Cow Daze Ch 02

Joy woke up feeling groggy. Otherwise, she slept comfortably enough, but doubted the others did the same. The arrival celebration lasted until the early morning hours, and the others were not shy about their alcohol consumption. Joy made it to her bed with a small buzz. Purity made it to her bed if not in it. Alicia slept on the couch, head lolled over the side and a punch bowl at the ready. Kat, who'd been the most frenetic during their drinking games, was still eating leftovers when Joy went to sleep. Normally, she wouldn't have left the other girl in such a state, but Joy didn't want a repeat of their strange kiss. After Kat and Luke disappeared into the woods for a while, Kat seemed normal again. At least as normal as Joy knew her to be. Luke paraded around with a shit eating grin on his face for a while that seemed to indicate Kat had done something with him to get it out of her system.

Rolling out of bed, Joy was surprised to hear noise downstairs. She pulled on a pair of pajama pants and headed down the narrow staircase to the kitchen. Kat was dancing around with a pan of eggs in one hand and a glass of milk in the other. When she saw Joy, her face lit up with excitement. "Oh! You're up, great. I can't wait to go on the run."

"Run?" Joy asked. Her memory tumbled into place. While walking over to their cabin, they'd begun making grand plans to get up and work off the booze. Kat, Joy, and Alicia all decided to get up bright and early for a long, cleansing run. Purity called them idiots. Joy silently knew Purity was right. How many times did she make plans to go running after a night of drinking? She'd never once followed through. "Oh, right. Kat, have you slept?"

"Huh? Oh yeah. I got up early that's all. Did you want some eggs? They're ones we brought. Not Bertie's." Kat moved around the kitchen with the same energy from the previous night.

"No," Joy answered. "Not hungry. Stomach's a little queasy — Kat, are you on something?"

Kat stopped, wiping away a milk mustache. "What? God, Joy, no. What would I be on?"

Joy shrugged moving past her to get a class of water. "Some kind of upper. I'm not judging, I'm just asking. You drank twice as much as either guy last night. You should be crawling down the stairs if you got out of bed at all."

"Huh," she said, a forkful of eggs halfway to her mouth. "I went to sleep not that long after you. Got up for a snack a little while after that, but I slept fine. I feel great, actually. Do you not want to go for the run? I can go by myself."

Joy looked at Kat. Something about the other girl seemed off. Kat had on an oversized t-shirt, probably Luke's. Yet, it fit her closer than it should have. "No, let me freshen up a little bit, and I'll go. A run would be nice, actually." Joy paused, watching Kat shovel the eggs into her mouth like a starving woman. Joy had experienced the hungover munchies from time to time. It always came back to bite her in the ass. She didn't want to be holding back Kat's hair while the eggs made a second appearance beside the running trail.

She went back upstairs and began getting ready. Joy checked her phone, but she had no service. Anthony said he'd come by around midmorning to get her, but she didn't anticipate him following through on that promise. He'd drag himself over at some point, but the guys had switched to a bottle of whiskey at 2:00am with Luke extolling the virtues of his Scottish heritage and Anthony making some optimistic claims about his own resiliency to alcohol. They wouldn't be up and rowdy for a while, assuming they didn't have whatever magic hangover cure Kat had employed.

Joy pulled on a pair of running shorts, a sports bra, and a snug shirt. She needed to go up a size, but for a college student, everything was expensive. Joy should have taken the job on campus for the summer, but Anthony wanted to come on the trip and wanted her to go with him.

At least I'm consistent with making stupid decisions for boys.

Teeth brushed, hair fixed, shoes on, and a quick check in the mirror done, she went back downstairs. Kat waited for her in the kitchen. She'd put on a tighter t-shirt, some leggings, and shoes.

And no bra.

"We're going to be jogging, you know?"

"Yeah?" Kat said as she hopped to her feet. Her breasts stuck out against the gray shirt, nipples clearly defined. "Oh, yeah, I tried putting on a bra. Couldn't stand it. I think...well, you know."

Joy nodded, but she didn't really know what Kat meant. She got some sensitivity near her period sometimes, but nothing bad enough to not want to wear a bra. If anything, a bra usually helped. But, everyone's different, she conceded. Joy's older sister got cramps so bad, she would be laid up in bed for three days. "Right," she said, "we'll take it easy."

