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Quarantine Zone

Prologue:

-Diaspora

Everyone knows which side of a quarantine they wanna be on. When my iPhone buzzed an emergency warning saying that a bomb had been set off in downtown Los Banos my survival instinct instantly kicked into overdrive. I scrambled around our three-person apartment throwing everything that had any worth into whatever boxes I could find.

"I get that you want to move out on our own soon," my fiance Connor said calmly, sipping his coffee, "But don't you think we should look at some places before we start to pack?"

"Didn't you get the alert?!" I shouted, tying my hair back into a ponytail as I scurried around. "A fucking bomb went off downtown! Where's the packing tape?"

He pointed to the laundry room. "Yeah, I got it. No casualties. And it was like three miles away anyway. They should really save those alerts for -- Hey, don't pack those shoes up, I need them for dinner tonight."

"No casualties? Doesn't that seem suspicious to you?" I ran over and grabbed his hand to show I was serious "It's a dirty bomb. We have to leave."

He sighed a half-scoff and set down his coffee mug. "A dirty bomb? Of what, the plague? You do realize there haven't been any reported cases outside of Africa, right?"

I looked him straight in the eyes. "Yes, the plague. We got a memo down at the station warning about a possible terrorist attack." He froze, processing the information. I shot off to our bedroom and started haphazardly tossing our personal belongings into some boxes from our last Costco trip. Plague Z was unlike anything the world had ever seen before, and even people who tended to write off media coverage on pandemics as 'hype' were glued to their TV sets to witness its effects. Those infected suffered permanent mutations of their bodies, and every time the victim would end up as some misfigured combination of animal and human. The actual species of animal that each victim took after was seemingly completely random, and wasn't determined by environment at all. One of the first victims, Keepja Entandwa, famously grew an udder, tail, and cow's head, leading to the occasional nickname of the 'Minotaur Disease.'

Connor quickly got to task helping me gather our more prized possessions and a few essentials. "We can't fit too much into the car. We're going to have to leave your grandmother's hope chest behind." I stopped packing the silverware and hovered over the heavy piece of furniture with him.

"Unacceptable," I said "it's a family heirloom. It absolutely has to come."

"Unacceptable? Look, Amy dear we don't have much choice."

I grabbed a pair of keys from the soap dish near the door and dangled them in front of him. "We take Violet's truck."

"She's at work. We'll have to wait until tonight and try to convince her," he said, slumping back down on the couch.

I had the feeling he wasn't taking the situation as seriously as me. "No way. She works at Wells Fargo like one block from ground zero." I pulled Connor off the couch and grabbed his face with my hands, forcing him to look away from the TV. "We're going to steal the Ford and get the fuck out of here right now. You have to trust me."

He took a moment and nodded slowly. "Okay. If you're sure. . . But you owe me big time for going along with this."

It was, to this day, one of the biggest risks we ever took, and it wasn't easy. It was all the stress of moving condensed down into a single day, plus the worrying that maybe I was overreacting, and maybe I'd get caught for grand theft auto. But I wasn't about to be locked into a quarantine with a disease where everyone who gets infected turns into a monster for life. And that's the best case scenario. Depending on the available care, the plague was fatal to somewhere between 1/10th and 1/3rd of those infected. Sometimes people would drown on dry land as their lungs were replaced with gills. Others couldn't figure out what their new diets demanded and accidentally poisoned themselves or starved to death. Combine that with the infrastructural damage and catastrophic social and economic effects in the afflicted areas and you had a real shit show on your hands.

"All loaded up." Connor grunted, slamming the back of the pickup into position. "You sure about this?"

I hopped into the cab and turned the key. The engine reluctantly turned over and came to life. "Stop asking stupid questions, honey. Get in." We drove West, into the face of El Nino, and didn't stop until we had made it into the heart of Los Angeles. Helicopters buzzed over our motel room that night, and half our fears and uncertainties were put to rest when a quarantine zone was announced over the afflicted area. We had escaped. Now we were free to patch up our lives and start over.

That should have been the end of it.

Chapter 1:

-Alone

** 10 Months Later **

"Hi I'm Steve Inskeep and this is Morning Edition on NPR. For the first time since the network collapsed in the Los Banos quarantine, survivors will be able to contact their friends and loved ones via the phone or 3G internet. This new development is helping federal CDC workers ascertain the extent of the damage and aid needs in the first and perhaps worst-off of the three major quarantines on the west coast. Initial reports seem to indicate that as much as 98% of the original population has been infected, and there is approximately a 15% mortality rate. Of course an extremely large portion of those infected have been unable to return to work, and we're just starting to get a look at what day to day life looks like inside after complete social and economic collapse. Joining us on the show today is Kent Bronson from Palantir, who is here to talk about how his software is helping the government and citizens track just what's happening inside the hot zone. . . "

The radio stopped abruptly as I pulled the keys from the new car and gathered my groceries from the back. Life in LA had been entirely bearable. We had managed to pick up some basic service-industry jobs before our savings ran out, and now we had our own low-income apartment and even an old Honda Civic that we shared. Sure we weren't where we had been before, but I think it's safe to say we'd gotten a new lease on life as well, and even the tedium of our new occupations wasn't enough to depress us.

