Quaranteam: Piper's Prelude (Ch. 02)

Quaranteam: Piper's Prelude

Part Two (of Five)

Fiona had been scribbling on her yellow pad the entire time that Piper had been talking, something that had just faded into the background as Piper told her story, but for a moment she paused, giving the journalist a chance to catch up with her notes. Piper had glanced over a few times while she'd been relaying the earliest parts of her tale, but decided that Fiona's notes were clearly in code or that she used a shorthand that Piper couldn't decipher.

(It was also possible that Fiona's handwriting was simply so sloppy that no one else could read it, but Piper felt it impolite to point that option out.)

"Did you have any clue that Covington had requested you personally?" Fiona asked her.

"They didn't tell me anything about my planned partner," Piper replied, "unlike they did when Andy requested you."

"Well, I called the base who put me in touch with Andy himself to talk over the request, so I knew they were coming. That's not how it works for everyone, though, I bet."

"Actually," Piper said, sipping from her pineapple juice, "you should probably talk to all of the girls about their experiences showing up to get the serum, because I would wager that each of them is unique in what happened. There's probably several similarities, but I think there will be lots of little differences that add up."

"Because of how they're being transported?"

"Not just that," Piper said. "Remember, we've all shown up at different points in the whole process of them building this system. I bet Aisling's story would be a lot more ramshackle than what you went through, considering she showed up to Andy's doorstep in what, May?"

"June, I think, but the timeline's still a little fuzzy for me," Fiona admitted. "I think Andy jokingly referred to Ash showing up in the fifteenth week of March."

"Yeah, time's gotten a little less precise during the isolation," Piper agreed. "But Ash has got to be one of the first women through the system, before they'd refined any of it. She told me she didn't even know about the dangers of other men's semen until Niko showed up a month or two after she met Andy, so that's probably something worth writing about in your book. Anyway, where was I?"

"You were talking about getting picked up from the Olympic Training Camp."

"Right, right..."

* * * * *

So on October 18^th, a woman from the Air Force showed up on my door. She was dressed in biohazard gear from head to toe, which was a little creepy, but that's what most of the soldiers were wearing up until I got to the actual base. I was given two hours to pack up everything I wanted to take with me into a single large suitcase and a single carry on. The woman told me she'd be back after those two hours with a troop transport, and that I'd better be ready to go by then, because once the truck showed up, they were loading me onto it with or without bags of stuff.

I'm not really a material girl, so I didn't have all that much to pack up. I was told either the Air Force would move the rest later, or I could come back and get it when we were on the other side of the pandemic. They weren't sure which would happen first. I loaded up a big suitcase with a bunch of cute outfits, a handful of personal things and my gold medal, because no fucking way was I leaving that in an empty house for what might be years. I threw in other things like my laptop, my make up, my toothbrush and toothpaste, my vitamins - that kind of stuff all went into the carry on. Still, two hours is not a lot of time, so I was still worried that I'd forgotten things even when I heard the truck pulling up outside.

It wasn't just me who was getting picked up either, as most of the volleyball team was on the truck with me. We weren't given masks or hazmat suits or anything, just loaded up onto the back of a troop transport, our suitcases sitting in front of us, although we were given these little bags we had to lock our cellphones into. We were told that when we got to the place where we were going to be injected with the serum, they would unlock the bags and return our phones to us, but until then, they needed to be off and contained for "operational security."

(That turned out not to be true - we weren't given our phones back until we met up with our partners, not at the place where we were injected. I didn't even get my phone back until after Andy took me away from Covington. That bastard withheld it from me.)

It was good to see a few of my friends again on the truck, and we hugged one another, as a few of the girls were struggling not to cry. One of them, Kari, wondered if we were being marched off to death camps, but we tried to put her at ease, pointing out that we'd been allowed to pack our things, which they certainly wouldn't have done if we were all going off to die. That calmed her down a little.

