Chapter One
Patient Zero
The whole thing was incredibly unlikely on a case by case basis. It is almost impossible for any given meteoroid to actually enter a planet's atmosphere. The vast majority of those will burn up in that atmosphere, never reaching the ground. So, the events that were precipitated by the Humbol meteor strike are totally far fetched. On the other hand, there are so many meteoroids in the galaxy that, from another perspective, the Humbol incident was inevitable. Regardless, the meteorite that struck near Humbol Arizona was unprecedented in its effects.
Jarod Michaels was a geek. The picture in the dictionary picture next to geek has his picture. Button down shirt, pocket protector, horn rimmed glasses, scientific calculator. Stereotypes are not something you should rely on, but there are enough people that fit any stereotype. Jarod was one such person. He had three computers, the laptop the only one he did not build himself. And he had no clue about women. I told you, he's a stereotype.
Jarod Michaels saw a bright streak flash across the sky, appearing to impact a mile or two north of town. Jarod had never found a meteorite before and was excited about the prospect of getting this one. He quickly put together a makeshift kit to recover it. Hopping into his VW, he drove out to where he thought the rock had landed. The hole was almost five feet deep, forming a trough eight feet long. Heat was still radiating from the impact site, heated by the meteorite that had been at several thousand degrees.
Jarod, having a very scientific mind, took pictures, measured the trough, took temperature readings and measured the angle that the rock had impacted the ground. It took an hour for the trough to cool enough for him to reach the meteorite. Like a scientist, he did not just hop down and pick it up, he used a long pair of tongs to grab it and put it in an aluminum box. The find was small, only seven inches across and weighed five pounds.
Jarod took the rock back to his house. It was still too warm to examine, so he logged his find on the national meteorite database via the internet, watched some CSI reruns on Spike TV and went to bed. In the morning, he went to work at the Blockbuster in Humbol. Entering the not yet open store at 10, he called out to the other employee there. "Hi Marie. How was your night?"
Marie Foster sighed, knowing she was about to engage in another exercise in futility. "Hi, Jarod. Last night was really lonely. I could have used some company."
"You should get a cat. I saw a sign at the Grange that they were giving away free kittens."
SLAM! Marie dropped the DVDs she was entering in as returned on the counter, her frustration showing. "Good grief! Do I have to ask him to fuck me in those exact words," she asked herself. "I've been trying to get him to notice me for months and he is so oblivious. I get more attention from my vibrator!"
Marie barely said a thing to Jarod for the rest of the shift. She had always thought that he was brilliant and funny and wanted to date him. She had been hinting for longer than she even knew, having been giving off signals unawares for twice as long as she had been dropping hints. The only person in town who did not know that Marie had the hots for Jarod was Jarod. The guys at Murphy's had a pool on how long it would take him to notice. The soonest date in the pool was 1 year, 3 months and 17 days from now. Most people considered that the equivalent of bidding $1 more than the highest bid on The Price is Right.
Once he got home, he began his investigation on the meteorite. Opening the box, he noticed that the rock was different. There was a green substance on the outside in one spot. Probing it with a exacto knife, he found that the substance was soft, almost plant like. He scraped some off and put it into a glass vial. He assumed that it was some fungal spores that had been picked up when it had plowed into the ground.
He took samples of the rock itself, from both the surface and from inside, using a coring drill. He had no doubt about what he would find. This was clearly a stony meteorite, no where near dense enough to be nickel iron. Needless to say, he was shocked when his drill broke through to a hollow center in the stone. Extracting the core, he saw more green on the inside edge. He scraped off the green and placed it in a second vial.
What Jarod could not see were the spores that he had released, both from the surface scraping and from the inside. The two spore bursts were from two halves of an alien bacterial fungi that had been drifting in space since the destruction of their home planet millions of years ago. Any one of them would have been harmless, but the two combined in his lungs to complete the reproductive cycle of the bacteria. The bacteria found itself in an alien environment, threatened by defenses that did not exist where it had evolved. If not for one thing, it would have died within hours and Jarod's meteorite would have simply been another curiosity sitting on some mantel somewhere.
