“Kissing Disease”
The first day, it was just an item on Carrie’s news feed. She was riding to school, taking advantage of the free wi-fi on the bus and the twenty-five minute commute to campus to check up on her social media, and one of her friends posted it to their page with the comment, “Dang, Nebraska! Smooch much?”
Cassie clicked on the link, and an article popped up with the headline, ‘New Strain Of Mononucleosis Hits Nebraska Town’. She scrolled down, more because the article was small than because it was interesting. “Valentine, Nebraska,” it said, “has recently earned a little unwanted fame due to an outbreak of a new strain of mononucleosis that has affected as many as 1,100 out of its population of 2,737. The town, best known for the special postmarks it places on Valentine’s Day envelopes, first began reporting cases last week.
“CDC officials in Atlanta have stated there is no cause for concern—although the strain does appear to be affecting adults who have previously been exposed to the Epstein-Barr virus, the symptoms seem to be relatively mild and mental and physical fatigue are being reported as the most noticeable sign of infection. It seems unlikely, though, that this year people will want a Valentine’s Day card that has been licked by one of the residents of this small town.”
Cassie chuckled to herself and closed the article without giving it another thought. She distracted herself with cat videos and Internet memes, and when it popped up in her feed again just before she got to campus, she didn’t bother looking at it a second time. Valentine, Nebraska was utterly removed from her day-to-day life, fifteen hundred miles away and smaller than the university she attended. It didn’t seem like anything there could possibly matter to her.
That didn’t stop her from showing the article to Lacey over lunch, when it popped up on her feed again between classes. “Did you see this one, Lace?” she asked. “You’re pre-med, I’m sure someone must have forwarded it to you.”
Lacey nodded, her face tinged with just a hint of exasperation. “I think I’ve seen it seven times this morning,” she said. “It’s all over my timeline.” She paused, the hint of a smile breaking across her face. “It’s totally going viral.” She waggled her eyebrows as her smile broadened. “Get it? Eh? Eh?”
Carrie threw a french fry at her, and steered the conversation to the calculus homework that was due in just under two hours. She put thoughts of Valentine, Nebraska out of her mind for the day.
The fourth day, it was trending on Twitter. “#KissingDisease spreads like wildfire across Nebraska,” one tweet said, with a link to an article that said the victim count in Valentine was up to 2,520 confirmed cases and hospitals in six nearby towns had admitted patients with symptoms matching the new strain. The CDC admitted that the new strain appeared to be highly contagious, and advised against ‘exchanging saliva’ (Cassie snorted at that) with anyone who had traveled through Nebraska in the past four to seven weeks. They continued to insist that there was no cause for alarm, though, as the symptoms of the disease remained mild and there had been no serious cases.
Cassie got to the campus center expecting to find everyone talking about it, but apparently there was a rumor that the Terps were going to fire the women’s basketball coach. As it was, only Byron, her lab partner in Chemistry, even mentioned it. “Did you see what the CDC said?” he asked her.
She nodded. “Something about not kissing anyone from Nebraska.” She smiled, but he didn’t smile back.
“Anyone who’s been to Nebraska,” he corrected. “In the last four to seven weeks. That’s the incubation period for mono. I did a little research online,” and Cassie made a personal decision not to roll her eyes at that point, because Byron was one of those guys who was always an expert after five minutes on Wikipedia, “and it says you can be contagious even before displaying symptoms. So you can be infecting people and not even know it.”
Cassie nodded, suddenly wishing she cared more about basketball. Byron seemed a little too into this. “Yeah, it’s got to be rough for the people who live out there,” she said.
Byron put his hands to his temples, then gestured outward explosively. “Don’t you get it?” he said melodramatically. “That CDC warning isn’t worth shit! All these people from Nebraska have had a month to spread this stuff around, maybe even two, and they’ve probably given it to people who’ve given it to other people by now. The CDC is telling people to watch out for everyone who’s been to Nebraska, but by now there’s a ton of other people who have it and don’t even know it!”
“Well, yeah, okay,” Cassie said, both because he was probably right and because Byron had a tendency to keep raising his voice until you agreed with him. “But I mean, it’s not dangerous, right? I had mono in junior high. You just feel like shit for a few weeks and all you want to do is sleep.”
