Corrupting Power
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Quaranteam 2:6
🕑 Added 2023-03-28 00:32:49 +0000 UTCChapter Six
December 12th, 2020
Andy woke up at home in his own bed, and the first thing he did was glance at his watch, which told him he’d slept about 16 hours. It was just about noon the day after he’d gone to get Mali and Melody, and he felt more refreshed than he’d felt in a long while. His body felt strange, though, not quite the way it should.
“Oh hey! You’re up!” Sarah’s voice said and Andy glanced over to see her sitting in the big armchair that was off to the side of the master bed. She had her iPad in her lap, probably reading some screenplay. “We weren’t entirely sure when you were going to be awake, so we wanted to be sure and totally have somebody here when you did. Lucky me, I won!” The tall redhead hopped up and moved over to lean down to press her lips against his, her tender fingers holding his face for a moment. “Just wait here, I’ll be right back.”
Andy found that the girls had brought him home, undressed him and put him to bed, his phone on its charger on the nightstand, along with his glasses. As Sarah darted out of the room, he reached over and grabbed his glasses, sliding them onto his face.
Then he began to worry.
Everything was blurry and distorted and his head hurt a little bit.
“Take those off, Andy,” he heard Niko’s voice from the door. “Then look up here and tell me who you see.”
Andy slid the glasses off his face and then looked up to the doorway all the way across the room, finding with utter shock that he could see perfectly four of his partners with their backs against the wall, Sarah then Aisling then Moira and Niko there on the end. Each of them had on a different one of his t-shirts, with yoga pants on beneath them.
“Did you give me Lasik when you had me knocked out?” Andy chuckled. “I see Sarah, Ash, Moira and you’re there on the end, Niko. And I don’t remember anyone telling you that my Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine t-shirt was fair game to borrow, Moira.”
Moira grinned, giving him a cheeky wink. “Every one of your shirts is fair game to borrow, sweetness,” she replied. “But you kin see it’s a Carter shirt from there?”
“Yeah,” Andy said. “My eyesight hasn’t been this good since I was like ten. What happened?”
“What happened,” Niko said, “is that you finally got a full regeneration, or as close to one as you’re going to get.” The four women moved over across the room, hopping up on the bed, slowly surrounding him, getting close. “That scar on your leg is completely gone, you’re probably a bit more flexible than your used to be, your eyesight’s back to at least 20/20 and there may have been a number of other fixes.”
Andy was a little agape then held a fingertip up, keeping everyone quiet as he took a deep breath in, held it and then let it out, listening… to nothing. “Holy shit, my tinnitus is fucking gone. I knew, I just knew something was off when I woke up, and it was that I wasn’t hearing that goddamn high-pitched humming that’s plagued me for the last ten years. I’m so used to having it in the background that without it there, something felt off.”
“You’re probably going to be noticing lots of those things for the next week or two, because after your body goes through regen, you’ll find lots of portions of your anatomy will have been tweaked and you won’t even have realized it,” Niko said to him. “It’s almost like waking up in a brand new body I’m told. Maybe I should get Alexis in here, since she’s been through it.”
“I guess I was just expecting that maybe I wasn’t going to go through regeneration,” Andy said. “Shouldn’t it have happened by now?”
Niko giggled. “Mathematically and statistically? Long before this. Everyone during an imprinting has about a ten percent chance of triggering a regeneration, both men and women. Considering how many partners you’ve got, dear, it’s a little mindboggling that you didn’t hit a regeneration cycle before now.”
Andy rubbed his eyes and felt that a few little bumps of skin he’d had on the outside of his eyelids were no longer there. It was odd, feeling portions of your body that didn’t feel like you remembered them feeling, he thought to himself. “Any idea what’s changed? Beyond the eyesight and the tinnitus?”
“Like I said, the scar on your leg healed up, and there were a handful of moles on your skin that you shed off in your sleep,” Niko told him. “But considering most of the stuff is internal, you’ll probably never know how much or little you actually changed.”
He laughed a little bit, stretching his arms over his head. “I certainly feel more rested than I ever have before, like I’ve been sleeping for a thousand years.”
