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The Love Parasite

Chapter Four

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Written by Arian Mabe (Amethyst Mare)

Commissioned by Fyrdrgon

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The lab team made quick work of getting the two families apart, trained officers – or, at least, Kasey assumed they were trained – hauling apart lovers with ruthless efficiency. She could not have said that she was not relieved to have her family separated, if only by a couple of feet between them, but it seemed a shame too to have the show brought to such a sudden end. It wasn’t as if they were doing anything that wrong, after all, though it depended on how open they were to people have sex in their laboratory.

A chill trickled down her spine and she straightened, struggling for breath as something – she could not tell what – tightened around her throat. Was it getting so normal to her, so familiar, that she didn’t think her husband and her brother fucking her very own daughter was anything out of the ordinary at all? Kasey closed her eyes and leaned back against the wall, quietly taking a spot on the end of the line they’d formed, although she was the only subject in the room that remained clothes, besides the technicians.

Not all of the technicians wore hazmat suits either, a fact that she gladly latched onto as a point of interest: anything was a good distraction. She pondered why that was, flicking through idea after idea in the comfort of her own mind and dismissing each and every one of them just as swiftly. There was no real rhyme or reason for it and all but one of the technicians wore a mask over their lower face, similar in style to what would be worn in a hospital ward, although she had always wondered about their effectiveness.

“What are your names?” She murmured, eyes downcast; they didn’t need another set of eyes on them to humiliate them in their nudity. “Were you also called in from your home?”

The daughter of the family leaned into her boyfriend’s arms – still she was assuming they were a couple, but everything about their demeanour said as much – and giggled as if drunk, swaying and dipping dangerously.

“Oh...” She laughed, nose in her boyfriend’s neck; he brushed her hair tenderly back behind her ear. “We’ve haven’t used our names in days! Does it matter anymore? We’re having so much more fun like this!”

Kasey gulped: would her family also lose their names or was it just a one-off thing? Luckily for her, the boyfriend rolled his eyes, although in a clearly loving fashion, and held her in close to his side, fingers digging ever so lightly into her smooth, creamy flesh.

“Ricky,” he murmured. “Her name’s Ricky. And she’s always like this, so don’t mind her. I’m Jack, by the way, but most people just call me Jack.”

“And other things besides!”

Even Kasey had to chuckle as the long-suffering Jack’s eyes rolled nearly all the way back into his skull. She could only imagine having to deal with the woman on a daily basis, but she supposed he saw something in her that she couldn’t, not being in love and all that. At least, not with her. Her heart warmed, eyes drifting to Curtis as if purely by accident. But their love was no accident.

Clenching her fist, she tilted her jaw up just a little more, defiance lining the tautness of her body. She pushed her shoulder blades back and took a deep breath, letting the clinically clean air bolster her as those in hazmat suits quickly exited the room, having brought what they needed in the form of a trolley and equipment, still half-obscured by their busy, shifting and crinkling bodies. Whatever happened, she’d still have Curtis and she’d still have her family. She’d make sure of it.

Only one technician was left behind to set up close to one of the back counters, seeming to take great care in putting as much distance between herself and those infected as possible. Kasey wrinkled her nose. If the damage was already done, why did she keep her back to them, working as quickly and furtively as possible with awkward jerky movements? It wasn’t as if the infection seemed to pass itself on, she had to say. Everyone who had had the venom enter their system – so far – had been bitten directly by the parasite.

But she hadn’t wanted to touch her own husband either, for fear of its potency being passed on to her, so she was hardly one to talk.

Turning at last to face them, the blonde-haired technician without a nametag – it wasn’t as if any of them had at all attempted to identify themselves – interlocked her fingers primly in front of her stomach. Her manicured nails gleamed in the overhead lights and Kasey pursed her lips. Did someone working in a lab really need nails that looked like that? She had the sort of face that looked as if she needed spectacles to appear serious, sharp cheekbones highlighting her expression of abject distaste.

“Alright now.” Shockingly, as if they were in school again, she clapped her hands. Twice. “If you could all stand up nice and tall for me, I’ll work my way down the line one by one and we’ll see just what we can get out of today.”

