Quaranteam 2:19 (Patreon)

Chapter Nineteen

January 23rd, 2021

The bachelor party began like most of them typically did – with Congressional hearings.

They were at Rook Manor, although the plan was to be out of the house within a few hours, once everyone had arrived. Until they had, they were doing something none of them had really planned on – they were watching C-SPAN.

“Mr. Rook, do you have experience seeing what an imprinted woman looks like when she’s gone too long in between appointments?” Senator Giancola (R, KS) asked him on the television.

“I do,” Andy watched himself say in response on the television, recorded yesterday. “Through no fault of my own. I’d like to stress that I am doing everything in my power to make sure none of the women I’m partnered with are unhappy.”

“We have heard indirectly from your partners about how satisfied they are with your performance and have entered it into the record, Mr. Rook,” another Senator, Senator May Collins (D, CO). “This is not a condemnation of your personal behavior. But you have a great deal of experience in dealing with those who’ve had complications resulting from the serum, which is one of the many reasons you’re here for these hearings. We’re not accusing you of anything. But could you perhaps describe for us the state of mind a woman who has gone too long between encounters with her partner?”

Andy remembered how weirdly hostile it had all felt at the time when this had been recorded, twenty-four hours earlier, but in watching it back now, he could see that maybe he was just jumpy by the whole gravitas of the whole thing.

“Unfocused would be generous,” Andy saw himself say. “Imprinted women who have gone nine or ten days without a tryst with their partner will be unable to think clearly and will be so focused on getting that encounter that basically anything else will become secondary to that goal, and that includes the physical well-being of herself and or anyone else around her.”

“How often would you recommend an imprinted woman have a tryst with her partner, Mr. Rook?” a third Senator, Senator Evelyn Yang (D, NY), asked him.

“I’m not a medical professional, so I’m not the person who should be answering this, Senator.”

“I’m asking strictly from your own personal experience.”

“Once a week to be safe, although sometimes needs can push that out for a few days, if there are other women in the Team there to look out for her.”

“What’s the longest anyone in your Team has gone in between trysts, Mr. Rook?” Giancola asked him.

“Thirteen days.”

“Was that healthy?”

“The partner in question wanted to determine the extent to which she could hold out if needed. She could’ve tapped out at any time, and I was on hand to make sure she was okay, ready to give her what she needed whenever she felt she had to yield.”

“Would you expect the average woman to be able to hold out that long, Mr. Rook?”

“I would stress again that I am not a medical practitioner, but that long? No. The need would turn into pain much sooner than that for most women, particularly younger women, but again, that’s purely based on personal experience and not professional medical opinions.”

“Would it surprise you, Mr. Rook,” Senator Yang picked up, “to know that we have spoken to medical professionals about this, and they are very much in agreement with your opinion?”

“Considering I’m close friends with one of the people who is working on the serum, Senator, no it would not.”

“Do you have any experience with what happens when a woman goes beyond the two-week period, Mr. Rook?”

“Personal experience? No Senator, I do not.”

“According to all the professional medical minds we have approached about this, they have all described matters the same way – the serum that is keeping these women alive goes into overdrive and begins to consume their bodies for fuel, and within a day or two, they suffer irreparable organ failure and die an extremely gruesome death,” Senator Yang said. “Are you aware of that?”

“I am, Senator,” the television version of him said. “As part of the Civilian Oversight Group assigned to keep tabs on the Quaranteam serum and its development, I have read all the literature, research and data I can get my hands on.”

“And yet, you are still of the mind that this proposed piece of legislature,” she said, lifting up a black three ring binder with two-hundred and eighty-five pages of paper in it, “the Men’s Protection Act, is too aggressive in the efforts that it takes to keep women from being left at the whim of a man’s foolish decision to put himself into harm’s way?”

The televised version of Andy sighed. “Yes, Senator, I am. I’ve read the entire bill, and there are several things in it that are quite concerning to me.”

“Such as?”

“Caloric intake restrictions? Shall we start there?” Andy said. “I fully agree that men need to take care of themselves, in order to be able to remain alive to provide for their partners for as long as possible, but you know as well as I do, Senator, that if a man dies of a heart attack, there are solutions to get any women assigned to that man reassigned, even if they are gruesome and unpleasant.”