“Just as long as a normal imprinter, so you probably didn’t have anything severe the regeneration had to do,” Niko told him. “It’s not like it was regrowing you a limb or something.”
“Can…” Andy frowned for a second. “Can it do that?”
“In some cases, yes, but they tend to be a little rare,” Niko replied. “I sort of assumed you’d gone through a regeneration with Ash or Lauren before I entered your life, and you just didn’t notice because your life was so damn busy.”
“I think I’d have noticed suddenly not needing to wear glasses,” he joked.
“That wasn’t a given,” Ash told him. “But you certainly would’ve noticed something.”
“How many of the girls went through regeneration?”
“Well, you knew Alexis did, but so did Piper, Sheridan and Fiona,” Moira told him, her Scottish brogue a bit more tempered now than it had been when she’d first arrived at the house. “An’ me, too. I was a bit annoyed that ye never got to see my bullet scar, but maybe it’s fer the best that it was gone.”
Moira and Fiona had both been imprinted on him before he’d seen them in person, something that he’d had to explain to his friends several times was fine. Phil had been up in arms, saying that what the girls had subjected him to was borderline rape, but Andy had shut down that argument quickly, pointing out that he’d known Fiona was coming, and he’d agreed to whatever Fiona’s condition was, sight unseen. Never once was a decision made without his knowledge, and Andy hadn’t been at all bothered by it, but he could understand why Phil had made the mistake to jump to anger. Phil dealt with questionable people all the time, although thankfully didn’t have any in his Team.
“I don’t know,” he said, leaning over to kiss Moira’s cheek. “I think a bullet scar might’ve been kinda sexy.”
“It hurt like shite when it got too cold, so I’m happy it’s gone.”
Andy laughed a little bit, moving to get up and out of bed. “Shit, I had some calls I was supposed to make last night. Did someone–?”
“I handled it, love,” Ash told him as she slid off the bed next to him. “You had the call with the other publisher about the McTaggart manuscript you found, but that’s pretty much just a formality. You know that and they know that. They’re already ecstatic to find out that he left them one last mystery novel that they can cash in on, but to find out that he also left behind an autobiography? They’re going to make an incredibly generous offer, and I figure we should honor the man’s wishes and just let them print them books without any real input from us.”
Andy started making his way towards the bathroom and his partners followed him into the large open space. “Well, minimal input,” Andy said. “I don’t want to change a word, but I want to make sure they’re sticking to the cover aesthetic the guy had for all the other books, and that includes for his manuscript. Maybe I can write a epilogue for the autobiography, just explain how I came to get tangled up in all of this.”
“Makes sense,” Ash told him.
There was a knock at the door, which made everyone sort of look over in surprise before Niko moved to it, pulling it open, letting in Melody, who was dressed in flannel pajama pants and a big baggy t-shirt. She moved over across the room, approaching Andy before wrapping her arms around him in a big hug. “Thank you for giving me a second chance, Andy,” she said to him before meshing her lips against his for a long moment before pulling back, an almost shy smile on her face. “Just making sure I fulfill my duties. Heard you were awake. Anyway, Piper’s gonna give me a tour of the place, so I’ll see you later.” She pulled back from him and slipped away before he could even think to bring words to his lips, disappearing out through the bedroom doors as quickly she’d entered.
“She seems nicer than I might’ve expected,” Sarah said to him with a laugh. “She and Piper going to be okay just the two of them, or should I dispatch Em to play peacekeeper?”
“I bet Em’s probably gauging how Mali came through the process,” Andy sighed. “Can I just say I’m not at all keen about having to avoid talking about her past for fear of stirring up repressed memories? I get that it’s what she wants, but it just doesn’t strike me as particularly healthy.”
“We all deal with grief in our own ways,” Moira told him. “Believe me, I’ve seen folk try every possible avenue to find a way to get through those dark passageways, but it’s not up to us to tell her what’s what. We respect her wishes and do the best we can.”
“Yeah, I suppose,” Andy said, putting toothpaste onto his toothbrush. “Well, unless you ladies need something, I should probably finish getting ready for the day, unless there’s something else you all had in mind.”
Niko grinned, giggling a bit as she headed to the door. “I’ll meet you all down for lunch after you’re through with fun time.” She stepped out of the bathroom, into the main bedroom, then headed out, closing the master bedroom’s door behind her.
