Quaranteam: Phil's Tale Ch. 05

"Phil, this is Aisling, Ash for short, and this is Lauren," Andy said, rubbing the back of his own neck sheepishly. "Frankly, I'm a little embarrassed they're stuck with me, but they both seem happy enough, so maybe I'm doing okay by them."

'Typical Andy,' Phil thought to himself. 'The wind blows in his favor, and he's immediately apologizing. But that's good. It means he's staying humble and not getting an inflated head over all of this.'

Lauren nudged Andy in the ribs with her elbow. "Andy's the most humble feller I've met. I think me an' Ash are just a couple'a lucky gals."

Phil wasn't sure where to start with this, so he decided he would let Andy set the stakes of what they were talking about and how. If his friend needed a few nudges along the way, he'd help out, but for the most part, he was just trusting Andy to navigate the waters himself.

After a minute or so of silence, Andy spoke again. "So Phil... what do you know?"

'Way to throw the ball into my court, Andy,' Phil thought. He clicked his tongue, gauging how much information to toss out in the first volley. "Okay, here's what I know. What I can tell you without either of us getting our kiesters thrown in the hoosegow, anyway..."

"That sounds best," Andy said.

"It's bad, Andy," Phil sighed, deciding to fairly set the stage for his old friend. "It's very bad. They're downplaying the body count for the media, but truth be told we're looking at over a million so far, probably a lot more. And it's only going to get worse. The internal projections are that we're looking at five million dead Americans before all of this is done." Of course, Phil was softballing it, because the actual projections were far worse than that, but there was only so much he wanted to dump on Andy up front. Best to ease him into the downward slide.

"Jesus," Andy muttered, clearly shellshocked by the news. "One million people dead? Seriously? How are they keeping all this quiet?"

"Lots and lots of work," Phil replied, being completely candid for a moment. The cover up had its own team within the operation, and they were growing larger every day. It was entirely possible they were going to relocation to Washington and manage the media response out of there soon. "It's not as bad outside of the US, but that's because other countries started taking it serious long before we did." In actuality, the numbers of countries outside of the US were starting to see rising casualties as well, but the last thing Phil wanted was Andy getting overwhelmed even more than he already was.

"Are the rules true?"

"I wouldn't be talking to you like this if I didn't think it was safe, Andy." It wasn't entirely true, but Phil didn't have an easy way to explain how things worked to him right now. "But it's going to get worse. A whole lot worse. People here still aren't taking it seriously. You see the news the other day?"

Andy nodded, sadness on his face. "People crowded into churches, shoulder to shoulder, demanding their faith will keep them safe. Idiots in city hall meetings, claiming the right to not wear a mask if they don't want to."

Phil nodded back to him. They didn't know it, but there was a good chance all of those people on television were going to be dead within a few months, but he needed to dial it down a little for Andy, at least for the time being. "It's madness. Half of those people will be dead before year's end, and I don't think we're going to have a lid on this until next year. We're living through Spanish Flu Part 2: Electric Bugaloo."

"Five million dead? That's like one percent of the country. How the hell are they going to keep it all quiet?"

"As much smoke as possible," Phil grumbled in complete honesty. The bullshit machine wasn't just in full effect, it was running on overdrive. "Keep the cover going until it's untenable. People are going to notice eventually, but the lockdowns are going to keep things contained for a while. But guys like you and me, we need to stay as safe as possible. Because we're high risk." He didn't exactly mean that, because he and Andy were probably two of the safest men in America right now, but people like them were, in fact, those most targeted by DuoHalo.

Aisling scowled at him, and for half a second, Phil wondered if she was going to call him on it, because maybe she'd heard people talking at the base or something. "How so? I thought the elderly and immuno compromised were the most at risk."

"They are," Phil said, nodding again, glad to see she didn't know any more than the average public, "but beyond that, it's men between the ages of thirty and forty-five. That's where the majority of casualties have been so far. Thankfully, you and me, we're buffered pretty well."

"What do you mean, buffered?"

Phil smirked, giving a tiny shrug. It wouldn't hurt to let Andy feel a little safer about his position in life, because his friend looked like he was about to drop dead from stress shock, and that would undo all the hard work he'd put in so far. "Let's just say we've been doing some vaccine testing in rather unusual and unorthodox ways. Did your libido used to be this high all the time, Ash?"