Kasey blinked. That made no sense. No sense whatsoever. Her frown deepened. Did she have to speak to them like they were children?

“You!”

The word cut across the room like the crack of a whip, making them all jump. Helena grinned as the manicured finger pointed directly at her.

“Yesssss?”

The woman appeared to resist rolling her eyes, half-turning.

“Come here. We’ll work our way from your end of the line.”

“Helly!”

As her daughter stepped forward, Kasey flung out a hand and bit her lip, wanting to call her back even as she knew, in her heart, that she had no power to stop her. Since the parasite had entered their lives in a highly dramatic fashion, she’d lost what little control she’d once had.

But it was Helena’s time to be the reassuring figure. Turning, she smiled warmly at her mother, appearing more secure in herself than she’d ever been, despite being as naked as the day she’d been born. Kasey shuddered. She remembered looking like that when she’d been younger. A lot younger.

“I’ll be fine, mom.”

“You don’t even know what she wants to do – do to you.” Kasey’s eyes darted furtively back and forth, looking to her husband for support. “Don’t go. Don’t do it.”

The technician sighed and leaned on the trolley, wheels creaking as they scooted a couple of inches across the pristine tiles. Curtis murmured something that he presumably wanted to be soothing, but Kasey didn’t hear him, her attention fixated on the tech to the exclusion of all else.

“It’s just a physical, nothing invasive.” She smiled, primly. “At least, not today. We’ll warn you beforehand.”

Kasey inhaled slowly, steadying herself. She sounded like she’d take just a little too much pleasure from something like that.

That one she’d have to keep an eye on.

Helly boldly hopped up onto the trolley, despite its unstable base, as the technician fussed around and locked the wheels in place a moment too late. But she had her patient in place to examine and could not really voice any further complaints, as much as the twist to her lips may have said she wanted to.

Kasey gnawed the inside of her cheek. She did not like that woman one bit.

“Now, tilt your head back for me...”

The technician examined Helena from every perspective, making notes on a pad that Kasey could not quite see to read, although she itched to know just what was being scribbled on the pad. Fidgeting, Kasey blew her hair out of her face and rapped her fingers impatiently on her arm. Good lord, if the woman took much longer, those without clothes would catch their death of cold!

And, even though her family was behaving with Helena over on the trolley – out of arm’s reach, should she say? – the same could not be said for the other family, Ricky and Jack and the others. Kasey gulped as Ricky kissed up Jack’s neck and the young man shivered, the line of his jaw tensing as she pressed her body up against his, seemingly unwilling to wait for her turn to, uh, get physical.

Kasey couldn’t suppress the smirk that pulled at her lips, but she strove to appear calm and composed, eyes politely averted for at least most of the time. She was sure no one would have honestly cared if she watched, but it still felt like the right thing to do and, well, doing the right thing, to the best of her ability, had become quite important to her. She sighed and pressed her fingers to one ear as if she could block out the soft signs and moans that were slowly rising in tempo and frequency. It was funny how things changed a person. She hoped she didn’t change that much from the whole horrid experience.

Keeping one eye on Curtis and Alex, to at least try to keep them out of trouble even if she could not, Kasey turned her attention back to her daughter, who was having her lower abdomen palpitated. Helly tensed and gave the technician a reproachful look that the blonde woman didn’t seem to notice, leaning away from her noticeably.

“That is tender,” she said, firmly and clearly. “Please don’t do that.”

“I’m done anyway.”

She stood and swapped a pair of gloves for fresh ones, eyes already dropping to the notepad on the trolley. Helly visibly relaxed, a little of the tension that had not been there before slipping from her shoulders. Kasey seethed inwardly – how dare she make her Helly uncomfortable? – and was about to storm over with all the wrath of a mother whose offspring had been wronged when the tech planted herself before Helena and crossed her arms. There was something in her stance that called Kasey to pause, barely having even shifted away from the wall. Her mind worked quicker than her muscles in the midst of all the change. Or perhaps it had always been that way.

The technician sighed and shook her head, though there was nothing of sadness in her eyes, but more of a morbid fascination.

“It is just as I thought...” She murmured, eyebrows raised so far that they disappeared beneath her sharply cut fringe. “You’re pregnant. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the others in your group are too.”

