Quaranteam Mccallisters Madness Ch 01

Part One -

"Just once..."

Doctor Adam McCallister had no idea how long the bag had been draped over his head, but he knew it had to have been hours. It might have even been a couple of days. Time was insanely difficult to judge without external tools, and he'd been unconscious for several stretches of it, only complicating the matter further. One of those times had been to sleep, but another had been forcefully inflicted upon him against his wishes via a blow to the head when he had refused to be quiet.

The lesson had been learned all too well from that altercation. Pain served as an excellent instructor to even the most stubborn of subjects, something he knew quite well from both sides.

He'd been moved several times since the bag had been put on, because he'd been forced to stand up and sit down multiple times, and he'd heard the distinctive sound of a van door slamming, plus whatever vehicle he'd been loaded onto didn't have the best suspension, so he knew part of the time had been spent on the road. He thought part of the time he'd been on a boat as well, as he could feel the seat shift unevenly beneath him, and the smell of the ocean had permeated even through the bag, although it felt like he was back on solid ground again, as everything had been completely stable since they took him off the boat.

Whoever had taken him, they'd done so while he was alone, which meant he had only a week or so before he would need at least one of his partners, or to imprint a new partner, before his immunity to DuoHalo would wane to dangerous levels. That thought had been dancing rampant through his insecurities since the second the bag had dropped over his head. What cruel fate would allow he, Adam McCallister, who had single-handedly saved the world from the brink of extinction, to die in the same manner as the wash of uneducated cretins who had insisted the problem would simply

disappear

if allowed to run unchecked. If it was to be so, he prayed that his captors would at least dispose of his body in an unmarked grave in the middle of the wastelands, and his story would simply trail off with some layer of mystery. It wasn't as though there was a lack of desolate land nearby, or what he assumed was still nearby, although he honestly had no real concept of his location. By this point, they could have moved him a few miles or several hundred.

Adam had done his best to try and acquire tidbits of information based on sounds, sensations and smells, but, as he'd learned early on, his skills in these fields were laughably lackluster, even under optimal conditions, which these were far from. There was a distinctive odor around them, but other than it being wildly unpleasant, Adam couldn't discern any meaning or point of origin from it.

More than anything, however, he simply wanted the handcuffs off his wrists and the bag off of his head, so he could connect with the world around him once more. This inky blackness of limbo was plaguing his morale and his very soul in the process. Answers needed to be given. This treatment was unacceptable for a man who had kept the Y-chromosome alive singlehandedly.

It was around that thought that the hood was taken off Adam McCallister's head.

Not that it helped much.

It took a moment for his eyes to adjust, but it seemed like he was in a fully enclosed room. Somewhere dark. There was a single source of illumination, an LED lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, but the lumen count must have been ridiculously low because the light wasn't even strong enough to give him a full picture of his surroundings. He glanced up and realized, no, it wasn't that the light was low, it was that it was encased on all sides but the bottom, a can forming a cone of light, shining directly down onto him and him alone.

'So, not friendlies, then, I see,' Adam thought to himself.

"What the hell is going on here?" Adam asked the room. He could vaguely make out shapes of other bodies moving around him, but how many and of what variety, he couldn't discern. "I was out for a walk, minding my own business, and you've kidnapped me, and I demand to know why."

"Doctor McCallister," a woman's confident voice said, her voice a strange blend of multiple accents. "You may as well drop the pretense. Do you think we would go to so much trouble to obtain you if we did not who you are and what you have done?"

"You know nothing about me," he sneered. He couldn't get a good look at her, because of how the light was, but could see that she was dressed from head to toe in a dark military style jumpsuit, black combat boots on. "If you did, you would have either killed me or put me in a lab by now. Instead I'm here, wherever the hell

here

even is."

"You are in purgatory, Adam," she laughed throatily. Her voice had a raspy quality to it, like the woman had been smoking cigarettes since a young age, or maybe had received some larynx damage at some point in her youth. "You are in limbo while we decide what to do with you."

