Results Not Typical Ch. 02

Author's Note: Sorry about the delay—hopefully Chapter 3 will be out sooner. Be advised that this chapter, while similar to Chapter 1 with its elements of mind control and voyeurism, deals mainly with group activity, including both hetero- and homosexual action. If you haven't read Chapter 1, you really should read that first. This one's a bit longer, but stick with it!

*****

He wasn't frowning when he burst into the control room; he was seething. His techs jerked in surprise when the door hit the wall with a hollow boom, Left nearly falling out of his chair. Furious, Dr. Mahler stalked into the room, hands clenched into fists at his sides. Right's mouth moved but no sound came out. He swallowed and tried again. "Um, sir? Is something wrong?"

Mahler didn't seem to hear him. "Unprecedented," he growled darkly. "They want something unprecedented, do they?" Left and Right exchanged bewildered looks. Neither, however, had the nerve to try and snap Mahler out of his reverie. That would bring his attention onto them, after all, and having Dr. Mahler focused entirely on you was rarely healthy.

Mahler, for his part, was barely aware of either of them. His thoughts were still on the meeting he'd just left, where the faceless, be-suited fools who controlled his funding had laughed at him. Laughed! He'd shown them the video of Test Group Six, proudly displaying the utter success of his latest formulation of Agent 739. He'd walked them through the physiological data he'd collected from the pair, which demonstrated their near-total descent into sexual frenzy within seconds of exposure to his compound.

And the VP of Operations, who had ultimate power over all funding allocation, had laughed. "All I see there," he'd rumbled in his crass Southern accent, "is a couple of college kids doin' what comes naturally. Put a pair of college kids in a room with a flat surface, and it's even odds you'll come back to find them fuckin' on it." He chuckled again, spawning sycophantic echoes around the room.

"I believe what Vice President Reynolds is trying to say," came the more reasonable voice of Dr. Petersen, the Vice President of Research, Mahler's immediate supervisor, "is that there's little evidence here that it was your compound which induced..." he gestured vaguely at the screen behind Mahler, which was paused on a scene of the couple at the height of passion. "Erm...that. There's no way to be certain it wouldn't have happened on its own." There were general murmurs of agreement from his fellow board members.

Dr. Mahler was momentarily speechless with fury. Moderating his tone with an effort, he said, "We selected these subjects specifically for their history of limited sexual activity. Neither is the type of 'college kid' to fall to rutting uncontrollably at the drop of a hat, as Vice President Reynolds seems to believe."

Reynolds waved a hand dismissively. "That just means they're even more horned up than most kids their age." Before Mahler could more than splutter in disbelief, he went on. "Tell you what, though, Mahler. I think there's potential in this drug of yours, assuming it actually does what you say it does. If you can prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt, you'll have all the resources you could ever want—I promise you that."

Mahler opened his mouth again, but once more the executive cut him off. "On the other hand, if you can't come up with the proof, you'll be out on your ass so fast your head might be left behind." The deadly tone of his voice made Mahler less certain he was speaking metaphorically.

Petersen spoke up again. "There you have it, Dr. Mahler. I expect you can demonstrate unequivocal evidence of your compound's efficacy, can't you?" Mahler managed a nod, so choked with rage he didn't trust himself to speak. "Excellent," said Petersen. "Show us something...unprecedented."

Right and Left were staring at him. Mahler abruptly realized he'd been standing in the middle of the room, growling incoherently, for quite some time. "Get your equipment together," he snarled suddenly, making both techs jump. "It's time to initiate Phase Two. I'll show them unprecedented..."

*

Jake's arm snapped out reflexively to silence his blaring alarm clock before he was conscious enough to comprehend the noise. Stretching, he opened his eyes. The motion revealed that the other half of the bed was empty and cool. Melissa was gone, and had been for a while.

Sighing, Jake looked at the now-quiet clock. Six a.m. the morning after. He paused. Morning after what? he wondered. The events of last night were decidedly blurry in his memory. Not blurry enough that he didn't know what had happened in general, but he was struggling with details. The taste of her skin. The weight of her atop him. The smell of their sweat. Their soft moans as they clutched at one another.