“Should we be forced to do that, Mr. Rook?”

Andy chuckled throatily. “Have you ever just not been in the mood, Senator?”

“Excuse me?”

Andy grinned a little bit, both on the television yesterday and today sitting in his living room. “I love all my partners, and I’m happy to be paired with all of them, but I have to tell you, there are some days where I just do not want to have sex. This won’t be a surprise to any of my partners – I’m sure they’ve been able to tell on one day or another where I’m just going through the motions and doing what’s expected of me. Because my partners have needs, and I am willing to set aside my personal mood at that moment to make sure those needs are being met. But I’m asking you right now, Senator, if you try and tell me that on a particularly miserable day, if I happen to have a second bacon double cheeseburger for lunch, that I’m going to be arrested and my partners are going to have to come to a prison to get their trysts, how much more harm do you think you’re doing than good?”

“Don’t you agree that your health is important, Mr. Rook, and that diet is a part of that?” Senator Giancola asked. It hadn’t been obvious at the time, but now, a day later, he could see she was teeing him up for a perfect answer, and that she had been doing so intentionally.

“I do, Senator, but let me ask you this – did you ask any of those doctors who’ve you consulted with about how long a woman can go in between trysts about what kinds of other changes the Quaranteam serum has done to men’s bodies? Because this legislature demonstrates that you absolutely have not. I know that, because my caloric intake now compared to what it was before I was introduced to the Quaranteam serum by my first pairing partner are in no way comparable.”

“How many partners do you have, Mr. Rook?”

“Keep in mind, Senator, I am by no means indicative of what the average male looks like in terms of pairing.”

“We’ll keep that in mind, Mr. Rook. Now please answer the question.”

“Twenty-two.”

“And how much would you say it’s affected your caloric intake?”

“I consulted with both my cook and my personal trainer before I settled on this number.” Andy winced at that now, realizing it kind of made him look like an entitled asshole, but there was nothing he could do about it a day later.

“We understand that Mr. Rook. If the average person should consume around 2000 calories a day, how much would you say you are consuming daily?”

The version of him on the television glanced down at his notes and then looked up to answer the question. “Somewhere between 8000-9000.”

“And if you were to be restricted to 2000 calories a day?”

“According to my trainer, you would be sentencing me to death,” Andy said confidently. “And this is in the research with which you’ve all been provided. A man’s appetite, physically, is tangential to the number of partners he has. For every five or so partners a man has, his needed caloric intake adds another 2000 calories needed per day. A man with five partners would need to eat 4000 calories a day, just to keep up with them. And yet, you have a very strict 2000 calorie a day mandated limit here in this legislation, which tells me either you aren’t reading the data very well, or you think you know better about this serum than the data, neither of which, I must confess, makes me at all comfortable with the bill in question.”

“So you’re saying we should strip that provision from the Act?” Senator Giancola asked him.

“Unless your plans are to arrest every man in America on day one, yes. And if those are your plans, then obviously, I object to that also.”

“What else in here in untenable, Mr. Rook?” Senator Yang asked.

“How about the unlawful detention clause?” Andy said.

“I don’t believe we have anything like that in this bill, Mr. Rook,” Senator Collins said to him in a way that sounded more condescending than he imagined she intended it to.

“Sure you do,” Andy said. “It’s called the Restricted International Travel Guidelines.”

“They’re simply guidelines, Mr. Rook,” Senator Collins said.

“Anything that can be punished for violating it by jail time isn’t a guideline, Senator; it’s a damn law, so please, don’t try and argue the definition of words with a goddamn writer,” he growled.

“You don’t think we need better protection for our men travelling abroad, Mr. Rook?” Senator Yang asked him.

“I think required itineraries that have to be filed a month in advance would be considered unlawful detainment, and in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution.”

“If you are traveling abroad, Mr. Rook, you represent a danger to your partners in that a foreign nation might attempt to capture you as an asset for their own use,” Senator Collins said.

“Then you need to close the borders to those countries and not let any Americans in. But between that and the PITS system you’re suggesting in this document, you do realize you are making many of the men in this country less safe instead of more, I hope.”

“How do you figure that, Mr. Rook?” Senator Yang asked.