"Should we leave a note or something? Or will they not be up for a while anyway?" Kat turned around, and Joy gasped. "What?"

"Nothing," Joy said, quickly. "It's nothing. I thought I saw a bug, but it's just a spot of dirt on the table." She moved quickly and wiped her hand across the clean surface.

I know that girl didn't have that ass,

she thought, cutting her eyes toward Kat's plumped posterior.

She had a butt like a surf board. Hell, we joked about it.

And yet, as Kat stretched her calves, Joy couldn't look away from the massive mounds stuck on Kat's backside. If she didn't know any better, Joy would have accused the other girl of stuffing some kind of prosthesis down her pants. The tights didn't leave a millimeter to the imagination though.

"Ready? I'll go in front," Kat said with a grin.

***

Penny heard her husband sneeze again in the shower. "Bless you," she said, not raising her voice. He wouldn't have cared anyway. She put the phone to her ear again and listened.

"GOVERNMENT MANDATE RECALL OF ALL DAIRY PRODUCTS PURCHASED BET —" A long static hiss filled the line before the robotic voice spoke again, more garbled, but Penny could make out some of the words. "—SULT EMERGENCY SERVICES FOR IMMEDIATE —"

The next word, something like quartering?

A flutter of panic ran through her,

Quarantine?!

Miles sauntered out into the bedroom with a towel draped around his hips.

The gym membership pays for itself, I guess,

she thought. "Miles, I got a strange voicemail. Something about a dairy recall, and I think they say the word quarantine. What could that be about?"

He shrugged and moved over to the bedside table to get his own phone. "Is the wifi dead?"

"Yes, and the cable, too. We get the satellite stations, but that's reruns of some western from the sixties." It wasn't unusual to be so cut off from the outside world, but the voice mail had her unnerved. "Wasn't there something on the television last night when you were watching? Some kind of press conference?"

Miles shrugged again. "I'll head down to the manager's station once I'm dressed. Sam sometimes forgets to leave everything running for us, you know?"

Penny nodded. "But the voice mail?"

"Lemme hear it," he said, dropping the towel.

Despite twenty years of marriage, Penny still blushed. She was quite well acquainted with her husband's manhood, but she never quite got over seeing it so plainly in broad daylight. She waited for him to pull on a pair of shorts before she held out the phone and pressed play. The message repeated with its crackles and hisses of static. Miles frowned at it, asked her to play it again, and frowned some more. "Have you gotten one of these kinds of messages before?"

"Sure," she answered. "Last one was about flour, I think."

"Are they normally like this? Don't they normally say who they're calling on behalf of or something?"

"I don't remember," she said. Penny had expected her husband to listen to the message and say it was nothing. "I bought a lot of milk and cheese. It's with us. We had some last night in all the food. I had a bowl of cereal for breakfast. What if it's tainted with something?"

"You feel ok, right?" Miles moved quicker as he dressed. "I feel fine. Good even, other than some allergies. If it was in the food last night and some kind of stomach thing, we'd all be sick by now. Never heard of milk being anything other than sour. They pasteurize it, and whatever. They have a hardline connection in that manager's station for credit cards and junk. I'll go down and figure out what the deal is. You can go check on the kids, if you want. I imagine they're going to feel like garbage after last night, poisoned milk notwithstanding."

Miles went into the closet to finish getting dressed, and Penny headed out to the main room of the cabin. She found her sister watching something out of the patio doors. Without saying anything, Penny walked over and stood beside Becca looking for whatever had caught her sister's eye. She spotted the two girlfriends in the distance on the far side of the lake. "Gosh, they actually got out and went for a run? I wonder how our daughters fared."

Becca looked over, "Hmm? Oh, yeah. They've been going for a while now. I don't think Kat has on a bra. Hope she didn't lose it in the woods."

Penny punched her sister in the arm, "Becca! What those kids get up to is their own business. You didn't raise Purity any different."

"I wasn't watching them," Becca said with a quiet laugh. "I was looking at that." She pointed up.

Penny followed her sister's pointing. The sky was bright and blue, except for the streaks of contrails turning the whole sky into a criss cross patchwork. She spotted three different planes at a glance. "What..."