"Who is this we, then?"

"Ah ah ah, Doctor McCallister," she cautioned. "I am the one asking questions for the time being. Perhaps, in time, I may be convinced to grant you some baseline of knowledge, but until that point, until I am convince that you are going to be a good little gimp, who does what he is told and only when he is told to do it, then you are unworthy of receiving even the most basic of answers to your questions."

"I'm an American citizen," Adam decided to try. "I have rights, you know."

"But you are not

in

America, Doctor McCallister, and therefore I am not obliged to give any credence to your pleas. You have no rights, no lawyer to be phoning and no reason that I should not beat, brutalize and torture you until you are providing the answers to my questions at a reasonable and satisfactory pacing," the woman said, as she moved around the small dark chamber.

Adam was starting to be able to see other forms leaning against the walls of it, mostly women, but one or two men, he thought. It was difficult to make out clearly, as he didn't have his glasses on, which meant his visual acuity was in the toilet at anything more than five feet.

"We have some of the details of your story, some moments we have a rudimentary understanding of," the woman continued. Adam used this moment to attune himself to the room a bit better. The chair he was on and handcuffed to. A table in front of him. A chair on the opposite side of the table. A metal floor beneath him. Not much to go on at all, but still it was something, a starting point on which to build the mental map of his predicament in his mind. "Others we know very little of. So I have been tasked with acquiring all of it from you, of harvesting what useful knowledge still resides in that horrible little brain of yours, and to determine whether it is more advantageous for us to allow you to remain consuming oxygen or whether you offer nothing of substance to this world you have helped destroy."

"Since you know my name," Adam said confidently, "then you know I am the inventor of McCallister's Remedy, the cure for the damnable DuoHalo virus that has been slaying so many fine men and women across the planet's surface. That alone should ensure that I have value."

"Remedy?" the woman asked, pausing in her movements around the room, folding her hands behind her back in thought for a moment before lifting one hand up to point a finger at the ceiling. "Ah! You must mean the Quaranteam serum that you aided in the development of."

Adam internally was livid. He'd single-handedly given them a viable treatment and management tool to keep DuoHalo from decimating society, and they hadn't even had the common courtesy to name it after him? True, he had defected from them and fled the United States, but there was no reason for Doctor Marcos to be petulant about it all.

"Yes, we know you had a hand in establishing that tincture for the Americans, but they are in the process of distributing it worldwide now," the woman told him, her voice condescending and amused all at once. "They are even making the formula itself public information, so that other countries can begin manufacturing it themselves. Within a matter of months, the whole world will be inoculated with this serum. And you, Doctor McCallister, you will be relegated to the level of a minor footnote in the ledger of history, if they are even so kind as to leave you in the tale at all."

Adam frowned. The woman was playing on the one weakness he could admit to himself that he possessed - ego. But even still, the case was compelling, in that it would be a chance for him to tell his own story on his own terms. "You aren't with the Americans

or

the Russians, so who are you? At the very least, I need something to call you," he said.

"Then you may call me Elle," the woman said.

"Like the letter L or Elle as in short for Elaine or Eleanor or-"

"Pick one," she replied, cutting him off. He hated when people cut him off. If he had been done talking, he would have

stopped

talking.

"Fine," he did his best not to spit back. "Elle then. What do you want to know?"

"Before we get started, ladies?"

A woman from either side of the room moved over to him and began adjusting his constraints. His arms had each been attached to the frame of the uncomfortable metal chair he'd been sat in for hours, and the women moved them so they were shackled together in front of him twice over, the links of the two pairs of handcuffs locked to the center of the table. At least his arms were elevated, he supposed.

But then he saw one of the two women set a box down onto the table, and he winced as she opened it. Inside was a syringe and a small bottle of blue liquid. "What the hell is that?"