“The head of my personal security spent time working for the CIA, and she said that if we were filing itineraries any time we traveled abroad, all it would take is one bad actor to gain access to that itinerary and they could pick us off with relative ease, even set up ambushes in advance for us. The PITS system is even worse. A foreign agency would just need to gain access to how that system operated, and they could track every individual male in the country. I know you want to protect men, Senator, but lo-jacking us like we’re all under house arrest isn’t the answer.”

“Some versions of this bill have suggested that every man in America be under house arrest, Mr. Rook,” a new voice, Senator Ruth Hadaway (R, IA), said. “I’m still not entirely sure why we’ve moved away from those.”

“Because, Senator, it also violates the Fourth Amendment,” Andy said. “Most men are carrying cellphones anyway, so I’m not entirely certain what actual benefit you need beyond that. If you wanted to establish a precedent where the government could use a man’s cellphone to gather his location at any moment, I would be entirely comfortable with that.”

“The military is of the mind that we aren’t doing enough to protect men in this country, and that they should now be considered a resource of the state,” Senator Yang said.

“I’m almost certain you either didn’t consult with the majority of military’s commanding officers before drafting this bill, Senator, or you disregarded their advice, and in either case, I think that was a drastic error,” Andy said with a soft laugh. “In fact, the head of my personal security said that if this law passes as written, we’d personally be breaking several parts of it within the first twenty-four hours, at her insistence, in order to keep me safer.”

“So what you’re saying, Mr. Rook,” Senator Giancola said, “is that the entire bill is a total waste of time and we should just scrap it.”

It was much easier to recognize her teeing him up in retrospect.

“No Senator, that isn’t what I’m suggesting at all. Some parts of this, I can completely understand and agree with, although I suspect some of those parts you’ll have problems getting other men to agree with.”

“Well, what parts of the bill do you not have objections to, Mr. Rook? Let’s start there.”

“Sure. There’re plenty of parts I have no objections to. Banning smoking. Fine, no problems there, although I imagine smokers may be angry. Maybe establishing maximum daily alcohol consumption would be okay, although I’m sure much of America will be up in arms about that. I don’t drink that much, but at least you’re not banning alcohol from men outright. Mandatory doctor visits every month don’t seem too unreasonable. A little overbearing for my liking, but I get it, and I can understand the overabundance of caution. Maybe once every three months? Just to not overwhelm our already overworked medical staff.”

“Just those?”

“Not at all. I’m personally okay with all law enforcement and military personnel in active combat duty being restricted to women only, but I suspect you’ll get some severe pushback from the Armed Forces about that, and I have no real horse in that race. And you’d still have to have men as part of frontline teams, just to take care of their female partners.”

“We’re going to hear from several commanding officers over the next week or two of testimony before we make adjustments and bring some version of this bill to a vote.”

“During those revisions, then, Senators, I ask that you keep your mind towards making this a workable bill and not to repeat the mistakes of something like Prohibition,” Andy said. “Make this a bill that protects men, not one that smothers them.”

“This committee would like to thank the gentleman from California for taking his time to offer his wisdom and insight into the current draft of the Male Protection Act, and hopes he know that we will take his criticism under careful advisement.”

“Senators,” the version of him on television said as he stood up, a young man of about college age moving in, clearly the next in line to be speaking at the hearings. He remembered how odd he found it that the seven-person committee didn’t have a single one of the nine remaining male senators on it, but also didn’t know how appropriate it would’ve been to point that out during his testimony.

“We will take a ten-minute recess and then will bring William Monteiro from Georgia to express his opinions regarding the current draft of the Men’s Protection Act that is currently under consideration and public scrutiny.”

They’d gathered at Andy’s house in the early evening, and because of the amount of different people coming from different places, they’d agreed to wait until they were all there before they headed into San Francisco for the night.

Each man had one woman from his security detail with him, but as per the terms of the party, they had to not be anyone’s fiancée. That meant Phil, who was one of the people they were still waiting on, would arrive with Violet on guard and not Linda. Andy was the only exception, and both Lexi and Melody would be providing the group with additional security tonight, with Lexi tasked with Andy’s personal security and Melody overwatch for the whole group.

