Quaranteam: Unbroken Mold - Ch. 1 (all readers) (Patreon)

Chapter One

March 11th, 2020

Senior Airman Tom Holt-Hodge looked out the window of the plane he was on and frowned as he noticed the plane’s wing tipping upward, meaning the 737 he was flying commercial on was turning off the expected path. He reached over to his right and shook his best friend, Joseph Barton, who was asleep next to him in their first-class seats.

They hadn’t booked first-class, but Tom’s travelling duffle had a National Guard symbol on it so a couple of businessmen had offered to give up their seats to Tom and his travelling companion, and Tom had just been too polite to tell them it would be fine for them to fly coach. Joe wasn’t even in the Armed Forces, but as he was traveling with Tom, the businessmen had just assumed he was, and both of them were now sitting back in coach while Joe and Tom were enjoying unlimited leg room and more offers of free drinks than they could shake a cocktail shaker at. Tom had felt a little guilty about taking the upgrade, but Joe, ever the fast talker, had just thanked the two men and gladly accepted the switched seat assignments.

“Joe, wake up,” he said quietly.

“Are they serving meals already?” Joe said, pulling the face mask from his eyes before looking around the cabin. He’d been in the recline position from the moment the captain had given the okay for them to do so, and Joe had always been able to sleep anywhere, so it hadn’t been any surprise to Tom when his friend had been lights out within minutes. “Dude, did I sleep through the whole flight? Why are the cabin lights coming up?”

“Something’s wrong,” Tom said. “I can feel that they’re redirecting the plane, turning us hard north. It’s a sudden sharp turn. Not sure quite why, but we’re being diverted.”

“Where to?”

“They haven’t said anything. They haven’t even said they are diverting us yet, Joe, but you don’t just make such a big ass turn for no reason at all.”

Thomas ‘Tom’ Holt-Hodge was in his fifth and final year at UC Berkeley, on the verge of completing a Data Science degree on the dime of Uncle Sam as a member of the National Guard. He was hapa, half-Asian and half-white, but leaned a little more towards his Asian heritage in his appearance, with short black hair cut straight, the epicanthal folds prominent enough for people to often think he was full-blooded Chinese, although his skin was certainly a shade or two paler than would’ve been expected if he was. He and Joe had been friends since they’d been randomly paired together in their freshman year as roommates, even if Joe had a tendency to make the worst possible first impressions on people.

Joseph ‘Joe’ Barton also looked quite a bit different than his best friend, a year younger but three or four inches taller than Tom. If Tom was a modern mix, Joe was a California classic – blonde hair and hazel eyes, basically having finished his senior year in all but tests in Finance, he was already being courted by a number of venture capital firms in the Bay Area, although he was thinking about signing on with Inner Light Investments, since Nathaniel Watkins was something of a hero of his. Both men were fit, but Tom seemed more elegant whereas Joe looked like the guy most likely to throw the first punch if things got hairy. The fact that Joe often slicked his hair back was the main reason that some people got sort of a skeezy first impression of his generally jovial best friend.

Just then, the intercom crackled and cut through the silence. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We’ve been advised that all airports are closing effective immediately, and as such, we’re being diverted to the nearest airport that can accommodate our passenger load. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but we have been told by the FAA that it is of the utmost importance that we get all planes out of the air. No immediate threat to any of you, but all flights are being grounded. We are being directed… to… Salt Lake City… so once you touch down, you’ll want to reach out to people wherever it is you’re headed, inform them that you’ll be either renting a car or sheltering in place in Salt Lake City.”

“Guess that flu they were talking about on the television isn’t just going to ‘miraculously disappear overnight,’ no matter what our President said about it,” Joe told him.

Tom and Joe had been travelling from San Francisco to Atlanta, where Tom was supposed to spend a week practicing on the courses over in Augusta, in preparation for his shot at the Master’s Tournament next month. They were part of UC Berkeley’s golf team, and while Tom had been something of a longshot for the Master’s, having finished second in the U.S. Amateur Championship, but the first place winner had fallen ill and had to cancel, so Tom had been given the go ahead to take his place, assuming he wasn’t called to help deal with escalated problems, which it sounded like could happen any day now. Before that call had come in, he’d been juggling between his studies and all the work that had kept them busy on base, but he’d still found time to keep his love of golf up.