"It's one of our little house cocktails. Sodium pentothol mixed with a few other relaxants, stimulants and intoxicants of our own blend," Elle said as she said down opposite him. He could see her face clearly for the first time now, a Caucasian woman in her late forties or early fifties, brunette, attractive without being overwhelmingly so, her nose looking as though it had been broken at least once in her lifetime. She had dark brown eyes the color of the earth he thought she would bury him beneath, once she was through with him. "It will help you be comfortable and also be... shall we say more forthcoming about your story."

"What possible motive to do I have to lie to you?" Adam grumbled, as he felt one of the two other women bring his vein to the surface then inject him with a very strong dose of the blue substance, which he immediately felt the effects of. The liquid had entered his bloodstream like ice, but was starting to warm up quickly, as he felt his body being drained of tension, a polite and pleasant fog settling in over his brain, sapping him of his will to manipulate or bend the truth.

"To you, Doctor McCallister, there may be little difference between lying through intent and lying through omission, but I intend to make certain that all the information I want to have at my disposal is provided to me in a timely and efficient manner," Elle said. "Now, tell me of your youth..."

* * * * *

My name is Adam Livingston McCallister. I was born on the Fourth of July, in the year of our Lord, 1968, and this is the story of both myself and my life's work.

I grew up the youngest of three children. My father, Doctor Alexander McCallister, was a renowned cardiovascular surgeon in the Hamptons, and my mother, Doctor Irina Miele McCallister, was one of the leading pharmaceutical researchers for the Naxxon Group, whom I am certain you have heard of. They were acquired by Brand Pharmaceuticals in 2015.

As the youngest, and the only male child, I was often lectured about how I needed to set a better example than my sisters, Celeste and Vivian, who were allowed to run rampant and do whatever they wanted. Celeste was seven years my elder and Vivian five, so they regarded me as the baby of the family, and while I looked up to them greatly when I was younger, in retrospect I felt like they often despised me for reasons I have never understood.

My father died when I was seven under shall we say scandalous circumstances. It would be years before I would learn the entirety of the story, but when I was in college I was able to piece it all together. Apparently my father had been having an affair with a married woman named January Janty, and one night they had been traveling from the bar to their cottage they had bought in the countryside, their little love nest away from their respective families. They had both had too much to drink, and so she had decided to fellate him while he drove them to their private abode, but the car hit a slippery patch of ice on that December evening and it slid off a bridge and down into a ravine, killing both of them instantly. The coroner's report included the grisly detail that my father's severed penis had been discovered inside of Mrs. Janty's mouth, a detail I did not need to be exposed to and therefore I expose you to it as well. I was once told by a therapist that by sharing trauma with others we loosen the sway it holds over us as individuals, but I have yet to find that to be true.

The scandal of the story destroyed the reputations of both my family and the Jantys, and we were shunned from the high society we had grown up within. We relocated out of the Hamptons down to New York City proper, where my mother and sisters attempted to reinvent themselves, doing their best to become upper class citizens among the crowd where the scandal hopefully would not follow.

It took its time, but eventually, word got around. The upper crust of the Manhattan elite, however, seemed much more willing to dismiss the matter, and while it caused a minor kerfuffle when it came out, the shame was gone within weeks, not months or years. In fact, to some, it made my mother more desirable, more resilient, more appealing as an ally and confidant. The relocation had done its job of insulating my mother from my father's failings.

Still, my mother's anger over my father's unfaithfulness never dissipated, nor did it even fade all that much. It lingered as a stain upon her soul until her dying breath, and while I do not know what my mother's final words are, I would not be in the least surprised to find they were one last curse upon my father's spirit, or a prayer that she would not be reunited with him in the afterlife.

Because my mother could no longer take her wrath over my father's infidelity out on

him

, she transferred that wrath onto

me

growing up. My sisters followed in her footsteps, so from the age of seven onward, I was repeatedly told that I was worthless scum, just as my father had been, and that I would remain forever unworthy of love of any sort. Not just me, either, but all men, my mother would proselytize, were horrific, dishonorable creatures, and the world would be better off without all of us upon the planet's surface.