"There's tons of them. All high up," Becca said. "Not sure, but in all the years we've been coming here, I don't think I've seen a single plane. Didn't think they flew over the mountains."

The feeling of worry in Penny's gut doubled. "They're all going away from one direction. What would that be? Northeast?"

"Huh, you're right," Becca said, for some reason holding her thumb out toward the sky. "Maybe there's a storm in DC or something."

Miles shuffled into the room, "What're you two looking at?"

"Planes," Becca said. "Penny thinks they're all going away from DC. World must be ending."

***

Images swirled around inside Luke's dreaming mind. As the tendrils of sleep receded, he struggled to hold onto the last of the fantasies. A woman, not Kat, sitting astride him and grinding. A pleasant, wonderful dream chased away by a beam of sunlight and the rapid return of more earthly problems.

He rolled over in sweat soaked sheets. His mouth tasted like vomit, but he had no memory of throwing up. He also didn't remember stripping naked before going to bed, though. Pulling back the sheet, he saw that his boxers had been forgotten somewhere else in the room. Luckily, he and Anthony had separate bedrooms. Swinging his legs out from the bed, he looked down at the throbbing erection. Morning wood wasn't unexpected or unusual, but this felt a little different. Normally, he could get up and go about his day without needing to address the situation. The erection should have been a physiological one, not an actual arousal. Yet, those dreams...

The previous day came back in blips. He remembered Kat bent over, the firmness of her ass squished back against him as she moaned in the middle of the woods. He remembered cupping her breasts as he came inside of her. His dick throbbed insistently. Somewhat frustrated, he hopped out of the bed and went to the bathroom.

The lingering effects of his hangover didn't seem too bad considering the foolishness of the late night shots with Anthony. In fact, Luke felt good enough to wonder if he was still a little drunk. Looking at himself in the bathroom mirror made him pause. He kept himself fit, but not exactly muscular. On a good day he might be able to show off a biceps, but otherwise he could best describe himself as lean. In the mirror, though, he could see the ripple of muscle along his shoulders and arms, even the faint hint of abs.

Dehydrated,

he thought.

Maybe dangerously.

Erection pressed against the cold countertop, he filled his hands with water in the sink, gulping some down and then washing out his mouth with the second handful. He splashed some on his face and thought of taking a shower to wash the grime of sweat off him. Still, his cock continued to jut insistently forward.

Simply thinking about it caused his mind to flood with memories of Kat. If he indulged those, other thoughts filled his head.

I could throw on a robe and go over to the girls' cabin. We could spend the morning fucking like animals, if that's what she likes. She'd want to moan, but I'd cover her mouth to keep the others from hearing. Unless...Joy did. She could be asleep in the room with us, or pretending, watching my dick slide in and out of Kat while she played with herself. She'd pull back the covers to show off those big, fat tits of hers, and the pink of her pussy as her fingers slid in.

His hand gripped his dick, masturbating feverishly as the thoughts ran through his head. As the idea of Joy slipped into his mind, others quickly followed. He'd not used thoughts or memories to jerk off since he was a teenager, but the session with Kat in the woods had provoked something in him. His dick felt good, too. Jerking off was normally mechanical until he came, but touching himself actually felt nice. And, he thought he felt bigger. Not in any substantial way, and perhaps due to the overall dehydration, but he knew his dick as well as he knew anything. Something about it was different.

Thoughts continued to spiral as he jerked off over the sink. He shut his eyes tight, picturing Kat on her back, tits wobbling back and forth as he fucked her. The image came to him as clear as anything, almost like an out of body experience. He seemed to

actually

be hunched over her, feeling the curve of her hips, the warmth of her legs wrapped around him, and the tight, wetness of her pussy. The image shifted to Joy's beautiful face and body, but it didn't stop. It changed again, to Purity.

Luke grunted. At some point, he'd raised up to his tip toes. As he lowered down to his heels, his balls pressed on the lip of the sink. The pressure and slight pull overwhelmed him as he came, pumping thick gouts of cum into the sink. The blood drained out of his head as he continued to stroke, somewhat unhappily, causing sparkles of pleasure to rocket around inside his head. As it stopped, he opened his eyes to see an alarming amount of cum covering the sink, dripping from the faucet, and even some on the mirror. More appallingly, the image of his cousin, on her knees, legs splayed, with her pussy wet for him, remained stuck in his head. With no small amount of shame, he began to clean up.