I did ask the woman who was organizing things why none of us had been given masks, and she informed me that we would all be receiving the serum tomorrow and meeting up with our partners shortly after that. At that point, she said, we would all be mostly immunized from DuoHalo, so if we caught it along the way, it would be flushed out of our system by the process. I asked if she could give me more detail than that, but she said not to worry about it.

I probably should have worried about it.

I counted about two-thirds of the volleyball team on the truck, as well as a number of other athletes that I'd met at social functions in the before times - gymnasts, sprinters, some swimmers although my friend Brooke wasn't among them. (I found out later she hadn't been picked by anyone in that wave, and Andy got her connected to Xander a few waves later.)

We were one truck in a convoy of six.

I also noticed that there weren't any men on our truck, something else I asked the woman from the Air Force about. She told me that only the first truck in the convoy had men in it, and that they were all buttoned up to the max in hazmat suits with their own oxygen supplies attached to them.

This was where it started to become abundantly clear to me that DuoHalo didn't affect men and women identically. The woman from the Air Force confirmed to me as much, specifying that it had a much higher and faster fatality rate among men, and that the incubation period wasn't anywhere near as long for males either, so they were taking extra care with the men because otherwise there was a chance they could be dead before they received the treatment.

I asked her, Colonel Fairchild was her name, she didn't give me her first name, anyway I asked her how bad it was out there, and she sort of gave me a tight-lipped smile and said she wasn't really at liberty to divulge that sort of information, but not to worry, because I was one of the lucky ones.

At that point, I knew we were pretty badly fucked.

That was her answer for a lot of my questions, and after a few minutes, she told me to stop talking because she needed to do headcount and focus on the last few people we needed to pick up. The last stop our truck made was in a pretty prestigious neighborhood, and I found out why when Colonel Fairchild brought our last pickup onto the truck.

The final person we picked up was Carolyn Fortiss, you know, the five-time gold medal winning gymnast, the one who's been on the Wheaties box and the cover of Time? I don't really know her, but she's basically one of the most recognizable athletes on the planet, and she'd clearly been given more notice than the rest of us, or she was an insanely fast packer, because she had two suitcases and a carry-on bag with her, which had two little dogs in it.

(I really wanted to ask why the 'one suitcase only' rule didn't apply to her when it applied to everyone else on the truck, but I decided I didn't want to be that bitch for the rest of the trip.)

At that point, Colonel Fairchild began to walk the length of the transport, and slap stickers with barcodes on our chests and our suitcases. The sticker, which I glanced at, had my basic vitals on it. Name, age, blood type, point of origin, point of destination, a "travel code" which in my case read CRQL5 but mostly said OMUL3 or OMUL2 or OMUL4 for the rest of the truck although Carolyn also had CRQL5 on her travel code.

The Colonel told us that once we were dropped off, we would be scanned, sorted and then sent off to our correct plane. Once on the plane, we should be patient and understanding with the one or two members of the Air Force who were tending to the plane, she told us, because everyone was stretched ultra thin and tempers were flaring due to exhaustion.

That didn't make a lot of sense to me until I peeked out the back of the truck and realized we were heading into Denver. "All roads lead to the Denver Airport," I remember thinking at the time.

Pretty soon, I found out just how true that was.

The Air Force had temporarily commandeered Denver International Airport, and was using it as a staging ground. I've been in and out of that airport loads of times, but this was the first time that it felt like it had been invaded. There were lots of soldiers stationed around - mostly Air Force, but some Army as well - and I found myself excited to do something I'd always hated.

Queuing.

We were advised to try and keep six feet between us and the person both in front of and behind us in line, but that rule was being followed pretty loosely. Bags were being passed through the X-ray machines, and I still had to go stand inside that body scanner, but they were moving very quickly through the whole process, like the security was just sort of making sure no one was doing anything especially stupid.

I think the automatic weapons everywhere did more than enough discouragement of that.