Kasey gasped, clapping a hand over her mouth as her eyes went wide, but Helly seemed completely unperturbed by the news, swinging her feet from the examination trolling as she grinned.

“Wow!” She clapped her hands together. “Pregnant!”

Curtis smirked and Alex clapped him proudly on the back.

“Wonder which of us is the father, bro.”

Kasey turned on them, lips curving sickeningly into a snarl.

“How dare you say that?” She hissed, hands balled up into fists. “She is your daughter – and your niece too! Putting this whole sorry mess behind us is never going to fucking happen if you’ve gone and knocked her up! Look at Helly! Look at what you’ve done to her!”

The younger woman, who was supposedly in so much distress, cocked her head to the side, forehead furrowing in confusion.

“I’m okay, mom, really,” she said quietly, a sympathetic smile on her lips. “I don’t know what the big problem is – I’m a grown woman. Isn’t this meant to be a happy thing?”

“She’s not going to understand the implications of it,” the lab tech said with an ostentatious roll of her eyes. “She’s not in her right mind.”

Kasey stiffened, every muscle in her body tensing up as if she had been frozen in place. And the words that came from her mouth were anything but warm, shards of ice flying from her lips like deadly, pointed missiles. Even Curtis coughed into his hand and averted his eyes as Kasey turned a dark gaze on the oblivious, blonde technician.

Oh no she didn’t!

“And just what, pray tell, is your name, exactly?” Kasey snapped, drawing herself up as tall as her small stature and slender frame allowed. “I don’t remember catching it to begin with.”

The woman rolled her eyes: big mistake.

“That would be because I never gave it to you in the first place.”

Kasey advanced on her with vicious intent, teeth clenched and shoulders hunched. The lab technician took a cautious step back, hands held up in a manner that was supposed to be placating but hardly came off as such, stark red heels clicking over the floor.

“Now, now...” She shook her head, disappointment in her eyes. “You’re not one of them. There’s no need to act like you’ve lost your mind too.”

“My daughter has not lost her mind!”

“Hey now – ladies, ladies, ladies! Let’s not get ourselves up in arms here! Aren’t we just here to have fun?”

Curtis took Kasey’s arm and gently steered her back and away from the wide-eyed technician, blinking rapidly like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. Kasey flipped her hand and scoffed at her, but otherwise allowed herself to be led back, anger dissipating as swiftly as it had flared into burning life. She leaned into her husband, forgetting everything that had happened, if only for a moment, as his arm slipped around her waist.

He was there for her. He would look out for her. Kasey exhaled softly, eyes half-lidded. She didn’t have to be in control of everything anymore.

And then the arm was gone, her side cooling where her husband left it to instead wrap both arms around his naked daughter, drawing her in to his chest with a soft murmur of congratulations.

“I’m so proud of you, Helly,” he breathed, lips nuzzling her hair. “It doesn’t matter who it belongs to – we’ll all help, all look after them, whether they’re a him or a her.”

Beaming, Helly threw her arms around her father and buried her face in the crook of his neck. In the background to the intimate scene, admittedly out of place in the laboratory, the technician sighed and rapped her fingers on the trolley.

“Could we please continue now? I’m due lunch soon and I don’t want you lot keeping me waiting here!”

Curtis huffed and rolled his eyes, a vindictive stab flashing through Kasey as her husband raised his voice to the snarky tech too.

Take that, bitch!

_ _

“Oh, I’m soooo very sorry that our love is disrupting your day,” he growled, words dripping with sarcasm so thick that one could have scooped it up with a spoon. “Maybe you’d like to see just what we’ve been doing for your voyeuristic pleasure – oh, sorry. I mean your research, of course, I do.”

The technician recoiled as if she’d been struck, painted lips parted in a silent gasp. Kasey giggled. There was a smear of lipstick on her teeth. She wouldn’t tell her about that one, her own little vindictive (if petty) payback. The bitch deserved it.

But Curtis wasn’t done.

With Helena’s arms around his neck, he picked her clean up off the trolley, her slightly swollen stomach pressed intimately up to his, the curl of dark hair leading down to his crotch. Kasey’s heart fluttered in her chest and she was barely aware of her brother sidling up beside her, idly stroking his cock as he anticipated the lewd show that was to come.

