Retrovirus 666 Ch. 02

"Come on!" Carmen said, glancing at the abandoned television equipment. "It's time to make our getaway. The video cameras have been rolling the whole time. It's only a matter of time before the police arrive.

I nodded. A team of naked drooling men followed silently behind us, including, of course, the governor.

"You remember how to drive?" I asked him, feeling more than a tad uncomfortable.

"Of course he does," Carmen said quickly and we rushed out of the building.

"Dr. Hawking, are you still there?" the phone buzzed at me as we loaded ourselves into a set of Hummers parked precariously out back, behind the white mansion.

Carmen and I piled into one car and the zombies into another. I didn't think I could stand to be cramped in a car with brainless hunks of flesh for more than a couple of minutes.

"Yes. I'm here, Dr. Snickett. What you are suggesting is fantastic, like the horn of a unicorn, dragon's blood or the philosopher's stone. Please do not bother me with rubbish, I'm rather busy at the moment. Or did you not know about all the police cars that followed us from Berkeley?"

"Yes, yes," the voice on the phone said dismissively. "I didn't expect you to believe me. That's why I asked Nurse Lindermann to bring you a sample.

"What?!" I exclaimed struggling to drive while holding the cell phone with my shoulder. "Believe me, that wouldn't be necessary."

I heard the ominous sound of a helicopter overhead.

"Oh good. He's right on time," the doctor on the phone announced with a strangely unsettling mixture of pride and capriciousness.

Out of nowhere came an incredible booming voice that sounded distinctly like someone swearing in German, and a bang as a body collided with the roof of the SUV. In the confusion, the car jerked into the empty lane next to me and I dropped the cell phone. With a little help from Carmen, I managed to steer the Hummer onto the shoulder of the highway.

"What the ruddy hell do you think you're doing?" I shouted out the window at the man on the roof. He was wearing a hospital gown and a climbing harness with a bit of a cut bungee cord tied from the front loop. Handcuffed to his wrist was a ominous black suitcase. I noticed vaguely that his brown hair had two pink strains in it, a sign that he too carried the virus. He jumped into the car through one of the back windows and smiled broadly.

He unlatched the suitcase by turning and twisting a series of buttons and levers. The hinges creaked open dramatically, emitting a great puff of grey smoke.

The smoke cleared and a red gemstone gleamed from the black satin interior of the case.

Carmen squealed like a school girl.

"Crystalline Gamuron," Nurse Lindermann said philosophically.

"Very nice," I commented skeptically. "Now, tell me how it works." One doesn't become a wildly popular icon in science without becoming a little skeptical.

"Well, it's still experimental," Lindermann declared, shrugging.

"It seems to have very complicated effects on anything around it. In particular, the effects on a human body are darn near miraculous. Believe me, this is good stuff. They were about to pronounce me dead yesterday and now look at me! Doctors de Sade and Snickett are holed up in a retro bomb shelter making more. They asked me to have you meet them in Bakersfield."

I made a disgusted noise and Lindermann laughed.

"Come on. Try it out! This stuff's unbelievable," he said, laughter still in his voice.

"I'll try it, if you don't want to," Carmen said to me, her eyes sparkling. It was obvious that she was mesmerized by the Crystalline Gamuron and couldn't wait to get her hands on it.

"Ok. You can try taking it if you want," I replied obligingly. I restarted the engine and pulled the car out of park. "I'd better not try now. I need to focus on the road."

Carmen reached into the case and took the gem in her hand, while Lindermann looked on. I glanced at her through the rear-view mirror.

Carmen put the red stone in her mouth as though it were a morsel of rich chocolate cake and I sighed slightly as she swallowed.

I pulled the car out in onto the highway and merged easily with the late night traffic.

Carmen began to moan and sigh orgasmically. Her face became oddly flushed and she writhed and convulsed against the seat of the car.

I had a hard time keeping my eyes off of her. It was a rather distracting display, and I couldn't say for sure that something hadn't gone wrong. What if she had been poisoned? I kicked myself mentally for being so permissive. As her advisor I was responsible in part for her safety. I shouldn't have been using her as a drug tester.

Carmen's breasts began to grow, as did her black and pink hair, which quickly trailed down to her feet.

It was several minutes before Carmen opened her eyes again. They had become the same shade of green as an emerald. She turned and smiled at me, and I let my mind return fully to the road ahead of me.

After a couple more minutes Carmen crawled into the back seat and began having her way with the male nurse who was accompanying us. It felt good for once not to worry about her lust corrupting the mind of the men she copulated with. Nurse Lindermann was obviously already infected with the virus.

Perhaps it is a little odd for such a reserved man, but I listened to their moans with no small satisfaction. My own serpentine cock swelled impressively, and for a time I drove with only one hand.

---

Carmen Black

They wouldn't let us board a plan to London from LAX. I knew they wouldn't. Dr. Hawking removed his greatcoat as he passed through security, so now that's gone, and I had to submit to an exhaustive body cavity search, due to new regulations introduced since the terrorist scare with the nuns with explosive underwear. After all that, they still wouldn't let us on the plane, because we were British. Britain had recently been placed on a list of terrorist countries, because its name looks so much like Bahrain.