I walked up the stairs to our apartments. I remember wearing a light new sun dress and sandals that I had picked up from the consignment shop. It was the kinda day that made you wonder who decided it would be a good idea to build such a huge city in place where you had to slather yourself with spf 100 sunscreen and wear a hat and sunglasses just to take a stroll around the block. I gingerly opened the door and made a B-line for the swamp cooler.

"Con-man I'm home!" I shouted, gathering my bags and heading to the kitchen. He must have been in the bathroom. "You can't leave the door unlocked like that. Someone's gunna break in here one of these days. You know there are crooks just go from apartment to apartment looking for ones that are unlocked right?" I finished sorting the groceries away and plopped down on the couch, exhausted. Working tech support wasn't very physical, but it was damn exhausting. I poured a couple glasses of Pinot Noir and switched on How it's Made. The narrator's drone always put me to ease. Today he was talking about how hazmat suits were made.

About twenty minutes into the show, and a couple glasses of wine deep, I decided to do some investigating as to Connor's whereabouts. I knocked and cracked the bathroom door. Sure enough he wasn't there after all. I called his cell. No answer. I figured he must be working overtime or something, so I put some Mac and Cheese on the stove and plopped back down onto the couch. Before I knew what happened, I had fallen asleep. I awoke to the smell of burning pasta, and quickly stumbled over to the stove by the light of the "are you still watching?" Netflix screen. The sun had set, and I groggily combed the house for any sign of my fiance. There wasn't any.

I was reaching for my phone to call his work, when the screen lit up with an incoming call. "Connor would like to Facetime. . ." it buzzed. I froze. Gone was the warm, relaxing SoCal day. Now I was cold; the swamp cooler had done its job too well. It smelled weird, and the room was silent save the vibrating sound the phone was making. Suddenly, I felt very, very alone, and very vulnerable.

I reached a shaky hand out to the phone and answered the call, being sure to point the phone away from me. The screen was black, as though someone was holding their finger over the camera. "Hello?"

A raspy sort of feminine voice answered, "Hey there my dearest love. . ." it certainly wasn't my fiance.

"Who is this?"

"Oh what, you don't recognize my voice? Maybe my face will do it." The screen lit up with the unmistakable face of a plague victim. It seemed to be a cross between human and hyena, with coarse yellow fur framing a bald, black half-muzzle. A pair of large, pointed ears twitched expressively as her powerful mouth twisted into a bestial smile. Her teeth looked like they could bite through bone, and she probably could.

"Violet?" I asked, stunned.

"Holy fuck the bitch got it!" She yelped, muzzle cracking into all too large of a smile. "Let's give her a round of applause!" Clapping and jeering could be heard from off camera.

"Where's Connor?" I asked. It was my first time talking directly to a plague victim. She didn't seem sick from her attitude, though. She seemed healthy, active, and more than a little pissed.

"Oh I don't know. . ." She mused fakely, ears twisting around on her head as she looked to the ceiling. "How about where's my fucking truck!?"

"I. . . I don't know what happened to--" I stammered.

"Bullshit!" She yelped, looking straight into my eyes from wherever she was. "You and half the cops in the city jumped town the moment that bomb went off. Not so much as a word of warning to us."

"Violet, I'm sorry I --"

"You're damn fucking straight you're sorry! You know I wouldn't even be pissed except you didn't even leave me the keys to your own fucking car!" She giggled a very unsettling chuckle. "You know what happens when half the cops up and leave a town, and the rest of 'em either die or can't leave their homes? You know what happens when you put a damn wall around a town that's sick and just ignore us except the occasional drop of supplies a few times a month?"

"Anarchy." I muttered.

"You're damn right, anarchy. You know how useful a truck is in an apocalyptic scenario? Haven't you ever seen Mad Max?" She handed the camera off to someone I couldn't see and stepped away, revealing the extent of her mutations. Perhaps the most obvious change was just how stocky and strong she looked. She had a barrel-chest with characteristically strong looking neck and shoulders. She bipedal still, although her legs seemed to be mostly hyena-esque, and I could hear her claws clicking on the concrete as she walked. A short tail that wagged about behind her, and her skin was either tan with black spots or covered in fur.