“Here you go, Helly,” Curtis crooned, planting kiss after kiss on her face and lips. “This is the congratulations you deserve, my darling girl.”

Their daughter opened her mouth, but anything she had been going to say was lost in a moan as her legs wrapped tightly around her father’s waist and he plunged his cock into her warm, wet depths. There had not been any question of her readiness for him and the young woman let her head fall back as he kissed her throat, tremor after tremor shivering through her body as he fucked her proudly for all to see.

She wasn’t quite about to give up the session as a lost cause, however.

“Order!”

The lab tech snapped her fingers in Curtis’ face, lips twisted into an anxious scowl.

“I will have order! You’re just trying to get ahead, jump the queue.” She pursed her lips and shook her head, eyes strictly professional as Curtis rammed into Helly, her cunt lewdly sucking at his cock with every thrust. “Now, wait your turn while I deal with your, ah, daughter.”

She tucked a strand of blond hair back behind her ear, but it only took a moment for her to realise that it was to no avail. She could huff and puff and roll her eyes as much as she liked, but there was no way to go about her job unless she was willing to physically separate the father and daughter team. Against herself, Kasey smirked and laid a falsely sympathetic hand on the woman’s arm. She flinched away as if she’d been stung.

“Why don’t you just leave them to it?” She suggested, a smirk lightening her expression. “It’s your fault they’re like this, isn’t it, anyway? Your job, your research. Or at least you’re one of the cogs in this machine.”

She scowled and folded her arms childishly across her chest, lab coat flapping about her legs as she spun about and put her back to them. Kasey laughed aloud: so childish. The technician was much younger than her and still had time yet left to learn authority, even if she currently lacked control of a situation of her own making.

“I am not a cog,” she hissed. “And we were going to save millions! This discovery was going to prevent famine, stop wars!”

Kasey laughed shortly and tapped the side of her nose as the woman fumed, practically hopping in place.

“Well, you’re certainly making love not war here.”

And Kasey wasn’t about to stop them, her blood up and her right to victory pumping through her veins with every frantic, driving beat of her heart.

“Sorry, sweetheart, but it doesn’t look like you’re going to have much order here today.” Kasey shook her head, finger pressed to the side of her jaw as if she was being thoughtful, but not really. “Perhaps you should have brought along someone, say, a little more experienced.

Oh, the way that her face contorted, twisting from anger to disgust and back again in a matter of seconds, was divine, it truly was. It didn’t matter that, in the back of her mind, Kasey knew that she was just being vindictive even while ensuring that she didn’t interrupt her family (for how embarrassing that would be!). All that mattered was that control was back in her hand, her closed fist ready and waiting to be sunk into the sorry bitch’s overly made-up face.

Stalking up to her with her head held high, Kasey prodded the woman below her collarbone. She stumbled back as if she’d been struck by a much harder force, lower jaw dropped in shock. But there was no mistaking the hatred that crossed her face, blue eyes shining with as much feeling as shards of ice slashed into the ugly beauty of her face.

Clucking her tongue against the roof of her mouth like a mother of another time, Kasey folded her arms.

“What is your name even?” She demanded. “You’ve come in here like you get to do everything and anything you want to my family like we’re nothing more than objects lined up on a desk to you, and we don’t even get to know your name?”

Kasey snorted, but she wasn’t done yet.

“With treatment like this, I have half a mind to go to your superiors. This parasite is your fault – admittedly collectively – but we’re the victims here and certainly not you.”

The speed with which the tech’s words cracked back through the air at her like the lash of a whip made even Kasey thrust down a shudder, unwilling to appear shaken in the slightest. No, all she was doing was for the good of her family and she had to be strong for them.

It was the least we can do.

“Kayleigh Miles,” the technician hissed. “And yours will be on file, just like that of your family, all of the others. But you’re not people to us, people that have names.” Her lips pursed, glasses glinting in a slice of light. “You’re only numbers.”

Kasey rolled her eyes. She must have picked that one up from Helena.

“That’s nice. I wouldn’t have expected anything less, but if you want to think that I’m horrified by that information, please go ahead.”

