Resistance 3 - Chapter 5

5.

Meghan woke up to an empty house after a fitful night of sleep.  Her mother was gone, and Derek had apparently gone off to work despite the circumstances.  She went downstairs and made herself breakfast, turning on the television and flipping through the channels as she ate.  Invariably, every channel was talking about the attack on the GDC.  Her father’s picture frequently appeared on the screen, but there were scant details about his state other than he had been badly injured and was in critical condition.

Meghan didn’t know how to feel.  A gamut of emotions ran through her, from some concern to resentful bitterness to sadness, all of which left her feeling somewhat hollow inside, which was itself disturbing; her father was on the brink of death and she here she was, somewhat conflicted and mostly numb.

She stood and scraped the majority of her uneaten breakfast into the garbage can.  She thought to call Nate back and found the idea too unappealing to do even though she knew she should.  Instead she packed her gym bag and went to go workout.

***

The day passed slowly.  After working out, Meghan had come home and made herself lunch, which she again barely ate.  She watched more news on the television but there were no updates and after a short while she shut it off, not wanting to see the footage of last night played back over and over again.  Instead, she opened up some of her study materials, though it was only a token gesture and she absorbed little if any of what she read.

It was nearly dinner time when finally her phone rang.  Meghan, sitting at the kitchen table with her school book, sitting in half a stupor was startled and snatched her phone up, realizing only then that she’d been waiting for the call all day.  “Hi, Mom.”

“Meghan,” her mother sounded tired, stressed and tense, but not completely unravelled.  Just hearing the way she said her name, Meghan at least knew that her father was still alive.

“How is Dad doing?”

“Alive still, thank goodness,” her mother confirmed.  “But he’s hurt.  Badly.

“Or so they tell me.”  A note of frustrated exhaustion and anxiety seeped into her mother’s voice now.  “They haven’t allowed me to see him.

“Anyway, we don’t know if he’s going to pull through.  There’s nothing to do but wait right now.”

“Oh.”  It was all Meghan said.  She couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Where’s Derek?”

“I don’t know,” Meghan answered.  “He was gone when I woke up and he hasn’t been back since.”

A weary sigh came across the line, her mother now the one to minimally respond.  “Well, go and find him please.

“I don’t know if…

“You two may need to come over here quickly if…

“Just please go and find him, Meghan.”  Her mother left it at that.

“Ok.  I will.”

***

Meghan stepped into the pub.  The sky was still bright in the early evening and it took a few moments for her eyes to adjust to the murky interior, which revealed a dingy, run down watering hole, consisting of a few empty booths and a bar that held the majority of the occupants, mulling over their beers.  Most of them had turned in her direction upon her entrance.

“Woo, woo!  Hello, little girl!”

“I’ve been saving a seat for you, right here,” a drunken patron said, pointing to his lap.

But even as Meghan scoffed and rolled her eyes in disgust, a voice from the far end of the bar cut in.  “Hey, shut the fuck up, you pukes.  That’s my kid sister.”

There was a series of muttered apologies and excuses, the men reluctantly turning on their stools back to their drinks.  Derek stood and made his way over, swaying only slightly, a pint glass in his hand.

“The hell are you doing here?”

“Mom said to find you…  I found you.”  She stood there, weighing between competing impulses to leave this shithole or carry out her accepted obligation.  After vacillating for a few moments, she picked the former.  “Well, anyway, I just wanted to know where you were so I could get you if we needed to go right away.”

“Go where?”

Meghan sighed.  “Go get on a plane.  To see Dad.  In case he dies,” she said bluntly.  She turned to leave.

“Whoa, wait, wait… wait a minute.”  Derek grabbed her by the shoulder, pulling her back around, a bit too roughly.  “Don’t go running off.”

He took a strong pull from his glass, then a second one, draining it and wiped his mouth roughly with his forearm.  “Harry, gimme two more,” he said to the bartender.  Then he gestured to one of the empty booths.  “C’mon. Sit here for a minute.”

Meghan reluctantly allowed her brother to guide her over, and she sat, distastefully brushing some old crumbs from the table top.  Derek went up to the bar and came back with the glasses of beer, setting one in front of her.

“Cheers,” he said, holding his glass up, and when she didn’t return the gesture, he settled for clinking it against hers sitting on the table and taking another hefty pull.

He let out a loud groan of appreciation, staring off to the side, not making eye contact.  Meghan eyed him as distastefully as the old crumbs.  Her brother looked older.  He actually wasn’t terribly out of shape, especially considering how heavily he apparently drank on a regular basis, most likely due to the manual labor his job demanded, but still he just looked… worn out.  