She blanched for a moment. "I thought it was just the cabin fever, but now you mention it, I've had a slight buzzing of sexual need since they gave me those shots. What the hell did they do to me?"

He raised a hand to calm her down. "Relax, it'll even out eventually. But it's designed so that you're protecting your partner, swapping fluids, giving him regular dosages of the natural antibodies you're building up inside." They were going to have to start directly educating women about what they were signing up for with the treatments, and Phil made a mental note to get to work on that when he got back to the office.

"Why not just give men the shots directly?" Lauren asked.

"Because when we've tried it, it's been fatal." He took out his vape pen and inhaled a drag off of it before blowing the THC vapor back out. It helped him destress some, but he tried not to over use it. "But if a woman with the vaccine is having regular sexual activity with a man, he's getting a non-toxic dose, and both parties have about 70% resistance to the virus. I wouldn't have put Andy down as polyamorous, but it's going to strengthen your armor even more, my man."

Andy smirked, looking at his feet sheepishly. "I actually put no preference, so it looks like I'm going to get a full slate."

"Nah, you'll probably stay where you are. Unless you got rated something ridiculous."

'Here comes the bit I really need to sell,' Phil thought to himself.

"Me and Eric got rated level 5s," Andy said, embarrassment in his voice

Phil nearly dropped his vape pen, his eyebrows raising, hoping it looked like genuine shock. The problem was that Andy was a great poker player, and so it was hard to lie to him. "Are you shitting me?"

Andy laughed and shrugged a little.

'Thank Christ,' Phil thought to himself. 'I think he bought it. Now don't let up.'

"How the fuck did that happen?" he asked Andy, knowing damn well how it had happened, because he'd basically made it happen.

"The guy coming to test us was a fan of the books, so I gave him an ARC of the new one that's been delayed a few months. As a way of saying thank you, he rated me and Eric as level 5s."

Phil chuckled quietly, shaking his head, hoping Andy wouldn't catch him in a whopper of a lie, but he needed to not let Andy in on too much too fast.. "You son of a bitch. I'm not even rated a level 5 and I work for the goddamn military on goddamn black ops shit."

"Allegedly," Andy added, grinning back.

Phil nodded. "Allegedly." He dragged the word out before he looked up then shook his head. "You're gonna get two more, huh? Good lord, I'm both jealous and terrified for you all at once. How are you going to keep all those personalities from conflicting?"

This was one of the things he'd actually been wanting to ask Andy for ages, since his friend had always had a way of managing people, preventing them from getting too angry with one another, keeping all the plates spinning without any of them falling down. The families were likely going to get bigger, and keeping multiple people from killing each other was sort of Andy's specialty. Surely his friend would know exactly how to do it.

"I'm going to do my best to stay the hell out of their way, mostly."

'Great,' Phil thought to himself. 'You have failed me, friend. It's okay. I didn't expect miracles.'

"That's not going to work forever, luv," Aisling said to him. "It's not like we're going anywhere, even when this virus recedes."

"You say that now, but..."

"No, they're always going to say that. Isn't that part of the public facing info about the pairing system?" Phil said. He hadn't kept tabs on what the people being given the serum were told, but surely they had to at least have been told some of the fundamental rules, right? They had to know they were paired, that other men's semen would be toxic, and that they were going to have recurring sexual needs that needed regular fulfillment. It was, like, five to ten minutes of basic info tops. Jesus, did Andy and his girls really not know any of this shit?

It was Andy's turn to raise his eyebrows. "No, whatever you're implying, it isn't public knowledge. But you're already in for a penny.."

"Might as well be in for a pound, I guess," Phil answered, nodding in agreement. He was going to light up hellfire as soon as he got back to the office, because if they were sending out people with serum in their blood and not telling them the baseline rules, whoever was managing that team needed to get their head out of their ass before the bodies started piling up. "Alright, but keep this just between us, okay?"

"Well, I'll tell Eric, Eric's partner, and my other two partners when they show up, but other than that..."