“Fun time?” Andy asked.
“Mmm,” Ash agreed. “Reds only.”
“Oh ho,” he chuckled. “Is that what this is?”
“Don’t worry, Andy,” Moira teased. “We’ll make sure y’kin still walk when we’re through with you.”
What should have been a quick five-minute shower devolved into a frenzy inside of the shower, with each of his three redheaded fiancées taking a turn getting a load from him, and it was at least twenty minutes before the trio was satiated. He was particularly surprised how much Moira was determined to play not only with him, but with Sarah and Aisling as well, and without Fiona present.
When Fiona and Moira had joined Team Rook, Andy had sort of suspected that the two of them might be more akin Lauren and Taylor in that they would be more insular as a pair and simply delve out with the rest of the Team from time to time, but Fiona had made it clear that she wanted to be on equal footing with Ash, Niko, Em, Sarah and Piper. Andy wondered if that had left Moira feeling a little bit out on her own, and she’d been working to solidify her new relationship with Andy a bit more each and every day.
Seeing Aisling and Moira kissing each other around the head of his dick while Sarah talked dirty into his ear and ran her fingers along his chest as she pressed her sizable tits into his back, it was rather overwhelming, not the least of which because Ash and Moira were very much getting into it with each other as much as they were with him.
He encouraged all the members of his family to be open and adventurous with each other, but Moira seemed like she wanted to prove she had a place with the family outside of her pairing with Fiona, to not rely on her old connection with Andy as a kind of crutch.
With all three of them satisfied, they toweled off and got dressed.
Andy’s days had gotten a lot less easy to predict since he’d gotten all the money from Nathaniel Watkins. He left his job over at Netflix and was focusing on writing full time, but over the last month, much of his time had gone to doing follow up interviews with various media sources, including several international. His interview with the BBC had gone a little viral since a number of the girls had wandered in and out of it during his talking with the presenter. He’d also spent more time than he’d liked to in contract negotiations, doing script revisions and offering notes on pitches and proposals for adaptation of his works for television and movies. It was the last thing he figured anyone should be focusing on, but the people at the studios were insistent that the more people were entertained, the less time they would have to dwell on their misery.
Andy came downstairs for lunch, finding lunch waiting for him. The girls were mostly hanging out, seeing what the plan for the day was, and wanting to check in on him after his regeneration. “So I figured I’d take Ash and Fiona with me into the city, although we’ve got room for one more, considering either Niko or Lexi’s going to be on guard detail,” he said.
There was a brief but frenzied set of Rock/Paper/Scissors games but in the end, Sarah came out on top and decided to take Andy up on the option of going into the city. As much as Niko wanted to go with them, she needed to head to the base so couldn’t head out with them, although Andy assured her there would be plenty of further opportunities in the future.
It was the first time Andy had been in the city since March, when he’d gone to see Soul Asylum at one of the very last concerts Slim’s would hold before closing during the quarantine. Apparently the closure had been planned in advance, but they hadn’t told anybody because they’d planned to have a grand farewell party in the fall, but instead, everyone had gotten locked in their homes, and the club had closed not with a bang, but a whimper.
They loaded up into one of the big Tesla SUVs and started driving south. Andy hadn’t realized it, but he hadn’t been off the grounds of New Eden since their arrival in September, and he was eager to get into San Francisco and see what the city was like, now that the Air Force had come and gone through most of the buildings, pulling all the bodies from the high end apartments and homes that hadn’t been willing to respect the quarantine.
Driving across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, it felt like the end of one era and the beginning of another. It was the middle of the day, and yet there still weren’t any other cars on the highway. Andy had driven across the bridge hundreds of times since he moved out from the Midwest, but never once in all that time had he been on the bridge with no other cars. Of course, the new Bay Bridge wasn’t all that old – well, part of it, anyway. The eastern span past Treasure Island had opened in 2013.
As they moved into downtown, heading down from the overpass, Andy was shocked at exactly how empty everything was, how quiet the city was. No matter which direction he looked, no matter which way he listened, San Francisco was like a tomb. It was eerie and unnatural. No cars parked along the streets, nobody walking along the sidewalks, no food trucks, not even a car horn.
