in Huntsville, Alabama, just before Uncle Mike's Internet connection went out -- Aunt Karen is my Mom's and Uncle Mike's older sister. They didn't feel the queasiness or numbness we'd had at the moment of the changes, or any noticeable physical changes at all -- but they had bad headaches for several minutes, and when they cleared up, they could hear each other's thoughts. Not just each other's, but anybody else who was close enough.
A few days later we found out that their telepathy only worked with other people who'd been in Huntsville at the moment of the changes; they couldn't hear people of the other new human species that were all around them. I remembered that fact, and made use of it.
When we finally got Mom and Dad on the phone, they told us to stay in Athens for a while longer, until the wrecks were cleared from the roads. Cobb County schools were still closed, anyway. When they announced they were going to start school again the second Monday after the event, Uncle Mike talked to Mom again and said he'd bring me home that Friday, to give me a couple of days to visit with them before I had to go back to school.
By then, things were almost back to normal in Athens -- as normal as they could ever be. We kept telling each other we were lucky, that most other places in North America and western Europe had a lot worse fatalities and injuries from accidents at the moment of the changes. But we also knew we'd been castrated, and our efforts to talk around it and ignore it just made it worse.
I found out -- I expect others did too, but we didn't talk about it -- that there was no point in masturbating with our new equipment. You could poke around down there all you wanted, and it wasn't any more interesting than picking your nose. I wondered if women were affected the same way, and guessed probably so; but the local news just said they'd lost their wombs and ovaries and stuff.
Uncle Mike and I played a lot of video games, and went for walks around downtown and various parks. We talked to some of the people we met, people Uncle Mike knew -- about the weather or the music scene or anything except the changes. As days passed, we saw more people who'd been away from Athens that Saturday and had come back since then, but none who'd been in Marietta or Smyrna.