The other woman scoffed and stepped away, turning her shoulder to Kasey.

“If you’re so eager to engage with me then, while your family is involving themselves with one another, you can come up here to be examined next,” the technician, whose name had been revealed as Kayleigh, said with an ugly sneer pulling at her lip.

Kasey hid her worry behind a mask of cool calm.

“Absolutely.”

Stepping up to the trolley

“Sit up here.”

“I’d rather stand.”

Kayleigh’s lips twisted, but she otherwise made no comment, assessing Kasey with a full body sweep of her eyes.

“How was your health before the parasite? And can you tell me whether or not you have been bitten?”

“I was in pretty good health,” Kasey replied, though there was a clipped edge to her words. “Not very often sick with a cold. No injuries or broken bones. I’m assuming, from my current state, that I have not been bitten.”

Kayleigh rolled her eyes.

“So you say. You could just have exemplary self-control. I’ve seen a few of those through here this last week.”

Pressing her lips together, Kasey said nothing as Kayleigh listened to her heart and lungs, only then instructing her to shuck her clothing so that she could conduct a skin examination. When Kasey baulked, shooting her a venomous glare of her own, it was stated quite plainly that those infected already had had their clothes off and that was just the reason she had not had to ask them prior. Oh, and would she please hurry up so she could get on with the rest of the examination?

Underwear. Kasey’s cheeks burned as she dragged her T-shirt off over her head and folded it neatly on top of the trolley out of pure habit alone. She’d only go down to her underwear. The stroppy cow could try and wrestle her out of her bra if she really wanted to see her in the buff!

The technician snapped on a pair of latex gloves, a smirk on her lips. The death stare radiating from Kasey, however, seemed to give her enough pause to not go through with whatever heinous humiliation was in her mind. As the woman checked her over, lifting her long hair out of the way to check her shoulders with a clinically light and professional touch, she clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth, hunting for something that Kasey could not know of. Sitting up straight and tall and still, Kasey kept one eye on her and one on her family, Alex behind Helena, groping and teasing her lewdly as she was fucked by her father.

Better her subjected to the humiliation of inspection than her daughter all over again. Though the way that the bitch Kayleigh took advantage of those in a vulnerable position was, in a word, sickening.

Letting out a soft “aha” of discovery, Kayleigh tapped her smartly on the shoulder. Kasey inhaled deeply and slowly and held that breath, counting to ten.

A handprint would look nice plastered across her face though.

“Ah, so you were bitten. I should have known that was a lie.”

Ignoring the venom in her voice, Kasey laughed shortly, without any humour.

“That’s funny because I’m sure I’d be fucking everyone in sight if that was true.”

The technician let out an exaggeratedly heavy sigh as if she was being forced to explain something basic.

“Here.”

She held up a small mirror, adjusting the angle until Kasey could see her back. A small, red mark, nearly faded into the natural tone of her skin, gleamed beneath her shoulder blade. Kasey shrugged.

“Looks like I scratched myself in the night.”

“I would think I’d know a scratch when I saw one. I’ll need a blood sample from you too, in that case. You can do the urine sample later on, unless you can pee in a cup for me now?”

Kasey wrinkled her nose.

“I think I’ll pass. I’ll take the cup and do that for you later, if it really is needed.”

“Oh, trust me, it is.”

Kasey didn’t look as the needle pierced her arm, but, as her daughter’s moans grew more vehement and needy, she had the perfect distraction in the form of a show right before her. Alex pressed up behind Helly as her blood filled the syringe and Kasey tilted her head to the side, wondering, just for a moment, what he was doing. But when Helena groaned in a way that she’d never heard before, it all became clear.

Anal sex. Kasey shuddered, luckily as the needle slid back out of her arm and Kayleigh muttered her disapproval of her patient not staying perfectly still. She’d never allowed Curtis to fuck her like that before, although he’d asked. Oh, he’d asked her many, many times and each and every time she’d said no, fearing the pain and fearing the stretch. Against herself, Kasey shuddered again, half-turning away and yet still watching in morbid fascination as her brother’s hips juddered wantonly up to her daughter’s pleasantly rounded backside, pushing more and more of his cock into her as the smaller woman was penetrated deeply in both holes.