"Yeah, well, that's what I meant by us, alright?" If he got his way, there would be a personalized phone call going out to every person with the serum in their blood before the end of the day, so it wouldn't matter anyway, and the last thing he wanted was for Andy to know how much he was involved with this project. "Okay, so here's the deal. Do you remember the first time they got a bit of you in them?"

"You mean..." Lauren started.

"I think you know what I mean."

Both Aisling and Lauren blushed and grinned widely. "Most intense thing that's ever happened to us," they both said.

"What do you remember right after though, Andy? Just you. They'll both have been passed out."

Andy stroked his goatee for a second then snapped his fingers. "They kept mumbling a word over and over, so quiet I could barely make it out... something like... imaging?"

The one time Andy should have been more curious and instead he's being respectful, Phil thought to himself. Wild. He shook his head and took another drag off his vape pen. "Not imaging, imprinting. You're bonded now. Mated for life, like walruses."

"You mean penguins," Andy corrected him, the know-it-all. "It's penguins that mate for life. And what does that mean here, mated for life?"

"You're intertwined on a chemical, biological and physiological level in a way we can't even begin to comprehend," Phil said, exhaling another cloud of THC mist. "If you go away from one another for more than a couple of days, you'll start to feel nervous, anxious, fidgety. After that, it'll be panic attacks, cold sweats. Past that, nervous breakdown. Unless, of course, the other person is dead, in which case that doesn't seem to happen." That was a lie, but the last thing he wanted was Andy and his family freaking out too much this early. He shrugged a little bit, trying to play it off as though he didn't know as much as he knew and more. "We're kids playing with the building blocks of life here, man. We don't even know what we don't know. But you, Lauren and Ash, you're a unit now. And anyone else you add into that will be as well. I mean, why do you think that questionnaire is so damn long? We don't want to screw up anybody's lives trying to help them. Besides, another of the side effects is that being in each others' company will produce natural dopamine to keep things relatively smoothed out, helps you get past the small stuff, and let's face it, it's all small stuff at this point."

"And this is happening all over the country?"

"Shit, no," Phil sighed. "We've barely gotten this off the ground in the Bay Area, and all the tech for this shit is here. There are governors all across the country absolutely in arms against this plan, saying they'll fight it tooth and nail, keep people from getting the vaccine until it doesn't have any of these crazy side effects."

They were lunatics, insisting everything would be fine, that they would pray away the disease, that their fearless leader had assured them it was all overblown hype, and that one day it would all just disappear. It was callous, but Phil found it just that those people would die in the highest numbers.

"I assume you're still working on that," Andy asked him.

"Of course we're still working on that," Phil said, rolling his eyes. The red tape had been infuriating, and he hadn't even been spearheading that portion of the project. "I'm just baffled by how many goddamn Republicans insist a semi-viable solution isn't a solution at all. Even if we were just hitting high risk areas, we could manufacture enough of this current formula to inoculate sixty or seventy million people in this country, all of whom would be 70% resistant to it."

"They claiming it's a sin against god or something?"

"Worse. But, I guess, more honest." Phil had a slightly bitter laugh filling the air. "They're angry they can't make a buck off of it." Fucking vulture capitalists. "Now, of course, there are factions that are just going ahead and doing it anyway. Front line medical workers, emergency services, and a few branches of the armed forces, and their associated contractors. Of course, the whole Bay Area is taking part in it as well, so I guess I would've gotten treated either way."

"So we're resistant but not immune?"

"Fuck, man," Phil groaned, trying to avoid giving Andy any solid details for fear it would oust him as working on the serum, "I'm not promising you won't get the virus at all, but even if you do, it won't be life threatening. That said, you still shouldn't go out of your way to expose yourself to this shit. It's a mean as fuck virus under the best of conditions, and this ain't those."

"You think they're going to start testing this vaccine in wider areas, Phil?" Aisling asked him.

He shook his head. "I wish to god they would, but the Moron In Chief is still calling it Kung Flu and the Chinese Virus, like he can spin blame onto other countries instead of admitted what a fucked up job he and his have done with this." The idiot couldn't even differentiate that they were fighting two pandemics and not just one. Covid was certainly bad enough, but DuoHalo was a thousand times worse, and some of the Orange Goomba's advisers had told him it would just be a momentary blip. He'd refused to take the serum, even with the benefits explained to him, because he insisted he didn't want to have Melania imprinted onto him.