Jake shook himself. All those bits and pieces were certainly interesting—and causing a sizable tent in the sheets—but he didn't have time for a stroll down memory lane; he'd set the alarm because he had a workout with his teammates this morning before class. He rolled out of bed and grabbed his discarded athletic shorts from the evening before, slid them on, and rummaged around until he found a clean-ish sleeveless shirt and some sandals to go with them. No one expected to smell good during morning workout; his teammates wouldn't care, and neither did he. Anything else he might need was in his locker at the gym. What he was wearing would suffice to get him across campus.

He racked his brain as he walked, trying to remember what precisely had happened the night before. He and Melissa had gone back to his room for...for what? Math. It had something to do with math. Tutoring! He'd asked Melissa to come back to his room to help him with his homework, but they'd barely started when...something...happened.

Jake stopped in his tracks. "The cloud," he said to no one. "That freaky cloud of gas or whatever!" A passing jogger eyed him strangely, but Jake ignored him. That creepy cloud had started all of it. Touching, tasting, sighing, moaning...he shook himself again. It was proving more difficult than he'd anticipated, keeping his mind off of what else had happened last night. He started walking again.

Where had that cloud come from? It had descended onto them...the ceiling? The vent! It must have come out of the ventilation system—but what did that mean? Had there been some kind of gas leak into the air ducts? Jake mentally kicked himself. What kind of gas leak spontaneously induced frenzied animal lust? Not that he'd minded, overmuch. There was only one explanation that made any kind of sense, as crazy as it seemed: someone had done this to them. Deliberately.

This revelation led to Jake spending his workout deeply wrapped in a mental fog, trying in vain to recover further details of last night's events—the beads of sweat on her skin were salty and cool as he licked them off—anything that might help identify the source or cause of the cloud. Indeed, he was so oblivious to his surroundings that he nearly killed himself and several of his teammates multiple times in the gym, dropping weights, tripping people, and generally making an idiot of himself. He created so much unintentional chaos that the coach finally banished them to the showers early out of sheer disgust.

The showers and locker room provided a whole other set of challenges. As images, sounds and scents from the night before rose unbidden in his mind, he found himself repeatedly fighting down an erection that would have earned him endless grief from his teammates. He showered, changed and fled as fast as he could, garnering even more odd looks and good-natured shoves from the other guys than he already had during the workout.

He remained distracted and jumpy all through his morning classes, twitching at small noises and unable to focus on his work. After lunch came the class he'd been alternately terrified of and yearning for all day: Professor Swanson's advanced calculus.

With Melissa.

It went pretty much as well as he'd expected it to. While Swanson, a reedy little man who seemed constructed entirely of chalk dust and frazzled gray hair, scrawled differential equations across the board at the front of the classroom, Jake tried to catch Melissa's eye where she sat at her TA's desk in the front corner. She refused to look at him. Jake's friend Eric, a towering black football player and one of the only people Jake knew who was actually larger than Jake himself, kept shooting curious glances between the two of them. Jake did his best to ignore him.

The first hour of the double period (why had he signed up for this class, again?) passed with agonizing slowness. Usually Swanson allowed them a brief break in the middle, lest bladders erupt or students collapse from caffeine withdrawals. As that time approached, however, the aged professor showed no signs of stopping—until something on his desk made a pinging noise. Swanson twitched, dropping his piece of chalk mid-derivation, swore, and then answered his phone. After a brief conversation, he hung up and turned to the class.

"Well," he said, his voice annoyed, "it seems I've been called away to an emergency department meeting. We'll have to pick this up in our next lecture."

A voice from the back asked, "So can we leave, then?" Pete, a wiry, blond senior who was on the wrestling team with Jake, although a weight class lower, looked ready to sprint for the door. Pete's stocky frat brother, Mike, was sitting beside him, and perked up at the idea of leaving early.

"No, no, of course not," replied Swanson. "The second half of this lecture period will be a study hall—you can work on this week's problem set." Pained groans rose around the room from the small class. Every student looked dejected, except Melissa and the two who always sat in the front row: Luke, a slender junior whose intense blue eyes seemed to dissect everything he saw, and Anna, a tiny Asian girl who was some kind of prodigy or something; despite being a freshman, she was by far the best student in the class.

Swanson continued unperturbed. "You'll keep things in order here, won't you, Melissa?"