***

Stale, hot air greeted Miles as he stepped into the manager's cabin. The drive down was uneventful, though Miles was quite restless. He tried telling himself it was worry, but he always struggled to lie to himself. He was horny. As far as he could tell, he woke up horny and had remained at a low burn. He'd briefly considered rolling Penny onto her side and finally taking her up on the offer of waking her by stuffing his dick inside her. He didn't, mainly because it wasn't only his wife that he was fantasizing about.

While the guest cabins afforded the visitors all the expected comforts, the manager's station leaned more toward efficiency. Fluorescent lights flickered on slowly. Despite visiting any number of times over the years, Miles had to wait for the light to get his bearings. A few things changed, updated furnishing for the waiting area, refurbishing of the counters and desk chairs, and the like. Large ring of keys in hand, he went to the back office and tried to remember which office had the computer which controlled cable and internet access. After two tries, he found the right one, a single room IT department which hadn't been cleaned before the summer break. Bundles of wires and discarded equipment littered not only the shelves, but the floor. It was slightly cooler in the room, though, as icy air vented in from a dedicated unit offset somewhat by the server racks at the far end of the room.

He went over to the computer and went to work. It took longer than it should, but eventually he found the appropriate program. He frowned. The program showed him a list of wifi emitters scattered across the mountain. All of them had "ERROR" in red letters beside them.

Welp, that's way beyond what I can fix. I did good to get this far.

He pulled out his cell phone, but he had no service. Instead, he brought up the number given to him for emergencies, which he considered this to be. Two weeks without internet would make the kids go insane. He grabbed the desk phone, hoping to dial out, but got nothing but a click. Some notes taped to the phone gave him some hope, but he couldn't get a dial tone.

Frustrated, he decided to try email. He opened a browser and began to type in his email provider, but he paused. The news blocks on the new page all showed similar stories. "VIRAL AGENT SHUTS DOWN AIRPORTS" caught his eye.

"As concerns continue to mount regarding the '8-batch' protein, the FFA chose to ground all flights leaving Dulles International while incoming flights have been diverted to nearby airports. Officials from the Department of Health and Human Services cite an 'abundance of caution' as the rationale behind this decision. They continue to advise limiting travel, but have not issued any official guidelines."

Miles went out to the site's main page. The whole of it was covered with stories about the 8-batch protein. For the first time that day, Miles's thought drifted from sex to a low panic. As he frantically looked through, he noticed a video of the press conference he'd seen a snippet of the night before. He opened the video. The man he recognized, Hugh Pearce, now stood behind a woman at the microphone. The name displayed at the bottom was "Dr. Amanda Lewis, CDC".

"Thanks, Hugh," she said as she adjusted the microphone to suit her. "We want to thank Mr. Pearce and everyone from the top down at Kent Agricultural Research for being so open and immediate with their concerns. To begin, I want to take a step back, and reiterate some things which have been generally accepted among the scientific community, but maybe haven't translated well to the general public. First, what we're calling the '8-batch' protein began on two fronts. The anomalous protein from '8-batch' is a byproduct of a viral infection in cattle. The protein then interacted with that same virus in humans, Influenza D, which usually doesn't affect humans at all. The virus has now reformed into what we can — and we'll wait for official classification — but what's effectively a new strain of influenza.

"Second, while this is the flu, as of right now, we have no reason to believe it is remotely lethal. That's very important. While it started as the flu virus, it has become something very, very different in how it interacts with the human body. Third, as of right now, we have no reason to believe this is widespread. The mutation itself is limited to a few individuals and those who they have come into contact with. We're currently monitoring all reported instances of strange behavior, but many of the reports are, I don't want to say hysterical, but perhaps overzealous in their assumptions. And, contrary to what you might have heard, the symptoms remain consistent with an extremely mild case of flu. Headache, low fever, sneezing, coughing, etc. Any other reports, specifically those of a sexual nature, should be regard with extreme skepticism."

Miles closed the window and went to social media. Scrolling through all the posts, he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Curious, he went back and searched for 8-batch, resulting in a subforum with a video pinned to the top of the page titled "THIS IS WHAT REALLY HAPPENS". He opened the link to a video where the comments were disabled and the user had no other submissions.