The problem with staying isolated indefinitely is that entropy never sleeps. You can be completely stocked with provisions and everything you'd ever want for entertainment, but the moment a pipe bursts, you've got to call in the plumber. Or maybe you are the plumber, and can handle the pipe by your lonesome; but just wait 'til your computer takes a dump and you have to scramble to recover your business records before the taxman comes calling.^° Entropy gets us all, sooner or later; the spectre at the Masque of the Red Death had probably just come to fix the clock.

^° (God knows what happens to the tax authorities when entropy sets its sights on them.)

Consider: I made it a month with only quick runs to the corner store before the toilet broke. The hell of it was, it really wasn't bad - no leaking, just a tear in the little flap that closes off the tank from the bowl. The cheap rubber it was made of finally lost to entropy, and now it wouldn't open straight or close properly. All that meant at the moment was the tank continually draining into the bowl at a trickle; it hardly seemed like a big deal.

But you don't work in IT for long without coming to appreciate how many Big Problems are just little problems left unattended, and it wasn't hard to work it out in my head. Entropy would continue its work until, soon enough, the flap wouldn't seal at all. When that happened, the tank could never fill, and without a tankful of water, the toilet wouldn't flush properly; in the worst case, it might even clog, fill the bowl, and overflow, and that would be Trouble City.

I could order a replacement online, but the shipping industry was still trying to cope with the surge in demand from everybody sitting bored at home and ordering new distractions for themselves - I glanced over at my guitar - on top of complying with CDC guidelines,^°and I didn't know how long it'd take to arrive, or how long I had before the toilet became a Big Problem. No, there was no getting around it - I was gonna have to go out.

^° (The big online retailers were already recruiting catgirls as warehouse workers on the theory that they were "done" themselves and "safe" transmission-wise. None of which was certain yet, but the regulators were maybe not pushing back on this as hard as they could've.)

It was funny how much of an ordeal just going out felt like, now. From all the new precautions, yes, but also because my standards had slipped so far in four weeks that merely dragging myself back up to baseline presentable was a chore.

I never cared too much about my appearance, but I'd been conditioned to at least make a basic effort, to avoid driving my mother crazy if nothing else. I'd told myself, when the lockdown started, that I wouldn't let myself go completely, but when you don't have to share an office or visit clients on-site, getting up in time to shower vs. enjoying that extra half-hour of sleep is a much tougher call, and your standards for what you can get away with on a webcam by combing your hair and keeping the lights down just...slip.

It wasn't just me, either; it was over a week since I last saw Nicole, out at the mailbox, but she'd looked noticeably more "dirty hippie" than usual. That surprised me - it'd always seemed to me that women, as a broad generalization, are more bothered by personal grunginess than men - but maybe this thing was making us all too lazy to bathe.

(She'd seemed a little dazed and out of it, too, but that was less surprising; having a surfeit of free time but not much to do with it tends to make you cycle between aimless, fidgety restlessness and nigh-catatonic^° lethargy, as I'd learned myself.)

^° (Damn it.)

Well, I'd have to, now; I couldn't even remember how long it'd been, but I definitely owed it to the general public to cleanse myself before walking among them. It was a weekend, anyway, and I'd already slept plenty; I wanted to get something done today, even if it was just fixing the toilet. Besides, it wasn't like I disliked it; I was just finding the siren-song of bed harder and harder to resist...

With a sigh, I left the toilet to its trickling, shucked off my pajamas, and hopped in the shower. It did feel good to finally de-grunge myself, honestly; I resolved to keep up on my hygiene going forward, though I knew that tomorrow morning I'd probably feel a renewed commitment to sleeping in.

Then I found myself disavowing hygiene all over again when I had to wash my hair. It really was getting out of hand; not that I couldn't manage it, but it was long enough to need conditioner just to keep the tangles to a minimum, and it still took several minutes to comb them out afterward. I wondered again about trimming it, but I didn't relish feeling stupid over whatever butchery I'd inflict on myself.

When I'd finally finished, I got dressed, grabbed my wallet, keys, and mask, prepped the coffeemaker so it'd be ready when I got back, and headed out the door. It was already early afternoon; I felt a twinge of guilt at spending all of Sunday morning lazing around the house, but it passed. I gave the Bug a once-over - tires inflated, check, no suspicious oil drippings, check, brush off the line of webbing that'd been strung from the eaves to the car's antenna by an ambitious but tragically misguided spider - and, out of the corner of my eye, spotted Nicole padding over to the dumpster, skirt fluttering and tail lashing...

...Hang on a minute.

Uneasily, not really wanting to confirm what I thought I'd just seen but compelled to make sure I wasn't hallucinating, I turned around. There was no doubt the thing I was looking at was Nicole - the wardrobe alone would've given it away, and even as she held a garbage bag at arm's length and fiddled with the latch on the enclosure, the body language conveyed her unmistakeable brand of...what would you call it, "mellow perkiness?" But her being a human-sized cat-creature? That was new.

