Pandemic

Chapter two, like chapter one, is slowly building up the relationship between the main characters, and while there is some erotic play, they still haven't had sex yet. Sorry, this story just asks a bit more of my characters than instant copulation.

Your comments and feedback are much appreciated, otherwise I never know what I could have done better. Chapter three will take me a few more days to edit, so there may be a bit longer break before that gets posted. Cheers, ~A

*

David woke slowly, changes in his surroundings slowly making themselves known. Possibly the most important was someone lying in the cot he normally would have slept in--how long had it been since he fell asleep in a chair? The handcuffs locking the girl's wrists to the steel tubing above her head and her feet together at the foot shoved him all the way awake... at which point he recognized the girl lying there.

"Oh, Anna," he murmured quietly, rising from his chair with a stiffness he had not dealt with in a decade. On second thought he grabbed the chair and rolled it over to the bed. He went first for his stockpile of gloves, pulling two from the box marked L. "This was why I didn't want you staying," he muttered, continuing his mental diatribe aloud every so often as he checked her over.

It took him a moment to realize she was wearing one of his spare t-shirts, and from the look of the thin blanket covering her legs, not much else. "What happened to you?" he asked the unconscious woman, wishing he could make an answer materialize by will alone.

Her wrists were unmarked save for a crease where they had been pressed against the handcuffs and the steel edge had been imprinted in her skin. He was about to check the blood at her neck when she shifted. Only slightly, but her head definitely moved, and the cuffs made a quiet scraping sound against the steel bed frame. "Anna?"

The tiniest of groans parted her dry lips; her eyes flickered then slitted open. "David?" she questioned, sounding half-asleep.

"Yes, I'm here, Anna."

He was about to say more when she moved her hand, jerking when the unexpected handcuff brought her up short. Her eyes widened, the situation abruptly registering, then she closed her eyes tightly, shaking her head. She appeared to be attempting to wake up from the nightmare--he was wishing something similar--but David's brain told him it was no dream.

"I'm sorry," he added.

"Me too," was the tiny reply. Her eyes were closed tighter than necessary to block out sight, and it pained him to see her in anguish, though he only had that small sign of it. But even with her eyes shut, a tear managed to sneak out and roll down her cheek.

"I warned you," he begged, on the verge of crying himself, hand lightly on the edge of the bed, wanting to touch her, but knowing he could not.

"I know. It's not your fault." She looked wrecked, though he had trouble deciding if it were from the blood loss or the shock.

But David still felt guilty. He should have kicked her out when Chloe and Samantha arrived. Sent her someplace safe. "Has the bleeding stopped?"

"I hope so," Anna replied, turning her head so he could view the blood across her collarbone. "From what Chloe told me, I nearly bled out." There was no emotion in her voice, just quiet reflection. "Help me, David, please..." she whispered, her voice just barely reaching his ears.

He could have cost her her life. "What time was this?"

"A little after 3:30, I think. I apparently had the presence of mind to lock the computer I was working at, so there was a timestamp. The girls cleaned me up as best they could, then left me here."

David looked at his watch. "That's awfully fast to heal that much," he commented, using a gloved finger to check her collarbone for an actual wound, rather than just the dried blood.

Anna frowned, blinking, then after a moment her expression cleared. "3 AM," she whispered. "That's why they haven't administered the vaccine. Our supply was compromised." They both knew that treating someone after the first twelve hours was ninety percent useless.

"What?" burst from him. He double-checked his watch, which still read 5:37 PM, and then turned his attention back to her with another topic on his mind. "I slept fourteen hours?"

She winced slightly. "Actually I think you fell asleep closer to two." He stared at her, making her drop her eyes. He had been unable to sleep that long in years... since before he could remember. Anna squirmed in his silence, eyes not lifting from the edge of the mattress she lay on.

"What is it?" he prompted, knowing a guilty look when he saw one.

"I, ah... I drugged you."

"What?" he burst out again. "With what? How much? You don't have the training to know what it could do, Anna!"

Her wince turned into a sigh, but she did look up at this. "Ambien, five milligrams, and it was a calculated risk. You hadn't slept since you got here, David," she pleaded. "I didn't know what else to do."

