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."