“Oh hey,” Xander said as he poked Andy. “You met the UGA Bulldog, Billy. I was just reading about that guy’s story in the New York Times. Seemed like a super down-to-earth kid.”

“Yeah,” Andy said. “He’d been through a rough patch, since basically they’d just been forgotten about on campus, and had been doing everything to keep themselves from catching DuoHalo or Covid. They’d done an amazing job, and Phil said they were looking into the guidelines the kid had developed to pass on to areas that still hadn’t gotten access to the vaccine yet, as a ‘best practices’ document that everyone could use.”

“He agree with you about everything in the MPA that’s fucked up?” Eric asked him.

“Like, 80% of what I objected to, he objected to,” Andy said.

“What did he object to that you didn’t?”

Andy grinned. “Well, I didn’t have a problem with men not being allowed to carry or own guns, but Billy went pretty hardcore Second Amendment fundamentalist on that when it came up during the hearing. Real ‘pry it from my cold dead hands.’ He was also, as expected, heavily against the booze restrictions. And he told me he didn’t even know about the changes to appetite a man has as the number of his partners goes up, so I think we’ve still got a long way to go in terms of education on what the Quaranteam serum can and can’t do. Hopefully they’ll take all my notes seriously.”

“Anything you objected to that he didn’t?” Eric said, turning off the television.

“Weirdly enough, he didn’t give a shit about international travel, and said he thought it was fine if we as a nation wanted to restrict men from traveling outside of the United States borders. Ever. ‘Safer at home’ were his exact words.”

Xander winced, shaking his head. “Not good.”

“I’m expecting that one to get stripped out, personally,” Andy said. “There’s just too much existing law that they’d have to overturn to enforce that kind of overreach. It would essentially be making every man prisoner in his own country, and that’s probably enough to get public sentiment against it. In fact, if I had to put money on how this bill’s going to turn out, I bet they strip out everything that both Billy and I criticized, and maybe do some adjustments to active combatant positions in law enforcement and military, and then just try and run the bill up with the rest of it as is.”

“As someone who’s trying to quit smoking,” Nathaniel Watkins said as he entered the room, his head of security, Octavia, just a few steps behind him, “fuck you for making it sound like I’m going to get fined if I don’t but thank you for making sure I’ve got incentive to just finally getting it done.” He laughed a little bit as Andy stood up and shook his hand.

“Thanks for coming, Nathaniel.”

“Wouldn’t have missed it for the world, Andrew,” Nathaniel said. “It’s a chance to get out of the house and hang out with a bunch of men, something I haven’t really had since the poker game was shut down and Covington was arrested.”

“You won’t hear me apologizing for that.”

“Nor should you, dear boy. Nor should you. Who are we still waiting on?”

“Just Phil at this point,” Andy said. He’d kept his bachelor party group relatively small – himself, Xander, Eric, Nathaniel, Ari and Phil (just Greater Phil, as Lesser Phil seemed to be having trouble with getting permission to leave Valhalla Falls over in Pacifica) – so that they could be agile and not traced to any one location easily.

“Of course,” Nathaniel said with a soft laugh. “The one organizing the event is always the last to show up.”

“Do you even know what he’s got planned, Andy?” Xander asked him.

“You meant what you two have got planned?” Andy smirked. “I know the two of you worked together on it, but that’s pretty much all I know.”

“I helped also!” Nathaniel said.

“That’s true,” Xander said. “We all chipped in a bit, but Nathaniel had all the money to make a couple of things happen.”

“It wasn’t really all that much,” Nathaniel said, sheepishly. “And what’s money if it’s not being used to make life better? And Phil was the one with most of the ideas, although I did add one of my own to the mix.”

“You tell Phil about that?” Eric asked him.

“I did, and he said it was a doozy of a closer, so we’ll end on that.”

“The last time you had a gift for me, you turned me into a millionaire, Nathaniel,” Andy laughed, “so I hope it’s nowhere near that.”

“Nowhere near that at all.”

“Good.”

“You have any idea how ridiculous it is organizing a bachelor party where strippers are the last thing on anybody’s mind?” Xander asked, as everyone laughed.

“And if we drink too much, we’re going to become federal outlaws!” Eric laughed.

“I can’t think of a better gang of hooligans to have by my side,” Andy chuckled.

