Chapter 1

June 19^th, 2020

Around day one hundred of the quarantine, Andy was starting to lose his damn mind. The governor of California had gotten on the television and announced that everyone who wasn’t essential was under what would normally be described as house arrest. Sure, the grocery stores were open (staffed by the barest of skeleton crews), but restaurants were only doing delivery (and charging an arm and a leg for it) and every bar in town was closed. The most time he’d spent outdoors in the last week had been walking out to the mailbox cluster for the complex down at the end of the street.

Even though both of them had decent paying jobs – Eric as a software engineer and Andy as a marketing writer – neither could afford an entire place to themselves in the San Francisco Bay Area, so Andy paid rent to Eric, who owned the condo (or at least was paying it down). But they got along well enough as roommates, so while the isolation had been a little annoying, it was nowhere near as difficult as it might have been if either of them had been living alone. Strangely enough, both men had openly admitted over the last month or so that they actually missed going into an office.

Andy also had a side hustle as an urban fantasy novelist and was getting frustrated as hell that the quarantine was keeping him in place also meant that his newest book’s release date was repeatedly getting pushed back. There was a warehouse full of fifty thousand copies of his next novel, “High Noon At Stonehenge,” and they were all just sitting there.

“They’ll come out eventually,” his agent had told him, but the whole thing felt very much like a death sentence to his literary ambitions. The last few books in the series had seen declining sales, and he’d hoped this one would be a resurgence for the series. Andy even had a box of advance copies sitting in a corner, along with a movie poster styled promotional in a frame that his publicist had sent him months before the pandemic had set in.

“Did you get the mail today?” Andy asked his roommate, mostly just to have something new to talk about for a moment.

“Nah,” Eric said from his desk, surrounded by computer monitors. “Didn’t see the point.”

“Fair enough.”

That had been their routine for almost three months now, and frankly, they were both a little bored of it all. It had been death by molasses since the quarantine had started, everything moving in slow motion and nobody really going forward.

Wham wham wham. The pounding of someone at the door made both men jump.

“You order food?”

“Nope. You?”

A voice came from outside their front door. “CDC. Open the door, please.”

Eric moved to the door and peered through the peephole. On the other side, he saw a man in a biohazard suit, covered completely from head to toe. He raised one covered hand and waved. “I’m perfectly safe, as you can see. We’re going door to door locally here in San Jose and testing people for the DuoHalo virus.”

Eric looked back at his roommate and shrugged. Andy grabbed his two cats, scooping one up in each arm as Eric opened the door. It was like something out of The Andromeda Strain, seeing the man in the yellow hazmat outside, a small box in one hand. “CDC? Really?”

“Yeah. I’m Dave. Invite me in?” Despite the giant hulking suit, the man seemed friendly enough. And if he wasn’t who he said he was? Shit. It would be something different, and at this point, anything different was good.

Andy shrugged and Eric laughed. “Sure, c’mon in. We just need to close the door behind you, so the cats don’t get out.”

“Sure sure, I get that. I’m here to test if you guys are clear. Is there some place I can set up?”

“Go ahead and use the kitchen table. You want us together or one at a time?”

“The test only takes fifteen minutes, and I can run up to four of them at a time, so come on. I can run you both.”

The man lugged the kit with a certain world weariness, as if he’d been doing this thirty times a day since the lockdown had started. Maybe he had, Andy thought to himself, although he was surprised he hadn’t heard anything about it on the news before now.

“Paperwork says you’ve got two guys living here – Eric Yang and Andrew Rook,” the man continued. “That you two?”

“That’s us,” Eric said.

“Nobody else in the condo?”

“There’s the cats,” Andy added, trying to be helpful.

“Cats can’t get DuoHalo,” Dave chuckled. “I meant other humans.”

“Nope,” Eric sighed. “Nobody else. God how we wish there were.”

“It would be someone else to talk to,” Andy added.

“Cool. I get that,” Dave said as he set the kit down on the kitchen table. He glanced up at the movie poster promotional on the wall above the kitchen table. “Oh hey, you guys are fan of the Druid Gunslinger books too? I fucking love those things.”

Eric laughed a little bit, sitting down in one of the kitchen chairs, as he rolled up his sleeve. “I mean, you could say that I guess. He writes’em.”

“What? No, they’re written by some guy named Blake Conrad.” He glanced at Eric and grinned, waving a hand in his direction for Eric to roll his sleeve back down. “I don’t need blood, man. Here, just rub this swab on the inside of your cheek for a bit.”

Andy smiled a bit sheepishly, putting the cats down. Neither seemed particular energetic at the moment, so while they moved a little bit away from him, both Huginn or Muninn seemed disinterested in leaving the room. “Yeah, that’s me. Blake Conrad’s my pen name.”