Not that it looked like it would matter now, since clearly the tournament was going to get cancelled. Hell, it sounded like the whole world might be.

When they landed at Salt Lake City International Airport, Tom saw the same shellshocked look on everyone getting off the plane. He wondered if it was at all like how people had been when their flights had been grounded on 9/11, as he was far too young to remember that personally.

What surprised him, however, was the pair of people in CDC biohazard suits standing just at the end of the walkway on their way in, looking at each person who was getting off the plane. They had a couple of local sheriffs with them, each of whom was masked up with small respirator masks, and had their sidearms out. It felt like they’d walked off their plane and into some kind of disaster movie, like one of them was trying to smuggle a nuclear bomb. Tom was hoping like hell they were there to see somebody other than them.

“That’s them there,” one of the CDC scientists said, pointing directly at them as they were walking up towards the airport.

So much for that idea, Tom thought.

“Senior Airman Tom Holt-Hodge and Joseph Barton, I’m Doctor Carter Peterson. I’m going to need you to come with us. We’ll have sheriffs grab your bags, but we have to go immediately.”

Joe was about to ask questions because that was what Joe did in these sorts of things, but Tom put his hand on his friend’s shoulder, and the two of them went along quietly, as the CDC scientists took them up the walkway and lead them over to a security corridor, taking them away and down onto the tarmac, where they had stickers with their names on them slapped to their chests. After that, they were loaded up into the back of a giant truck where another man in CDC gear gave them each their own little ventilator to put on immediately.

“Hey, I’m Doctor Spender,” the guy in CDC gear in the back of the truck said to them. “Your plane wasn’t redirected to the nearest airport – it was redirected here, and you’re only the first of about ten batches of people we’re expecting, so get comfortable. The bad news is there’s a chance you’ve been exposed to Covid, but the good news is that we can’t confirm that yet. There was a confirmed case in your dormitory back at Berkeley, so we’re redirecting all the flights with points of contact here, and we’ll be taking you all to the same place, a base outside of Provo, where you’ll all be kept in isolation until we can get you fully tested and cleared.”

“And if we turn out to be positive?” Joe asked, unable to contain his silence any longer.

“Well, then we’ll keep you isolated and do our best to try and get you through it if you actually are infected,” Spender told them. “But let’s hope you aren’t. It’s pretty nasty.”

“I thought it was just like some kind of flu.”

“It’s way worse than that,” Spender said. “But don’t let me scare you unnecessarily. You’re probably fine, and with any luck, you’ll be on your way again within a few days.”

July 7th, 2020

“You know when I said playing golf for all eternity would be a great life, back at the start of this?” Joe said to him with a chuckle, while Tom crouched down to study his putt. “I was wrong. I’m going out of my fucking mind here, Tom.”

“Look, you heard the CDC, Joe,” Tom said to him. “Our bloodwork came back with some anomalies that they wanted to investigate and they didn’t feel comfortable letting us leave the base on our own, but that we could spend time outdoors playing golf at any of the local courses, as long as we kept our distance from whoever we encountered. It’s a gilded cage, obviously, but you have to admit…” He stood up, moved to position and then putt the ball slowly but surely across the ten feet of green or so before it dropped into the cup satisfyingly. “There’s plenty of places for us to play, so at least it hasn’t gotten that boring yet.”

“Four months!” Joe said, throwing his hands up in the air. “Four months doing nothing but playing golf, watching television and taking the occasional blood test. I should be considering it a vacation, but I’m going out of my damn mind, not really seeing anyone except you, unless you count our weekly visits from Spender and Peterson, which I assure you, I do not.”

“Take your putt,” Tom said to him.