Kasey tried to lick her lips, eyes wide, but her mouth was too dry. Maybe Curtis would have his first anal experience – at least for many years – with their very own daughter.

She wished the thought didn’t excite her quite so much.

But as Alex groaned in orgasm, climaxing quickly within her daughter’s tight, clenching – oh, she could almost feel it herself! – hole, Kasey turned away, letting each of the remaining crowd be disentangled from one another for their own examinations. None of them, assuredly, found it as humiliating as her and Kasey morbidly drank in the sight of naked body after naked body, lusts roused and a little part of her stubbornly clinging on to the notion of voyeurism in a world where, at least temporarily, it appeared to be allowed.

She gulped. There was no telling when that would change.

Cum oozed viscously from her daughter’s previously tight pucker as Alex slipped out, Curtis still thrusting into her cunt as if he hoped to impregnate her for a second time. But the man – and what a man he was in that moment, jaw clenched as he tried to fight off the ultimate pleasure – could not do a job for a second time until nature had run its course and he spent his seed into a pussy already well seeded.

Head rolling back against the wall, Kasey let the sounds of sex, the air thick with it, wash over her, lulling her into safe recluse of a world where she didn’t have to think or worry or mind what anyone else thought.

At least not for a time.

*

Of course, they were not permitted to leave the facility and Kasey was forced to sleep in a clinical cubicle, the most basic of hotel rooms, with only a single bed and small set of drawers to store her belongings. She’d laughed at first and scornfully asked them just what they expected her to put in the chest of drawers – blood samples, marked by date, perhaps? – but the staff assigned to their care and comfort appeared a different breed entirely to the wary guards and surly technicians that they’d been treated to thus far. Although none of them were allowed home, they had free reign of a section of the facility, which was on lockdown just for them.

How lucky.

And there were more of them there, oh, there were. Not a single one of them could have approximated the scope and reach of the parasite, just how far it would spread with its venomous bite in the search of prey, but it had drawn in more than a hundred victims, at least by Kasey’s count. Faces blurred into one another over the couple of days of being locked up in the research section of the facility – a secure section, she was sure – but all had been given their own individual rooms even if they did not often seem to sleep in just the one of them. Families struck just like hers had come together in the most intimate of manners, but there were others too, like the sorority house that had been infected and now had an interestingly lesbian interest thrumming beneath the surface.

Two days. Sex and tests and all but a blur. Kasey kept as close an eye on her family as possible, going between their doors at intervals when they were all in their rooms, or at least in some of their rooms. Once she found Helena on her back on the bed with Curtis kissing her swelling stomach and Alex holding her legs up around his waist, cock spearing into her. Another time, Helena lay on her side with her father’s hand possessively on her large stomach, Alex’s cock pushed between her lips. Kasey tried not to linger, but, when she thought no one at the facility was watching her specifically, she did tuck herself behind the door and watch her family fuck themselves to multiple, delicious orgasms.

Ah yes: the pregnancy. That was progressing. It seemed that the parasite had a few more tricks up its figurative sleeve to reveal and one of them was reducing the gestation period. It wasn’t as if Helena was the only one heavily pregnant, however, as Kasey passed woman after woman with a smile on her lips and a large stomach that could only have meant one thing in the hallways and laboratories where tests were conducted. They all looked happy, nearly deliriously so, but Kasey did not engage. It wasn’t as if any of them seemed interested in her anyway. She sighed to herself in the privacy of her room, a book open in her lap as she leaned back against the wall. Besides her family, no one was interested in talking to her at all.

Of course, the fact that more tests were being done and all of them poked and prodded to within an inch of their lives didn’t mean that they were getting any answers either.

“Has it been found yet?” Kasey asked a cleaner who was running a yellow duster over the top of her still spotless chest of drawers. “I did wonder, but hadn’t thought to ask anyone else so far.”

The cleaner, a pale-skinned woman with black hair dragged back into a tight bun, grimaced and put a hand on her hip.

“Why do you think I should know?” She demanded with a roll of her eyes that may have been reserved especially for the most annoying person she had to encounter that day. “I’m just the cleaner, I clean things. You think I’m involved in any of this parasite crap they’re making a hustle and rabble about?