Finishing his collections, he got online and scheduled time at the environmental research lab where he did computer work in exchange for lab time after hours. He would be able to perform tests on the materials he found night after tomorrow night after work. He had a small asthma attack while he was doing that, and took a hit from his inhaler. Dinner and bed followed.
A war was going on in Jarod's body while he slept. It actually started when the spores first entered his body. His immune system recognized that the bacterial spores were an invader and moved quickly to knock them out. Trapped in an alien environment, the extra terrestrial bacteria was fighting a losing battle. Then, the one thing happened. Jarod's lungs were flooded with albuterol. The asthma medicine induced rapid growth in the bacteria, with the accompanying increase in random mutation. For a while, it was reproducing faster than his immune response could kill it. Like all mutational processes, the vast majority were unsuccessful, dying quickly. But chance produced a mutation that could survive in a human body, invisible to the defenses.
As the night progressed, the bacteria spread throughout the body. The period of rapid growth and mutation passed. There was an impasse in the war. The bacteria survived, but could not spread. Its attempts to form spore growths had been lost in the mutational process. It looked for ways to escape the body. Now don't misunderstand. It was not sentient, but unlike earth bacteria, it was capable of acting as a whole, towards a purpose. At first, it simply did what all life attempted, to spread out. It invaded the various areas of the body where fluids excreted in some way. Its big problem was that it could not survive outside of the body for more than a minute of so. To spread, it would have to find a way to be transmitted to another body directly.
Over the course of the night, Jarod was concerned that he was getting sick. He had to get up several times in the middle of the night for various bodily functions that seemed to go out of control. The bacteria tried to organize itself in his mouth, discovering that he had a tendency to sleep with his mouth open. The constant inhaling of air killed off every bacteria that was there. The same happened with his nose. They successfully settled into his sweat glands, but that would prove to be an unsuccessful means of spreading, since sweat was almost never transmitted directly from body to body, interiorly. The bladder and rectal areas were also busts, for while they were safe havens with exits, the efficiency of modern plumbing wrecking that avenue of spread.
But, the testicals, that was different. Protected from external contamination, once used as intended, the bacteria would be transmitted directly from one body to another. Of course, the bacteria could not know this, but it did not need to. The bacteria provoked excretory responses in Jarod all night. For him, this meant numerous trips to the can for little or no productive activity, and a raging hard on that caused him to masturbate more than once over the night. From that activity, the bacterial colony was able to identify the portions of Jarod's brain that controlled sexual function. The bacteria in those portions found that it could stimulate some of these areas to noticeable effect, while others seemed to be immune. For Jarod, this meant that the bacteria could arouse him and make him horny (not the same thing, by a long shot). This would make for an interesting time at work tomorrow.
Marie had a frustrated night herself. Not because of a bacteria infection from space, but from the unmet desire for a certain geek. She rolled in bed, unable to sleep. Her body was flushed and her mind stuck on Jarod Michaels. Her breasts were sensitive and her pussy was damp. She moaned in her sleep, dreaming of being taken by Jarod in the throes of passion. She woke in the morning with her hand between her legs, covering in her own juice, smelling of sex. She was most definitely not rested.
Marie and Jarod worked the same day shifts at Blockbuster for different reasons. Marie was a gamer. She spent Friday nights and Saturday afternoons with seven other people using dice, paper and small plastic figurines, pretending to be heroes in a fantasy world of dragons, giants and demons. Jarod liked his weekend nights because that was when all the really good shows were on. You know the ones, Stargate SG1, Stargate Atlantis, Battlestar Galactica, The Dresden Files, and the Farscape reruns. So five days a week, Marie would drop a hint that she was interested in Jarod and each day, it would sail over his head, unnoticed. Today would be different.
Jarod woke with his cock hard as a rock, painfully so. He took a cold shower to try to ease the problem. Having relieved himself more than once last night, he was incredibly sore and dreading another go at himself. He also found his mind stuck on an unfamiliar subject for long periods of time, sex. Not that he never thought of sex before, he was a guy after all. But for him, the near constant mania about sex was unusual. He went through his morning routine and arrived at Blockbuster at five after ten.