One of the things he’d always gotten used to was that going into San Francisco during the daytime was radically different than going into it at night, but now, it was almost like being in the city at 4 a.m. except that it was two in the afternoon. He fully expected that if they wanted to head back across the Bay Bridge during rush hour, they wouldn’t even need to slow down.
That was unheard of.
Before, it all sort of taken on a level of unreality, the numbers too big and hard to comprehend, the losses so unimaginable that it sort of took on a sheen of imperceptibility. But driving through the once thriving downtown of San Francisco only to feel like the entire city was devoid of people, it all hit home just how monumental the loss to life had been.
They headed up Fremont Street before crossing Market to head over to Montgomery Street, passing by the Transamerica Pyramid Building before turning onto Columbus Avenue. Despite the fact that they were heading up to City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, they crossed the infamous corner of Columbus and Broadway, which was sort of ground zero for the majority of the strip clubs in San Francisco. The Condor Club was right on the corner, and it had been featured in an Eddie Murphy movie. Hell, it was the first topless club in America, opening as such in the 1960s. He hoped that it reopened at some point, but it was hard to say, especially since the clientele had to have dropped to almost zero. Maybe it could rebrand more as a bar and keep the topless part simply as a legacy part. The other nearby strip clubs – Centerfolds, Big Al’s, the Hustler Club, Vanity and all the rest – they weren’t quite the historical mainstay that the Condor Club was, and he wondered how this particular street corner was going to look in just a few years’ time.
Andy hadn’t brought his partners to see The Condor Club today. No, today it was stopping at City Lights and then one other place before heading back home. As he headed into City Lights, a broad smile spread across his face as he spotted a familiar person behind the counter. “Hey Brittany,” Andy said with a laugh. “Wasn’t sure you’d still be here on the other side of all of the mess.”
Brittany was something of a staple at City Lights – she’d been working there for almost twenty years now apparently, and her look hadn’t much changed in all that time. She looked exactly how people expected San Francisco to look – her brown hair was in thick dreadlocks, her nose had three separate piercings, her ears had spreaders that had opened the lobes enough to slide a Coke bottle through, and what wasn’t covered by the giant baggy clothes she wore stood a decent chance to be covered in tattoos. He was never quite sure how old she was – she could’ve been a hard-lived thirty or a well-kept sixty, and neither would’ve surprised him. Still, she was an utter sweetheart, and she ran over to give Andy a big hug. “I saw you on the television last month, so I knew you’d made it, but I have to admit, you seemed like you’re doing a lot better than you were last year,” she said.
“I saw Lawrence didn’t make it,” he sighed.
Brittany laughed, rolling her eyes at him. “Andy, darling, Lawrence was one hundred. He’d lived a grand old life. I think he was ready to go long before the plague came to decimate society, although I’d wager he’d have had something wicked to say about it. That said, our rent has fallen to basically nothing for the time being, just as a way to keep San Francisco, you know, San Francisco. Ginsberg, Kerouac, Lawrence himself… we can’t just let all that history disappear into the ether.”
“I know, that’s why I wanted to come by, see if maybe you wanted to do a charity signing for the latest Druid Gunslinger novel,” he said. “I know I’m not a Beat poet or even maybe as radical a lefty as you like to normally house but–”
“We’d be delighted, Andrew,” she said to him, patting him on the back. “It wouldn’t hurt to remind people that we’re still here, still kicking. Didn’t you lose a lot of your fanbase with all the deaths, though?”
“I’ve done pretty well in cultivating a fifty-fifty split in my audience, so we’ll see how the turnout would be. You and everyone else here was so nice to me when I got started, I feel like I have to give something back. You remember that first signing? I think we had three or four people show up total to get an autograph, and I’ll bet half of them didn’t even really know who I was. They were just buying a copy to be polite.”
“Nancy always told us that we never knew whose work would catch on, or where people find their inspiration from. She was a big advocate for us including Tolkien and the like in their own section, saying we shouldn’t devalue fantasy or science-fiction just because it wasn’t always appealing to the mainstream,” Brittany told him. “I’ll see about setting aside the first Saturday in January for the event, so we’ll have a little time to publicize it and we’ll see what kind of turnout we get, but any publicity is good publicity.”