“It’s going to have a huge economic impact,” Byron said ominously. “I read that it could cost the United States up to two hundred million dollars in lost wages and productivity.”
After long moments of internal debate, Carrie asked the question that was bouncing up and down in the front of her head, demanding to be asked. “Where did you read that?”
“There’s a whole thread about it on Reddit,” he said. Carrie bit her tongue, but he must have seen the look on her face because he said, “There were a lot of people saying that! It wasn’t just one guy or anything!”
Carrie decided to ask what Byron thought about the basketball coach.
Later that day, on her way home, she messaged her friend Gena, who’d decided to go to school in Kansas City. “Any sign of mono out your way?” she asked, adding a smiley face at the end just in case Gena had gotten one too many queries like that in the last few days.
“3 or 4,” Gena responded after an hour or two. “All in quarantine. No biggie, I don’t kiss w/tongue.”
Carrie shot her back a “:P” smiley, followed by, “Look out! Kissing monster gonna get U!” That was the last she thought about it that day.
By day seven, CNN had started round-the-clock coverage. Seventeen states were now reporting cases, and the CDC was encouraging anyone who was symptomatic to voluntarily quarantine themselves. “While the disease does appear to be mild,” a spokesman said at a press conference that the news networks seemed determined to repeat every twenty minutes, “this is nonetheless a disease that we are taking very seriously. Please make every effort to avoid contact with infected individuals, and if you are infected, please try your best not to spread the disease.”
Carrie kept half an eye on the screen as she ate breakfast. She wasn’t freaking out or anything—the furthest east anyone had reported a case had been Ohio—but it didn’t seem nearly as remote as it had a week ago. As she watched, one of the reporters asked, “Is it true that the chronic fatigue is worse in this strain than in other versions of the Epstein-Barr virus?”
It was a little unnerving to see the CDC spokesman flounder for an answer. “Well, it’s—there are some unusal aspects to the way the virus is presenting itself, but...” He looked off-camera for a moment, then back to the assembled reporters. “I’m sorry, but at this time all I can say is that the disease does not pose an increased risk to the public. We are taking all necessary steps and can only reiterate our recommendation to voluntarily quarantine if symptoms present themselves.”
Carrie let out a small, worried sigh as she dumped her dishes in the sink and went to the bus station. She felt weirdly exposed, standing in the small shelter next to a handful of other commuters. She knew it was irrational, the same kind of bullshit fear that the media had spread over ebola only with a disease that wasn’t fatal or even particularly dangerous, but she still felt kind of creeped out standing really close to a whole bunch of people.
She wasn’t alone. The normally crowded bus had several empty seats, and Carrie took one in a mix of gratitude and embarrassment. Clearly, more than a few people had decided to travel in a nice, germ-free car rather than risk mass transit. Starving college students didn’t have that option, though, so Carrie hunkered down in her seat and angled her body away from her fellow riders as she opened up her tablet and began to check her feed.
The first thing she saw was a status update from Gena posted a couple of hours ago. “Why is it so hard to get out of bed in the morning?” she posted, along with a picture of a grumpy-looking cat with a caption saying, ‘THE ONLY PERSON ALLOWED TO TALK TO ME IS COFFEE’. Carrie let out a tiny chuckle as she clicked the ‘Like’ button.
The rest of her feed felt reassuringly normal, apart from Byron’s tinfoil-hat link to an article claiming that the CDC had quarantined the entire state of Nebraska and was keeping it under wraps with a complete media blackout. She shared it with the comment, “Anyone from Nebraska want to reply to this to prove my crazy friend wrong?” Admittedly, she was going to pay for that later today after Chemistry, but she felt like someone had to be the voice of sanity.
Three stops from campus, Gena posted another status update. “Feel like crap,” she said. “Going back to bed. #Hopeitsnothingserious”
Someone on the bus coughed. Carrie couldn’t help herself; she flinched.
She spent the rest of the day anxiously checking her social media every chance she got. Gena didn’t update, and Carrie’s messages to her went unanswered. She’d managed to work herself into a pretty serious panic by the time she met Lacey for a study date over lunch, and it didn’t help matters even a little that Lacey was wearing a paper mask over her nose and mouth when she came into the cafeteria.
