Quaranteam - Book Two (Ch. 10.5)

Intermission Two - Billy

December 16 ^th , 2020 - Athens, Georgia

William "Billy" Monteiro was on the verge of losing his goddamn mind. In the spring of 2020, most of the students of the University of Georgia had been sent home, and the college temporarily shuttered to try and ride out the epidemic, but for some students, like Billy, whose parents had already rented out his former room in their house, leaving wasn't really an option. A small handful of students had been forced to remain on campus and done their best to band together, and some of the faculty had stayed to make sure the campus wasn't completely in the hands of the students.

That had been mid-March.

By April, it had been relatively evident that the semester had just been totally cancelled, but again, the students who were trapped on the UGA campus still couldn't leave. The administration had done everything possible to make sure that the students weren't simply abandoned, but that they were taking care of one another and that the staff who made their homes on campus were still working while keeping safe. Hot meals were delivered to students in their dorm rooms twice a day, the bathrooms were still getting cleaned and above all else, the internet access never, ever went down.

When summer rolled around, Billy had asked his parents if there was any chance of him moving back home while the campus was running on autopilot, but his dad had insisted that everyone had been told to shelter in place now and that even the woman who was renting his old bedroom had started working from home full time, so none of them were leaving the house if they could help it, and they certainly couldn't displace their renter because Billy didn't want to stay on campus or get his own place off-campus.

They'd argued for a bit, but at the end of the day, Billy agreed that he had told his parents they could rent out his old room when he'd moved out, but he hadn't expected them to take him up on it quite so quickly. So going back to his parents' place was out of the question.

That meant he had chosen to remain on campus along with the handful of other students and faculty who didn't have anywhere else to go. But then the rules changed, and fast. May was a whirlwind of whispers, rumors, and gossip that everyone was going to die. There were reports drifting through the Internet that the death tolls were clocking much higher than anyone was putting up on the news, so the students had decided to take matters into their own hands.

Within the first week of June, the students built their own operating protocols - how people could move across campus, how they could pass things between each other while still avoiding contact, and how they could keep from going insane with isolation sickness. Rules were being bent, sure, maybe even broken, but they weren't dying. In fact, the mini community that had sprung up at UGA hadn't had a casualty yet, something the students were taking as a mark of pride. There were only about 400 students on the entire University of Georgia campus, and half that in terms of faculty living on campus, but they'd formed their own small village to make sure nobody took any unneeded risks, that nobody got into trouble or stepped outside of their safe zones.

They'd even divvied up the risks for supply runs, by making sure whoever went (usually one of the few paired of people already sharing a room, either student or faculty) was picking up supplies for a few dozen people and then delivering it to doorsteps. They'd commandeered a couple of the handtrucks and rolling pallets so they could get things in bulk, and CostCo was doing what it could to help everyone stay safe. People would Venmo their share of what they owed and then things would be delivered to their doorstep.

By September it was clear they weren't going to have a fall semester either, but by that point, the campus was getting more comfortable with their new processes and procedures. The community - they were calling themselves the R.E.M. Runners, after the famous band - had a working set of guidelines that were helping everyone manage, but even though they were physically fine, they were still fighting a losing battle against the depression that was settling in.

In October, Billy heard from one of the staff members on campus that there was going to be some kind of a solution coming, but that it was going to take a while. Stay put, they were being told, and hold fast. It was starting to eat away at him, not really being able to see or talk to anyone. He'd built friendships with a couple of other students on campus - they'd started 'hanging out,' if being hundreds of feet apart yelling across a courtyard could be called that fairly. Mostly guys - Dwayne, Eric, Cal - but a couple of girls too, like Ella and Molly. More often than not, they were spending nights on their Discord server, in one of the dozen voice channels, sometimes playing party games like JackBox or Among Us, other times just playing Call of Duty. It wasn't much, but it was a band-aid situation designed to keep them from getting too antsy. Voices in the head were giving a little solace, but not anywhere near as much as a simple hug would've put him at ease.