“Where are my manners?” Andy laughed. “Brittany Vozsesnesky, these are my fiancées Aisling, Sarah and Fiona, and my partner and bodyguard, Alexis.”
Brittany grinned over at Sarah and gave her a polite little nod. “I recognized Miss Washington as soon as she came in, but figured it impolite to geek out at her. But I have to ask… Is this Fiona the same one mentioned in the thank yous in one of your early works?”
Fiona giggled, giving a little mock bow. “Guilty as charged,” she said. “I read a lot of the early pieces that would become the first Druid Gunslinger novel and encouraged him to keep writing at it. We were lovers in college before we both developed a case of the stupids, which, thankfully, we’ve outgrown as we’ve gotten older.”
“It’s amazing how much of the world we reevaluated once we realized it might’ve been ending,” Andy sighed.
“Larry would’ve been proud of you, dear,” Brittany told him with a soft smile. “He always liked your books. Said you never got bogged down by telling your readers about things they didn’t care about and kept everything moving along nicely. He admired your economical use of language. Said it was uncharacteristic for your field.”
They sat and chatted for a couple of hours, each of the women getting a chance to talk over things with Brittany while Andy sort of wandered through the stacks, looking through what books the store currently had on offer. Brittany didn’t know Andy all that well, but she’d known him for decades now, and his partners were always keen to find information they didn’t have previously about him. Brittany even took the time to show the women a photo that had been taken of Andy at his first signing at City Lights, and true to his word, the store looked especially empty in comparison to the rest of the photos around it in the photo album.
During his time strolling around, he would occasionally catch Fiona taking pictures of him out of the corner of his eye, never stopping to pose, but somehow knowing that Fiona would only catch him at his best. He wondered if she was taking them just for herself or if she was working on some kind of book that had him tangentially involved.
After heading out from City Lights, it was time for Andy to check on one of the people who he cared the most amount that he didn’t really know personally. Just up the street a little from City Lights was a place that Andy considered to be one of the great institutions of San Francisco, a tiny little corner restaurant called Buster’s Cheesesteaks.
Buster’s wasn’t going to be a historical site any time soon, but to Andy, it was perhaps the greatest cheesesteak he’d ever had. Buster’s had been a longstanding tradition between him and his friends, the place they’d always stop after a concert to get food before driving back down to the South Bay after the show. Buster’s was always open late at night, and hilariously enough because of its locale, the person working the register was inevitable a stripper who couldn’t get a shift that night. There was a vaguely Eastern European blonde girl in a half-zipped up track suit behind the counter right now. But the stripper cashiers weren’t the reason Andy kept coming.
Standing at the grill was the tiny smiling Latino man that Andy’s heart swelled to see alive. “Oh thank god Carlos,” Andy laughed, a sort of heavy nervous tension inside of him breaking for a moment. “I was worried like hell you hadn’t made it.”
Carlos was lucky if he was five foot tall, but he was built like a fire hydrant, squat and muscular. He was a Latino man somewhere in his late fifties if Andy had to guess, and his English wasn’t amazing, but he’d been with Buster’s for as long as Andy had been going there, maybe longer, and he was a good part of the reason Andy suspected the food was as amazing as it was. Initially Andy had suspected that Carlos might even be Buster, but he’d asked and Carlos had laughed, pointing out that just because he was around all the time didn’t make him the place’s owner.
“No worries, Mr. Rook,” Carlos said to him. “I took good care of myself when lockdown was called, and as soon as the government come calling, I do what they tell me, and they pair me up with eight lovely chicas, including Gretchen here.” He slapped the tall blonde on the ass and she giggled, rolling her eyes in his direction as she reached over to ruffle his short black hair in her fingertips. “They all love me.”
“Well, I love your cooking, amigo. So how about we get some cheesesteaks cooking?”