Even from behind, I could tell she'd been hit hard by the transformative effects of the contagion. The tail snaking out from under her long gingham skirt had caught my attention, but I saw the tall, triangular ears poking out from a head of hair that'd gone from platinum-blonde to white, could see tufts of cheek-fur (and...whiskers? I couldn't tell from here) past her tresses on either side, and could hardly miss how her tank-top compressed the fur on her upper arms so it appeared to be spraying out from her shoulders.

For a long moment, I just stared. She went into the enclosure; I heard the dumpster lid lift and the bag softly thump as she tossed it in. I couldn't sort out how I felt about this. Certainly, Nicole was the least surprising person to end up as a catgirl of anyone I knew, and it did explain why I hadn't seen her in over a week. But there was a little twist of dread in the pit of my stomach: it was here. The plague had come to my country, my state, my county, all the way down to my own neighborhood. Was anywhere safe...?

As I was brooding, the lid slammed shut and she re-emerged. I could see better now; she was indeed a full-fledged anthropomorphic cat-woman, and those were in fact whiskers. Her whole body was covered in orange tabby fur, but her throat, lower face, and (I assumed) the front of her torso were the same bright white as her hair. And from the front, it was impossible to miss that her breasts had been joined by two new pairs underneath, each set a bit smaller than the one above it.

While I was processing that, she noticed me staring at her, and I got to see her expression go from surprised to mildly embarrassed to excited to pensive and back to excited again. It was extremely strange to watch; I'd never seen a cat-person in person, or even on video in any detail. The kind of thing she now was registered in my brain as an animatronic or CGI creature, and there was some of that in the expressive articulation of parts I wasn't used to seeing articulated; humans don't generally emote with their ears or twitch their whiskers. But it was all too lifelike to seem properly fake - an inverse Uncanny Valley effect, as I tried and failed to perceive a living creature as a simulacrum.

"Uh, hhey," she said, with a nervous grin. "Long time nyo hsssee...?"

I said nothing for a moment, still staring at her face. It wasn't exactly a cat's face scaled up and pasted onto a humanoid body; the head was a bit rounder, the slit-pupilled amber eyes less proportionately huge. Her smile showed a mouthful of sharp little fangs, but the shape was somewhat closer to human - definitely a muzzle, but without the split upper lip. Whiskers sprouted from either side, beneath a triangular pink nose.

"...I kinda hhad to get the garrbage out," she continued. "I'd alrrready left it forr like a week when thiss hsstarrrted; it was getting prretty rrripe." Her voice was recognizable, but strange. A lot of the consonants sounded funny, probably since her mouth was so different; as she spoke, I caught a glimpse of her thin, crinkly-edged sandpaper tongue.

"I, ah, wha...uh, Nic-Nicole?" I stammered nervously. Should I even be speaking to her right now? Was this smart? Okay, supposedlythe infectious stage was mostly over by the time the transformation started, but still...what if it wasn't? There was still so much that was uncertain...

"In the flesh," she grinned, flashing those sharp little teeth at me again. "...And furrr, I guesss. Hiss thiss cool orr what?" She turned her hand this way and that, admiring it; I couldn't help but stare. It was clearly a hand, if a bit stubbier than it'd been when she was human - "when she was human," I thought, needing a moment to process that - but the fleshy pink paw-pads on the palms and fingers, the orange-and-cream fur, the claws that poked out from her nailless fingertips when she flexed just right...

I shook my head, trying to sort out my thoughts. "Cool?" Of course she would think that; but it was still unsettling to hear someone be so glib about the wholesale alteration of their entire body. She was literally a completely different creature than she'd been her entire life, and her primary takeaway was that it was "cool!?" I sighed, wondering again if I should keep clear of her. "It's, uh, definitely a thing."

She chuckled. "Hissn't it jusst! I didn't even rrrealize it was hhappening 'til I woke up with cat'ss eyes on Tuesday. Beforre that I was jusst kinda addled - you know, all hhuggy and euphorrric and rrrubbing up againsst things." Her ears drooped. "I guess that'ss the virrruss talking, hissn't it? Lucky I hhad the kitties therre to hssnuggle hinsstead of the neighborrs - I jusst hholed up hinsside with 'em 'til it was overr. I think it'ss gonnya be a while beforre Gillie forrgives mya, though."

I was still plenty unsettled, and the barrage of speech tics wasn't helping; it sounded half like someone trying to reconstruct human speech out of feline vocalizations, and if it weren't for everything that was recognizably her, I'dve worried that I was talking to some kind of conspiracy-theory impostor, a nefarious cat-alien trying to infiltrate human society, unaware that it forgot to put on its skin-suit that morning. Even so, I half-wondered if I was. (She wasn't doing this on purpose, was she?)

But I had to admit I was impressed by her presence of mind. The whole point of the behavioral symptoms pre-transformation was to help spread the virus; to resist or redirect those impulses into a safe outlet for most of a week was no mean feat. "Uh, yeah," I said. "Guess that was...about the best possible outcome, there...?"