“Overreact much?” Carrie asked, a little more sarcastically than she’d meant to.
Lacey frowned. Well, she narrowed her eyebrows a little and the shape of her jawline changed. “You don’t take pre-med classes, Carrie. If you did, maybe you’d—”
Carrie rolled her eyes, knowing that she was venting a whole bunch of displaced stress right onto her friend and study partner but unable to stop herself. “Oh, I forgot, two years of pre-med has made you the medical expert, right? I don’t know why the CDC doesn’t just hire you now, since you clearly know more than them about the right precautions to take.”
Lacey glared at her furiously. After a moment, she pulled down the mask to reveal a mouth set into a hard, narrow line. “I’m not wearing this because I’m a med student,” she hissed, looking around to see if anyone had noticed Carrie’s outburst. “I’m wearing this because I’m over at Davidge Hall all the time for my classes and I’m seeing a lot of the doctors who work there wearing them. The staff at the Institute for Human Virology? They all have these on. All the time now, not just when they’re doing active research. I don’t know what they know that I don’t, but I can make some guesses.”
“Sorry,” Carrie said contritely, as Lacey wolfed down her food. “I’m just kind of stressed right now. I didn’t mean to take it out on you.”
“It’s okay,” Lacey said, pulling the mask back over her face. “I was pretty rude too. It’s all kind of effed up right now, you know?”
Carrie forced a shrug. “Eh,” she said. “We’ll know things get really bad when the Republicans stop running attack ads claiming the Democrats don’t have a ‘mono plan’.” It was a feeble joke, but they both laughed.
Carrie finally got home around six to see that Gena had finally posted an update. “Think I might stay home tomorrow, too,” it said. “Just to see if I feel any better. Not sure I’d get much out of classes anyway—my brain feels like warm oatmeal.”
Carrie left a “Get well soon!” comment, and went on to check her notifications. She looked for comments on her Nebraska post, and was oddly disquieted that there were none. The thought hung with her for the rest of the night.
By day sixteen, the media blackout had failed. Carrie got back from her weekend shift at the grocery store—all the cashiers were wearing masks now, and about half the customers as well—and flipped on CNN just in time to see a headline crawl along the bottom of the screen that read, ‘Nebraska Infection Rate at 90%’.
The talking heads were discussing whether the CDC was taking the whole thing seriously enough. “A ‘blanket ban on non-essential travel’ sounds good,” one of them said, “but banning travel three weeks after the first symptoms were reported is pretty much just closing the barn door after the horse has bolted. If you want to get this thing under control, I think—”
Carrie muted the TV and called Gena. The phone rang long enough to start up a train of paranoid worry—what if the symptoms were more serious than she thought, what if the quarantine had extended to Kansas, what if what if what—but Gena finally picked up. “’Lo?” she said, in the muzzy tones of someone who had just woken up from a deep sleep.
“Hi, Gena,” Carrie said. “Just me again. Wanted to check up on you.”
“Oh, hi, Carrie,” Gena said through the phone, her voice slightly slurred with exhaustion. “No change. Slept about sixteen hours yesterday. Fever’s still hovering around 100. Throat’s not so bad, though.”
Carrie saw another headline scrolling across the bottom of the screen out of the corner of her eye, ‘CDC Refusing to Recommend Anti-Virals for Kissing Disease’. “That’s something, at least,” she said. “You’ve still got groceries?”
“For another four days,” Gena replied. “My roommate’s probably going to be mad when she finds out I’m eating her food.”
Carrie snorted. “Your roommate ditched you last Sunday, kiddo. Probably drenched herself in Purell and ran for the hills.” She logged into her Twitter account while she talked, and began scrolling through her feed. Unsurprisingly, ‘#KissingDisease’ was the number one trending topic on Twitter. “Even if the food was still good when she got back, she probably wouldn’t want to touch it in case it had germs.”
“You’re probably right,” Gena said, in a tone that suggested that she didn’t have the energy to argue even if Carrie was telling her the sky was pink. “Anyhow, I’m just waiting to get better. That’s all you can really do, right?”
“Huh?” Carrie was momentarily distracted by another trending topic, ‘#Carrier’. “Oh, um, yeah. That’s what they’re saying on the news. You get yourself plenty of rest, eat healthy, and don’t operate any heavy machinery or anything. Okay?”