After much talk, we decided that we'd continue to head south. The Marquis claimed to have connections in the area that would help us, but I doubted it. The fellow's completely mad, after all. Brilliant, but completely mad.

I've noticed new powers that probably did not have prior to my ingestion of Crystalline Gamuron. The finger I crushed in the door quickly healed without bruising, and once, without thinking, I lit the campfire without matches. On the downside, I was constantly desperate, and no amount of orgasms would satisfy me.

The doctors studied us like we were rats in a maze and took detailed notes as we drove or when we stopped for food. It was enough to drive one insane! I noticed that they didn't touch the Gamuron. They didn't seem to realize that they themselves aren't immune to its effects, and as time passed, I began to think they might need a little reminder.

About an hour into our journey, Nurse Lindermann began talking about the Gamuron project as though the whole thing had been his idea, and I listened closely to him because I didn't have anything better to do. The road from Sacramento to Bakersfield is unbelievably dull.

Anyway, he began speculating that somehow the presence of 'Barr bodies' in their cells would keep women from turning into mindless zombies from sudden infection with the gene therapy virus, but not men. I didn't understand most of it. I'm a physicist, not a biologist, after all. But after Lindermann found a prostitute on Sunset Boulevard and had extremely kinky and wild sex with her for eight hours, he had me pretty much convinced. The prostitute was so impressed with his abilities that she decided to stay with us.

---

Dr. Hawking

This morning Carmen and I went sightseeing while the two medical doctors were giving a talk at the local university. As you might figure, this was complicated by both the complete lack of clothing worn by Carmen and myself and Mr. Lindermann's peculiar choice of attire. The nurse seemed to adhere to us like a human barnacle, though whether he was doing so in order to have some form of protection or to observe our actions, I didn't know.

He hung back, clutching the arm of the young prostitute he had corrupted, a slender, attractive woman who wasn't a day over nineteen.

After days of being completely naked I began to realize that I could sort of blend into a crowd by behaving as though I was wearing clothing. I can never understand people who insist on seeing with their own expectations rather than by observation, but I have to admit that at least in this instance we were able to manipulate it to our advantage.

Around noon, we came across the Midway Aircraft Carrier Museum and decided to step in. The admission was rather expensive, but Mr. Lindermann produced a wad of dollars out of his black briefcase and paid for all our tickets, extracting student discounts for the two ladies and the senior price for myself, despite my apparent youth.

The two of us exchanged knowing smiles as we walked up the metal stairs onto the aircraft carrier.

What I saw was devastating. Everywhere I looked were clusters of unhappy-looking tourists. The employees who welcomed us on board looked like they were millimeters away from slitting their wrists with a letter opener.

I took my complementary audio tour from a very large woman who never once met my eyes as she explained that we must keep the player around our necks at all times.

We moved away quickly.

The ship itself was fascinating, and my party basically completely ignored the cumbersome recorders. There was something about the organization of the ship itself that filled me with the sort of passion that fills naval romances and I was solely tempted to tear apart the plastic barriers that kept some of the passages closed to the public with my bare hands.

On the guided tour of the bridge I stole the uniform shirt off the manikin of the ship's captain, and though my conscience hurt a little from the theft, I knew that there was nothing in the gift shop that could compare with the treasure.

"I must have this ship," I said whimsically to Lindermann while the guide was telling a very boring and ridiculous story about how moral sailors are.

Lindermann reached into his briefcase, pulled out a black cell phone and began quickly speaking into it in German. He produced another series of red crystals from his case with the same overly dramatic puff of smoke and hid one under the captain's chair.

The four of us continued down the stairs onto the top deck. Lindermann began hiding the other crystals on various levels of the ship and in different rooms, giving us very detailed instructions as though we he were performing an alchemical ritual of some sort. The scientist in me cringed as this horrid ritualism. But I knew enough to keep my mouth shut. Perhaps no one else was capable of knowing what sort of miracle it would take to get this old ship moving again.

Twenty minutes later, I looked up from my work to see two Hummers flying through the air towards the ship. I could tell from their trajectory that they had driven up a ramp at high speed and weren't really flying at all, but that didn't keep my heart from pounding.

The ship suddenly began to move underneath me and everything began to spin as I fell flat on my face. When I had righted myself, the obvious level of decay that hung over every square meter of the carrier was gone. Instead, the ship felt alive, like a gigantic life form with a mind of its own. I rushed towards the Hummers, where Doctor Snickett was instructing a pair of mindless zombies to block off all exits, and another team to hurry the teams of somber-looking tourist onto one of the cargo elevators.

Children hid behind their mothers' skirts and couples held each other, uncertain of their fate.

"If you're under eighteen, please step forward!" Governor Schwarzenegger announced. Comforted by a familiar face, all the children stepped forward.

"Throw them into the sea!" he exclaimed, and the other zombies obliged, picking up the struggling children and teenagers and casting them into the ocean.

Lindermann was kind enough to throw a couple of life rafts into the waves after them, muttering under his breath, "we aren't Nazis anymore, after all."

"Ok, now let the orgy begin!" the governor shouted out across the ocean.

And as he said, so it came to pass that the greatest and most bizarre orgy ever took place on the newly revived museum ship.