When November rolled around, the weather cooled but it hadn't snowed, and so while the outside meetups were still happening, people were in much heavier clothing, and the fatigue was starting to show. The lack of physical contact was eating away at everyone something fierce. More than a couple of times, some of the other students had broken down crying, saying they didn't care if they died anymore, if they could just hold another person's hand again, even for a few minutes, it would be worth it. Collectively, they were doing everything they could to keep anyone from going off the reservation, but the last thing most people wanted was to succumb and die when they'd been so dedicated and careful thus far.

Billy was doing his best to keep a level head about it, but it was clear how close to breaking everyone on campus was. They weren't going to be able to hold up their quarantine all that much longer, no matter much they tried to adapt. There were limits to what the human soul could be expected to endure. People had broken down crying too much lately, and a couple of people had broken protocol and gone rogue in early November. They'd left campus, headed for who knows where. Somehow, deep down, Billy knew they were dead the minute the minute they'd headed off campus, but he couldn't let himself take the time to grieve them, because those who still going were pretty sure the casualty rates were off the charts.

Hell, at this point, they were starting to expect they'd be fighting off hordes of flesh-eating zombies before 2021.

At least spending a few weeks planning how to handle a zombie apocalypse had kept them busy for a while. It made a lot of people laugh, and everyone ping-ponged between treating it deadly seriously and cackling their damn heads off, which was good. Some of the blueprints people were doing for "zombie defenses" were truly the kind of thing that made everyone laugh, even the people having the hardest time. Idle hands were the devil's work, and the idea of zombie planning kept everyone busy for most of the month.

Then, towards the end of November, all the shoes dropped at once.

An entire fucking closet of them.

The President's speech had clarified a lot of what was going on - not just one plague, but two. Covid and DuoHalo. The worst fucking double-act in human history. The details weren't expected, because the casualty rates were brutal, but they weren't even. That was the biggest shock. Men were dying in such large volumes that they were now being considered precious resources. Everyone on campus had been so isolated, they hadn't really been aware how the deaths had been split. But with the information about how many men had died, suddenly all the unanswered phone calls were making sense, not because people didn't want to get back to them, but because there wasn't anyone alive on the other end of those lines.

He'd watched the 60 Minutes story with rapt attention, figuring this was going to be the blueprint about how his life was going to go moving forward. He needed as much information as he could get, and even if the story was at least somewhat propaganda bullshit, it would still be the general plan he'd be following for the next few months.

They were pairing men up hard, and the plan was to make sure men were safe, sexually active and producing offspring. The new family unit was going to be something like one man and a dozen or so women, all bringing new children into the world. Whatever he had been planning on doing with his life, those plans were going to have to go through a complete rework. He'd been thinking about getting into cybersecurity, since it seemed to be a field that was always growing, but now, he didn't have a fucking clue what he should be doing with his life.

By the end of that singular episode of 60 Minutes, it dawned on him - maybe people had just forgotten they were even out here, what with most of the universities closed during the pandemic. People were concentrating on areas they knew where people were, but what if someone somewhere along the way had just assumed the campus was empty and marked it off on some map as 'deserted land?' So he did the only reasonable thing he could think of to do...

...he made a phone call.

On November 22^nd, at 10:25 am, he contacted the Air Force and informed them that approximately 150 men were safe and secure on at the University of Georgia campus, but that it had been getting harder and hard to keep people on campus and prevent them from getting out of line or running off. There were also about 200 women on campus, as well as about fifty faculty, of which he thought the male-to-female split was maybe three-to-one. That meant he had close to two hundred men, all alive and safe, who were wondering when they could get this treatment they'd just seen on television. The woman who'd answered, a civilian named Sherry Spender, had been so astonished she'd nearly dropped the phone, but insisted that he stay on the line while they gathered as much information as they could from him.

