Quaranteam: Phil's Tale Ch. 13

Chapter 13

October 28 ^th, 2020

The whole damn thing was starting to come apart at the seams, and Phil wasn't entirely certain what the hell any of them could really do about it. The news was going to break soon about the deaths that the nation was facing, and the cover stories they were using to try and hold it under were beginning to chip away. The cover up really wasn't one of his priorities, but he knew that the better it held up, the easier it would be to get people through the process.

Hospitals had even been given emergency doses of the serum, for what were called 'Hail Mary' cases. In a last ditch effort to try and save men who'd been infected with DuoHalo, women were being directed to try and keep whatever men they could alive, so if there was an unimprinted woman near a man who'd come into the ER with DuoHalo, if she thought she could even vaguely be a match for him, emergency authorization for dosing the woman with the Quaranteam serum and her getting imprinted on the man immediately had been authorized. The so-called 'Hail Mary' program had resulted in at least fifty men who would've been fatal cases of DuoHalo making a complete recovery, although they had lost a few as well, and had been forced to reimprint those women using the necrotized sperm method, something nobody liked doing, but was the only possible option at that point.

The Air Force was doing what it could now to start really moving people from place to place, and it was being done in so many different methods that Phil had trouble keeping track of them. There were Air Force cargo planes transporting people back and forth, but they had also just temporarily commandeered a number of commercial airlines as well. The main difference was that the commercial flights were full purely of women, and the Air Force cargo planes had men on them, but each in their own quarantined plastic bubble. It was a lot of people to have to relocate, but it was life and death, and the Air Force was doing their best to manage the situation.

The lab at New Eden had expanded even further, so they could do more and more injections every day, and the observation time post-injection was dropping every day. The idea was that they'd gotten comfortable enough with the process that if something went wrong in the period of time between injection and imprinting, they'd know it almost immediately, so observation time had fallen from 12 hours down to just an hour or so now, unless candidates had extremely uncommon conditions, like exposure to dengue fever, malaria, shingles, scurvy or other medical complications.

In preparation for Andy's party in a few days, the girls were all starting to put together costumes, including making one for him, just because his free time seemed to have disappear somewhere along the way.

"Hey babe," Linda told him. "I think we need to take a field trip. You up for getting off the base for a day?"

Phil looked up from his workstation with a thankful expression on his face. Anything to get him out of New Eden would be a welcome respite. Before he'd had the advantage of going to see Andy, but with Andy and his family safely tucked away inside the walls of New Eden, the idea of going anywhere had become almost impossible. The ordered lockdown had been quite strict, so if there was something that called for him to go off site, even if just for a few hours, he was going to take it without hesitation. "Absolutely. You sure we're going to be safe?"

"It won't just be us," Linda said. "You'll be one of four doctors we're going to take to visit a handful of locations. We want to get a number of perspectives on how the high rises are going to function before we start moving people into them en masse. They're already doing it for a couple of them, but you know what a mess San Francisco is, so we're going to do a tour of four different sites, evaluate each of them not just individually but collectively as well."

"Let's get to it, then."

"Ah ah," Linda said. "One sec." She reached behind her and grabbed a bullet proof vest, sliding it on over Phil's shoulders, strapping it in place before grabbing a light jacket, pulling it over it, so that the vest was completely concealed. "I'm done taking risks, and if we're going to be outside of what I feel like is a safe zone, we're taking all available precautions."

"All precautions?"

"It'll be you, me, Paloma and Violet, so you're safe as houses. Basically, all the dignitaries on this little excursion will have no less than two personal security escorts."

"But I'm getting three?"

"Because you're my special boy," Linda teased with a laugh. "And because my safety's dependent on yours. I'm not in favor of you going off base, but I think in this particular case it's important that we do so. And when I tell you that I need you to come and take a look at something, just do it, okay?"

Phil's expression devolved into a little scowl. "What aren't you telling me?"