Andy felt his phone in his pocket vibrate at the same time as his Apple Watch buzzed at him. Phil was fishing out his phone as well, clearly having felt the buzz.

There on his wrist, Andy read a news blast from the Associated Press. "President contracts mystery virus, collapses in Oval Office. 25^th Amendment being invoked."

"Well, shit, looks like you report to somebody new now, Phil."

At that point, everything got incredibly hectic. Phil promised he'd do a better job of keeping in touch, and that he'd do what he could to keep Andy in the loop, and Andy told Phil that it was good to see him, and that if there was anything he could do to help, Phil just needed to ask.

Despite the fact that his phone was blowing up, he and Audrey waited until Andy, Aisling and Lauren got back into Andy's car and drove off.

The news was actually ahead of what his own people had heard, but the report was now that Trump had DuoHalo, and didn't look likely to make it, and that they were going to be invoking the 25^th Amendment to elevate Pence to President, but there were reports inside the military that Pence also had DuoHalo, and that they weren't sure he'd even make it through the swearing in ceremony.

After Andy's car drove off, Phil and Audrey got back in the car and Linda sat up. "So what do you think of him, babe?"

"He seems like a genuinely good guy, although I might be a little worried about him spilling the beans to the press or the masses," Linda said. "I don't know that you hit it home enough how he shouldn't be talking about it."

"Well, I can try and hit it home again later. Do we know what's going on in the Presidential chain of command right now?"

"Well, Speaker Pelosi and her husband have had the serum given to them, so if milquetoast drops dead, we have someone safe in the line of succession," Linda said, reading messages on her phone. "Needless to say, the shit is hitting the fan back at the base right now, so pedal to the metal."

"Going as fast as I can without getting the highway patrol on me, babe," he told her.

"I think they're probably all watching the news at this point, hun," she replied.

By the time they got back to the base, Vice President Pence had collapsed during his swearing in, and the machinery in Washington was doing its best to get Speaker Pelosi sworn in so there was someone calling the shots.

Phil's first stop was at the processing team, where he chewed them a new one, saying he'd heard that people being given the serum weren't being provided with a list of dos and don'ts, including vital things like the danger of exposure to semen from someone other than the person was imprinted to. The guy running the processing team apologized, and asked Phil to write a short list of guidelines that would start using immediately, but as it turned out, nobody had even told him what they could and couldn't do, and his wife was imprinted to him, so anything he needed to keep her safe, he wanted to know as soon as possible.

In fact, it was starting to look like everyone on the base except he and his direct team were doing the absolute minimum needed to get people resistant to DuoHalo. He was most of the way through an outline of what needed to be done, what people needed to be told and how to tell them, when Linda came rushing into the room. "Phil, I need you right now."

"Can it wait, Linda? I'm nearly done wi--"

"Now, Phil!"

He'd learned that Linda didn't raise her voice unless it was absolutely necessary, so he saved the document and got up, following her out of the room. "What's going on?"

"What happens if someone's injected with the serum and doesn't get paired up with their selected person?"

"They're supposed to be brought back here and paired up with another person, as soon as possible," Phil said as they walked and talked, heading towards the staging area. "The longer they go with the serum in their veins without being paired, the harder it's going to be for them to think straight. Why?"

"One of our own came back after the person she was going to be paired with died when she was en route to meet him," Linda sighed. "And I don't leave one of our own behind."

"Who is it?"

"Have a look," she said, as they entered the room.

There, sitting, well, fidgeting more of, was 2^nd Lieutenant Niko Redwolf, dressed in fatigues. She was curling her fingers into fists, unable to sit still for even a moment, shifting and twisting in her seat, as she looked over at them when they walked in. "Hey Doctor, Captain. So, the guy I was supposed to be getting paired up with, when we knocked on his door, well, he was already dead. He'd been dead for a couple of days. I don't know what the hell to do now. Shit, I don't even know what's fucking happening to me. I can't think straight. I can't see straight. I'm going out of my fucking mind."