He fumed silently that this girl had dared drug him during an epidemic of this nature. There was so much more at stake here than she knew. "You could've just asked," he pointed out.

A dry laugh was his immediate answer. "Yeah, we both know how that would've gone," she accused quietly, eyes falling shut wearily. "It seemed like I didn't have other options."

"Couldn't you have tried to come up with something else, then?"

Her cheeks flushed slightly, practically flaming in comparison; her eyes remained closed. "When we met you made it pretty clear I'm too young for you," she began, and would clearly have been fidgeting if she were not already restricted. "So my options were limited. I ran out of ideas."

David groaned aloud, putting his face in one hand, unable to look at her for a moment. This intelligent young woman with similar interests and such expressive brown eyes... she really thought he did not want her? Their age difference was greater than she realized, but the images pouring into his head made it obvious that at least his body couldn't care less.

"Sorry," she mumbled. "You asked."

It took every ounce of his self-control to raise his head and look her in the eye. "I did," he agreed quietly, afraid speaking at a normal volume might betray his weakened self-control.

She met his eye this time, and a smile spread across her face. "Something tells me you're not out of ideas," she commented, a tiny amount of her customary sarcasm dripping into her voice as one corner of her mouth quirked upwards. "May even have too many of them just now, I'd imagine."

He could strangle her just then. He wanted her like no other, and he could never touch her again. She was out of his reach forever. "I wouldn't press like that if I were you," he growled, glaring at her, angrier for his lack of control than because of her flirting. "Might get what you ask for." Then he kicked himself. That sounded almost like an invitation, and that had not been his intention... had it? This was no time for his body to betray him, but the imaginative scenarios involving her naked in his bed just kept coming.

To his surprise, she shrank away from his glare, making him frown. It wasn't like he was really angry at her, but she looked positively frightened. "What's wrong?"

"You... you're one of them," she whispered, her closer hand tugging at the cuff that bound it.

"What? Of course not." What had given her an idea like that? "What's the matter?" When she frowned, eyes still fixed on his face as if she had seen a ghost, he added, "What did you see?"

That made her blink and shy away from his gaze. "Your eyes," she told him, voice still a shaky whisper. "There's something... I don't know. A silver gleam, and then your eyes were a different brown. Reddish brown, and golden, too."

He turned his head away, closing his eyes. He didn't know how she had seen what she did, but he needed to put it to rights before one of his assistants walked in and noticed. "Is that better?" he asked, turning back to her.

She nodded, though she did not relax at all. "What are you, if not one of them?"

David sighed. "I'm something else, Anna, and that's all I can say." That didn't reassure her, and he was not surprised. It hardly resembled an answer that could be neatly tucked away and forgotten. Looking away from her gaze, he saw the bloodwork results that one of his aides must have run for him, and it gave him an excuse to continue looking anywhere but at Anna. He flipped through the three pages, seeing nothing surprising until he reached the last page. The result was normal, but the comments section noted '13 hours, no marks on pt'. That wasn't possible...

He looked over at his patient, and true enough, he didn't see any markings. Grabbing a new pair of gloves, he replaced the ones on his hands. "Let me see your wrists," he ordered, reaching out to quickly run fingers around both of her wrists before she could shrink away. Over halfway through her transition, and no mark? Unbelievable.

"What's the matter?" she asked, face betraying her worry as he checked her wrists for the second time.

He grabbed a nearby box of alcohol swabs and ripped open one packet to start cleaning the dried blood away from her collarbone. "You don't have the mark."

Her eyes widened, though any attempts to check for herself were useless. At this point she could probably rattle off the transitory symptoms as well as he, and they both knew that the virus took twelve hours or less to sweep through the entire system, and once that happened there were blackened bruises visible at places where veins were near the surface of the skin, such as the wrists. "You're sure?"

"Yes," he replied quietly, tearing open a third alcohol pad to clean up the last of the blood. "No marks at all," he concluded, finding nothing beneath the smeared blood but a small freckle.

"How is that possible?" she prompted, all earlier fear of him gone in favor of self-preservation. "What's wrong with me?"