“Okay,” Gena said, her sleepy voice warm with affection. “Talk to you tomorrow?”
“You bet,” Carrie said, before finally disconnecting the call. She un-muted CNN while scrolling through a few of the ‘#Carrier’ tweets. letting the bloviating of the pundits wash over her while she read:
Being a #carrier is like winning the lottery, it makes some people into assholes.
Visited Nebraska three weeks ago, feeling fine—#Carrier?
My boyfriend thinks he’s a #carrier, keeps telling me to make him a sandwich. #doesntworkthatway
Public service: Stay away from social media. If you don’t listen to me, you’ll listen to them. #Carrier #KissingDisease
@Bobby_Reyez It’s not just guys—I’ve seen #carrier women doing it too.
Anyone know what the #carrier odds are? I’m hearing 10%, but I don’t know if I trust the source.
I love my #carrier I love my #carrier I love my #carrier I love my #carrier I love my #carrier I love my #carrier I love my #carrier
I kissed a girl, and I liked it...four weeks later... #KissingDisease #carrier
That one had a photo attached, of a woman down on her knees playing with the photographer’s dick. She didn’t look too into it, though; she looked like she was struggling to stay awake. Carrie rolled her eyes—why did some guys always think the world needed to see their cock? She closed Twitter and went to unpack her groceries. She’d stocked up a little on canned goods, just in case of...well, just in case, she told herself, deciding that finishing that sentence automatically made her sound paranoid.
After she finished, Carrie did a search for “carrier”, “carrier mono” and “carrier kissing disease”, but most of the results were just more Twitter pages. She did find a forum where people were talking about a rumor that some of the people who had the disease were asymptomatic, but there was a lot of argument over whether they were really asymptomatic or just still in the incubation period and everyone was a self-proclaimed expert and there were a lot of all-caps posts, so she just mentally filed it all away as Weird Shit until she could find a reliable source. She switched away from CNN to Netflix, pushing the whole mess out of her head until she went to bed.
Day twenty-two was mostly about trying to call Gena. Carrie rang her cell phone four times waiting for the bus, which was twenty-seven minutes late, and got no answer. She looked at her news feed three times between calls, stabbing at the touchscreen with freezing fingers. Gena was updating her status, but she wasn’t picking up her phone.
Carrie snarled under her breath as the phone went to voicemail the fourth time. She checked Gena’s status again. It was the same as fifteen minutes ago, a topless picture of Gena with the sentence, “Gonna be seeing a whole lot more of me from now on!” She didn’t look like she was excited to be showing her tits to everyone on her social media, though. She looked dazed and exhausted, like she’d just tried running a marathon and had given up around mile sixteen.
The bus finally showed up, and Carrie filed on along with a group of six or seven other masked passengers. The bus driver wore a mask, too. He wasn’t the regular driver. Carrie found an empty seat with no real difficulty, and went back to checking Gena’s news feed.
She scrolled back, trying to see if she could find some kind of explanation for Gena’s posts. There was nothing else from this morning, but late last night there was a picture of her kissing some white woman Carrie didn’t recognize. Carrie blushed a little—it didn’t exactly look like a ‘friendly’ kiss, either. Gena had her eyes closed, and one of her arms was halfway up the woman’s shirt. Carrie was so embarrassed she almost scrolled past it (when had Gena gone lezzie?) but she stopped when she saw the caption. “Guess who made a huge mistake last night? Me, that’s who!”
Carrie scrunched her face in confusion. Okay, so Gena had apparently gotten tired of being cooped up in her house like an invalid, and she must have gone out drinking and wound up macking with another girl. Not smart, especially for someone with a communicable disease—shit, did the other girl even know Gena had mono? But it was an understandable thing that that people sometimes did. (And then tried very hard to pretend never happened because it would make things really weird around her study partner otherwise. Carrie was suddenly very relieved that her little experiment with Lacey hadn’t wound up on Facebook.)
But that still didn’t explain this morning. Carrie scrolled back a little further, hoping to find something that would at least explain why her best friend had decided to have a night on the town despite being sick with the most famous contagious disease in America, but all she found was an update that said, “Finally out of food. Got to get my butt out of bed and go grocery shopping, I guess.”