"It might not even be able to happen, but if it can, I think I'm going to buy you a little bit of time for a one-on-one conversation offsite where we know nobody's listening. We'll see if that works or not. It's going to be done on the fly." She flicked her fingers in his direction. "Set yourself as Out of Office for the day, and let's get going."

They headed upstairs and over to the motor pool, where they were taking Humvees to drive off the New Eden estate, bulletproofed within an inch of their life. Phil couldn't see who was in the other Humvees, but the minute they passed the gate marking the edge of New Eden, he felt himself give a deep sigh of relief. He hadn't realized how weird it had been staying within the borders of New Eden, and in some ways, he could empathize now with the people who were starting to go stir crazy from the confinement of being told to stay at home and not go out for anything. He had a whole town he could move around, and yet the concept of "go no further than this" was enough to put everyone ill at ease.

The Humvees headed down 680 before taking the interchange to switch to 580 heading west. The freeway was basically still abandoned, although Phil could see the occasional car out and about, never quite sure if it was someone who was safe to be going out or someone taking their life in their own hands. The drive down 580 into Oakland was especially peaceful, the giant mountains on either side of them mostly barren of trees, providing a stark contrast to the quiet hills of New Eden, which had been overwhelmed with foliage, so as to provide everyone with a high level of privacy.

"It is so peaceful out here," Paloma said, her voice still heavily tinged with that European Spanish accent. "I do not imagine it was this way before the pandemic set in."

"You were never out to the Bay before you relocated here?" Phil asked her. He and Paloma were slowly learning to trust one another, peeling away layers of the woman's spy instincts a bit at a time. It wasn't that she wasn't warm or friendly, merely that she avoided giving any personal information by way of reflex. The less she said about herself, the less lies she had to remember. But Phil had pointed out time and again that they were part of a family unit now, and Paloma was doing her best to let her mental defenses down a little bit when it came to him.

"No," she said. "I'd never left Europe before this. Much of my work was internal security within the borders of Spain, although I did, from time to time, have to venture out into other parts of Europe. I had often wondered what the draw of America was, but agreed to be part of the cultural exchange, and now I find myself considering how truly remarkable much of the land is here. I do hope that I will find the people as palatable when I'm able to meet more of them."

She had her hand on Phil's thigh, as she often did when she was sitting next to him. Phil wasn't entirely sure if it had been something in her particular genetic makeup or if something environmental had given her a stronger than anticipated reaction to the Quaranteam serum, but Paloma had gone from nearly ice cold before her imprinting to liking to have as much physical contact with Phil as she could get, even if it was just sitting near him with one of her feet pressed against his leg. She almost seemed like she needed the constant reassurance that he was nearby, and was always eager for physical affection, ready to escalate things at a moment's notice if Phil gave any inclination of being in the mood. Her fingers on his thigh were always just a few inches away from his cock, as if she was just waiting for him to give her the signal. He'd gone out of his way to make sure he wasn't giving her false go signals, but also to keep her satisfied. In addition to needing to be near him, she also had a much shorter refractory period in terms of needing regular doses. The average timeframe for most women on how long they could go between doses was about ten days, but if Paloma had gone more than five days, she would get itchy and agitated. It was something that had Phil studying her bloodwork during his increasingly rare spare time. He wondered if it was a reaction to something in her specific genetic makeup or reacting to some environmental factor that had altered her body somewhere along her life.

"We aren't going to have time for you to scratch your itch on the way there, Paloma, but if it's really bothering you, by the time we're heading back to the base, it should be dark enough that I don't think anyone'll be looking into our windows, if you really can't wait," Linda said. He'd expected Linda to be a bit more paranoid with Paloma, but the two women had spent extensive time talking when he was otherwise occupied, and they'd seemed to find some common ground, an understanding between women of similar professions who were now united behind one cause, that of keeping his ass safe.

"I appreciate that, Linda," Paloma said. "I may well take you up on that. I tend to find the more men I am around, the faster my need for Phil's release grows."