Melissa sighed, but nodded. "Of course, Professor."

"Excellent, I'm leaving you in charge," said Swanson. He turned to the six other students. "You will all listen to Melissa while I'm gone." He looked back at Melissa, and added, "Don't let them weasel out of here early. I expect them all to work hard for the entire period." Melissa just nodded again.

Swanson left, and as soon as the door closed behind him, Pete and Dave started packing to leave. Melissa scowled. "What are you doing? He said to work on this week's assignment."

Pete and Dave exchanged a look, and laughed. "Yeah," said Pete. "That's going to happen."

Dave grinned at Melissa. "You could always come back to the house with us and...study." Pete high-fived him. Jake shook his head at them, opening his mouth to defend her, but froze at the sound of a metallic snick coming from the door. Jake was seated nearest the door, with Eric a few seats over. Luke and Anna, in the front, were apparently actually working on their assignments and had noticed nothing. The other three were still bickering and hadn't heard it either.

For a moment, Jake thought the sound was Swanson returning, but no one entered. Still listening hard, Jake noticed another odd sound—or rather, the lack of one. He always sat in this section of the classroom because it was right under the only functional vent, and the room could get unbearably stuffy without that constant, slight breeze across the back of his neck. The downside was the perpetual hum of the ventilation.

He couldn't hear it anymore.

Suddenly he remembered another detail from the night before; while Melissa and he had been at his desk, the ventilation had been running. And then it had suddenly stopped...right before the cloud poured out of it and everything went crazy. His blood went cold. "Guys," he said. No one looked at him. The two in the front were busily integrating something or other, and Melissa was still arguing with Pete and Dave, while Eric watched with amusement.

"Guys!" he barked. Everyone turned to look at him.

"What?" asked Pete.

"We may have a problem," Jake said, and looked up at the vent above him. To his horror, a hazy cloud, shimmery like heat above asphalt, was descending from it and the other two (usually nonfunctional) vents in the ceiling. Melissa gasped. Jake's eyes snapped to her, and for the first time, she met his gaze. The blood was draining from her face. She recognized it, too.

"What the hell is that?" asked Eric, having followed Jake's gaze upward.

"Some kind of gas leak!" said Dave, sounding panicked.

"No," said Melissa, deadly quiet. "Much worse than that."

Everyone but Jake stared at her in varying degrees of horror. "What could be worse than a gas leak?" asked Luke, his voice surprisingly calm. Then again, Jake had never noticed him actually exhibit emotions before. Why should he start now?

Jake looked up to gauge the cloud's progress. It now filled the entire upper half of the room. "Just trust us," he said. "It's worse. We need to get out of here." He ran for the door, but as he half-suspected already, found it locked. He shook it and shoved, muscles bunching, but it did not yield. The door and its frame were both steel; they weren't going to break, period. There were two windows high in the opposite wall, but both were above the level of the gas, now, and were too small to fit through beside.

The gas cloud, or whatever it was, was only inches above his head now. "Everyone get low," he ordered the others. "And grab onto something. This is going to be rough." Miraculously, they obeyed, seemingly so relieved to have someone tell them what to do that they did as they were told.

"How do you know?" asked Eric, who had unsuccessfully tried to cram his great bulk under his desk. "What is that stuff?"

"We don't know what it is...but we've seen it before," admitted Melissa. Flat on the floor as he was, he couldn't see her, but her voice sounded like it was coming from the vicinity of her desk in the front. "Everyone brace yourselves. It's going to mess up your heads for a bit. Just hang on, the disorientation passes."

"So, what? It just makes you dizzy, and then what?" came Dave's voice, tight with fear.

"Then," said Jake, "things get really messed up. Once you come out of it...just don't touch anyone, okay? All of you, spread out and stay away from each other."

"What? Why?" asked Pete.

"Just trust me," Jake replied. And then the cloud descended below the level of the desks, and everything was spinning and upside down and he tried to fight it but he couldn't seem to move his body and the whole nightmare was happening again and he couldn't breathe!

