Quaranteam: Phil's Tale Ch. 15

"I think they get along just as well without me there as they do when I am there, truth be told, but that's probably for the best. Audrey runs the emotional half of the house; Linda runs the practical half. The two have settled things exactly how it works for them. And me."

"And the sex is still good?"

Phil laughed. "Jesus, Bill, the sex is better than it's ever been, better than it has any right to be, and I'm just along for the ride, so I'm doing everything I can not to fuck it up. The Daniels Effect is in full force among Team Marcos, and I intend to not do anything to disturb it."

"Did you see the collection of insane women we had showing up yesterday for delivery today?"

"I glanced a little bit at it, but didn't take a full gander, why?"

Bill let out a slight whistle. "Three actresses, two musicians, an acrobat, one of the Fortune 500 CEOs, an athlete, a porn star and a couple of strippers, among the more usual collection of beautiful women who are doing well in their field. A bit more fame all at once than I think I'm used to, although I have to admit, the acrobat impressed me a lot more than most of the celebrities, although I'm hard to get star struck any more, considering who we've had come through our gates over the last few months. When we were injecting her, she was showing me how she could bend her leg to put the bottom of her foot on the back of her head, and you know that kind of thing's going to be crazy in the sack."

"Did it seem to you like we got a lot more all at once than we normally do?"

"Yeah, the General said it was a double batch. They were even pairing up women to share observation tents because we didn't really have room for it, but Fielder said it was necessary."

"You think it was?"

Bill sighed, gently putting his hands up in the air. "We're not paid to ask those kinds of questions, Phil. I assume maybe there was a scare that the efficacy numbers were getting too low for the resistance reports here in New Eden, and they wanted to shore up all the people here."

"But we generally stagger them in one at a time. Doing a double drop on so many households, even here in New Eden... that strike you as odd?"

"We've had a couple before," Bill pointed out.

"Right, but those were relatively early days. This feels different."

"Well, a lot more of these were HPR's."

"HPR's?"

"High Priority Requests," Bill replied. "You know how the people with the money are. They're paying to produce the serum in mass quantities, so they expect it entitles them to a few perks here and there, so maybe they just decided they wanted a double drop this one time."

"How many people are getting new partners in New Eden today?"

"Let's see..." Bill turned back to his actual desktop computer and used the mouse to open up the deployment and pairing reports system, calling up the listings for people who'd been sent to New Eden for processing yesterday. "Huh. That's... odd."

"What's that?"

"It looks like over half of the men in New Eden are scheduled to get two women each today, which is... well, it's an outlier on the averages, to be certain."

"Over half? That include—"

"Yep, your name's on here." Click. Click. "So's mine." Click. Click. "So's both of your friends you had me looking out for."

"That's very strange."

Bill was scanning through the names and then his eyes narrowed. "That can't be right..."

"What's that?"

"Look whose name is on the list," he said, tapping the monitor with his stylus.

"That can't be right..." Phil agreed.

"We could go down and see if she's down there."

"Why would she be down there?"

"Why would she be on the list of people being paired today if she wasn't down there?"

"What the fuck?" Phil said, leaning in to look at the monitor closely.

"What am I missing?" Bill said.

"Look at who's with her," Phil said.

"Now I know that can't be right," Bill agreed once he finally saw what Phil was looking at. "We need to go and talk to her, and I mean right now. I know we're not supposed to be in that area because of protocols."

"Fuck protocols," Phil said. "I want to know what the fuck is going on, and I want to know now, so I'm going in there."

Bill nodded, getting up from his chair quickly. "Yeah, fuck it."

As soon as they stepped out of Bill's office, Linda looked at Phil with concern. "Something's wrong," she immediately said.

"We're going into the observation area for a few minutes," Phil told her.

"Baby, it's your rule that men aren't supposed to be in there."

"That should tell you how important it is that I'm willing to break it this once."

Linda scowled. "Yeah, fuck it. Let's go."

The trio headed towards the elevator, making their way upstairs before heading over to the small hangar that had been constructed for overnight observation of injected women. The woman guarding the post looked at Linda, looked at Phil, looked at Bill, then back at Phil, before shrugging, opening the door for them. She'd obviously decided that whatever Phil was doing, he must've been cleared for it, so she wasn't going to be the one to get in his way.

Once inside the hangar, they kept their movements as quiet as they could, as most of the women were still sleeping in their cots within their private sealed tents, but Phil knew exactly the number of the tent they were headed for.

They arrived at tent 33 and Phil cut the ziplock tie off the outside and opened the zipper to set foot inside of the small tent, Bill and Linda just a step or two behind him. "Why didn't you tell me, Charlotte?" Phil sighed, as Dr. Charlotte Varma and her daughter Asha sat upright on their cots, both having still been asleep.

"Tell you what, Phil?" Charlotte asked him.

"That you were ready to get paired with someone." In his mind, he was already starting to worry that Charlotte had been caught up in the 98.7% debacle, although he realized consciously that he didn't have any real reason to expect that.

"It's because I wasn't ready," Charlotte said. The blonde French doctor had been part of the team for so long that Phil had just assumed if there were going to be any big changes, she would've told them in advance. When her husband had died, she had almost seemed to go on autopilot, but the last few months, it had seemed like she was starting to wake up again. "But yesterday, one of the people I was about to inject bumped into me and I accidentally injected myself with the serum. That, we can agree, sort of took the decision from my hands. So I called Asha to the base, got her injected as well, had our test results run through Oracle as fast as we could and found the closest positive pairing we could get, which turned out to be right here in New Eden, thankfully. I'm a little leery about one man being imprinted to both myself and my daughter, so I'm going to ask him which of us he'd prefer when we get there, and the other of us will come back to the base for reassignment."

"Who are you paired up with?" Phil said. "I saw your names on the list and didn't even look to see where you were assigned to."

"The gentleman associated with the serum's scaling solution. Arthur Covington the 4^th."

It was Phil's turn to scowl. "Isn't he a little old for you, Asha?"

The 18-year-old stuck her tongue out. She was half-French and half-Indian, so she looked exotic and sounded even more so with her thick London accent. "Age is just number, I ain't bothered."

"I'm hoping he'll take me, and we can find my daughter a suitable replacement elsewhere."

"And if he doesn't want to let her go?"

Charlotte frowned. "He'll have to, won't he?"

"He should have to, yes."

"What aren't you telling me, Phillip?" Charlotte said.

Phil sighed a long, deep breath. "I don't trust that guy, Charlotte. I feel like he's been playing the system for his own advantage from almost the very moment the whole crisis started."

"Do you think he wouldn't let me leave if I wanted to?"

"I don't know if he would try, but I won't let him if he does."

Charlotte offered him a weary smile. "Bless, Phil, but what will be, will be."

He took Charlotte's hand in his own. "I'm telling you, Charlotte. If things seem skeezy, you call me and I'll figure out how to make it right."

Charlotte's weary smile faded and was gone in moments. "My Dev is dead, Phil. I'm just trying to make sense of what's left."