Quaranteam: McCallister's Madness Ch. 05

Part Five - "Dark Legacies"

The last twelve hours had been rather harsh for Doctor Adam McCallister. He'd been given time to spend with Dasha, who had been teary and joyous that he was, in fact, still alive and hadn't been overly harmed by their captors. And they'd redosed her, in a sexual encounter that felt both genuine and sincere, something Adam was still slightly uncomfortable with.

He'd spent much of his life struggling to find rhyme and reason for the actions of women before finally deciding they generally just liked fucking with men's heads. But Dasha's face had contained genuine concern when he'd first seen it, and that hadn't been something he'd expected to see. Dasha had been with him out of a sense of self-preservation, but perhaps at some point over the past several months, they'd found something deeper. He certainly hadn't been putting on airs when dealing with her, letting his natural emotions run open, always speaking his mind and never sugar coating his thoughts. Dasha had argued with him some of the time, but she'd always done it in a way that demonstrated at least she understood where he was coming from.

The second woman, however, had been... less understanding.

His captors had called the woman Stevie, but Adam figured it must have been something like Svetlana or Sveta, because she was far too eastern European to be a Stephanie, which is what Stevie was usually short for. She was muscular, strong, far more physically powerful than Adam himself had ever been, even in his prime. She looked like a brute, like her body had been acclimated to weight lifting, wrestling, or maybe hard, heavy labor. She had clearly been given the injection somewhere before the trip had started, used to placate and calm her, or, more likely, to keep her mind rattled, to keep her too addled to be able to think straight. She had dark hair, black like the endless night, and the room reeked horribly, the bucket left for the woman to shit and piss in having been knocked over in some fit of rage. Her skin was pale, and she was cagey, ready to pin Adam against a wall, but he did his best to offer her some signs that she would get through this, that she just needed to indulge and pair with him.

And so she did.

It was the roughest, most bestial sex Adam had ever had in his long life. He took no active hand, played no active part. He was, in the most literal sense of the word, just a body, a receptacle full of cum for her to take her draw from. She pinned him to the ground and rode atop of him. Any time he tried to take any action to try and exert some control, his hands were pinned back down onto the ground, and she just kept thrusting down onto his cock.

When he finally came inside of the powerful woman, she slumped on top of him with such force that he was nervous he would be crushed underneath. It took him a couple of minutes, but he eventually pushed her body off his and laid her down on her back. She was, naturally, muttering imprinting over and over again.

They left him in with her unconscious body for far longer than they needed to before he'd been hauled out, taken into a washroom of some kind then hosed down none too gently. He wanted to complain about how rough they were being, but the stink of shit and piss took so long to get off of him that he couldn't blame them for wanting to make sure he was getting properly cleansed.

Once that was done, they took him back to Dasha, letting him get dressed and then finally laying down to sleep while two guards stood watch the entire time. To Adam's mind, he might have been finally starting to come through onto the other side of where he'd been. Dasha slept clinging to him like she was terrified they were going to take him away from her again, despite their captors insistence that he would be brought back so that she would be regularly dosed. With Dasha in his arms, he was able to get a good night's sleep and let his mind consider what his future might hold for him.

The next morning, he was allowed to wake up on his own, and once he was up and mobile, one of the guards mentioned that he was going to go have a meeting with Elle to discuss what his future might actually hold. If nothing else, they weren't talking about executing him right away, which meant that there would be opportunities for him to escape later in the future.

When Adam had been a very young man, he had studied the evolutionary marvel that is the simple cockroach. Despite millions of years of evolution, the cockroach had never been eliminated as a species, and had found itself able to survive and endure predators, changing environments and ever present threats to its well-being. The cockroach was a survivor; that was something Adam admired, the tenacity to never be beaten down or broken by anyone or anything.