“Then you aren’t trying at all,” Phil said as he strolled into the room. “You looked good on television, though. Senators didn’t give you too much trouble once the cameras were off you, I hope?”

“Most of them seemed nice enough, although I did get a few ‘liberal hippy’ comments from one or two of them.”

“Your tax dollars at work,” Phil said. “You’d think they’d ask for my fucking opinion on these things, but no no, they have the reports, and that’s good enough for them to think they know how I’m going to answer every one of these fucking questions.”

“I thought they said they were asking Bill McKenna to do it because he was more—”

“White?” Phil said, annoyance in his voice.

“Restrained with his profanity, I was going to say.”

“It’s okay, Andy,” Phil sighed. “You don’t have to apologize for their subconscious racism. You’d think I’d be used to it at this point, but whatever. Bill’ll be fine anyway.”

“I think that was my other line of thinking,” Andy said with a smirk. “That you wouldn’t be dragged dead or alive to Washington D.C.”

“I suppose that’s fair.” Phil looked over at Lexi. “We ready to go? I’m set on my end, but I know better than to dictate security maneuvering to our protectors.”

Lexi looked over the gang of men and offered a tiny smile and little shrug. “Yeah, fuck it.”

“And this is your head of security, Andy?” Phil teased.

“Yeah, fuck it,” Andy laughed, as they all started heading towards the cars. They were two men and two security personnel to a car, and Andy watched as their small convoy of three cars made its way out of New Eden and started heading south on 680 before turning west on 580, heading towards Oakland and San Francisco, which didn’t surprise Andy at all. Him and Phil had shared a car, as he’d expected them to, because he knew Phil would want to grill him on what had happened off screen when he’d been in D.C. yesterday to testify.

“They treat you okay? I know you said they did earlier, but that was when everyone was around, so I figured I’d check when it was just our Teams in earshot,” Phil said.

“They’re just scared, Phil. Just like you and me and anybody else.”

“Sure, but they also have the power to tell me I can’t have chocolate any more, and I think if I find them trying that shit out on me, I’m not going to want to do any more research for them,” Phil laughed. “I heard they hadn’t even seen the part of my reports discussing increased caloric intake. You think they’ve read about the Sergei solution?”

“I’m certain they have, because they asked me not to mention it before the cameras were turned on,” Andy said. “Something about not wanting a rush on it before you were ready to roll it out. Speaking of which, you check in on that thing with Melody that I told you about?”

“Sure did, and let me tell you, that is some fucking terrifying potential in there.”

“How strong is it?”

“The one person we tested it on for verification we told her to never smoke again, and now even the smell of cigarettes makes her nauseous to the point where she won’t let anyone else smoke around her. We’re trying to do more testing without actually using the encoding, but it’s starting to look like we might have to, so we’re considering offering it as an option to some of our first wave reassignments to make up for the Oracle hacks that Covington and his people did.”

“They actually hacked into the Oracle system?” Andy asked him.

“Yep. Assigned it to override the results of any pairing they wanted to make and pumped out a fake 98.6% compatibility result to the parties involved. That lack of deviation made it pretty easy for us to track them down, although there were a few actual results of 98.6%’s that we came across and just double-checked with unaltered code to be sure.”

“You think this encoding thing was put there by the Russians before Sergei left?”

“Nah, we’re pretty sure it wasn’t done intentionally. Hell, at this point, operating theory is that it’s just a natural mutation in Sergei’s DNA that’s causing it, which would square away reports that we have about the Germans having something similar. I’d wager that if you gave one of the reassigned Germans an order during that period of time, they’d say encoding in German, not in Russian, because I bet they got their reassignment sperm from a gay German man. The current line of thought is that with the reset comes a chance to actually encode something additional into the nanobots programming, which makes us a lot less likely to want to roll this stuff out for mass use, although it may turn out that the need is just too fucking great for us to ignore it.”

“Jesus, I got fucking lucky,” Melody muttered under her breath.

“You’ve got good people looking out for you,” Phil told her. “You’d have come out okay no matter what they accidentally said.”

“If so, there’s going to be a shitload of precautions for the stuff when you roll it out to a wider audience, right?” Andy asked.