Kasey grinned.

“Because you hear everything that goes on around her, whether they think you’re listening to them or not.”

“Hmmph.”

The cleaner put her hands on her hips, but Kasey had gotten through to her, as much as she didn’t like to interact with “guests”, clearly.

“No. No cure. Yet.”

The words came after a long pause and Kasey pursed her lips, sliding her gaze to where she wished there was a window, but only a small television screen, flat to the wall, resided. What she would have given for a window...

“And anything else? Progress?”

The cleaner sighed and shook her head, busying herself with gathering up her supplies, though Kasey had only really ever seen her use a small portion of them.

“They’ve brought in more people still, but, no, I’m afraid there’s nothing that I’ve overheard.” Her lips twisted, perhaps in sympathy. “I’m sorry I don’t have anything better for you, chick, I really am, but that’s how it is. Maybe soon they’ll have a cure?”

“And things will go back to normal... Maybe at long last. Or it can’t come soon enough either.” Kasey swallowed a groan. “This is no kind of life, to live cooped up in a box.”

Kasey leaned her chin into her palm, staring off into the distance as the cleaner – she would have to ask her name at some point when the woman lingered for more than a few moments, ever eager to be on her way – bustled to the door. But the dark-haired woman halted in her tracks, sliding a look back over her shoulder that Kasey could not decipher before the words hit her.

“Hey now...” Her eyes took on a wicked glint as she paused with one foot over the threshold. “Wouldn’t be so bad to be like them now, would it?”

Kasey blinked, a blush leaping to her cheeks before her mind caught up with the woman’s words.

“What...”

“You know...” She waggled her eyebrows suggestively. “Sexing everything up! Looks like a lot of fun there, hey!”

If she’d hung around for any longer, Kasey would have found out right then and there what it was like to die from sheer and utter embarrassment. But she disappeared back the way she’d come with a lilting cackle that had even Kasey chuckling along with her in turn.

What a card she was!

But she had hardly any time at all to think over what she’d been told, not that she’d been told very much at all, before the sharp clack of high heels down the narrow corridor heralded another arrival. Kasey leapt to her feet from the bed, toes curling against the clinically cold and tiled floor that had little going for it, but had not a chance to check on her family before that accursed technician, Kayleigh, and a flittering crony entered her small room.

Setting her jaw, Kasey folded her arms across her chest, although she had nothing to hide in the pink T-shirt she’d been given to wear, the logo one that she didn’t recognise. The pang for her own clothes, she knew, would not fade until she was good and done with the whole sorry affair. For, despite anything, all one mother craved was for everything to go back to normal with her little family.

Kayleigh snapped her fingers at her assistant, a slender man with a mop of brown hair and glasses at serious risk of sliding right off the end of his nose. He fumbled with a set of instruments, setting them down on the chest of drawers to sort through as she clicked her tongue impatiently against the roof of her mouth.

“Come on now,” she egged him on to greater heights of clumsiness. “Honestly, is this your first day?”

Kasey’s back stiffened and, before she knew it, she was engaging with the she-demon herself, if only to draw her attention away from the young man who looked as if his eyes were about to spill over with tears.

“To what do I owe the pleasure this afternoon, my dear Kayleigh?” The words slipped from her lips like slithers of ice breaking away down a stream. “It isn’t often that you come here to see me in this little...abode of mine.”

The woman’s lips twisted, though it didn’t take much for her to appear ugly. Kasey seemed to get that particular nasty expression from her rather a lot.

“It seems, my dear,” she purred with a decidedly mocking note, “that you are rather more interesting than even your deviant little family.”

Kasey’s eyes narrowed, arm flinging out with her hand curled into a tight fist before she realised what she was doing.

“Deviant? Just who do you think you’re calling names here when it was your fucking creation that’s caused all of this?”

Her chest heaved as she tipped forward, a little thrill going through her of victory as Kayleigh took an inadvertent step back. She wasn’t so controlling when she didn’t have her usual crowd of groupies to back her up, or perhaps it was the small, enclosed space that she had put herself in with her patient. Kasey smirked, tucking a strand of hair back behind her ear. Either way, it was her fault and she’d make damn sure she knew it too.