"I think..." he began, then stopped. "There's nothing wrong with you, Anna. I think you're not like the others here... it's hardly probable, but I think the source of this virus was here." His thoughts raced. If the Source of the depraved ranks had been here, why was he still alive? Had he been so deeply asleep that the man couldn't sense him? It was just as hard to believe as the unmarked girl before him, wide eyes falling shut as she yawned. "I need to run more blood work," he muttered, grabbing the sheets of lab results again and rising, buried in the pages.

"No, don't!" she cried, startling him into his seat again. "Sorry," she winced. "Please don't leave me, David." Her eyes told him more than her plea, though that in itself was shocking enough. He hadn't thought she was the type to ask for anything. She reached for his hand, but he jerked away.

Just a small movement, but the pain it caused was visible in her eyes. "I'm sorry, Anna."

"What's the matter?" she asked quietly. For a moment he thought he saw a tear in her eye, but she closed them too fast for him to be sure.

The matter? How could he explain? He was supposed to let the mortals keep to their set path... but then he realized she was already off her path. And it was not his fault, that could be laid at the feet of the Depraved. "You asked what I am," he started slowly, glancing at the curtain to the main lab and pausing long enough to make sure none of his patients or assistants were close enough to overhear. "I'm not one of them, but like them, my body is... toxic... to yours. That we share in common." He was unsure how to explain to a mortal, he had never had the chance to. But he needed to do something, he had obviously hurt her. "Any fluids that carry my DNA... oils or sweat." He rubbed his fingers together. "Saliva is stronger," he continued, nodding at the place where the evidence of a bite had disappeared altogether. "And blood even more so," he finished with a sigh.

Basics accomplished, he did not know where to go from there, but just plunged ahead anyway. "You're one of the few I've ever met who could stand the touch of my skin, Anna, the majority can't. And to those like the one that bit you, my skin would be corrosive. A single touch would burn through them like acid. I don't want to hurt you..."

Having listened carefully, Anna turned her head away, and he desperately wanted to hug her close. He had grown more than fond of her in just three days.

"Chloe was quite upset," David told her quietly, trying to find something that might make her smile. "Once I'd explained she understood, but she asked me several times why I had to revel in your touch..." he trailed off. That was not what he had meant to say, was it?

Anna twisted back to face him, cuffed wrists clinking against the steel bed frame. "What?" she whispered, eyes wide.

Damn. David winced. "I can't tell you how much it means, even such a simple thing as contact," he replied at the same volume, hand rising from his lap before he had realized it, but he forced it back down.

"I'm beginning to get an idea," she replied, eyes dropping to his gloved hands and then rising back to his face. The sympathy and sadness in her gaze hit him like a punch to the stomach, and he looked away. "Even with gloves?" she murmured after a moment of silence had passed.

"They don't last long," he told her, looking down at his hands. He could already see the places where the plastic had thinned at his fingertips and the pads of his palm. David stripped them off and threw them in the nearby barrel. "Acid isn't a bad comparison."

This time she had tears in her eyes when he finally met them. Again he started to reach out to her, only to cut himself short and watch a tear slide down her face. "I don't want to live like this," she whispered. "Either I wind up like them..." There was no need to specify who 'they' were. "Or I'm left stranded as one of the survivors of the modern Plague. I don't even know if I will survive." He refrained from commenting, knowing that his cure was unlikely to work on her if she were first-generation as he suspected. "David," she called, moving her elbow to bump against his knee and get his attention. "David, I would rather die happy than the alternative. Please."

He had trouble dragging his gaze away from her pleading eyes, but he desperately wanted to. "Anna, I..."

"Please."

If he could have looked away, perhaps he could have said no. But he could do neither. She had as much as told him she would have brought him to her bed if she believed her age were not a stumbling block for them--which his mind promptly reminded him was ridiculous--and he had wanted her for some time, more even than he cared to admit to himself. Dreading what would happen, he slowly reached out and laid first his fingertips and then his whole hand on her cheek. "I'm sorry it turned out like this," he told her, almost inaudible.

She opened her mouth to reply, but then frowned. "David?"

"Hmm?" he asked before he realized his hand was still on her cheek, and hers had joined it, cradling his without the slightest hesitation.