Grimacing in frustration, Carrie rang Gena’s phone again. Still no response. She spent the rest of the bus ride cursing the travel ban, her decision to go to school halfway across the country from her childhood friend, her friend’s decision to go to school halfway across the country from her, their collective decision to ever leave International Falls, and of course the tiny packages of genetic material that had decided to hitch a ride in everybody’s fucking saliva.
When she did get to campus, she spent something like forty-five minutes waiting for her professor to show up for American History before finally blowing the class off altogether and heading for the campus center to try to see if anyone had heard anything about classes being cancelled. There was nothing on the university website, but...Carrie bit her lip behind her mask, trying not to think about the little things that had been piling up over the last few days. Late buses. Empty classrooms. Shops that were closed without explanation. According to the local news, the CDC still listed Baltimore as ‘No Cases Reported’, but Carrie had a nasty feeling that their information was a little behind the curve.
That nasty feeling turned into a sick chill in her gut when Lacey came in. She had an ashen complexion, and her eyes looked like they needed to be propped up with toothpicks. “I don’t feel so good,” she said in a small voice, sounding more pathetic than Carrie had ever heard her in the two years they’d known each other—and that included Lacey’s break-up with her high school sweetheart. “I think...” She paused, as though the effort of that much brain work exhausted her. “I think I need to go home.”
Carrie saw out of the corner of her eye that people were backing away from their table like they’d just seen a plague victim. She knew she should probably do the same, but there was just some shit you didn’t pull on your friends, not even if it was the smart thing to do. Gena might be stuck halfway across the country, but Carrie could at least help Lacey. “Come on,” she said, pulling her gloves on and taking Lacey’s hand. “Let’s get you back to your place.”
“Okay,” Lacey said, offering not even a token resistance to the idea of skipping the rest of her classes. She passively allowed Carrie to lead her out of the campus center and across campus to the small block of student housing nearby. She was clearly tired, but she walked along behind Carrie without any complaint.
“Come on,” Carrie said encouragingly, “just keep putting one foot in front of the other. We’re almost there.”
“Uh-huh,” Lacy replied in groggy tones, as though she wasn’t even really hearing what Cassie said before she agreed with it. She followed placidly, putting one foot in front of the other like it was all she could think of doing, until the two of them made it back to Lacey’s efficiency apartment off-campus.
“Okay,” Carrie said once they were inside. “Now, I want you to get those clothes off and get into a nice warm bed—whoa!” She yelped in surprise as Lacey began to methodically strip naked right in front of her, staring straight ahead with vacant, hooded eyes as she pulled her shirt over her head.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Carrie repeated, her brain momentarily too stunned to come up with anything more coherent. Lacey froze, her shirt half-covering her face. “Lacey, I meant after I was gone. After I leave, go ahead and get undressed and get into bed. Get plenty of sleep, make sure you eat regular meals, and I’ll come check on you tomorrow. Okay?”
“Mfuh-huh,” Lacey muttered through the fabric of her shirt. She showed no signs of putting it back on. It was as if she was so fatigued by the disease that she...that she couldn’t really....Carrie let out an involuntary gasp. Suddenly a lot of things made sense in a very unpleasant way. She let herself out, locked the door behind her, and pulled out her smart phone.
Gena had updated her status again. This time, she was entirely naked, squatting on a thick black dildo that was stuck to the floor by a suction cup. “My carrier knows a slut when she sees one,” the caption read. There were a few comments from people Carrie knew, people who must have put it together a lot earlier than Carrie had. They were all telling her to get out, to follow their instructions and go straight home. She would have left one as well, but the last comment was from a woman Carrie didn’t know named Bonne. It just said, “I told her not to read anything. She’s mine now.”
Carrie called Gena’s phone again, but got no response. She hadn’t really expected one.
After that, Carrie couldn’t see much point in trying to go to her next class. Instead, she spent the rest of the day navigating a suddenly-unreliable mass transit system, waiting for buses that never came and calling taxis that never showed up. She finally got home at around seven thirty, her eyes red from random and unpredictable bursts of crying, and collapsed onto her couch with a last few sobs of frustration.