While she was able to keep from espousing these opinions too loudly in public, in private her drinking habits would consume her, and I spent many a week limping because she had belted me until I had finally blacked out from the pain, most times over a transgression as simple and minor as having left a toy out of place, or forgetting to close a window when I left a room. My sisters were of no aid, sometimes egging my mother on, sometimes accusing me of such falsehoods as to induce a beating on their behalf.

My father's legacy lived on in their hatred of me.

My mother had no interest in remarrying, and her career in pharmaceuticals was lucrative enough that the family's lavish lifestyle dwindled not one iota. She worked hard and kept busy, which was fine by me. The less I had to endure her misandry, the better, I decided.

As they grew older and left the house, both of my sisters came out as lesbians, something my mother seemed to embrace with great enthusiasm, as if it was one final fuck you to the patriarchal society in general, and my deceased father in specific. Their contempt for me has yet to fade, even all these years later.

By the time I was in high school, I had learned to manage my mother's tantrums, mostly through the process of avoidance. Were I not around to anger her, there would also be no me around to inflict damage upon. This meant that I immersed myself in my studies and school recreational activities as intensely as I possibly could.

In absence I found ablative armor.

My grades were excellent, far better than either of my sisters had ever achieved, so my mother could not hold poor scholastic performance over my head as a justification for her anger. I ingratiated myself well with the other students. Oh, I wouldn't say I cultivated much in the way of friendships, but I did everything I needed to in the quest to emancipate myself from my mother.

High school was, if anything, a holding pattern that I simply pushed myself through over time, and once I was past it, I never looked back. With my grades and extra curricular achievements, I was able to garner a scholarship to Stanford University, completely across the country, away from everyone and everything I had ever known. It would be a chance to reinvent myself, to be someone better, stronger, more interesting and more resistant to the harsh truths of the world. I would leave the East Coast, and with it, abandon the trappings that had suffocated my very sense of being, and be reborn among the freedom and lucidity of the West Coast.

Such was the plan, anyway.

Two utterly life shattering events happened in my freshman year of study at Stanford which complicated matter significantly. The first was meeting Eve Merriweather at a freshman mixer being held in the dorms. I was not doing particularly well in my attempts to find and make friends, simply because I was, I admit, socially inept.

I had survived through high school by functioning as a part of many groups without ever standing out from the herd in social regards. I had little interest in being in charge or leading groups, content to do my work and engage in conversation when someone approached me. I simply didn't venture forth to

start

conversations. This had given me, I suppose, a certain level of mystique in high school, a status of curiosity, and those who liked to acquire large numbers of acquaintances would simply see me as another tally on their scoreboard, and I would find myself involved in groups of people without so much as lifting a finger on my own.

My first few days at Stanford, I had attempted to fall back into familiar patterns. My hope had been that, just like as had happened in high school, my quiet mystery would draw in some of the more prevalent alpha individuals, and I would find myself folded into existing social strata before I knew it.

This was not to be the case.

At the mixer, I was engaging in very little mixing. I had by necessity started venturing out of my comfort zone, and begun initiating conversations with individuals, mostly at random, an attempt to seed the clouds, if you will, prime the pump and form a basis for others to build upon, but as it turned out, my skills in this regard were atrophied, assuming they were even there to begin with.

I was attempting to relate an anecdote from my high school days that had often functioned as an icebreaker, and when I hit the punchline, not a single person of the several gathered around me laughed. Not even so much as a smile. I was regarded by a sea of blank, uncomprehending faces, like a herd of dogs that had just been shown a card trick.

Just then, as I was contemplating ritual disembowelment as an escape route from this incredibly uncomfortable situation, a figure behind the row of blank faces began to laugh. It was her. Eve. She then explained quickly that the word "pop" was, in other parts of the country, used in lieu of the word "soda," and with that bit of information, the crux of the tale dawned on the others, who all started to laugh, as if beginning to come around, that crucial piece of information taking a moment to make the entire tale click inside their feeble minds.