“Oh fuck yeah, way more than there are with the base QT serum these days,” Phil said. “Probably have it done under armed guard, and maybe stuff earplugs into the woman’s ears before she takes the Sergei Swerve.”

Andy laughed hard at that. “You aren’t really calling it that, are you?”

“Informal nickname around the base, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it stuck. Shit, I didn’t come up with the name Quaranteam serum either, so sometimes these names just happen organically.”

“No other side effects than that, though? The Senators were leaning on me pretty hard to tell them a reassignment solution was imminent, especially one that let the gays get in on the action as soon as possible.”

“You didn’t promise dates, did you?”

Andy scoffed, rolling his eyes at his friend. “Regardless of what you may think sometimes, Phil, I’m not a goddamn idiot. I told them that I didn’t know, and even if I did know, the answer would be I didn’t know until told otherwise by the goddamn Air Force.”

“Good. Great. Fine.” Phil rubbed his eyes a little bit. “It’s starting to sound like mid-February we’re going to begin rolling it out in waves, with the completely unvaccinated getting first crack at it, followed by priority cases needing reassignment.”

“Like the women assigned to Brian Morrison?”

“Heard about that, did you?” Phil scratched his head. “Yeah, that trial’s going to start up around the same time, but it sounds like Morrison’s going to plead guilty by reason of duress, arguing that yes, he did do it, but that one of Covington’s people held a gun to his head to make him do it.”

“None of us ladies did that shit,” Melody said.

“No,” Phil said, “one of Covington’s few male guards. He had a couple, up until they were disarmed and contained by the NDR.”

Melody smirked, looking out the window. “I hope you’re not asking me to apologize for that shit, either, because that we did and do not regret.”

“We are not,” Phil said with a smile.

“Good,” she replied. “Because they were a bunch of pansies who weren’t worth shit unless they got the drop on you.”

“Anyway, if Morrison is found guilty, then the five women who are partnered with him are going to be given an option on if they want to stick with him or be reassigned. Nobody’s entirely sure how the whole case is going to come down. Some people want the guy put to death, other people think he was mostly not at fault since he was at gunpoint, or so he claims.”

“And you?” Andy asked.

“Me?” Phil exhaled, shaking his head. “I think I’d rather have had my own brains blown out than do what that man did to that poor woman.”

“Right answer,” Phil’s bodyguard Violet said from the seat next to him.

“We’ll see how that case pans out. We’re going to see a lot of new laws springing up very quickly, as the government does everything it can to criminalize all the possible new paths of abuse men now have to women, and vice versa.”

“Vice versa?”

Phil frowned, looked around the car then looked Andy dead in the eyes. “I need everyone in the car to agree to absolute secrecy about what I’m about to tell you. Not you, Vi, you already know, but Andy, Lexi and Melody, otherwise I’m gonna have to sit on this.”

“If you don’t think you can trust me at this point, Phil—”

“Fuck it,” Phil grumbled. “So, if a group of women wanted to, they could actually get the benefits of the serum from their man without giving him the benefits back for long enough for him to catch and die from DuoHalo. We think.”

“What?” Andy said. “How?”

“So, when men and women are dosing each other, they’re exchanging nanobots, but if a team of women wanted to, they could just jerk a man off and consume the sperm only after it wasn’t in contact with the male host anymore. They get refueled, he gets weaker. They could do this until the guy died, and at that point, they have the necro option open to them. All they basically need to do is make sure they aren’t really getting any of their bodily fluids onto their male partner. It’s actually stupid simple if you think about it.”

“Fuuuuuck,” Andy said. “Yeah, okay, that lines up with what I’ve read in your reports about how the serum works. The women in question would have to be pretty ruthless to do that sort of thing, though.”

“You know how people are, Andy. You think there aren’t people like that out there?”

“Yeah, you’re right. So that’s just something you’re going to sit on until the laws are getting put together by Congress, the ones beyond the MPA?”

“Members of the Department of Health and Human Services are working day and night to get drafts of laws they can put in front of Congress, so hopefully that’ll be early next month as well. It’s a billion and one things, all of which we needed ten fucking weeks ago.”

The Tesla Model Y passed under the bridge toll system as the FasTrak box beeped cheerfully, marking their bridge toll as paid, before the car started driving up onto the Bay Bridge and towards San Francisco proper.