Gena’s news feed had filled up with pictures of her rimming Bonnie’s asshole, fingering Bonnie’s pussy, suckling Bonnie’s tits, spreading her legs wide so that Bonnie could shove a massive dildo into her cunt. She had the same expression in every picture, a sleepy stare that suggested she was too exhausted even to think about what she was doing. She just knew that someone was telling her what to do, and the virus made her too groggy and confused to resist. No wonder the CDC was losing its shit over this thing.
Carrie blinked back another round of tears and sent a message to Bonnie. “Enjoy it while it lasts, bitch. Once she gets better my friend is going to kick your ass so hard you will have shoe prints on your fucking kidneys.” Her face stung hot as she typed—she was a thousand miles too far away to protect her friend, and all that protective adrenaline rush was flowing out uselessly in surges of blinding anger as she texted with the fury of a thousand fiery suns.
Five minutes later, Bonnie messaged back. “Turn on the news,” she said. The little smiley face at the end of the comment made Carrie literally see red for a moment. Once she’d recovered enough of her equilibrium to set the phone down instead of throwing it violently across the room, she switched on CNN.
And her world fell apart.
The headline was big, not moving on a crawl but plastered across the bottom of the screen. ‘CDC Admits Symptoms Persistent’, it read. Below that, in smaller letters, it said ‘No Reports of Nebraska Victims Recovering’.
A CDC spokesman, not the same one as a few weeks ago but a different one, was delivering a prepared speech through a paper mask. “...at this time,” he said. “Apart from the asymptomatic carriers, that is. It appears that the virus is able to continuously adapt its exterior protein shell to evade detection by white blood cells.”
One of the reporters asked, in a voice slightly muffled by his own mask, “Then does this mean the disease is progressive?”
The CDC spokesman shook his head. “No, the body adapts its defenses as well. The result is that the disease doesn’t get worse, but it doesn’t get better either.”
Another round of hands went up, and one reporter asked, “Is the CDC taking any steps to protect the human rights of the disease victims? We’ve heard reports that some of the asymptomatic carriers are taking advantage of the confused mental state of patients.”
The CDC spokesman held up a hand for calm. “That’s really not my area,” he said. “I’m aware of some isolated incidents, but that’s for law enforcement to—”
Carrie snapped the TV off angrily. She threw the remote as hard as she could against the wall. Then she went to bed and cried herelf to sleep.
On day twenty-six, Carrie stole a car. She didn’t want to, but she was running out of options; she’d missed her daily check up on Lacey twice because the buses weren’t running, and Carrie knew that she couldn’t leave her friend alone for too long. It wasn’t safe, not with infection levels running near seventy-two percent in the greater Baltimore area. The people who hadn’t developed symptoms yet were starting to get confident, acting out in the belief that they were probably Carriers, and Lacey couldn’t think well enough to resist commands anymore.
As she looked for a car with keys in the ignition, Carrie tried to remember exactly when everyone had started capitalizing the term. It was definitely a social movement now; CNN was reporting that most of the Midwest was now entirely controlled by Carriers, some of whom controlled armies of as many as sixty thousand infected followers. The President had retreated to an undisclosed location, and the CDC had devoted all its resources to the task of curing the disease. Carrie just prayed she could keep Lacey safe until they had a breakthrough. Then they’d go to Kansas City together and...and...
Carrie let the thought drop. She was a bad enough driver when she could see clearly.
It didn’t take her long to find an abandoned car; once the disease had started spreading, it went through the city fast. Lots of people started off for home feeling fine, and went into their houses too disoriented to remember to take their keys with them. The first few she found had empty gas tanks, probably from people leaving them running by accident, but she finally got into a minivan that started. She headed towards campus, finding bitter amusement in the fact that at least traffic was light.
She turned the radio on, tuning to WBAL to see if there was any news on the CDC effort, but instead all she got was heavy metal music. Probably some Carrier or other had decided that an all-news format wasn’t ‘cool’. She left it on; death metal suited her mood right now.
At this point, she was at least ninety percent sure she was a Carrier herself. “Carrie the Carrier,” she muttered out loud, her voice sounding strange in her ears from lack of use. She’d been around several people who were displaying symptoms, and even though she hadn’t done anything stupid—
And then it was on her, a rush of guilt and shame so intense that she had to pull over to the side of the road and let the hot tears spill down her cheeks and soak her mask. Two days of hiding from it, pushing it down, telling herself that she would have stopped even if she knew she was...was...