They didn't let him off the line until the afternoon, with him having to plug his phone into the charger and talk to them on speaker as he detailed how the students were keeping safe, what protocols they had in place to keep them all separated but safe, the teachers and faculty who were still on campus, and how tense it was all getting, what with the news of just how many men had died.

Billy hadn't really felt like he was much of a leader, but as he talked with Sherry, he felt like maybe he'd been underestimating how much he'd been doing with keeping the campus safe, having coordinated food deliveries, plate takeaways and cleaning regimes, so much that the other buildings around campus had taken their cues from the systems Billy had helped design. All he'd really wanted to do was keep those who were trapped on campus like he was safe, from themselves and each other.

By the end of the day, the Air Force had a plan for someone to come by and test them in the immediate future, telling Billy to rally the wagons and keep everyone strong, that before the end of the year, he would be able to share a bed with not just one, but several people, and that every single one of the people he'd been talking to at distances for the better part of a year would be able to sit down and shake his hand to say thank you for keeping them alive.

Word traveled around campus fast after that, and within a day, all slack had been picked up, and everyone was back to taking everything intensely seriously again, knowing that they were so close to the finish line, a sense of renewed energy and reinforced potential, that there was a finish line in sight.

(It certainly didn't hurt that they were being promised overly eager sexual partners as well, considering most of the people who'd stayed on campus had been single beforehand, and, in the words of one of the guys, "I've seen all the porn there is to see." If they hadn't seen the special, with the slightly frumpy looking author and his bevy of unbelievably gorgeous women, the whole thing might've been a bridge too far. But everyone was watching it, and thinking the same thing - if that guy can pull those women, what the hell is waiting for me?)

Billy heard back from his dad that he'd been contacted by the Air Force the very next day. He had, of course, paired up with Billy's mom, but also that the woman who'd been renting out Billy's old room had been added in almost immediately, as well as a couple of other women, including one who was barely older than Billy, which felt fucking strange. Thankfully, they were hours away, and he had problems of his own to keep him busy.

On December 7^th through the 9^th, the Air Force came and tested all the men and women on the University of Georgia campus to ensure nobody had DuoHalo or Covid, and to get everyone to take their Oracle questionnaire. It had almost felt like an invasion, with a dozen troop trucks rolling onto campus and each building getting a complete sweep for dead bodies, of which they apparently found a couple. While everyone on campus would've loved for things to move along quicker, they were told they were being considered a precious resource at this point, and the last thing anyone wanted to do was to get them sick just before the finish line.

The hurry up and wait was, still, more than a little brutal, as some of the students were then moved from one hall to another, being put into places so that a couple of the buildings - Rutherford Hall and Rooker Hall - were getting adjusted to be able to house the sort of new family units that were to be expected on campus moving forward. Rooker Hall was already known for its apartment-like dormitory space, but apparently even more modifications were needed to get everything up to spec for how they would be expected to live while attending college there. The Corps of Engineers came in and did quickhack alterations to the buildings, but what exactly those alterations were hadn't been detailed to the students or faculty, who were just as much in the dark as everyone else, but it had all been done incredibly quickly, as the renovations took only a few days, and most people were too busy discussing how they'd responded to the Oracle test.

The Oracle questionnaire was everything Billy had expected it to be and much, much, much, much more. To his surprise, a large portion of the questionnaire was under the heading 'Dealbreakers,' and gave each student a chance to lay down the things that they positively, absolutely would not endure under any circumstances. At first, he'd been surprised that there was no mention of infidelity, but then he remembered the portion of the 60 Minutes special where they'd been talking about 'negative exposure of unpaired partners,' as well as the rather gruesome photos they'd shown, just to drive the point home. He'd kept his dealbreakers relatively simple - nobody allergic to dogs, no vegetarians and nobody who was into the far extreme of filth-based sexuality. (It boggled Billy that there were people who found piss and shit to be turn-ons rather than turn-offs but he supposed to each their own.)