Phil frowned a little, taking out his iPhone and opening the Note he kept on Paloma's various oddities, adding in yet another line item into his list of strangeness she experienced regularly. "Going to sound like a weird question, Paloma, but have you noticed that your sense of smell has gotten stronger?"

"Yes," she said, as if the realization was just dawning on her. "And I can distinguish between many men by scent. You, your friend Andy, Dr. McKenna especially, but I think I can recognize perhaps as many as a dozen different men by scent alone. Is... is that problematic?"

"No, not per se," Phil said, "but it is unusual, so let me make a note of it. We've had reports of some women gaining enhanced sense of smell post imprinting, but it's generally been restricted to being able to identify their partner at short ranges. Being able to recognize other men? I think that's a new one."

"But there's nothing... wrong... with me?"

"Hey," Phil said, taking her hand and squeezing it. "Stop getting in your head about it, okay? Everyone's reacting to this stuff very differently, and there's no right or wrong way for it to be. Whatever changes it's making to you, we'll get through them together."

Paloma smiled, looking down at her hand being held by him, then looking back up at him nervously. "Thank you, Phil. I do not remember being this easily emotional before the treatment."

He gave her a sly little wink. "Well, that's one thing I think you have in common with a lot of the women who've taken Quaranteam - more raw and intense emotions."

"We're all right there with you, Paloma," Violet said. The busty airman typically liked to remain a little removed from conversations, but the last few weeks, she'd started coming out of her shell and interacting with all of the rest of the women in Phil's Team more, as if it had finally sunk in that they were all going to be part of her life for the foreseeable future. "Just don't push yourself when you don't have to."

The Humvees exited the highway close to the Bay, just on the outskirts of Oakland. There had been a number of mini high-rise complexes along the waterfront, but the entire aesthetic had certainly changed. Phil knew that many of the buildings had been filled with bodies months ago, but the National Guard had been mobilized to do sweep and purges for corpses. Many of the buildings had been completely emptied out.

"We're going to stop here and take a look at one of these buildings, Phil," Linda told him. "The bosses want you to see if the way they're structuring these places will work, or if there's something they aren't thinking about."

The four Humvees split, two and two, one pair in front of different buildings. The other person wasn't someone Phil recognized, as the two groups moved into the lobby, where they were met by a member of the building refinement team, an armed soldier from the National Guard operating as his bodyguard. "Hey there. I'm Joe Raynor, renovation site manager. This is Corporal Hensen, my, uh, partner and protector," Joe said to them. He was the sort of guy who looked like he was in way over his head, struggling to keep himself sane by just focusing on the project and not looking much at the world around him. Hensen, by contrast, looked like she was making it her job to keep eyes on everything else, and as such, her and Linda met eyes immediately, nodding in respect of each other. "Let's take an elevator up a couple of floors, and I can show you how the building is put together."

The other group with Phil's was made up of two people in suits, a man and a woman, and two women in camo, holding weapons. Clearly the couple were the VIPs, but Phil didn't recognize either of them and didn't want to tip his hand that he didn't know who they were or why they were there.

Once in the elevator, Joe waved a keycard in front of the elevator at which point the box seemed to unlock. He pushed 4, seeming to pick a floor at random, although Phil had been through enough of these surprise inspections to know that it was carefully planned and would be the floor they had in the best shape in the building.

When the elevator hit 4, the doors opened and the three groups of people stepped out into a small lobby. The area around the elevator was mostly circular, and there were a few bare couches against the walls, indicating it could be used as some sort of waiting area.

"So these buildings were big enough that even if a man's Team got to be rather big, giving them a whole floor to themselves would excessive," Joe told them, leading them over towards one of the four doors. "Each of these four doors opens to its own quadrant of the building, which we've done our best to convert into a stand-alone area for each Team. That means 14 converted and retrofitted apartments transformed into one large unit with about 20 bedrooms for men and women and a dozen or so rooms that can start as nurseries and be converted into rooms for kids as Teams start the hard work of repopulating the country."