And it all came back to her again. And she knew she was lying to herself.
She’d seen Byron, on her last trip to Lacey’s apartment. He lived in the dorms, so when the outbreak had hit, he must not have had anywhere to go to. She’d found him wandering the campus in a daze, clearly symptomatic, and she’d guided him back to his dorm room. Because that was what you did, right? For friends?
And she’d brought him inside, and she’d sat him down on the bed. And he had done everything she told him to, just the way that a good little sick boy did. His eyes had looked at her, so confused, so lost. Desperate for someone to tell him what to do. Desperate for someone like her to guide him. Carrie remembered that sleepy, glassy look perfectly.
She’d told him to take off his clothes. Unlike with Lacey, she hadn’t told him to wait until she left the room.
He’d stripped naked, revealing a body that she had spent a lot of Chemistry classes thinking about. He hadn’t protested at all, hadn’t delivered a speech about how she was taking advantage of him or complained that he found an article online talking about the ethical implications of the disease or told her about a home remedy he’d found for the disease on Reddit. He’d just taken off all his clothes and stood there, waiting for her to instruct him.
Carrie had told him to get hard. Just to see if it would happen, she’d told herself. Not because she planned to...to...to do anything. Because doing something would be wrong. Just as a test. To satisfy her intellectual curiosity. It wasn’t like she was actually going to—
His cock had stiffened like an iron bar within seconds. And right around then, Carrie’s resolve got a lot weaker.
Weak enough to watch him stroke himself, putting his cock through its paces while she watched. Weak enough to tell him to lie down on the bed, still erect, still throbbing, waiting for release. Weak enough to consider pulling off her mask, her clothes, and—
But he was sick. He had the disease. And when it came time to pull her mask off and kiss those lips, she couldn’t do it. Not because she was noble, or even decent, but because she was afraid. She’d put him in Lacey’s apartment like he was a broken toy, and tried to pretend it had never happened. But now she was heading back to see him, and she wasn’t sure if she could handle that.
Still, it wasn’t as if she had a choice. “Suck it up, asshole,” she told herself in a voice thick with tears. She put the car back into gear and drove the rest of the way into the city, stopping one more time along the way to steal some groceries.
She got there just as the Carrier was leaving. Carrie recognized him in a distant, vague way; he was a student, someone she’d seen a few times on campus but didn’t know well enough to call by name. He was walking out of Lacey’s apartment building, holding Lacey’s hand and leading her along meekly behind him. “You’re doing great, Lacey,” he said, a smug grin on her face. “I’m going to take you somewhere nice, and show you—”
Carrie dropped the groceries, charged across the street faster than she ever knew she was capable of, and tackled him to the ground with a surge of adrenaline-fueled strength that she was absolutely stunned to find out she had in her. He wasn’t a big guy, but he had at least twenty pounds on her—that didn’t matter, though, not when he was taking Lacey.
“You leave Gena alone!” she shouted as she slugged him as hard as she could. She didn’t even notice what she said; she was operating entirely on reflex, responding on an instinctive level to the threat he represented. She gave him a good solid punch in the face that she could tell was going to develop into a black eye, and another one that split his cheek open. If she had a strategy at all, it was just to beat nine kinds of hell out of him before he knew what was happening.
Carrie’s advantage didn’t last long. The Carrier managed to reach up and pull at her mask, tugging it off her face and letting out a little grunt of surprise when he saw her. Once her mask was off, he grabbed her and rolled the two of them over so that he was on top of her. He pinned her arms to her sides, leaned down, and gave her a long, slow, deliberately sloppy kiss. “Better hope you’re a Carrier, slut,” he snarled at her, before standing up quickly and running off.
Carrie led Lacey back into the lobby. Then she went out and got the groceries and brought them back inside. She walked Lacey back up to the apartment, where Byron was waiting—the door was wide open, not even locked. They must have let him in the second he asked.
She set the groceries down and went into the bathroom. She washed her mouth out, knowing it would do absolutely no damn good. Then she went back out into the small studio apartment and fucked Byron senseless while Lacey watched.