“You know what? I think I’m done playing golf, at least for a week or two,” Joe said as he moved over and took a half-assed swing at ball with his putter, only knocking it half the distance between himself and the hole. “I know we don’t have much else to do, but I can’t fucking take it. I need to do something different for a while.”

“Don’t just half-ass this game, though, Joe. Finish out the round and then we can take a few days off and just sit in the cabin and watch television or whatever.” Tom had seen this coming for weeks, but had hoped it might hold out a little bit longer. To be fair, though, he wasn’t all that far from breakdown himself.

Days had turned into weeks had turned into months.

It wasn’t just them, though. The whole world seemed like it was on lockdown, one way or another, and their ability to get news had been hampered by the fact that the CDC seemed to want to keep them isolated from anything regarding the Covid virus or this other virus that they’d seen a few reports about called DuoHalo, which sounded like it was as bad, if not worse, than Covid. The few times they’d tried searching for information on DuoHalo on the web, their internet connection had ‘mysteriously’ gone out and had stayed off for the better part of an hour. They didn’t even have access to their own phones, being relegated to the cheap flip phones the CDC had given them. And whenever they were set loose on a golf course, they were given ankle bracelets designed to notify their Air Force handlers if they set foot outside of the boundaries of the golf course.

Joe had been far more on edge than Tom had, Tom realized, because he’d been locked down without his girlfriend. Olivia Choi, Joe’s girlfriend, who was stranded back in Oakland had been slowly going crazy being apart from her boy. Tom had threatened to just run off on foot from their security detail, but they’d been informed a number of times that as soon as it was safe to bring Olivia to them, or for him to be sent back to Olivia, they would do so. They’d spent as much time talking to each other on the phone as they could, but it still wasn’t even close to what Joe wanted, and Tom could tell.

They finished up the hole and headed over to the golf cart before the little, tiny plastic puck in his pocket started to vibrate. Tom pulled out the antiquated flip phone from his pocket and opened it. “What’s going on, Doctors?” Tom said into the phone.

“You boys nearly finished over there?” Doctor Peterson’s voice said to them on the other end of the line. “We have some developments here that may be of interest to you two, if you don’t mind swinging back early.”

“Yeah, I think we’ve had our fill of golf at least for a little while. If you want to send our escorts over, we’ll be ready to head back.”

“They’re already waiting for you at the clubhouse. We’ll see you soon!”

Peterson sounded chipper, something that Tom hadn’t heard in his voice the entire time he’d been at the research facility. He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing, but considering Tom’s life was starting to feel a little bit like the movie “Groundhog Day,” he found himself agreeing with Bill Murray that anything different was good.

When they got to the clubhouse, sure enough, the armed guard from the Air Force was there waiting for them, still wearing the full gasmask. “Heya Bobby,” Joe said to him as they parked the golf card and plugged it into a charger. They grabbed their golf bags from the back of the cart and moved over to toss them in the back of the Humvee that was used to transport them to and from the research center where they were being kept.

“He still beating the pants off you, Joe?” Bobby said, clicking on his little tablet, marking that both men were in the car, connecting the geofencing on their ankle bracelets to his tablet and removing it from the golf course.

“Course he is, Bobby,” Joe sighed. “He’s only the number one amateur golfer in the United States.”

“Number two,” Tom corrected.

“I’m betting the old number one’s probably dead at this point,” Joe said, sinking into his seat as much as he could. “At this point, I think everybody except us is probably dead.”

“You talked to Olivia this morning, Joe,” Tom said by way of reminder. “So clearly she’s not dead, is she?”

“Did I?” Joe said, mostly just arguing for the sake of arguing. “Maybe she’s dead and I’ve been talking to an AI simulation of her. I wouldn’t put it past the government to try and do something like that to keep me from losing my mind.”

“If it was a simulation,” Tom teased, “then I imagine it would pretend to laugh at your jokes much better than your actual girlfriend does. And they’d have to fool me too, since I talk to her a little bit each day, and I know the difference between a computer and a real person.”

“Do you, Tom? Do you?”

“… I do.”

“Yeah, okay then.”