“Aren’t you even worried?” Meghan asked somewhat confrontationally, after sitting a few minutes in silence watching Derek work his way through his pint with efficiency.

“No, I’m not,” he replied, blithely.  “Doesn’t look like you’re all teary-eyed about it either.”

Meghan considered this for a moment, before taking up her own glass and taking a drink, not knowing what to say.

“Why is that?” Derek asked.  “Is it cause you don’t give a shit about him?  Any of us?

“We might as all drop dead, right?”

He was looking at her now, and while he was clearly intoxicated, his gaze was level and focused nonetheless.  There might have been a hint of anger in the look, but mostly it seemed like mild interest.

“Derek…”  It was Meghan’s turn to look away now.  “It’s not… I don’t…

“It’s...

“It’s hard.”

He considered her for a few moments before he leaned back in his seat then, apparently satisfied with that response.  “Yea,” he agreed simply, raising his glass again.

They sat there, drinking in silence.  “It doesn’t matter anyway,” Derek said, after a little while.  “He’s not gonna die.”

“Yea?” Meghan asked skeptically.  “How do you know that?”

“What the hell do you think they’re doing over there?  Why’s Dad always so damn busy?  They’re still fucking around with the Legacy Virus.  They’ll use it to fix him up…”

Meghan drank her beer, mulling that over.  Was it true?  “How do you know?”

“C’mon…  A virus that can fix anything?   Heal virtually any disease, any injury, bring you up to your physical peak… you think they’re gonna just forget about that?”

“It doesn’t fix everything.”  Her voice was bitter, flat.

“I know.”  Derek’s voice was quiet too, and when she looked at him, he was wearing that expression again, examining, searching her face.  She realized suddenly that it was the same look her mother gave her just before she left.  “Harry, two more.”

Meghan looked down, surprised to see her own glass empty.  Her brother took the mugs, getting up from the booth with weary grunt, returning with two more beers.

“I know,” he repeated again.  “It’s…  fucked up.  Everything’s so different now.

“It’s harder for people like us.  Most people our age, they don’t know, they don’t understand…

“They were infected their whole lives.  The way things are now, this is new for them, different.  Kind of exciting, even.  They feel like they’re free for the first time.  For the old people, they remember life before EV.  They know how the world’s supposed to be, and all they care about is getting it back to how it was.

“Us…  we’re stuck in the middle, right?  We don’t know any of this stuff, the old world rebuilding.  People who’re Mom and Dad’s age... they get it.  They remember it.  But you and me?  We’ve never seen any of it.

“And how we feel, how we think now…  this isn’t something new for us, like it is for the rest of everyone our age outside of Quarantine.  We remember what it was like before.  For all them, there is no before...

“It’s how we thought when we were infected -- that’s what was new, that’s what was different.

“For us.”

“So what’re you saying?” Meghan asked.  “You wish you were still infected?”

Derek didn’t answer, drinking a third of the pint in a single swallow.

“I never said that...  But maybe those anti-vaxxers got a point,” he said at last.  “Maybe there’s nothing wrong with it.”

“‘Nothing wrong’..?  Do you remember what it was like…  what it made us do..?”

“Of course, I remember.”  Derek’s voice was sharp, showing emotion for the first time.  “Do you think you could ever forget?  That’s the whole fucking problem..!”

He looked off angrily for a moment, then turned back to his beer, downing it, setting it down roughly with a thump that bordered on a slam.  “How…  how can we just go back?  Try to live like none of it ever happened?  Pretend that we didn’t do the things we did…  that we didn’t like it…  

“Didn’t…  enjoy it..?

“Maybe the Virus isn’t in our brains anymore, but we still have the memories.  We remember how it felt…  what it was like to think that way…

“It altered how we think… What if now, we still…  kind of think that way, sometimes?

“How do you cure that?  How do you cure how you think?  How much of it was the Virus and how much of it was me myself?  

“How do you fix... your memories..?”

Meghan looked at her brother’s face and saw there all of the same turmoil that had been raging inside of herself these past years.  She understood now why he drank so heavily, which perhaps she had always known but refused to acknowledge in her own self-absorbed rebellious desire to get away; instead of getting lost in a bottle, she had run away to college.

She raised her glass hesitantly, and then extended it.  

“Derek…”

He looked up with some surprise, and raised his own.

“Cheers.”

The glasses clinked.

***

It was late when they left the pub, headed for home, and both of them were quite drunk.  Meghan tried to walk in a straight line, weaving into the grass and then veering back to run into Derek, who was then knocked off course as well, despite his significantly larger mass.