On day sixty-one, Carrie went out for food again. It was hard—just putting her clothes on again felt like an enormous effort—but they’d gone through all the stock she’d gathered a few weeks ago and she couldn’t let her friends risk going outside. They were sick.
Carrie stumbled to the elevator, pressing the call button four times before realizing it wasn’t lighting up. “Out of order,” she muttered, smacking her forehead and heading for the stairwell. She should have realized that. The power had been off for a long while now, even longer than the cable. Even with the spare charger, Carrie’s smart phone had gone dead ages ago. She didn’t even know what the world outside would look like.
It took her almost an hour, but Carrie finally made it down the stairs and out of the building. She looked over at the stolen car, trying to remember where she’d left the keys, but finally decided it would be safer to walk. She was too tired to drive safely, and anyway the car would just attract attention.
She probably shouldn’t have had so much sex last night, she thought to herself as she walked the six blocks to the nearest grocery store she could remember seeing. She wouldn’t be so tired if she wasn’t fucking so much. But Byron was so fucking hot, and when he fell asleep Lacey was soft and warm and so wet, and they couldn’t say no. None of them could say no to Carrie. She was a Carrier. They had to obey. If anything, they’d gotten more obedient since Carrie had started telling them what to do, like they’d stopped trying to think for themselves once Carrie started doing their thinking for them. And all Carrie could think about anymore was sex.
Carrie had to sit down and rest three times on the way; being cooped up in the apartment didn’t give her much chance to exercise. She was always tired, even with all the sex. Some days it seemed like all any of them did was sleep and fuck. Probably because there was nothing else to do. When she woke up, there was no TV, no books that weren’t big blurry boring confusing textbooks, and Byron’s cock was right there and all she had to do was ask and it popped right up for her to ride. Carrie smiled dreamily at the memory. She’d have to give him another good fuck when she got back with the food.
Unless it wasn’t needed anymore. Maybe while they were holed up in the apartment fucking each other senseless, the government had found a cure and sent in the troops and everything was back to normal. The news reported that the CDC labs had broken contact a few days before the cable went out, but that was just probably because they didn’t want to be disturbed while they were working on a cure. It was a safety measure or something, she was sure of it.
When she got to the grocery store and saw the woman wearing camouflage loading things into a jeep, Carrie broke into a huge grin and headed her direction as fast as her weary legs could carry her. She was right! The Army was here! She almost cried, she was so relieved to know that everything would be back to normal again soon.
The woman saw Carrie approaching, and gave her a big smile. “Hi there!” she said in an accent that sounded like she’d driven a few hours north to get here. She stowed the last of her supplies in the back of the jeep as she spoke. “You look like you need a little help, don’t you?”
Carrie nodded, the sudden relief of realizing their ordeal was over cascading through her body and leaving her exhausted. She hadn’t realized how tiring it was, trying to keep her friends safe, trying to do the right thing, having all those Carrier responsibilities. But now that she had someone to help her, Carrie realized just how worn out she truly was. “Uh-huh,” she said, unable to think of anything more to say.
“Well, I’m just the person to help you,” the woman said. “My name’s Nancy. What’s yours?”
“Carrie,” she said. It took her a surprisingly long time to remember. She hadn’t heard it in so long...
“And are you alone, Carrie?” Nancy asked, cupping Carrie’s chin with her hand and looking at her with sparkling, excited eyes.
“No,” Carrie said guilelessly. “I’ve got two friends a few blocks that way.” She pointed back the way she came. “They’re sick,” she confided in worried tones.
“Well, don’t you worry,” Nancy said. “You just take me to them, and I’ll bring the two of you back home with me. You’ll be nice and safe there. I don’t let anyone rustle my cattle, I promise.”
Cattle? Something about that didn’t sound right to Carrie. She struggled to make sense of it, through a mind that she suddenly realized was thick and foggy with exhaustion. She wasn’t cattle, she was a...a something, there was a word for her, a special word that she knew a few minutes ago, but she was too tired to remember now. All she wanted was for Nancy to make things better the way she said she would. Carrie was so glad she’d found someone who would keep her safe.
“Get in the car, slut,” Nancy said, her voice purring with anticipation. Without a word, Carrie passively complied.