The drive back was relatively quiet, heading out of Provo towards the Air Force base just outside of town. Each time they made the drive, they would pass a rather large looking Army base, and each time, both Tom and Joe would scan for some sign of what went on there, but nothing but intimidating fences and nondescript buildings looked back at them. They didn’t even see the guards on duty at the gate station, their presence clearly hidden behind security glass of some kind.

After another ten minutes or so, they reached the Air Force complex where they were being kept. It wasn’t a huge sprawl, but there were a half dozen or so structures, most of which Tom hadn’t seen any real movement from during the time they’d been there. They were restricted to a small dormitory that had been emptied out of soldiers and felt terrifyingly empty. But in what had to be the common area, Drs. Peterson and Spender were sitting on one couch, with two other people Tom didn’t recall having seen before on another. Both were in their mid to late 50s, a man and a woman, each with an odd mix of red and silver hair, his short, hers slightly longer, gingers trying to fight off the greying process. Tom could tell by the subtle body cues he could take in from them that they were likely a couple, something that was reaffirmed when he got close enough to see matching wedding rings on each of their left hands.

“Ah, there you are, boys,” Dr. Spender said to them. “Come on in. We wanted to talk to you about an opportunity we have in front of us to try and get a head start on fighting against this DuoHalo virus you may have been hearing about. These are the Doctors Meyer, Jonathan and his wife Jeannie. They’re here to see if you might be interested in helping them test a variant from the main serum that’s starting to get deployed.”

“We don’t even know what the serum is you’re talking about, so saying you’re testing a variant doesn’t tell us a whole hell of a lot,” Joe said while Tom moved to sit down on the third couch in the U shape on the floor.

“At this point, I think we might do just about anything to get the hell out of here,” Tom confessed. “What can you tell us?”

“So the vaccine for DuoHalo is… shall we say extremely unconventional,” Dr. Jonathan Meyer said to them. “But because you’re both athletes in excellent shape, you’re fine candidates to help us test our variation. Your partners will be as well.”

“Partners?”

“Look,” Dr. Peterson said, “there’s some things about this vaccine that are… going to defy conventional understanding. That said, it’s important that you follow the rules that we lay down if you’re going to proceed as part of the test. We don’t need to discuss them now, but it’s imperative you agree to them. Mr. Holt-Hodge, all of this is going to be part of your service with the National Guard, so really, we don’t even need your permission, as this falls in line with your service to your country, but Mr. Barton, you have no such agreement, so as part of your willingness to participate in this study, we would pay off your entire college debt – tuition, room, board, outstanding loans – anything associated with your college tenure would be fully covered and paid in full, assuming you’re willing to work with us on this particular study. And, as I’m sure you’ll see, the study comes with its own benefits.”

“What kind of benefits?”

“We’ll talk about those a little closer to the study starting up. Mostly we just need you two to agree, and we’ll have a chance to bring you some new company once you do,” Dr. Jeannie Meyer said to them. “Look, we’ve brought contracts for you each to look through and sign, and once you do, we can start seeing about improving your situation here.”

Tom looked at the table and saw there were two collections of papers, each held together with a single staple, so he grabbed one, noticed it had Joe’s name at the top and then handed it to Joe before leaning forward again to grab the other one. There was a lot of legal terms in it, and whole sections of it that didn’t mean anything to him, parts that claimed he would be signing away his “initial pairings through the Oracle system” and that “eventual use of the Oracle system in regards to his pairings would be at the discretion of those running the study.” None of that made any sense, but he had to assume it was important, otherwise it wouldn’t have been in the document.

He tried to make sense of the document for as long as he could, but at some point, Tom realized he just wasn’t going to get any more information until they wanted to give it to him, which was never something the military had been good at.

“Fine,” Tom said, grabbing the pen, flipping to the last page of the document, signing it and dating it. “But I want a copy of this left here.”

“Done and done,” the male Meyer said, opening his briefcase to take out a copy of the document, swapping it with Tom’s, putting Tom’s signed copy back into the briefcase. “And now you, Mr. Barton?”

