Chapter 2

June 20^th, 2020

It was a little past noon the next day when there came a knock at the door. “Open up! CDC!” the voice on the other side shouted at them. “Delivery and I don’t have time to fuck about so let’s go!”

Andy was in the living room working on his laptop, and glanced over at Eric, who was hip deep in a conference call. “Don’t worry, I got it. They probably just forgot some questions yesterday or something,” Andy said. Eric waved his hand, carrying on with his conversation with his coworkers as Andy set his laptop aside.

After rising from the couch, Andy made his way over to the front door and opened it without thinking to look through the peephole. The cats were both asleep upstairs, so he wasn’t worried about them. When he opened the door, there were three people outside of it, but not the one he’d expected. The person in the middle inside the biohazard suit looked a lot like Dave had, except for the face. The man inside the suit was black man in his late forties. He looked a lot less jovial than Dave.

To the left and right of the man in the biohazard suit were women covered from head to toe. From the clothing, it was almost impossible to make out any details other than the woman to the left of the guy in the biohazard suit was very short and the woman to the right of him was slightly taller than the other. Both of them wore hoodies with the hoods pulled up and ski visors over their eyes and scarves over their noses and mouths. They both also wore long sweatpants and had those fuzzy lined boots he’d never thought were fashionable, and he couldn’t see an inch of skin from either. Each of them had a small roller suitcase with them, the kind of travel bag someone takes for a holiday no longer than a week, and a large bag under their arm, an oversized purse maybe, or a laptop bag. The whole appearance was almost like Berkas by Gucci.

“You Eric or Andy?” the man in the gear asked him.

“Andy.”

“Copy,” the man said, tapping at his little pad with a stylus that dangled from it. He let the stylus drop and then opened a pouch on the outside of his suit, unholstering a bottle of Lysol. He sprayed the surface of the tablet for a few seconds then held it out to Andy. “Just use your finger to sign on the line. Any day now. I’ve got another seven deliveries to make today, and people are on the bus waiting so let’s go.”

On the street down the driveway, Andy could see what looked like a Greyhound bus waiting with its hazard lights blinking, although considering how few people were out on the road, it almost seemed unnecessary to him.

Andy lifted a finger up and signed an approximation of his name on the tablet’s surface. It felt odd giving a signature with his index finger, but he supposed sanitizing the screen was easier than sanitizing the stylus. “So how long is this for?” Andy asked. “How long are these people are staying with us?”

“Which bedroom is Eric’s and which bedroom is Andy’s?” the shorter of the two women asked, her voice heavily muffled by the scarf.

“Upstairs and turn right for Eric’s room and left for my, uh, Andy’s room,” he said, as the two women immediately brushed past him and ran upstairs. Andy turned back to the CDC worker. “How long?”

“The fuck should I know, pal? I just deliver them. Nobody tells us grunts shit. Whole thing is FUBAR.” He took the tablet back from Andy and glanced down at it. “Anyway, that’s it for this batch. I’ll see you again in a few days, maybe a week or so, with the next one.”

“The next one?” Andy asked, but the man had already turned and started walking back to the bus. “What do you mean the next one?” But the man had already moved on, and either didn’t hear Andy or didn’t care. Andy suspected it was the latter. Behind him, up the stairs, he heard both his and Eric’s bedroom doors shut.

He closed the front door to the condo and locked it, then turned the padlock and put the chain back on, just so Eric wouldn’t harp on him about making sure the door was secure. Andy looked over his shoulder and glanced at Eric, who shrugged. Neither of them knew what the hell was going on or what to expect. Andy moved upstairs and knocked on his own bedroom door from the outside, a sensation he’d never had before. “Uh, hello?”

“Five minutes please!” a woman’s voice on the other side of the door said to him.

Andy sighed, turned around and walked back downstairs. His roommate looked over at him, having just wrapped up his conference call. “She wants five minutes,” Andy said with a spread of his hands and a shrug, completely at a loss.

Eric laughed at the absurdity of it all. “We’ve been kicked out of our own rooms. Great.”

Andy moved back over to the couch and picked up his laptop, sitting back down and starting to write again. He was curious, though. Insanely curious about what was happening in his own room and why he wasn’t being allowed in it for the time being. Neither of the cats were complaining so he imagined it couldn’t be too bad. With his conference call done, Eric had turned on his music, because Andy could hear the tiny noise flareups, even though Eric was just wearing earbuds. He did love his death metal loud, which was why Andy often wrote from his room.

Andy spent a while trying to work but trying to focus felt damn near impossible. He popped into the Netflix marketing Slack channel to let the folks at his day job know what was going on.

-your partner showed up?- his boss typed. -take the rest of the week off. you’re going to be busy-

-They said they’re going to be back later with another delivery. What the hell does that mean?- Andy typed into the channel.

-oshit- his boss, Cameron, typed back at him. Cameron had always had shitty typing skills, so in Slack messages, he never capitalized anything, and used every opportunity to use single letters or numbers as words, like he was Prince. -how big is your bed? queen sized?-

-King sized.- Andy replied. -California king, actually. Don’t know what difference that makes though. I figured it would just be one partner per person.-

-u have a king bed tho- his boss replied. -did the site ask u the polyamory question?-

-Yeah- Andy typed. -I put no preference-

-shiiiiiiit- came the reply. -okay take off the rest of the week and let me know when you get another partner and we can do the same again as many times as you get partners-

-Wait. What? How many partners can they give me?-

-depends on what level the tester gave you, my guy told me when I got tested-

-He said he gave us level 5. He was a fan of my novels so I gave him a signed copy of the new one and he set us as level 5s as his way of saying thank you.-