This particular morning, however, he wasn't taken back to the interrogation room, but instead allowed to meet with Elle up on the decks. He'd been cautioned that it would quite cold, and they had given him a jacket, gloves and a hat. When Bee had brought him up to Elle, he'd found her smoking, leaning against the railing, peering off into the distance, and Adam could see shore off, probably 40-50 kilometers away, although still too far for him to make out any real details.

"We must be nearly where we're going," Adam said to her. "Otherwise you wouldn't have let me up here."

"Mmmm," Elle nodded, taking a drag from her cigarette. "At this point, we're basically home, and I'm less worried about pirates or Russians."

"Are you going to tell me where we're going?"

"Soon, Doctor," she said, tossing her nearly finished cigarette out to sea. "Very soon. Before the day's end, we will have a new home for you, one way or another. Either you'll be working for us, or we'll be shipping you back off to the Americans. Personally, I suspect the former rather than the latter. Considering you shot and killed someone, I cannot imagine they would welcome you back with open arms."

"But you and your people will?" Adam said, moving to lean against the railing next to her. "I find that hard to believe."

"Mmm. We'll welcome you, but I think the 'open arms' bit is a touch naïve, don't you?" She smirked slyly. "Besides, I still have a handful more questions for you to answer, but I think this time we'll try it without the truth serum, just to see if you can learn to be cooperative with people who might offer you shelter and asylum or if we should simply let the Americans have their most troublesome son back under their watchful eye."

"Ask away."

"The Americans were able to pick up on the pairing system you'd implemented into the Quaranteam serum very quickly after your defection," she said, folding her arms over her chest. The wind was chilling but not so brutal that it would freeze them immediately. "How?"

"Oh, that's easy," Adam said with ominous laughter. "I left most of my notes for Doctor Marcos to find."

"You... you what?"

Adam smiled, seeing the confusion in Elle's eyes. It was nice to see her on the other side of a thousand questions, because these, unlike at least half of the ones she'd asked earlier, she didn't have answers for in advance. "I know what you must think of me, Elle, but I'm never cruel without reason or merit, and as much as an obstruction to my work as Doctor Marcos was in some regards, he is also a tremendously talented scientist, and someone for whom I have the utmost respect, at least professionally. I had given them a great gift, and while I knew it would take some time for them to see it that way, I wanted them to understand the rules early on, so that countless lives wouldn't be wasted with needless experimentation and guesswork. My files detailed how the lock and key system worked, what some of the sorts of consequences I expected to occur if the wrong key was applied to a lock it didn't match, and how deeply folded into the serum all of my work was."

"They knew what you'd done, what, within days, weeks after your abduction?"

"Days, likely," Adam agreed. "A week tops, but Dr. Marcos was likely able to understand almost all of the fundamentals within just a couple of days. I wanted them to know how to keep women from being harmed by any of this, and how the work I'd borrowed from Eve's old company had dovetailed nicely into the work he'd done in developing the serum. The..." He paused before scrunching up his face, as if it was distasteful for him to say it. "The Quaranteam serum truly is a remarkable combination of several people's work, not just mine but his and Dr. McKenna's, as well as the Doctors Varma."

"So they knew what would happen if they let a woman engage in sexual activity with someone they weren't paired with?"

"Naturally," Adam insisted. "Oh, I'm certain they did some minor testing just to validate the claims I'd made in the notes I'd left for them, but Phil would've found those right away. I wanted women to need men, not to die in the large numbers that we men were dying." He snorted in annoyance. "Do you honestly think I would want to see so many men dying off if I could've done anything to solve it? Trying to extricate the work from Eve's old company and reintegrate it back into the Quaranteam serum without my lock and key system might not even be possible. If it is, it would take years to be able to pull those particular strands apart, and by then, the serum has done what it set out to do - women and men are inescapably bound to one another on a molecular level. Regardless of whatever other complications have sprung up along the way, I have succeeded in making women need men more than fish need bicycles."