Nicole kept grinning, ears perked and tail lashing. "Nyo kidding! I nyeverr even imagined being thiss, myakniaow? I'm sstill wrrrapping my hhead 'rrround hhow cool it hiss. Look, look!" She hiked her skirt and thrust a leg out; I was distracted from explaining how that wasn't what I meant by a very much unasked-for mental image of an all-cat production of It Happened One Night. "Like, actual pawss," she said. "And a tail! Wild!"

Her feet were more like feline hindpaws; the toes short and chunky, with larger, slashier-looking claws peeking out from their sheaths. Her leg proportions and stance had changed, too; she was basically standing on the balls of her feet, heels raised, and I nervously dropped back into a normal human plantigrade stance when I realized that I was doing the same. It looked and felt like she was leaning towards me, which was unsettling, but her tail seemed to keep her on-balance.

But I found myself leaning away regardless. She wasn't as bad about personal space as Parker; but then Parker hadn't changed from a (mostly) normal human being into a new and alien-yet-not lifeform after contracting a highly infectious disease. On a conscious level, I recognized this creature as Nicole; but parts of my brain were still unsure whether it was going to eat me, assimilate me into its collective, or hack something up on the rug. "You're, uh, taking this well," I said antsily, trying not to be weird or impolite about...all this weirdness.

Her ears perked and her whiskers twitched; I watched the tufts of cheek-fur shift around as her grin broadened. "Should I nyat be? Thiss hiss hssso rrrad, Kit!" She grabbed me by the shoulders, tail lashing excitedly behind her; I could feel her claws pricking through my shirt, and I bristled and shrank from her touch.

I could tell she noticed; her ears drooped slightly and she looked taken aback. Great; now I'd gone and hurt her feelings by not being as into this insanity as she was...and now I felt all awkward over it. Why did people have to be like this? What was I supposed to do, apologize for...for being put off by it!? By the claws, the fangs, the forward behavior, the incessant mewling and hissing...? Wouldn't that be any normal person's reaction? Did she not understand that? Or did she even-

"A-are you doing that on, on purpose?" I sputtered, half-consciously.

Nicole frowned, taking me by surprise; I hadn't processed the fact that she still had eyebrows until now.^° "Mrow? Doing what?"

^° (Well, sort of. There were no patches of darker hair on the brow-ridge, but I could see the patterns in her fur distort, especially the ring of white around her eyes. I wondered if I'dve noticed, had she not been a tabby.)

"The, uh, the c-cat thing," I said, feeling even more uncomfortable; I hadn't meant to say it, it'd just slipped out. This was all so discombobulating; trying to hide my discomfort for the sake of politeness without giving the impression that I shared her enthusiasm felt like tap-dancing in a minefield. "You know, the, the 'mya'-ing and, uh, hissing and...stuff."

She thought about it, ears back and pupils narrowed; then her expression turned to surprise, ears back up, whiskers twitching, maw hanging slightly open. "Oh, rright! Nyah, it'ss jusst a hsside effect orr ssomething." She chuckled; even that had a feline trill to it. "It'ss getting betterr, too; firrrsst coupla days I was jusst yowling 'n sspitting. Think therre's ssome wirrres crrosssed in my brrrain rright niaow, and it'ss taking mya a bit to adjusst."

I could only stare at her, mind boggling. And that doesn't freak you out!? I thought, but I couldn't bring myself to ask since I was in no way prepared for the answer. How could she be so calm about changes to her own brain? About losing the power of speech, even!? She might be recovering, but still...!

Was this what the virus did to you, made you think that all this insanity was normal and okay? Or...was it more than that? What if she was so okay with it, so jazzed about it all, because making her feel that way helped promote the spread? If she felt so enthused, would she want to share it with others? With me? Even if she wasn't contagious - which wasn't certain, yet - would she feel like we ought to want what she'd experienced? Want to be like her? Would she see us as abnormal for not wanting it!? What if she took steps to...

No. I cut myself off there; that was unfair. I was being paranoid, projecting my own fears onto her. She'd even made sure to stay isolated; she'd never have done that if she were covertly trying to spread it, would she? In some nightmare scenario where she was an intentional assimilator, wouldn't it make more sense for her to, say, go around ringing our doorbells and crouch outside waiting to unleash the Glomp of Doom, or try to, I didn't know, lure us inside to look at her etchings-

"Hhey," Nicole said brightly, flashing me a fangy grin, "wannya come overr? Gotta feed the kitties firrrsst, but I've been putting togetherr a collage with all the hsselfies I took durrring the prrrocesss! Nya oughta hssee it - it'ss prrretty nutss!"

For a moment I just stared - trying to keep my cool, trying to hold onto the nice sensible counter-arguments I was just making to myself, trying not to look like a complete flake in front of my neighbor... But all my attempts to rationalize it were falling apart as my subconscious screamed at me that THIS WAS A GIANT, TALKING CAT-MONSTER THAT WANTED TO BRING ME BACK TO ITS LAIR AND MAKE ME INTO ONE OF ITS KIND.

"Mrow? Kit? Nya doing okay?" I heard her say; but the sheer insanity of it was too much to cope with, and without a word I edged my way back around the Bug to the driver's door, got in, fired her up, and sped off.