As before, however, it passed after a minute or two. The underside of the desk swam into view overhead. His limbs began to respond to his instructions, if sluggishly. Jake noticed something in his peripheral vision, and turned his head. There, under the desk he'd been sitting at for the last hour, was a small tube of generic lubricant and a string of those same odd, unmarked condoms that had appeared in his dorm the night before. He stared at them blankly for a moment, shocked. He remembered seeing these same supplies in his room, and he certainly hadn't put them there.

It seemed unlikely Swanson was stocking his classroom with sexual supplies, so it stood to reason that whoever was plaguing his life with this freaky drug was also setting up the locations in advance. They had rigged their gas in the vents and strategically placed lube and condoms in easy reach. Jake felt like throwing up. What kind of sick, perverted bastards would do something like this?

"Why is there a string of rubbers under my desk?" asked a bleary-sounding Pete. "Have I won some kind of creepy-ass lottery?"

"No," said Jake. "I've got some too."

"Huh," said Pete. "I have some lube, too. You?"

"Yup," Jake replied.

"We've got both up here, as well," said another voice. It took Jake a moment to recognize it as Anna's; she was so quiet, Jake wasn't sure he'd heard her voice more than once or twice before.

"Damn," said Pete. "And here I thought I was special."

"You're certainly special," came Melissa's voice. "Just not that kind of special." Over Pete's spluttered protests, she asked, "Everyone okay? You can come out now, the gas is dissipating."

Everyone emerged from their hiding places: Luke and Anna up front, Melissa on the far side, Jake and Eric in the middle, and Dave and Pete in the back. Pete and Luke, like Jake, were holding several condoms and a tube of lube each. Jake dropped his onto his desk, shuddering.

"Okay," he said. Everyone looked at him. "Things only got really weird last night when Melissa touched me after exposure. Just everyone stay away from one another, and maybe this will pass before anything...unfortunate...happens."

Eric raised an eyebrow. "What do you mean, unfortunate? What exactly happened, when you two got hit with this stuff before?"

"Just trust us," said Melissa. "You don't want to know."

Eric made a scoffing noise. "I feel fine! Everyone looks fine." Before Jake could react, Eric had clapped a hand to his shoulder. "You look okay to me. Whatever that was, I don't think it did any harm." He paused, his eyes going a bit glazed. "In fact...you look great, Jake. You feel great, too." The hand on Jake's shoulder changed from a reassuring pat into a caress, as Eric's hand started to explore the muscles of Jake's neck and shoulder. Tingling heat flew across his shoulder, down his spine and straight into his groin. Jake feebly tried to pull away, his body already resisting the instruction, but Eric's other hand landed on Jake's arm, pulling Jake toward him.

Before he really knew what was happening, Jake found himself snugged backward against Eric's body, his arms sliding around Jake's waist. Eric's hands slithered up under Jake's shirt. One moved up, lightly tracing the ridges of muscle along Jake's abdomen, making Jake shiver. The other slid downward, easing under the elastic waistband of Jake's athletic shorts and boxers. Eric's fingers tangled in Jake's pubic hair.

Jake went from slightly swollen to full erection in about two seconds, and Eric's hand wrapped around his swiftly stiffening shaft and started to rub and squeeze it. He could feel something large and insistently hard pressing against his left hip. He already knew what it was. Trying to distract himself from the sensation of Eric's hands and the feeling of warm lips on the back of his neck, Jake looked around the room, and swiftly realized why no one had spoken up about Eric's behavior.

In the front of the room, Luke had Anna flat on her back atop a desk, kissing her fiercely. His hands pinned hers to the tabletop, and his legs pushed her knees apart, so that he could grind his hips against hers. From the noises she was making, she didn't really object. As Jake watched, Luke released one of her hands—quickly seizing it with the other, so that his one hand held both of hers—and slid his other hand up under her shirt, making her writhe and moan against his mouth.

Deciding that particular image would not help him fight the hot feeling of need rising within him, he turned his head and looked toward the back of the room. To his surprise—perhaps unwarranted, given his own position, and Eric's—Pete and Dave were entwined in a chair, also kissing ardently. Pete was somehow shirtless already, and Dave's hands were sliding all over the lean muscles of his chest and shoulders. They broke the kiss for just a moment, long enough for Dave's shirt to join Pete's on the floor, before pressing more tightly together, visibly reveling in the feeling of skin against skin. Both sported sizeable tents in their jeans.