Once we were past the security screener, we had our barcodes scanned and were directed to where our plane was waiting for us. Terminal A seemed to be heading to the West Coast, Terminal B around the Midwest and Terminal C heading to the East Coast, although that's just something I remember somebody saying. No idea if it was true or not, but I did get taken over to Terminal A. The last I saw Carolyn, she was heading off towards Terminal C.

There were a lot of women passing though Denver Airport on the day I was there, and not a whole lot of men, although I did find out later that was because men were being directly loaded onto planes and not being made to sit around waiting, or if they did have to wait, it was somewhere else entirely, and not with loads of other people.

Most of the women soldiers weren't very chatty, but I did manage to glean a few bits of information from some of them. Men mostly weren't being relocated, because it was generally considered riskier than moving the women to them, but that didn't mean all men were staying put. In some cases, relocation was deemed essential, especially as many of the uninfected men had gotten that way by being remote. Isolating forever, the soldier told me, wasn't going to be an option, so these men were being "brought in from the cold." She laughed when she told me that a few of them had even been by force, but that when they saw what the future held for them, they would be thankful.

She didn't elaborate on that for me.

If it hadn't been for the troops with automatic weapons and the almost complete lack of men, it could've been just another day of flying through Denver.

I headed over to Gate A37, and saw there were about twenty other women there for departure. It was also around this point that I started to notice that the women were mostly good looking women in their twenties and thirties. Sure, there were varying shades of height, weight, hair color and skin tone, but there was beauty basically all around me. That was the moment when I started to get a very bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.

The flight I was scheduled for was to Oakland Airport, and the plane itself was a United plane. The soldier at the check in told us all that there weren't assigned seats, however we were going to be boarded in groups, so the first class stuff was first come, first serve.

Wouldn't you know it, there were only two CRQL5s on our flight, and we were both seated first, so we each took a first class seat. The other one was Stacey Razi, the downhill skier and Onvon Cosmetics model.

The plane didn't have any flight attendants on it, but there was one soldier from the Air Force, who was also seated in first class, and there was one soldier at the door of the aircraft who had taken our luggage from us, sending it down to the belly of the aircraft. I'd half expected them to just let us bring it on board with us and have it on an empty seat, but apparently some rules were still being followed, although I was allowed to bring my smaller carry on with me.

Once they had everyone loaded onto the plane, they did a role call again, checking to make sure every person scheduled to be on the plane was, although I don't know what they would've done if we weren't all there.

As it turns out, on a two-thirds empty plane, having a whole row to yourself is just as good as first class, so basically everyone took an area to themselves. Some of the girls were gossiping with one another, but most of us were still in a sort of daze and kept to ourselves. I was reading a Sue Grafton novel, so I didn't socialize that much, but I did spend maybe half an hour talking with Stacey, seeing if she knew anything about where we were going or what was going on. She really didn't know anything more than I did.

When the pilot's voice came over the air just before takeoff, I realized it might have been the first man's voice I'd heard all day long. He assured us that he would get us across the country safely and quickly, and that he hoped to avoid as much turbulence as possible. There wasn't going to be any food or drinks served over the flight, and he was sorry for that, but at this point, he just wanted to help keep as many people alive as possible.

He stressed the word alive, even if he didn't know that he did it.

I could tell that rattled some of the women in the cabin.

It's odd how much you notice little things being off when you're doing something you've done a bunch. I've flown dozens of times, maybe hundreds, I'm sure you have too, but it was very strange that nobody was going through the safety announcement, nobody was walking through the cabin to check that the seats were up or that seatbelts were fastened, there wasn't a scolding voice telling us that tampering with smoke detectors was a federal offense. The captain told us when we were taxiing, told us when to prepare for take off, when to prepare for landing and when we could get off the plane, but the rest of the time, we were basically alone together. Some of the girls clapped when the plane landed, maybe just as a release valve for some of the nervous tension.             

