Quaranteam Unbroken Mold Ch 2

Chapter Two

July 10

th

, 2020

"You know, if Lucy was here, she'd be chewing our asses out for being nice to you," Meg laughed, leaning back on the couch.

"Who's Lucy and what the hell did I do to offend her?" Tom asked.

"Lucy is one of the members our volleyball team, and what you did wasn't to her, but to her boyfriend," Mel added, sitting next to her friend. "Does the name Tyler Straithairn mean anything to you?"

Tom smugly smirked and nodded his head with understanding. "Okay, yeah, that name definitely means something to me." Tyler Straithairn was the star player of the University of Oregon golf team that Tom had played against late last fall. The UO team had come into the tournament feeling overconfident, and Tom had quietly dismantled their team one member at a time, with Tyler being the last challenger he had to defeat to win the series. Tom had basically locked Tyler out by the time they'd reached the back nine. "Brother or boyfriend?"

"Lucy's boyfriend," Meg said. "She spent like a week trying to cheer him up after you kicked his ass up and down the links."

"It wasn't anything personal. I just wanted to make sure I won."

"I think that's what she said pissed him off the most about it," Mel giggled. "That he told her you were so

nice

about it, apologizing for doing well on a course you hadn't played before."

"Tyler's kind of an asshat anyway," Meg said. "He gets pissed about anything, even when people really aren't doing anything wrong. Can you imagine how dense you gotta be to get mad at someone for being

nice

? But whatever, that's Lucy's problem and not ours."

"I imagine that either of your boyfriends wouldn't be thrilled about you being here either, though," Tom offered.

"They would be—" Mel started.

"—if we

had

any," Meg finished. "It's a little hard making time for a boy when we're constantly with the volleyball team, practicing."

"Not that we don't think about it," Mel laughed. "I mean, I know Meg's thought about picking up a couple of F'n'F's while we've been touring for games."

"F'n'F's?" Tom asked.

"Fuck and Forgets," Meg groaned. "Thanks, Mel; now I sound like a total fucking slut."

"No you don't," Tom said. "It's good to have a healthy sex drive. I've never understood when women who want sex are considered sluts when men who want sex are considered studs."

Meg pointed at Tom with one hand and put her other fist up in the air. "Right on! That's it exactly. I'm taking back the word slut and reclaiming it for pride!"

"I don't think it works li—" Mel said.

"I'm taking it back!" Meg said, standing on the couch her arms in the air. "I'm a proud slut and there's nothing you can do to stop me!"

That made all three of them start laughing at the absurdity of it, but the laughter was a needed release valve, as the cabin fever Tom had been experiencing was already starting to affect Meg and Mel. The 'tour' of their little area hadn't taken more than an hour or so, and after that, it had been frustrating to realize just how remote and removed from civilization their little base was.

"Fuck, I hope they tell us what's going on soon," Mel sighed. "I'm mostly pissed they confiscated our cellphones, so I can't update my socials or even check Instagram while we're here."

"I know, right?" Meg grumbled. "So fucking stupid."

"Well, considering that NDA I had to sign," Tom said, "I imagine it's some pretty serious test or something that we're being used for."

"It definitely is if they're worried about us talking about it with our friends and family," Meg agreed.

"They said they were gonna tell us all about it soon, though," Mel added.

"So why are you in the National Guard instead of playing golf at a professional level, Tom?"

"Right now I'm one of the top ranked amateurs, but I wasn't recruited into the Berkley Golf Team when I was in high school. I was a walk on and fought my way onto the team, but I had to agree to a national guard commitment to pay for college tuition. I wasn't really any good until junior year where I started applying my data science major to my golf skills, seeing it less as an art and more as a science. I wasn't on anyone's radar until the end of last year and didn't get serious attention until I started my 5th year, my final one."

"The classic overnight but not really Cinderella story, huh?" Meg asked.

"Something like that," Tom replied.

The door to the barracks opened and Joe entered, dripping with sweat, just having gotten back from his run. Joe had been spending some time getting to know Meg and Mel, but had been trying not to do too much, for fear of pissing Olivia off. "Looks like the Meyers are coming over to talk to us. Their jeep was pulling up as I was jogging in. I'm gonna hop through a quick shower - I'll be back out in like two minutes. Don't let'em start without me," he said, walking past them towards the boy's room and its attached bathroom.