“Jesus, quit knocking into me,” he griped, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a flask, taking a swig.

“Are you kidding?” Meghan asked, reaching up and swiping the flask out of his hand.  “Don’t you ever stop?”

She took a pull herself, coughing slightly as the harsh whiskey burned its way down her throat, sitting in her stomach.  She hardly ever drank, and the alcohol was really hitting her hard.  Luckily, it wasn’t all that far to stumble home.

“So Mom says you’ve got yourself a little boyfriend at school…”

“Oh, shuttup.  I really don’t want to talk about it.  I only told her so she’d stop worrying about me being ‘all alone, so far away from home’.

“What a big mouth..!   She can never keep a secret...”

“You’d be surprised about that,” Derek slurred heavily now as he took the flask back.

Meghan eyed him blearily as he took another drink.  “Yea?  Surprise me, then.”

Her brother didn’t answer immediately, letting the suspense build a bit before simply stating:  “She’s banging the neighbor.”

“What?!”  

Derek took a few staggering steps before realizing that Meghan was left behind, rooted to the ground. 

“C’mon,” he said, yanking her, nearly off her unsteady feet.  “I don’t wanna stand out here all night…”

“Uh, hello?  Mom?  Having an affair?”

“Not for the first time…”

“You’re kidding me!  Why?  Why would she do that?”  Despite her shock, Meghan resumed her drunken amble along side her brother, trying to wrap her head around the situation.

“You know why.”

“No…  I don’t.”

“Yes, you do…  Mom and Dad, they fight all the time.  He’s never here.  He’s like you, he ran away, buried himself in his very, very important work…”

“I--” Meghan opened her mouth to protest the comparison, but then closed it again. “So…  so what then..  She’s mad at Dad so she goes off and gets with the neighbors?”

“It’s not just the fighting…”  Derek gave a funny a look she didn’t completely understand.  “Everyone needs attention…  affection…”

Meghan didn’t respond as they weaved down the sidewalk.  Suddenly, it wasn’t so hard to envision her mother, lonely and angry.   In the arms of someone else, not her husband.  Someone paying her attention, giving her affections.  And more…

As the other morning, suddenly it was so clear in her mind, her mother with some nameless, faceless stranger, passionately entangled, blonde hair damp with perspiration, writhing in pleasure…

Nothing she hadn’t seen before...

Meghan’s head was awhirl with the alcohol and everything her brother had told her.  It was all so surreal.   So… twisted…

She barely realized that they were already on the front walk of their house.  She stumbled suddenly on a crack, letting out a cry as she fell forward, her intoxicated reflexes too slow and dull to catch herself.

Strong hands circled her waist, arresting her fall.  

“You all right?”

Derek hauled her up, and for a moment his brown eyes locked with hers, and in that moment, countless other memories flooded back into her mind, past occasions that she had looked into those eyes.  The same ones that were running through Derek’s head, judging by the look on his face.

Meghan’s phone rang then, startling her.

She pulled herself from her brother’s arms and took her phone out to answer it.

“Hi Nate.”

She opened the front door and went inside, leaving her brother behind, standing there on the porch.

***  

“Meghan, how much have you had to drink?”

“I dunno, baby, a lot…  too much…”  She was lying in bed, still fully dressed, on top of the covers.  Her eyes kept sliding shut on her.

“You should be a little more careful…”

“It’s fine,” she said dismissively, waving her free hand in the air as though her boyfriend could see it.    “I was with my brother… he’s got big muscles…” 

“Um…Ok…  

“Any news about your dad?”

“I don’t wanna talk about that…” Meghan felt herself slurring her words but wasn’t at all able to prevent it.

“Ok… what do you want to talk about..?”

“I dunno, I dunno…”  Meghan shook her head on her pillow, which she regretted for the way it made the room spin about.  “It’s been a crazy…it’s crazy here..”

“Are you all right?”

“Yea…  no…  you wouldn’t understand.”

“Oh.  I see…”  She could hear the hurt in Nate’s voice.  That was just the way he was.  He wouldn’t get angry or self-defensive at being excluded -- only downcast at being left out.  “Maybe… maybe you could help me to understand.”

Even in her inebriated state, she knew that while this proffer was genuinely extended, there was still that slim element of gentle probing, that intrigued curiosity. 

“You can’t understand…  you wouldn’t get it, there’s nothing I could say…

“You’ll never know how it feels…  what happened to me was different, different than anyone else who got infected.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Usually people got infected and they just changed right there on the spot.”

“I know that,” Nate said.  “But you..?  How were you different?”