While normally Carlos was massively focused on his cooking and didn’t talk to people seated at the counter, today he was happy to be chatty and get caught up with Andy, even if they didn’t really know each other that well. Carlos lived in the city, and had been moved from his old tiny apartment into one of the tall condo towers over on Van Ness, where he’d been given his own floor, in addition to being paired up with a number of gorgeous women. And while he hadn’t originally been the owner of Buster’s he was now and asked Andy if he should change the name of the place to Carlos’s. Andy said as fun as it might be, people might get worried that things were different if the name changed, something Carlos said he could understand.
It had also turned out that Carlos was a huge fan of the Ballerina Badass movies and insisted that he be allowed to get a picture with him and Sarah together, stepping out from behind the counter for perhaps the only time Andy had ever seen it happen. Sarah was more than happy to oblige, though, even giving Carlos a shot where she was kissing him on the cheek, which made the short order cook’s tanned flesh take on a blushing highlight of deep red.
As they ate, Andy spotted Fiona snapping pictures again, not just of him but of Ash, Sarah and Lexi, as well as the girl behind the counter, who was mostly engrossed in some paperback novel she’d brought with her, when she wasn’t packaging up food. Fiona also snapped pictures of the empty streets, stepping out into the street to show just how empty the city was, taking a couple of photographs standing in the middle of Columbus Ave. Lexi, for the most part, kept watch by the door. She’d gotten her order to go, planning on having it later, once they’d gotten back to New Eden, despite Andy’s repeated insistence that she eat it there. Being ‘on watch’ meant she couldn’t afford to be distracted, she’d told him, and in the end, he’d relented, because he’d promised that whenever Lexi insisted something was for security reasons, he would defer to her.
It was taking more getting used to than he’d expected it to.
Andy was surprised to see that even though Carlos was making time for them to talk, there were still plenty of orders coming in. After a few minutes, Andy began to understand why. Food delivery services had flourished under the pandemic, but the method in which everyone was functioning was entirely different. The area next to the register had become a large staging area, and women were constantly coming in and out to pick up orders and take them on their way. Fiona took pictures of those people too, and Andy started to suspect she’d begun work on some kind of book about the DuoHalo epidemic.
“I think to myself when all this start, ‘who will want my food’ but it turn out, comfort is something people willing to pay quite a lot for, and my food, it brings comfort,” Carlos said with a big, toothy grin. “So, I find silver lining to massive cloud, and I cling onto that for my comfort.”
Andy nodded in understanding. That was all any of them could do, cling onto what light they had against the overwhelming darkness and see the way to the other side.
Sure enough, when they were heading back across the Bay Bridge to the East Bay during what would’ve been rush hour, Andy still didn’t see another car anywhere on the roads. Even the people who were safe to travel were still deathly afraid of moving around, for fear of catching DuoHalo, for fear of spreading it, for fear of something, anything unforeseen going wrong. Despite the president promising ‘a return to normality,’ the reality didn’t quite reflect that optimism so far.
He wondered, looking out the window while Ash held his left hand and Fiona held his right, Sarah sitting up front, chatting away with Lexi, what more he could possibly be doing to remind people that they were still alive, still going.
The trip to SF had been meant to make him feel better; instead, he felt only more worried than he had been before they’d left. He needed to be doing more, but what exactly that meant, he wasn’t sure. Not yet, anyway.
Comments
Kaywye
Okay after fixing the fubar with my card so I could re pledge here...I finally see why you said that the unconsciousness would be understandable. Well done...it's was a good mechanism to ramp up the reader's anxiety and keep tension there, without having it be an adrenaline OD. Thanks for this chapter.
JC
bookmark
Nick J
Stopped at Buster's for lunch today. Holy hell, you did not undersell it. CP- come for the stories, stay for the food recs lol.
Nick J
Oh cool, haven't been there yet. Will definitely add it to my lunch rotation!
Corrupting Power
Buster's is a real place too, and if you've not gotten a cheesesteak from them, I cannot recommend them highly enough.
Nick J
One of my favorite things about Quaranteam is that it takes place in the Bay. I always get a little excited when there's travel to a place I'm super familiar with (work right down the street from City Lights) lol. Thanks for doing the area proud!
patient1
Quaranteam 74, weekly update 73. Always excited to see Quaranteam in the lead!
Bearded beer nerd
The last sentence is ominous.
Rurik
So happy the next chapter is out, so sad I'm waiting for the next. ☺️