"Anything to break this fucking monotony," Meg grumbled. "Hopefully they'll explain what the fucking paperwork was about."

"We're just as curious as you are," Tom told them. They'd spent a good part of the last day trying to get any of the guards to tell them

anything

to no avail. He felt like they should've been open and transparent about what was going on, but instead, the guards on duty had all been extremely tight lipped.

The Doctors Meyer entered the barracks with their two guards, a pair of fit blonde women in fatigues wearing large aviator style sunglasses, escorting them, as always. It almost seemed like the two doctors didn't go anywhere without their bodyguards, something that found a little odd, but had chalked up to the supposed importance of whatever the Doctors Meyer were working on.

"Hello, Meg, Mel," the male Meyer said to them. "You two getting settled in okay?"

"Can we wait just a minute or two for Joe to get out here before we start talking about anything serious? He should be out in just a couple of minutes," Tom said. "He was out on a jog when he saw you pulling up."

"As long as he hurries," the female Meyer replied. "We're on a little bit of a timetable today, and we want to get started as soon as possible."

"We were just making small talk anyway," the male Meyer said. "You are both fine, yes yes?"

"Just fine, Doc," Meg answered.

"We're just confused as to what's going on," Mel said.

"Me too," Joe said, entering the room, still drying his blonde hair, having pulled on a shirt and some pants, not having bothered with socks or shoes. "We agreed to take part in your little experiment, but so far that seems to be little more than sitting around waiting for you to do something."

The two Doctors Meyer looked at each other before the male Meyer took a laptop out of his satchel while the female Meyer turned on the television in the room and ran a cable to it from her husband's laptop, so it would mirror the computer. "What we're about to tell you is completely classified and part of the reason you were required to sign the NDAs and why we're keeping you sequestered from being able to communicate with the outside world," the female Meyer said.

On the television, a Powerpoint presentation began titled "Surviving Tomorrow: The DuoHalo Epidemic," and suddenly everyone in the room was paying rapt attention to the screen.

"As of January of this year, the entire world has been quietly and secretly fighting a war against a disease called DuoHalo, and we have been losing. Badly. The virus has a 100% fatality rate for those of ages 11 to 17, and a lethality rate of about 91-92% among men ages 18 and above, and a lethality rate of 10-12% among women ages 18 and above. Children ages 10 and younger are immune to the

effects

of DuoHalo but are common carriers of the virus."

"Jesus fucking Christ," Tom muttered beneath his breath before he could bring himself to speak actual words. "You're talking about the end of the world."

"Thankfully, Airman, we aren't," the male Meyer said. "We've got a solution, albeit a very,

very

unconventional one. It was developed by a joint project between Air Force and Boeing, and they're calling it the Quaranteam Serum. When used correctly, it's basically able to defeat DuoHalo, Covid and a significant other number of viruses. But the correct usage isn't the easiest of things to do."

"What the hell does

that

mean?" Mel asked.

"The Quaranteam serum cannot be directly injected into men," the female Meyer said. "Doing so is fatal to the male. But the serum can be given to women, who can then transfer their resistances to their male partner through sexual contact. It does, however, come with certain side effects, which include, in essence, bonding that woman to that man, so that she cannot have sexual contact with any other male partner otherwise she'll experience serious burns and possible death. Extremely regular sexual contact between paired partners is not only suggested, it's required to strengthen and reinforce the immunity, however the experience is enhanced to be even more pleasurable than normal sex is."

"Wait wait wait," Joe said. "You're telling me the Air Force built a sexually transmitted vaccine?

Intentionally?

"

Both of the Doctors Meyer laughed a little bit, shaking their heads. "Not intentionally, no. There was another project, originally intended to be a working towards an injury recovery serum that they sort of stumbled into a working solution for dealing with the problem we were currently facing. They've just gone into major deployment of it now, but they're doing so under military smokescreen, keeping it secret specifically not to cause panic. When a paired woman and man have sex, they reinforce both partner's resistance to viruses. We have a whole pamphlet on the matter you can read while we're doing the injection. We are only now just starting to mass manufacture the serum, and with supplies limited and the death toll rapidly skyrocketing, we need to keep the public in the dark for as long as we possibly can."