He was supposed to be in the middle of his sophomore year and instead, his freshman year had never really ended, and he was on month 12 of that second semester. And the Oracle questionnaire, it was a nice little distraction to take his mind off the fact that he felt like he was in a total holding pattern, just waiting for the world to wake up again, and to prevent him from thinking about just how many people he knew were now dead. Hell, if he'd been even a single year younger, he would've been a fatality instead of a survivor. (He'd actually heard from a member of the Air Force that the two dead bodies they'd found had probably died very early on in the pandemic, and they were both under the age of eighteen, having started college early.) He could start to dream what kind of women they were going to be pairing him up with, what his life would be like on the other side of it.

During the time they'd had to wait, he'd watched the recording of the President's speech a bunch, as well as the 60 Minutes story, the entirety of which was up on YouTube. He wasn't particularly thrilled at the idea of being a father so young in his life, but the news of the last few weeks had made it abundantly clear, he was expected to be fathering kids as quickly as possible. And it did mean he was going to be the center of attention for a bunch of beautiful women who would be somewhat hand-picked to share his interests.

Billy was starting to wrap his head around all of it, now that that news embargoes had been dropped, that the number of fatalities across the world were epic and awesome and terrifying, all in the truest senses of the words. In hunkering down on campus, Billy and the others had probably evaded the deadliest plague in human history.

Through dumb fucking luck.

But just after he'd finished his morning exercises, there had been a knock on his 4^th floor Church Hall dorm room door. Billy had damn near jumped through the roof. With the exception of the time the troops had come knocking on his door on Dec. 7^th, nobody had knocked on that door since March. Even when food or supplies were dropped off, the people bringing things never knocked - they would leave things on the doorstep, head back to their own room, and once in their own room, they'd call to say that things had been dropped off. It was all to make sure nobody was breathing quite the same air as anybody else, and while it certainly wasn't a guarantee, it was a measure, and all the measures they'd taken had been enough to keep them all alive.

"Who is it?" Billy said.

"Corporal Alice Hickman," a female voice said. "United States Air Force. Can I come in?"

"Is it safe?"

"I assure you, Mister Monteiro, I couldn't be any safer if I tried."

Billy moved over and opened the door, seeing a single woman in grey and blues of urban camouflage waiting for him, a kind smile on her lips. She looked like she was in her mid to late twenties, but she was ridiculously fit, a sort of Nordic beauty the likes of which he'd spent much of his high school years dreaming of, her blonde hair up in a bun, her blue eyes staring right at him. "Well, I guess you should come in, then," Billy said, stepping back into his 10' by 10' prison dorm room. "Close the door, though. We're still observing all our protocols until it's safe for us to be moving around the place again, and I certainly don't have this Quaranteam vaccine the President was talking about, so I'm still what you would call high risk."

Corporal Hickman moved into the room and closed the door behind her, as Billy moved to sit in his desk chair and she moved to sit down on the couch, looking over at him. "So you're the Bulldogs' Bodyguard, huh? I thought, I don't know, I thought you'd be older. You don't look like you're even old enough to share a beer with me."

He'd heard the nickname every so often for the last few months, based on how he'd just sort of told people how to do things. He wasn't trying to be an ass about it, but whenever it felt like people didn't have an idea on how to handle things, he'd just told them what to do and how to do it, and they had, because maybe they'd been too caught up in their own shock, or maybe fear and indecision had taken hold. The UGA mascot was the English Bulldog, specifically named Uga, and a couple of the students in May had jokingly referred to him as the Bulldogs' Bodyguard, since he was shepherding them through the crisis. In late September, after he'd talked a couple of students who were having a particularly hard time with isolation into staying put instead of running off, one of them had made a special order, found out Billy's hat size, and a black bowler hat had been left with his next food delivery. Billy had laughed about it, but had kind of liked how the hat looked on him.