"You, uh, look pretty healthy, Violet." I said, ignoring the urge to mention her alterations. "Where are you? Where's Connor?"

"Yeah healthy," she said ignoring my questions. "A healthy freak! How do you like the new me?" She turned around dramatically, giving me the full 360 view. She had kept her human breasts, which were just as sizable as they had ever been. They were capped with large black nipples, and a tuft of fur rested in her cleavage. That's when my eyes wandered down south and I got a very unexpected lesson in Hyena anatomy.

The picture was blurry, but I could see a cock and balls between her legs as clear as day. "Is that. . . a cock? You grew a cock?"

She smiled that big nasty smile of hers again. "Oh yeah. Well, sort of. First thing I did when we got internet back (before I looked you up and kidnapped Connor) was do a little research on Hyenas." The cameraman handed her back the phone and she brought it up close to her junk.

"Wait, you kidnapped Connor!?"

"Now you see," she began, gesturing with one paw-like hand "it's not actually a penis. It's my clit." It looked to be about eight to ten inches long. Pretty big. It wobbled about as she lifted it up and let it drop. "It's a bit less sensitive than it was before, but really it's better that way. Now I can wear pants if I want, not that I ever do. These balls," She cupped her sizable scrotum, moving her shaft out of the way so I could see the spotted, furry sack. "Aren't actually balls at all. It's just a pouch of fat that looks like balls. Weird evolution thing, I guess. I'm no biologist. It's super fun to bounce them around. . ."

I wanted to ask about my fiance, but I was transfixed and stunned. I just gazed into my phone, half forgetting where I was. "Uh huh."

"My pee hole here is still my peehole. It runs up my cock just like a real man's." she squeezed her hand up the length of her coal-black hyena clit, causing a bead of. . . something to form at the top. "And I can get an erection just like a guy too. I can even maintain it, which I something I'm not sure that real hyenas can do. Here let me show you." Slowly she started stroking her length up and down, and sure enough it started to stand up and throb just like I'd seen Connor's do so many times. She was definitely more of a shower than a grower, but it was still a huge cock by human standards. I had heard that the plague tended to sort of focus in and accentuate the sexual parts of the afflicted. "Oh yeah that's the ticket." she moaned.

"Where's Connor?" I shouted at the phone, feeling helpless.

"Oh him." She paused and redirected the camera up to her face and then tapped the screen, switching it into forward-view. Connor was sitting on a chair in the middle of what looked like a basement. He was blindfolded, and restrained. There was a red ball-gag in his mouth, and he was naked. He could probably hear our conversation. "He's going to help me demonstrate the rest of my changes."

"Don't you lay a fucking paw on him you bitch!"

Violet handed the phone off to someone I couldn't see again and stepped into the shot. "Bitch! That's funny. Like a dog. Actually Hyenas aren't canine at all. Just a bit of trivia I learned today; I was wondering why I didn't have super-smell or something." She stepped over to Kevin and stroked his shoulder with a paw. Connor shook and struggled in vain. "Although speaking of smell, I have found that I do have a certain. . . effect on men." She reached a clawed finger to the tip of her psuedopenis and gathered a droplet of her natural lubricant. Then she brought her paw up beneath my poor fiance's nose. His writhing and struggling slowed and stopped, and he craned his neck forward, trying to smell more of whatever it was. Violet appeased him by wiping it off right beneath his nostrils. "There we go. Not so scary anymore, am I, Connor?" She cooed.

I was shocked. "Please, Violet, please! You're going to infect him! I've learned my lesson! I'll find your truck! I'll buy you a new truck! Just leave Connor alone." Tears were streaming down my cheeks at this point, betraying my panic.

She smiled and straddled Connor's knees so she was face-to-face with him. "Oh yes. Infecting him is exactly what I'm going to do." She licked her lips hungerly with a long, inhuman tongue. "Something interesting that I've learned from personal experience is that the changes from the virus seem to be topical to the point of infection." She stroked her length calmly as she talked. "That is to say that the first place I touch him with my bodily fluids is guaranteed to end up changing. With those pheromones it should only take a touch. . ." She reached her other paw down and fondled Connor's cock and balls. The camera moved in for a close-up as his penis immediately began to rise to attention. Violet scooted forward so that their two shafts were resting against each other. Hers was larger by a couple inches.