"How high is the death toll?" Joe asked.

"Much, much,

much

higher than any of us would like," the female Meyer said.

That news hung in the air for a long moment, with a graphic showing the death toll already in the millions on the screen, as the projection kept rising at what seemed like an unstoppable rate. Suddenly, the weight of everything felt a whole lot real.

"Why is it called the Quaran

team

Serum?" Tom asked.

"I'm glad you asked," the male Meyer continued. "With a single female/male connection, the man has somewhere between a 30-50% resistance to the DuoHalo virus. A start, but far from ideal. But with a decent number of multiple female partners, that resistance can be brought up to almost total immunity, not just from DuoHalo, but dozens if not hundreds of infectious diseases, and not just for the male, but all female members of that Team."

"Multi... are..." Mel kept starting and stopping before she could finally get the sentence out. "Are you proposing pairing multiple women up with one man? Like... like some sort of fucking harem?"

"That is, in fact, the ideal path for the system to work, and considering how many men we've already lost across this great nation of ours, the longer we wait to get our men protected, the more trouble we're going to be in when it comes to keeping our species alive," the female Meyer said. "I'm already imprinted to my husband, as are our two guards, Airman Vaughan and Airman Guerrera, and as such, we're all guaranteed to survive this plague together. But in looking towards the approach the Air Force is using to find matching partners, there have been some concerns that certain genetic traits and markers might get lost moving forward because of personal biases or current trends, so we've been engaged by the government to help curate... a few specialty matches, in a concerted effort to preserve some of these genetic traits."

"We also want to see if we can use one of the serum's side effects to help focus this preservation effort a little bit more," the male Meyer said. "For everyone's benefit."

"You mean other than the fact that you're giving every dude in America a harem?" Mel said, clearly a little uncomfortable with all of this.

"Would you rather see all the men in America die, Miss Collins?"

"Well,

no, obviously,

but..."

"Then this is what we got," Airman Vaughan volunteered. The two soldiers were actually remarkably similar, both looking somewhat Nordic, about the same height and build and even similar bust sizes, Tom noticed, but based on their last names, he thought it was highly unlikely they were sisters.

"Besides," Airman Guerrera chuckled, "the

other

benefits are pretty fucking great."

"What

other

benefits?" Meg asked.

"Increased sexual sensitivity, increased orgasm intensity, a sort of general all-around euphoria on a day-to-day basis when around one's partners," the female Meyer said with an almost shy smile. "Honestly, I've never felt so much like a woman as I did on the day I was imprinted onto my husband."

Meg looked over at her friend, and then over at Joe and Tom. "Wait, are you saying you want to imprint

us

onto

them

?"

"Hang on a minute!" Joe started to say.

"Don't worry, Mr. Barton, you've made your wishes abundantly clear," the female Meyer said. "And we're respecting them. Your girlfriend Olivia will be showing up either tomorrow or the day after, along with another woman. We were hoping that both of you two women would be interested in pairing up with Mr. Holt-Hodge here."

"Wait,

both

of us?" Mel asked, looking back at her best friend with eyes as wide as spotlights. "I mean, I'm an open-minded girl, but—"

"What, I'm not good enough to share a man with, Mel?" Meg said, almost a touch of accusation in her voice.

"We're talking about fucking the same

boy

, Meg!"

"It sounds like if we didn't, we'd be split up and might not see each other anymore," Meg countered. "And I don't want to lose my best friend." She reached over and grabbed Mel's hand, closing her fingers around it. "I know it's weird, but you and I, we've helped each other get through a lot over these last few years, and now the government is here telling me most of the boys we've ever flirted with in our lives are probably dead, but if we agree to fuck Tom for the rest of our lives, we'll both live nearly disease free."

"But—"

"And that one time... I didn't hate it, if I'm honest."

"Jesus! Meg!"

"Is nobody going to ask

my

opinion in all of this?" Tom said with a soft laugh.