Elle nodded, a touch of sadness on her face. "That's our doctors assessment as well. Whatever wild coincidences it took to get these three things to line up, there are no shortcuts out and back away from it. Much of our lifetime will be spent unraveling this particular dilemma, but it is also true that this sick and demented revenge fantasy of yours against the women of the world has also been the path to their salvation." She reached into her pocket and pulled out another cigarette before offering one to Adam, who at this point couldn't help himself, nodding in acceptance. She lit her own first with a little butane lighter before lighting his as well. "If we kept you away from the Americans, what could we expect in exchange for that?"

"What is it you're looking for?"

"Work on ensuring that the children born out of this global catastrophe are going to be able to survive and endure through the new world, since I do not know if we will ever be able to completely eradicate DuoHalo, especially with all the mutations that have begun to spring up."

Adam turned his head and dropped his eyebrows a little in concern. "Mutations?"

Elle took a long drag from her cigarette before blasting a column of smoke up into the air, nodding. "Between ourselves, the Brits and the Americans, we've identified nearly two dozen variations from the original DuoHalo virus. Some of them interact in odd and unusual ways with the Quaranteam serum, but it seems like the serum is still able to best even the most virulent of mutations. They simply sometimes have special needs."

"Like what?" This was all the first Adam was hearing about the variants, and his mind was already starting to wonder what he would need to do to improve the serum.

"One of them causes a woman's hair to fall out, although it always grows back once she's imprinted, and rather quickly. Another corrupts your lock/key system so that semen from someone other than the man a woman is imprinted to will send her into a state of blind rage. But it doesn't seem to cause damage to her skin or flesh anymore. We've also seen increased photosensitivity, monumentally increased hearing to the point of detriment, synesthesia and in some extreme cases, memory alterations, but we suspect that may be related to some odd interaction of the regeneration effects and trauma effects."

"Regeneration effects?"

Elle smirked a little bit, something which made Adam feel slightly nervous. She knew something that he didn't, and he hated when people knew things he did not. "The Quaranteam serum is providing some regenerative effects to those who take it. Women are occasionally reporting they've had lingering illnesses or injuries that have disappeared after being imprinted. They've ranged from minor things like dead nerves to restoring lost vision or, in one extreme case, we've seen it completely regenerate limbs, although that tends to be far more complicated. We think that in attempting to 'restore' the body, that effect is affecting brain chemistry and removing memories that have detrimental effects to the mind. We're not entirely sure what the long-term consequences of that will be, so we're trying to keep a close eye on it. Whatever it is you think you invented with the Quaranteam serum, it's clearly evolved far beyond its original designs. We've had scientists looking into ways to try and spur on the regenerative effects, but so far, that has been entirely ineffective. The regeneration only seems to happen on pairing, and nothing we can do will cause it to trigger later."

"But no such regenerative effects for men?"

She tsked him, waggling a finger in his direction. "They seem like they occur in varying levels to some extent, each time a man gains a new partner. Sometimes they can be increasingly minor; sometimes they can be very dramatic, severe restorations. I was certain you must have seen some of those benefits."

"I had noticed some minor improvement in my health here and there, but nothing overly dramatic."

"Well, you have been beneath the number of recommended partners for some time, Dr. McCallister," Elle told him. "Perhaps once you are brought in line with what you're supposed to be, you'll see some more of the effect in action."

"Can I ask you a somewhat personal question, Elle?"

"If you like, although you have to be prepared for an answer that you're not going to like."

"Do you hate me for what I've done?" he said before taking a long drag off his cigarette. "Do you hate me for how I've bent women to my will, to make them dependent on men for their survival?"

Elle allowed a bitter smile to cross her lips. "The arrogance on you truly is remarkable, Dr. McCallister. Yes, you have in some ways manipulated women into forming some rather tangible bonds with men in order to keep them alive - but we could have always chosen not to do it. We could've let the majority of men die, and then just repopulated the planet with all of the children who were too young for DuoHalo, once they came of age. As ridiculous as it seems, the decision truly was ours, and not yours, and we chose to do what was asked of us, so that we would not have to live alone without men, for all their complications and their benefits. So, do I hate you? No, Dr. McCallister. I pity you. I empathize with you regarding the harsh events that have crafted you into the frightened, broken little man that you are, but hate? No, Doctor, you haven't risen to the level needed to extricate some of my precious remaining hate from me. I have spent far too much of it thus far with my life, and so I cannot give it away so freely now."