I watched in stunned silence. Too upset and shocked to say anything. My heart felt like it was about to jump out of my chest. Violet's voice started again. "Oh yeah. Look at this cute little dick. Not bad for a human. I bet he pleases you well with it, doesn't he? You know, Amy, I've become something of a cock connoisseur recently." Connor let out a weak moan as she fondled their dicks together. "And I love variety. So. Time for that anatomy lesson to continue." I watched, entranced, as her cock slowly began to shrink. I wasn't sure what I was seeing at first, but sure enough it started to retract back into her body in time with her heartbeat. Before long there was no hint that she had ever had a cock at all, just a raised mound with a glistening opening right above her sack. She sighed. "There we go." The hyena-girl stood up and positioned Connor's cock right against her new opening. Her faux balls brushed against his penis. "This is going to be the last time you get to use your human dick, little boy. Enjoy it."

And with that, she started lowering herself down onto his erect penis, her opening stretching easily to take him. She worked herself about halfway down his shaft and then slowly, rose up before plunging back down onto him, this time taking his cock all the way. Connor moaned, and his head slumped forward onto her breasts in obvious pleasure. I watched in helpless horror as she started working up a rhythm, my fiance's hips bucking in rythm. Each time he disappeared inside her, her balls would plop down onto his, causing the whole mess to jiggle. I screamed into the phone. What I said, I don't remember, but they both ignored it completely.

As their hips grinded together, Violet reached a paw-hand down to Connors chin and lifted his face to hers, smiling a lusty half smile. The way she touched him was gentle and caring. It was almost romantic. She touched her lips to his, and he puckered up and returned the gesture. He teased her thin black lips gingerly between his own, and pressed in. Violet turned and winked at the camera, sticking out her long, flat tongue at me before returning to her ministrations. She had started tolift herself almost all the way off of Connor before plunging herself down onto his shaft, sometimes teasing him by only lowering herself an inch or two at a time. My lover was getting a real proper, excellent fucking, and he seemed to be enjoying it.

She licked up his face as a moan escaped her mouth. She bounced faster and faster on Connor's eager dick. Her long canine tongue plunged deep into her fuck-toy's mouth, and she turned her head sideways and pushed in. Those big jaws opened wide, covering almost the entire lower half of his face in a perverted sort of beastial kiss. Perhaps it was my mind playing tricks on me, but I could swear I saw some impression of her tongue fluttering around deep in his throat. She fucked him faster and slower, varying her pace to keep it drawn out as long as possible. I watched the whole thing. Finally, I saw my Connor's legs twitch. I knew from experience it was a telltale sign that he was about to cum. Violet threw her head back and lowered herself fully onto him as a huge orgasm rolled over them. They stayed frozen in that pose for a moment, then she exhaled, gave him a peck on the cheek and stood up.

She took the camera back from whoever had been filming, and held it directly up to her crotch so I could watch as her shaft unfurled back to its former glory. Some combination of her and my lover's juices dribbled out of the tip. "Oh WOW!" She exclaimed breathlessly. "You sure know how to pick 'em, Amy. God I'm so full. You haven't been ignoring his needs have you? No matter. He won't go hungry for pussy again."

"You bitch." I choked out, sobbing. I could hardly think of anything to say, much less say it. I was completely in shock at what I had just witnessed. Connor was surely infected now. Even if I found him and rescued him, he'd be a monster within a couple days. "You fucking. . . you. . How? How did you get out? "

Violet beamed. "I didn't get out, silly. I just brought him to me, here in the quarantine zone. I've got plenty of boys here to do my bitchwork. Connor's just the newest addition to my harem. Give him a week or two, and there's nothing he won't do for me. I wonder if he'll even remember your name." She smiled a terrible toothy grin. "You know I should thank you for stealing my truck. Back when I was normal like you, I just had a dead-end job at the bank. I was the man's bitch. Now I MAKE men MY bitch!" She hooted a horrible, hyena-like laughter that echoed all the way from the quarantine zone to my apartment. Even just the thought of that sound now sends a shiver down my spine. It was predatory, powerful. I don't know how, but I knew it was telling me and everyone who was hearing it that she was in charge.

Yet somehow it gave me clarity. It made her the enemy. Years of being a victim of bullying at school and discrimination in my career had taught me how to deal with cunts like her. When someone hits you, sometimes the best thing to do his hit them back ten times as hard. "I am going. . . to kill you." I whispered.

She stopped laughing. "What was that?"

"I said I am going to find you and murder you for what you just did."

"Oh. Well." She paused. "Hey if you DO drop by, be sure to bring some In-n-Out Burger with you. There's none of them in the quarantine zone and I'm just craving a double-double something fierce." She started laughing again, and then the sound just stopped.

The screen showed a picture of my fiance, smiling and sipping on a beer and read "Connor. . . . ended." Then it went just went black. And suddenly I was sitting in my silent, odd-smelling apartment. And now I was very much aware of how alone I really was.