He opened the door and lead them all through it. Phil could see signs of the old structure still there - it was impossible to remove the central hallway that ran down the length of the building, although in many cases, the front doors or even the front walls of many of the apartments had been removed, leaving it open and exposed to the long main hallway. "I imagine you had a lot of excess wasted space, once you considered all this space for one family," Phil said as they moved down the long hallway.

"Yeah," Joe said. "Some of it was easy to reclaim and do other things with, but some of it was an utter bitch to figure out how to deal with, like the kitchen space in all the units. We ended up converting one entire apartment into a master kitchen for the whole unit, and left a couple of the further units with functioning kitchens, but for most of them, we just expanded the main room so that the living room, dining room and kitchen just became one big open space for each Team to use as they see fit. We left most of the excess power lines in there but had to cap off loads of water lines and the like. And we've got a shitload of relatively brand-new fridges and stoves that we don't really need. I think someone said they're going to be reclaimed, but at this point, I imagine we've got way too much stuff for way too few people across the board."

Phil nodded. "Wouldn't surprise me one bit."

They stepped down towards the far end of the hallway, and Joe led them into one of the exposed converted units. As soon as they set foot in it, Phil could see what the man meant about converting the space. The kitchen had been extended to take over what used to be someone's entire condo, tile having replaced carpet, a large prep station out in the living room, a number of fridges lining the wall, as well as a couple of large-scale freezers. "This was one of the one-bedroom units, and the bedroom itself has been converted into a pantry, so the Team can be stocked up on supplies just in case this whole DuoHalo thing goes further south on us."

"We're hoping it won't," Phil said.

"Hope in one hand, shit in the other," the man in the suit said to Phil snidely. "See which fills up first."

"I'm sorry, you are?"

The woman reached her hand forward, pushing the man back just a little bit. "Sorry Doctor Marcos," she said. "We should've introduced ourselves. I'm Senator Caroline Giancola from the great state of Kansas, and this is my husband Colin. We're here getting a tour of what everything's going to look like once we move past all the death and destruction. Obviously, we don't have as many metropolitan areas in Kansas as you folks have out here in California, which makes it even more important that we get them right and don't screw the pooch during our consolidations."

"Hell," Phil said, "I think the Bay Area alone has about twice the population as your whole state does, Senator. But I suspected that considering how much farmland you have out there that your casualty rates would be significantly lower."

"Somewhat lower, but certainly not massively lower," the Senator sighed. "The distribution of people and lack of urban centers meant it was easier for many people to respect quarantine, but I think some of that was traded off by other people who thought it was nothing but a hoax and that they could ignore it with impunity. Kansas had about 1.4 million men in it last year; now, we think that number's closer to two or three hundred thousand. We're doing what we can, but the transmission rate on this damn virus is off the charts, and almost a quarter of the population of our state is under 18, so you can imagine how the loss of so many children has eaten into our resilience."

Phil frowned, nodding in understanding. "I wasn't trying to make light of your problems, Senator, simply point out that they're an entirely different set of problems than ours. I wouldn't think hubs like we're putting together out here would be necessary for your state."

"I want to see how you're doing it all so we can decide how we want to approach restructuring cities like Wichita and Kansas City," she sighed. "We can't afford to just abandon our urban centers, but we're going to have so much unoccupied real estate, it's going to be disturbing."

He sighed. "Yeah, I'm trying not to think too much about that myself, just because the last thing I want to do is imagine how empty San Francisco's going to be after all of this. It used to be a giant commuter city, but now, it's going to be a lot more like a ghost town. The last thing I want is for it to basically be given up on, which is why we're doing things the way we are. The concept is to make new village centers clustered around several of these buildings, giving everyone new neighborhoods, even if it is for rather large and unwieldy family units."