"Oh?" Adam finished off the cigarette, then flung his stub into the sea, much as Elle had done. "Who has taken on the brunt of your hate?"

"I gave much of it to the progenitors of the plague onto the world," she sighed. "It wasn't as though it was a planned release, but still, had they been honest regarding their accident, it could've saved millions upon millions of men. Somehow, though, I think they were eager to try and even the odds globally a bit."

"You know where DuoHalo comes from?"

"We do."

"Will you tell me?"

Elle smirked, as if considering the matter for a bit before she finally nodded. "Alright, I will answer your question if you promise to honestly answer one of my own."

"Ask and find your answer awaiting," Adam said.

"If you wanted to, could you easily extract what's needed to make the Quaranteam serum work from your lock and key system?"

Adam smiled with a sad sigh. "Not easily, no, nor could I do it quickly. I wasn't misleading you when I said earlier that it was sort of a perfect storm that resulted in all of the things coming together at exactly the right moment. Within... five? Maybe ten years? It's conceivable, but by then, it won't matter. Everyone will have developed full immunity to DuoHalo, and I suspect there will be some form of lock pick that will allow people to move out of my lock and key system. There's already one naturally occurring reassignment solution, and you said you have another, so why wouldn't I expect it not to last? I wouldn't change anything if I could, but the honest truth is that I can't, so even thinking about it isn't worth the time."

"Mmm. Life doesn't like us thinking too far ahead and is always happy to interrupt our plans for us," Elle responded. "But you did answer my question fairly and so I am obliged to answer yours in kind. We have almost total confidence at this point that the DuoHalo virus was developed by a team of Australian scientists, originally intended as a biological attack weapon, but one which they had no intentions on using, until there was a leak and the virus escaped into the wild via one of the researchers, who was taking a trip around the world, meeting with foreign dignitaries to discuss how to handle other epidemics. Because she was a woman, she was most mostly asymptomatic until she'd been in over a dozen international airports, and infected tens of thousands of people."

"And they chose not to tell anyone?"

"We can't prove definitively it was them, but we have more than enough that we feel comfortable in treating it as facts. They've denied it, as you would expect them to do, but it was surprising how aggressive they were regarding their quarantines, which is why Australia is in better shape than most of the other countries. They couldn't be seen to be acting too quickly, otherwise it would be evident that they had advance knowledge."

"Are you going to confront them with this knowledge?"

Elle sighed and offered a weak shrug. "What is to be gained by sharing their shame with the world? It's a disaster, and disasters happen. If we were to disseminate the information, all the nations would hate them for decades, even though its release was never something planned or even considered. They didn't even realize they'd done it until the first casualties started springing up, and by that point, they were mostly just in panic stations mode, as the rest of us. Do I let them be defined by their accident? Do I have the right to condemn an entire nation for the mistakes of just a few people? I do not think that I do, so I'm going to choose to keep that as my private piece of information. I have trusted you with it now, so if you wanted to, you could try and spread that information."

Adam nodded then shrugged. "I find myself in agreement with you, Elle. I do not think there is much to be gained by divulging this great plague's rather everyday and ordinary origins. I will keep your secret for you."

Elle nodded. "By the end of the day, we will have you in your new home."

"Are you still unwilling to tell me where we are heading?"

She smirked a little bit. "I think the surprise will be worth the wait. Come, let us head below before we both freeze our asses off. When we are ready to make landfall, we can have another conversation."

Bee helped Elle bring Adam back downstairs, back into the interrogation room, although now it was lit normally, and as such felt far less intimidating. Dasha was there waiting for him, and the two sat in the room surrounded by guards for what felt like three or four more hours.