I'd been through the Bay Area a couple of times before, but each time I'd come in through SFO instead of Oakland Airport, so I'm not entirely certain how the airport was supposed to look, but I'm pretty sure it didn't normally like it did on that day. We didn't actually go into the airport, as they pulled up rolling staircases to the planes away from the main terminal. We walked down onto the tarmac, early in the evening, and were scanned as soon as we had our suitcases again.

Once that was done, they began sorting us.

A lot of the girls were being sent to a place called Valhalla Shores. Some of them were being sent to something called San Jose Heights. A handful of them were going to Palo Alto, a place they called the Pallisades. A few were headed towards the Presidio in San Francisco proper.

And there were seven of us headed for New Eden.

There wasn't any one commonality to the seven of us, other than I guess beauty, but that seemed to be a common thing for all the women being transported around. I did see, however, that all of us had that same code on our stickers, CRQL5. I remember at the time thinking maybe that was some sort of code for New Eden, but Stacey headed over towards the group headed for the Presidio, so I ruled that out. Based on what I know now, I think the L5 part of the code refers to Level 5, as in the person who they're being brought to. I don't know what the rest of it stands for. You should probably ask Niko about that, since I'm sure she'd know.

We were loaded into the back of a troop transport truck, and they started driving us east along 580, as the sun was starting to set. The truck was covered, but the back was open, and looking out, it was surreal how empty the freeway was, even in what had to be what was usually around rush hour.

I tried to talk to one of the other girls heading for New Eden, but the soldier sitting in the truck shushed us then told me we shouldn't talk with anyone until we were through screening protocols and getting ready for our injections. Once we were on base, we could talk to people there, but for now, it would be best if we all just stayed quiet, the soldier said to me, and who wants to argue with someone holding a machine gun, right?

We headed east then north, which made me sad, because I'd hoped to at least get a glimmer of the Pacific Ocean, now that I seemingly lived on the West Coast, but I decided not to make too much of a fuss, because there would be time for that later. The years in Colorado had made me miss the ocean waters from back home in Florida. Whenever I traveled home to see my family, I always made it a point to spend a day out on a boat in the ocean, just to get some of those vibes back in me.

Geez, I'm starting to sound like Sheridan, and her surfer talk.

She's gonna teach me how to surf eventually, though. Apparently her and Tala go all the time.

Whatever. I'm getting off topic.

The rest of the ride was entirely silent, so that I didn't piss off the woman with the Uzi or whatever. We eventually arrived at a checkpoint, where whoever was manning the gate hopped into the vehicle and scanned us all again. He was dressed in full hazmat gear, and each person was checked individually before he hopped off the truck and sent us through into the base or research center or whatever the hell it was.

They'd erected a large metal barn-like structure next to their main research building, and that was where the local processing was happening. Inside the barn was a sea of sealed chambers, clear plastic sheets forming containment tents. There was also a section that was curtained off, so we couldn't see what was going on behind there, but that's where we were led.

At the entrance to the curtained area, a soldier took our bags from us, telling us we'd get them back in our observation/orientation pod. Then we were taken one at a time into a long partitioned hallway, where we were told to strip down, as they were going to hose us down and decontaminate us. I was a little annoyed, as we were told that whatever we'd been wearing on our way to the base was being destroyed, for our own safety. Thankfully I wasn't wearing anything especially unique, but I still didn't like losing an outfit, especially since I had so few with me.

I couldn't see any of the other women, nor could I even see who was speaking. I was standing on a conveyor belt with a partition in front me and behind me. I dropped my clothes into a little chute then flipped the switch on the nondescript wall from "not ready" to "ready." I guess I had to wait until everyone had done so, because I stood there, naked and alone, for several minutes before the conveyor belt started to move.

After a few feet, the belt stopped and warm soapy water gushed down on me from above, not like a light shower, almost like someone just dumped several buckets on top of me, as I clung on to two handrails on either side of the pod. The water drained below my feet, somewhere off to the side of the conveyor belts, and then the pod started to move again.