“I’m not sure I should be doing this without my girlfriend Olivia’s input,” Joe said as he kept glancing through the paperwork, trying to find meaning in the cryptic word salad.

“If you sign the document,” the female Meyer said, “we can look into having your girlfriend brought here to join with you in the study.”

Tom caught a strange look from the male Meyer to the female Meyer, but then saw Jeannie put her hand on her husband’s knee reassuringly. There was subtext to be deciphered, but Tom didn’t know either person well enough to glean what was being communicated.

Joe looked down at the document again, but the expression on his face made it clear he wasn’t getting any more information from it than he had on his first pass. Tom could see the look on his friend’s face that echoed exactly how he felt – they were missing something. Something important. But who the fuck knew where it was in that camouflaged jungle of words.

He picked up the pen, scrawled his name on the last page and then looked away off into the distance. “Olivia. Get it done. I want her here if I’m going to be part of this little science experiment of yours, because without her, I’m going to be a goddamn mess.”

“We’ll look into it, Mr. Barton, but I promise you, it will be a top priority for us,” Dr. Jeannie Meyer said to them as she took the contract from him, returning it with a blank copy for him to read in more depth after they were gone.

“See that it is,” Joe said, “because if it isn’t, I’m sure I can think of ways to throw plenty of monkey wrenches into whatever plans you happen to have cooking. Don’t test us, Doctors. We’re not egghead smart, but we’re still smart, okay?”

“No one’s doubting that, Mr. Barton,” Dr. Spender said, as all four doctors stood up and moved to head towards the entrance to the building.

“Do you feel like we should be checking our pockets to see if we’ve still got our wallets, Joe?” Tom asked his best friend.

“More than that,” Joe said. “I’m thinking to check and see if we’ve still got our underwear on.”

July 9th, 2020

It had been something of a chaotic couple of days, as they were starting to find out what was happening outside of their little bubble. The Air Force was trying to keep them still mostly insulated, but the world was making it too hard to keep them sheltered.

The President had died, and so had the Vice President, meaning the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, had become the first female President of the United States, not that Tom was too thrilled about that. He wasn’t a big fan of either party, but the fact that people had died off at the executive level meant that the world must’ve been in total shambles, and the cracks in the façade were starting to show.

Around that point, Tom noticed that Bobby, their regular Air Force liaison, had gotten a bit, well, peppier was perhaps the only way to safely describe it. He was happier, fitter, more productive. Even Joe, who wasn’t always the most perceptive of people, noticed that he was a bit more relaxed and joyous.

“What the hell, Bobby?” Joe finally asked him. “You get a new girlfriend or something?”

“Something like that,” Bobby said with a smile that threatened to spread right off the edges of his head. “You’ll understand in time, fellas, but it’s like that old saying, with every dark cloud comes a silver lining, and I’m gonna enjoy this particular bit of silver until I’m old and grey.”

No matter how much more they’d tried to push him on it, he wouldn’t talk and tell them what had lightened his step. Tom had a suspicion they’d know soon enough. They’d built a mock chipping area next to a mock putting green, just so Tom had somewhere to practice his short game. They needed to keep busy, and they couldn’t always be leaving the small compound, so they’d brought the practice area to the base, having set up shop as best as they could. It was hot at hell, though, so they could really only be out for about an hour or so at a time before they needed to head back inside where it was air conditioned. No way in hell Tom would’ve guessed Utah had summer temps approaching a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. They’d been chipping for about forty minutes, so they were getting close to needing another break.

When the truck came rolling towards the building, both Tom and Joe stopped what they were doing to watch it approach. It wasn’t the vehicle that brought in food or supplies, nor one to bring in a shift change, because Bobby had been off yesterday, and had come in on the shift change this morning.