“Have you got any good news, Phil?”

“A couple of things that I imagine will be on the news within the next week or two,” he said, leaning back against the faux leather seat. “We’re going to move from 50 to 55 states, assuming the vote passes.”

“Who are we adding?”

“Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba, Taiwan and Baja, the part of Mexico that looks like it’s dangling off California anyway,” Phil said. “That’s what I’ve heard through scuttlebutt, although confirming anything of that magnitude is basically impossible right now.”

“What about that rumor that we were taking the Vancouver metro area from Canada?”

“Supposedly the Canadians are putting up more fuss than the U.S. government thinks its worth, but who knows – that could just be a hard nose bargaining tactic. That said, the Germans are offering out their offshoot of the serum with pretty low expectations, so it may be the time of international land acquisition is mostly behind us, although I’m betting that’s not true.”

“Why not?”

“Because South America’s in so much trouble right now, and they know it. A bunch of the countries said they didn’t want and or need the serum, and that they’d just ‘endure’ DuoHalo,” Phil said, shaking his head. “Which means men’s casualties are way higher than expected in places like Columbia, Venezuela, Brazil, Peru and most of the rest, and the women are begging us to send men in, to stabilize the countries, even if it means subsuming them. The South American situation is taking up a whole lotta time for discussion from a bunch of people way way way over my pay grade. Even if we don’t gobble up some of that land, some of those countries are going to have to consolidate, just to fucking survive.”

“What about the drug cartels?”

“They’re almost all completely wiped out, Andy,” Phil chuckled. “They thought basic facemasks were going to be enough to prevent DuoHalo from spreading, so before they knew it, they were dying off like New Zealand was, and nobody down there really had access to our serum.”

“So what you’re telling me—”

“What I’m telling you is that by this time next year, it might be as high as 65 states. The next six months are going to be crucial.”

“How about Africa?”

Phil threw his hands up. “I don’t have all the intel, but reports are starting to circulate that one of the northern African countries has gotten enough of our serum that they could develop their own and are spinning up production. If that’s true, shit, that one country could end up taking a good portion of the continent, assuming their serum doesn’t get taken from them in some attack or something. We’re working on negotiations with several African countries, though, and it’s not impossible that one or two of them want into America’s nestled bosom. Of course, South Africa’s a wild card, considering they got access to the serum very early as well, both from us and the Germans, so who the hell knows where they’re going to land.”

“Europe?”

“It’s tough to say, but it looks like the Germans are sort of spear-heading a new European Union, with them at the forefront. I think the Brits are still kicking themselves a bit for the whole Brexit disaster, and not feeling like they’re a part of the EU as the Germans help turn it into a powerhouse pulling through the pandemic. Austria’s already made motions that they want to become part of Germany, and it looks like both Czechia and Poland are considering the cost/benefit ratios as well, so I wouldn’t put it past either of them.”

“Asia?”

“China’s still a big unknown, but we’re pretty sure they’re on the higher end of the death count. We’ve been amping up to annex Taiwan, and they haven’t rattled sabers, made angry phone calls or threatened us in anyway, so they may be in real trouble. Japan was having fertility problems long before they started having men dropping like mayflies, and North Korea’s probably at zero male survivors, not that anyone’s bothered by all of that, although I know South Korea’s a little nervous about trying to move in and put flags down.”

“What a clusterfuck.”

“Right? Like Eddie Izzard said, ‘Hey England, what’s behind your back?’ ‘Oh, it’s India and a number of other countries…’ Welcome to the age of New Empires…”

Andy looked out the window, seeing they’d descended into San Francisco proper and were heading towards the northside. “Are we heading into Chinatown? You know how much research I’ve had to do about this area for the Gunslinger books?” He chuckled, tapping Melody, pointing over Phil’s shoulder. “That building over there’s where the protagonist’s office is supposed to be.”

“Sorry boss, I still haven’t read your books,” Melody said, frowning a little like she expected to be scolded for her lack of knowledge.

“Nah, that’s fine,” he said, leaning back. “They’re not for everybody.”

“I like them,” Violet offered.

“You haven’t read any of them,” Phil said, rolling his eyes, but Violet was quick to respond.