"Oh

fuck

," Meg said, suddenly burying her face in her hands for a second. "Here we are arguing like a couple of spoiled bitches and you don't even

want

—"

"Hey," Tom said. "I didn't say

that

at

all

. You're both very beautiful women, and I realize I don't really get a choice in this because I'm part of the team the National Guard volunteered for this experiment. But I just want to say that I've really enjoyed talking with both of you gorgeous ladies for the last day, and if you're willing to go through this with me, well, I'd consider myself pretty fucking lucky. You're both kind of out of my league, and it's super crazy that neither of you sees that, but I think we could all be pretty great together. That's, that's all I wanted to say."

Mel's face puckered like she'd just made an ass of herself before laughing a little bit. "Alright, fine, fuck it. If Meg's okay with it, I guess I am too."

"Your father is also a redhead, is he not, Mr. Holt-Hodge?" the male Meyer asked him.

"He is. Is that what this is about?" Tom asked. "The redhead gene?"

"It's a contributing factor," the female Meyer said. "We're doing some experimentation on how genome sequencing works with the serum, and it's important that we have a couple of constants. With your father being a redhead, and both ladies here being redheads, you'll have a strong chance to have redheaded children, helping preserve that particular gene."

"Hang on," Meg said, raising a finger. "I'm okay with fucking regularly, but let's not rush to kids quite so quickly."

"Miss Carroway," the female Meyer said. "The population of the planet is going to be cratered by the time we stabilize from this plague. So we have to be planning for the future. Nobody's asking you to get pregnant right this minute, only asking you to consider the inevitable option of it. You'll have months, even years to decide when the right time is for you and your Team."

"If you don't like it, Miss Carroway," the male Meyer said, "we can let you go back and take the traditional Oracle program path, but your earlier point does stand - the two of you would likely be very separated from one another, sent to different cities, states even."

"And during that time, you'd be at risk of catching DuoHalo," the female Meyer said.

"Not to mention the trouble of getting you back into the system and relocating you again."

"At which point, obviously, there's only so much anyone can do to protect you from the virus."

"Or—"

"Or you can accept Mr. Holt-Hodge as your partner, and we can go get the two of you injected with the serum right now," the female Meyer said. "You could be back getting imprinted within a few hours and within a day or two, the three of you would be highly resilient to DuoHalo."

"And having the best fucking sex of your goddamn lives," Airman Vaughan added.

"Thank you, Bridget," the male Meyer said with a chuckle.

"No, thank

you

, sir," she replied with a sly wink.

"Don't forget to tell'em about the other thing, Docs," Airman Guerrera said.

"Oh yes," the male Meyer said, almost as if this all was an afterthought. "Part of the Quaranteam process involves a chance at what we're currently calling 'regeneration.' I realize exactly how science-fiction this all sounds, but I assure you, it's science fact. When a woman is imprinted on a man, both the man and the woman stand a chance of going through a regeneration process, which comes in three levels - small, medium and large. A small regeneration involves little things that may be fixed - a scar on your leg, for example, or a trick knee that occasionally gives you a cramp. A medium regeneration involves more serious changes, like restoring a healed broken bone back to good-as-new condition, or cleansing your body of lingering parasites or toxins, or even correcting poor eyesight or hearing. A large regeneration is almost like a complete factory reset of your body, restoring everything to optimal condition, including solving major illnesses or in some cases genetic problems. Big changes."

"How big are you talking, Doc?" Joe asked, suddenly honing on a point he found especially interesting. "Like significant physical recoveries?"

"If we can trigger a large regeneration, Mr. Barton, it's almost the sky's the limit. We've seen them regrow missing limbs, purge lungs of lung cancer, rebuild removed organs from scratch, even restore sight and hearing. We don't know what the upper end of it is capable of, because it isn't something we can reliably trigger... yet. That's another part of our research, trying to make sure we can trigger at least some level of regeneration during all pairings."

"It can cure cancer?" Joe followed up. "For good?"

"If a regeneration happens, we think so, Mr. Barton," the female Meyer said. "We've seen it beat lung cancer, ovarian cancer, stomach cancer and even regrow removed testicles."

"It can regrow missing body parts? You're sure?"

"If we can trigger it. We're hoping that the modifications we've made will trigger a regeneration in all pairings we create using this serum and—"

"If you let me request and add another person of my choosing for my Team, I'm in," Joe said, and Tom immediately knew who his friend was talking about. "The chance of making her whole again is too important to pass up."