Meghan felt herself drifting off to sleep, but she forced herself to stay awake and answer.  Somehow, she felt like she wanted to talk about it now.

“I’m ready,” she mumbled.  “Ready to tell you all my secrets…”

“I...”  Nate sounded uncertain.  “Maybe we should talk when your head is clear.”

Meghan inhaled deeply, and let the air out with a long sigh, the extra oxygen perking her up slightly.  “I’m the reason our Quarantine Zone fell to the virus.”

“What..?  Meghan…you… you never told me… I didn’t know any of this…”

“I got infected through some kind of minute exposure when I went outside of our Quarantine Zone,” she continued on, oblivious to her boyfriend’s startled confusion.  “I didn’t even know I was infected at the time.

“And then I came home.  My parents weren’t there.  My brother was in a coma, you knew that already.  It was just me by myself.

“Back then, I was fat.  I had pimples.  My eyes were brown and my hair was dark.  

“But everyday, I’d wake up and I’d be a little different.  My skin was a little clearer.  My eyes were lighter.  I was skinnier.  My hair was blonder.

“And it was like that for a week.  Everyday, getting more and more fit, little by little, but as the days passed, it started happening faster, more changes, bigger changes all at once.”

As she recalled those events, everything that had happened, how it all felt, the words began tumbling out faster, her breathing a little more rapid, and the hand that wasn’t holding her phone went to the bottom hem of her shirt, pushing it up, running her fingertips against her flat, soft stomach, firm, toned muscles just beneath.

“And then my mind, Nate, you don’t know what it was like inside my head…

“I could feel it everyday, the corruption growing in my head, little by little…

“Even as my body was changing, I could feel my mind changing, my personality… each day, turning into more and more of a slut...”

Her free hand went inside the front of her jeans, and she was unsurprised to find her panties drenched.  She’d felt that they’d been that way since the walk home, as soon as Derek had told her about their mother…

“All the things inside of my head, Nate, fucked up, nasty, twisted things…things I wanted to do, things I wanted to have done to me…  it was all so sick, all so wrong…

“But all of that just made me feel hotter, hornier… thinking like a depraved little whore just got me dripping wet…”

Her pants were unbuttoned, unzipped now, her panties pushed to the side, fingertips running up and down her slit, spreading her lips and then sliding inside.  Nate hadn’t replied in awhile, but she knew he was still there; she could hear him on the other end, breathing quietly, though at a subtly increasing pace, and she knew his hand was down his pants too.

“And then the by the end of the week, ohhhh…  It was amazing…  I didn’t even look like myself anymore.  I was all skinny and fit… blonde hair…  my eyes had turned blue…  I had big, giant, sexy tits...”

Meghan went back to holding her phone up with her shoulder, her hand snaking up her shirt, feeling herself up, pawing, squeezing them, remembering how incredible and exciting it had been, seeing them swell and grow larger, jutting out from her chest, filling and straining the fabric of her tops for the first time.

“I looked like a smoking hot, sexy, blonde whore, Nate…

“And I felt like one too.”  Meghan was panting loudly now, uninhibited in her drunken state.  “I was so fucking horny all of the time, dripping wet… all I wanted was to get my little blonde pussy stuffed with a big giant cock… hot, sticky cum filling me up, squirting all over me…”

The lubrication was soaking her hand as she plunging her fingers in and out of herself, grinding her thumb roughly against her clit.  Peripherally, she wondered if Derek could hear her.  The thought of it excited her more.

She was close to climaxing, her hips starting to twitch upwards.

“I’m gonna cum, Nate…  Cum with me…  

“My eyes are closed, baby…  I’m thinking of your big dick, squirting all over my tits, all over my face… unnnhhhh...”  She moaned in longing lust, visualizing just that, though it wasn’t her boyfriend’s face she was thinking of.  Nate was groaning, breathing hard, beating himself off.

“Yea… yea…,” she encouraged raggedly.  “Cum with me, baby…  cum with your dirty little slut--

“Unnnnnngghhhh..!”  She moaned lewdly into the phone, squirming around in bed as the orgasm hit her, the pleasure washing over her in waves.

“Jesus, Meghan--”  Nate choked out and grunted, and hearing him get off made Meghan cum even harder.

“Uhhhhhh, uhhhhhhh, uhhhhhhhhh…” Meghan continued moaning in lascivious pleasure, luxuriating in the glow, revelling in it.

“Oh… fuck…”

“Holy shit,” Nate gasped.  “Meghan…  Meghan...

“Meghan..?”

She heard him say her name a few more times, but her eyes were so heavy now, and it didn’t seem important to answer.

She drifted away to sleep.