“Fuck you, boss!” Violet giggled. “I thought ‘The Wraith’s Lexicon’ was the best one of the bunch, personally. You ever thought about doing an entire book from the Hunt Mistress’s perspective? I think his sister has deserved to be the protagonist a couple of times already, considering how important she’s been in some of the books, so you should think about it.”

“If I started telling stories from the perspective of every character I’d ever mentioned, I suspect the books would take a lot longer than they already do,” Andy joked.

“Then consider it for just one,” Violet said. “It’d be a smart move.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Enough chatter, we’re here,” Phil said as the car moved to stop right in front of one of the places Andy had spent the most time in within San Francisco’s city limits – The Fillmore. It was one of the most legendary concert halls on the West Coast. The inside walls of the building were lined with posters of all the legendary acts that had played sold out shows featuring everyone from Tom Petty to the Grateful Dead to the Wu-Tang Clan to local heroes like Green Day and Metallica. Any time a show sold out, everyone in attendance got a free poster from the event, and Andy had over a dozen posters from people he’d seen here, including Weezer, DJ Shadow, Something Corporate, They Might Be Giants and more.

“I didn’t know the Fillmore had reopened for shows yet,” Andy said, looking over at Phil.

“It hasn’t. Not yet. But private events? They were more than happy to welcome us.”

There were even places for them to leave their cars on the streets, something basically unheard of on the San Francisco streets. And even if they hadn’t had bulletproof glass in all the windows, Andy wondered if they still weren’t a thousand times safer on these streets than they would’ve been in the exact same location pre-pandemic. There wasn’t a tour bus or anything in front of the building like there usually was for concerts, so Andy wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. “Are we just stopping in or is there a reason we’re going inside?”

“Private concert all for you, my friend,” Phil said as they moved out of the vehicles and up the stairs inside the venue. “Now, keep in mind, our options were a bit limited, because, well, a ton of the bands you listen to are either dead, outside of the US or both, so we went through your Spotify history and found someone who was both alive and within the US, and we think we got someone’ll who make this night pretty memorable.”

As they entered into the main room of the Fillmore, Andy could see there was only a single instrument on stage – an upright piano. And sitting right next to the piano was a familiar face, someone Andy had seen live a number of times – Andrew McMahon, frontman for both Something Corporate and Jack’s Mannequin before he basically decided to go solo, although Something Corporate had played some reunion shows over the last few years. He was a skinny blonde guy in his late thirties who looked like he’d just been letting his hair grow for the entire lockdown.

“Thanks for getting me out of my house for a while, gentlemen,” Andrew said to them. “Not being on stage for like a year has felt super weird. Anyway, I understand it’s a bachelor party for a guy with a pretty cool first name, so let’s rock out!”

Over the next couple of hours, McMahon played a set of greatest hits culled from all his various projects, even taking time to play the ten-minute epic “Konstantine,” one of the earliest Something Corporate songs, and one that would often get requested by crowds, but rarely played on tour, because of the song length.

After the set, and an encore, McMahon came to join the party at Andy’s invitation. They headed out of The Fillmore and over to another place Andy spent a lot of time, an all-hours hole-in-the-wall deli called Bite, where they ordered a mess of sandwiches and drinks to take with them. Then they got back into the cars and drove south of Market St., to the area where the nice new high-rise towers had gone up.

They moved to the underground parking garage where they apparently had three spots reserved for them, so they parked and headed over to the elevator, taking it up to the penthouse as Nathaniel swiped a keycard in front of the magnetic stripe reader.

“Your place?” Andy asked him.

“Not anymore.”

When they reached the penthouse, Andy was shocked to see that the two-story penthouse had been converted into a combination office/getaway pad with traces of his literary career all over the place, including book posters, standees of the Gunslinger and plenty of nooks and crannies for Andy to sit and write.

“I figured you were going to need a sort of landing pad inside San Francisco proper, so, I give you, Andy, your very own townie penthouse,” Nathaniel said. “Now, as per Phil’s instructions, let’s go watch ‘Seven Samurai’ in your ridiculously impressive home theater.”

Andy had to chuckle. His friends did indeed know him all too well. And it helped keep his mind off the massive wedding that was only a week away and was likely to be the biggest event he would ever be involved in.

“No pressure,” he thought to himself.