He pulled away, eyes widening. "You don't have a mark... still. Did you feel anything?"

"Not besides you, no." Her forehead wrinkled in confusion.

Trembling, he reached out to brush hair out of her face with timid fingertips. His glance asked the same question, and her answering head shake gave the same reply. Sliding his hand back to where it had been, both of them were robbed of speech. Finally it was David who spoke. "What are you?" he asked her, wishing he had even an impossible idea of how this was possible.

Her worried frown was all that answered him.

"That's it," he decided, pulling away reluctantly. "I'm taking you somewhere safer than this to figure out what's going on." He rose and moved to the curtain, which he pulled aside to call to his nearest assistant. "Chloe, pack up my kit, will you?" Not leaving her time to argue or question, he returned to Anna, rummaging in his pockets. He was unlocking the handcuffs when Chloe entered with the fishing tackle box that served him as a field kit.

"What are you doing?" the woman gasped.

"I'm taking her to the ICU. She's still unmarked, yet she's healed herself completely."

This statement was enough to make the woman gape at him silently for awhile, but not enough to completely dispel her objections. "You can't bring her there without restraints, David, please! It's not logical, no matter what's going on." Her mistrust was beyond blatant in the gaze she leveled at the younger woman in the bed.

David stopped, sighing, only having freed one of Anna's wrists from the bed. "Fine," he declared at last, unlocking the second cuff from the bed frame instead and clasping it around Anna's free wrist.

When he started unlocking his patient's feet, Chloe butted in again. "She has to be bound, David. You might lose her otherwise."

Only a glance at David's ire kept Anna from jumping into the argument in defense of herself. David had no such control. "That's ridiculous, Chloe. She wants to know what's going on just as much as I do."

"I don't care. It's only proper that you lock her feet just as you do every other patient we get in here. You can't know how she'll react in an hour or three... she could be just as insane as the others soon."

A growl came from the man, but Chloe stood firm. After a minute of vicious staring contest, he sighed, unwrapping the cuffs from about the foot of the bed, finally clicking them around Anna's ankles. "Satisfied?" he shot at Chloe.

"Hardly," she butted back, but she did set the field kit on the ground and return to the main part of their work area.

Seeing Anna's yawn, David's annoyance melted into a smile. "Perhaps it's for the best, anyhow. You look like you'd fall asleep on your feet."

*

Anna stirred only slightly as the car stopped, and barely noticed when David opened the passenger door and did his best to smoothly pick her up and out of the car. With her head on his shoulder he quickly carried her towards the house, kicking the door open rather than bother with the doorknob. He could fix it later... this was a bit more important.

"David?" she murmured as he lay her in his bed, unlocking her handcuffs to restrain her once more.

"We're here," he replied quietly, brushing a stray strand of hair out of her face and enjoying the chance to touch her... maybe Chloe's word choice of 'revel' had not been as far off as he had thought at the time.

"This isn't the ICU," she accused when her eyes opened.

He smirked a little. "I only told Chloe that so she wouldn't try to stop me. This is my house. The ICU wouldn't know what to do if I brought you there."

"So you just decided to chain me to your bed?" There was some humor in her voice, but it sounded a bit forced.

"Lucky me," David replied, trying to follow her lead. "Shame, I think I got rid of my fuzzy handcuffs..." Her eyes widened so fast he burst out laughing, and she joined in a moment later. "Chloe did have a point about me not knowing what you might be like in an hour, but I don't think I need to worry." She looked about to question him, so he sat on the edge of the bed and stroked her cheek. "I've been doing this awhile. Just trust me?"

"I do. Just keep thoughts about bondage to yourself next time, hmm?" The humor was a little less forced this time, and she had a smile on her face that did not seem to care how tired she was.

David's eyes roved up and down her body once, then he bit his lip. "Sorry. It's hard with you in chains and all. Not exactly how I would've liked to get you in bed, I can say that much."

She blushed furiously, surprising him. He had thought she had lost too much blood for that. Maybe there was hope for her after all.

"There are a couple tests I'd like to try, to see how far this has progressed. Can you make sure you're locked? I don't want you braining me." Because his thoughts were getting dirtier, his conscience informed him. He deserved to get punched.