The truck stopped in front of the barracks, and they saw two people clad in heavy clothing hop off the back of it, carrying small suitcases as they headed into the building, escorted by one member of Air Force guard. Tom had noticed the guards around the base had slowly stopped wearing those giant gasmasks they’d been sporting most of the time they were there over the last few days. It hadn’t been immediately, more like a slow rotation of the masks out and bare (smiling) faces in. Tom had also noticed that they were being guarded by a nonstandard distribution of women soldiers. In fact, of the six people on guard duty, only two were men and four were women. And based on the bright pink attire, Tom was guessing the two people being delivered to the barracks were women or had an undying love of 80s neon.

“New faces being added to the experiment today?” Joe asked Bobby.

“Had to be sooner or later,” Bobby said. “Hopefully you boys lucked out.”

“What do you mean, lucked out?”

“You’ll see soon enough, I’m sure.”

Tom wasn’t entirely sure he liked the laugh of Bobby’s that accompanied his comment, but there was nothing to do about that other than to carry on. But it would’ve been rude not to greet the newcomers, so they scooped up their golf balls, tossed them into the bag followed by the clubs and then gathered up the bag to head inside.

Once inside, Tom noticed that one of the doors was shut, so he went into the room they’d claimed as their own and put down the golf bags. Then he stepped into the bathroom attached to it, splashed some water on his face, a little under his arms and then toweled down before heading back out into the common area, just in time to see the door open.

He hadn’t expected two beautiful women to come strolling out, but he’d learned that whatever he expected wasn’t what he could rely on happening. The two women were of similar builds, one a few inches taller than the other, both wearing yellow shirts with green trim on them proclaiming “University of Oregon Women’s Volleyball.” One had auburn hair while the other was more of a strawberry blonde. They were both athletic and shapely, the blonde a bit bustier than her friend but also a few inches shorter. The auburn-haired one had the most piercing green eyes he’d ever seen, contrasting to the strawberry blonde’s bright blues. Both had giant smiles on their faces, as if they were so happy to see Tom and Joe that they couldn’t contain themselves, or maybe they just wanted to make an amazing first impression on them so they dialed up the charm as much as they could.

What a knockout pair of women, Tom thought to himself.

“Hey there fellas,” the strawberry blonde said to them. “I’m Meg, that’s Mel. We were told we were being brought here for some kind of study, and they were going to waive our college debts for taking part in it. They tell you two the same?”

“They told me that,” Joe said before Tom could get a word in edgewise. “They told him that he’s in the National Guard, so he doesn’t exactly get an opinion in the matter.”

“Do you know what the test is about?” the auburn-haired woman named Mel said to them, a bit more sass in her tone of voice. “I got the impression it might be about this DuoHalo virus I’ve started seeing reports about, but they wouldn’t answer much of anything we asked them. We were told we able to get out of quarantine if we did, but only the two of us from our whole team.”

“They say why?” Tom asked.

Meg shook her head. “They didn’t say much of anything. Just marched in, pointed at us and told us to come with them if we wanted to live.”

“They actually phrase it like that?” Tom joked.

“I wish!” Meg giggled. “It would’ve been so much more dramatic if they had. But no, it was just a handful of soldiers showed up to our quarantined dorms and asked us to come down and bring bags with us. They said that we were going to be helping in vaccine research, but they didn’t say if it was for Covid or DuoHalo or both. Then they tested us and brought us here. They said someone’ll be by in a few days to give us our doses and our instructions, so I guess until then, you want to show us around?”

“Sure,” Tom said. “There’s not a whole lot to see, but we can give you the dimestore tour. I’m Tom, that’s Joe. We were supposed to be flying to Georgia to play in a golf tournament there, but it seems like the whole damn world’s on pause.”

“Cheer up, boyo,” Mel said, smirking at him. “You’re in Utah now, not too far from the headquarters of the Church of Latter-day Saints.”

Tom winced a little bit. “You’re not Mormons, are you?”

Meg laughed, shaking her head. “I’m a godless heathen, and Mel’s Methodist, although she’s about as lapsed as you can get without being totally fallen off.”

“I’m busy, okay?” Mel said with a shrug. “God understands.”

“So how about that tour?”

“Sure,” Tom chuckled. “It’ll take all of two minutes, but let’s go…”