Kayleigh’s family was probably into something weirder than them still anyway. If they’d been the ones infected by the parasite, it would be nothing more than righteously deserved, if Kasey had the judging vote on that matter.

But Kayleigh seemed to relax, flicking through a notebook without seeming to actually read any of the scrawl on the small, neatly lined pages.

“Aggression... My, you are an aggressive one, aren’t you?” She didn’t expect an answer or pause for one either. “Did either your husband or your daughter – or your brother, for that matter, experience the same inclination to rage?”

Kasey’s jaw dropped.

“I am hardly one to rage.”

The technician raised an eyebrow, holding her hand out for something that Kasey could not see.

“Really? Well, with how you’ve been acting since we met, you could have fooled me.”

“Funny how a mother reacts when you degrade her family and poke her daughter in ways that should only be done by a respectful professional.”

She would not have regretted the words even if she’d been completely with herself and in her right mind, but the way Kayleigh reeled back, fingers tight around something small and cylindrical, made it worth it. The room seemed to close in around them, claustrophobic and sweltering, as Kayleigh took a wavering step forward.

“I am every bit a professional and certainly one more suited to examining a creature in such distress as your daughter.”

Kasey rolled her eyes, feeling like a teenager all over again for all the attitude she had on hand. But, regardless of how she felt, strong and powerful in the centre of her own domain, little did Kasey know that the dynamic was slowly shifting. And there was nothing she could do about it.

“Please do not refer to my daughter as a creature. It is your creation, this abomination, which is causing us such a great deal of distress.”

Kasey drew herself up taller, pushing her shoulder blades back as if it would make her seem larger and more imposing than she actually was, lending her own mind strength. It was the human equivalent of a bear standing on its hind legs to scare off other predators or scatter scavengers that may have posed a different kind of threat. And that was all Kayleigh was: a scavenger.

“Why, I would not be surprised at all to hear that it is you that is to blame for the whole matter and that is just why you are now so involved. You’re trying to atone for some sick sense of sin and self-righteousness, but the only way you can put this right now is to actually set everything to rights and cure those infected!

Her voice rose as she spoke, ending on a triumphant note and a jab of a pointed finger, added in just for good measure. But it was not to be, a fleeting kind of victory that never had any true grounding when she did not understand what was happening around her.

The woman that Kasey had grown to hate smiled sickeningly, the sweetness entirely false.

“Of course, you would think such a ludicrous thing, considering your immunity. You can’t see the big picture without really living it.”

She held up what was clasped in her hand, grinning as if she’d won a prize, and Kasey finally saw it in sharp, crystalline clarity: a syringe. She swallowed, though didn’t mean to make it look quite so obvious. But, of course, Kayleigh noticed. The bitch noticed everything.

Yet there was something that Kasey had to latch onto, despite the growing sense of dread clutching at her heart as the woman stepped closer and closer, her aide a shadow at her side.

“What do you mean, I’m immune?” Kasey blinked, unwillingly backing into a corner of her room as the wall shook, Curtis clearly engaged with their daughter on the other side of it, judging from the moans. “What does that even mean? And why are you looking at me like that?”

Kayleigh raised a cold, calculating eyebrow as she advanced, the empty syringe held high as if she was deliberately trying to make the needle catch the light. Knowing her, she probably was. Kasey pressed her lips into a thin, hard line.

“Answer me.”

“Oh, I intend to.”

The woman’s lips parted in a smile that Kasey was not quite sure that she intended to be as sultry as it came off. On the other side of the wall, the headboard of the bed slammed into the wall and her pregnant daughter screamed through climax. Kasey would have winced – why, oh, why couldn’t they just close the door? – if she was not otherwise distracted.

“Just when I please.” Kayleigh grinned, though there was no humour in it, only deadly intent. “The tests will hold all the answers I need.”

Brandishing the needle like a weapon, she nodded to Kasey. With her back to the far wall, television screen still flickering faintly with a show that she hadn’t really been watching, there was nowhere left for Kasey to retreat to. And, damn, did Kayleigh know it, that sadistic bitch.

The needle glinted.

“I’m just going to need a few samples.”