Chapter 12

Something nagged at the back of Mike’s mind. As a roboticist and electromechanical engineer, he’d spent his career working around high-voltage electrical equipment, so the fresh, pungent scent in the air was instantly familiar to him. For the first time since he woke up and smelled it, however, he wondered at its source. Normally, it would be concentrated around an operating piece of equipment, like an electric motor or transformer, but this seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere, which made absolutely no sense.

“Was there a thunderstorm earlier?” Mike wondered aloud to Marcus.

They were alone now in the basement. When no one returned from Overton, Renata grew concerned and decided to risk walking Sophia back to the nurse’s office. With Mike appearing to be in relatively good health despite his recent ordeal, and sunset fast approaching, Theresa returned with them to help manage the students and prepare the dorm in case the blackout lasted past dark. Marcus agreed to hang back to keep an eye on Mike until the ambulance arrived.

“Nope,” Marcus said. “Barely a cloud in the sky all day. Why?”

“Do you smell that?” he asked, suddenly concerned that maybe he really was concussed after all.

Marcus sniffed the air. “Are you asking why it smells like the photocopier in the office?” he asked with a chuckle.

“Exactly,” Mike said, looking around the basement workshop. “It smells like ozone. Is there a transformer down here I don’t know about?”

“Not that I’ve ever seen.”

“Huh. Weird.”

Mike thought to speculate about it more, but elected to file it away for the time being. Of the many unexpected and alarming things to happen to him that day, a peculiar smell ranked near the bottom of the list. His main preoccupation at the moment was coming to terms with the fact that eight of his favorite students had drugged and stripped him naked in his workshop for some reason.

Actually, the reason was quite obvious. His painful erection had only just recently started to abate. He’d been unconscious for hours. What had they done to him, or with him, during all that time? He didn’t want to believe they would be capable of such a thing, but the evidence was as undeniable as it was incredible. He’d been sexually assaulted by the eight members of the Robotics Club.

Perhaps even more troubling than what they did to him were his feelings about it. By all rights, he should be angry, even furious, but he felt none of that. In fact, he had difficulty conjuring any feelings of ill-will at all for his attackers. Instead, he was impressed they could come up with such an elaborate scheme in the first place and actually execute it as well as they did.

Theresa explained what Mia told her about the sedative and the antidote, and about how professional and practiced the young fifteen-year old girl had seemed. Both when she examined him, and then during the process of preparing and administering the shot. She spoke and conducted herself like an actual medical doctor, Theresa told him with amazement.

Mike had a great fondness for the eight girls of the Robotics Club. They were his most dedicated students, and also the most talented. Their ability to master complex engineering concepts and apply them to their projects would have put them in the top tier of students at Caltech or Stanford, yet these were high school girls, some as young as fourteen. Mike tried to remember what he was doing at that age, and it wasn’t learning advanced mechatronics.

Something else occupied his thoughts as well. The idea that they would go to such lengths just to see him naked and fool around with him that way made him feel ... honored. Mike had taught high school students long enough to learn that they were not the innocent little children their parents deluded themselves into believing them to be. He had fairly liberated and highly scientific views on sex to begin with, which undoubtedly colored his perceptions.

In modern times, the students of Scirewood were considered adolescents, but that was a distinction that didn’t exist a hundred fifty years ago. During the entirety of human history prior to that, girls their age would have been considered adults and, as such, expected to take on adult roles and responsibilities. The fact that their modern day parents infantilized them and treated them like children didn’t change the reality of either biology or evolution.

Like it or not, deny it or not, those eight girls were sexual beings, and they experienced the same sexual thoughts and urges as everyone else. Because of their lack of experience, however, they weren’t always properly equipped to manage those desires in a healthy way. Part of the reason was because they received almost no serious, in-depth sex education at school. But in Mike’s opinion, the root problem was that experienced adults were absolutely forbidden by social convention from having frank and explicit conversations about sex with them.

In every other aspect of life, the older generations were expected to pass down their wisdom and experience to the younger ones, and in the past, that included sex. But over time, sex became an increasingly taboo subject that no one other than a parent should ever discuss with anyone below a certain arbitrary age. It made no sense to Mike because sex was just another biological process, like digestion or sleep or aging. It was how the species reproduced, for god’s sake.

At an evolutionary level, humans were nothing more than machines, designed by nature to create other humans. The idea that you could lock away such a fundamental aspect of evolutionary biology behind social prohibition and religious hokum was the height of hubris. Nature doesn’t care about your society’s unhealthy obsession with sex. It was going to do what it evolved to do, all your silly rules be damned.

Perhaps for those reasons, Mike didn’t feel nearly as victimized as he might rightfully be expected. First and foremost, he considered himself a man of science. Eight curious, brilliant girls had wanted to learn about sex, and they chose him as the guinea pig for their experiments. By all accounts, they dedicated themselves to the undertaking with as much seriousness and scientific rigor as could possibly be imagined in such a scenario, and, on net, it went about as well as could be expected. They hadn’t caused him any serious, long-term injury, and in Mike’s estimation, a lost afternoon and a sore cock was a small price to pay for advancing scientific inquiry.

“Marcus! Mike!” Theresa yelled from the basement entrance as she hurried down the stairs at a near run, pulling him from his thoughts.

“We’re here!” Mike answered, hearing the panic in her voice. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s the students! They’re sick!” she shouted.

When she met them in the main workshop, she stopped to clutch her sides, bending at the waist to catch her breath. She’d very clearly sprinted the quarter mile from Overton House at top speed, and that fact alone alarmed him.

“What do you mean they’re sick?” Marcus asked.

“I don’t know!” she said, on the verge of tears. “Oh god, Marcus, I’ve never seen anything like it. One by one, the girls just started vomiting and shitting themselves everywhere!” Then she did cry, but managed to rein it in by pressing the back of her arm against her mouth. “And some of them have, like ... I don’t know, burns on them or something. Renata doesn’t know what to do, and nobody’s phone is working!”

The hairs on the backs of Mike’s arms stood up, and Marcus noted his reaction.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

The very first thought that came to mind was some kind of chemical spill. He thought about the power outage and the strange odor in the air. Ozone had a slightly fresh chlorine note. He could imagine a freight train derailing and knocking down power lines; potentially catching fire and releasing toxic fumes into the air. But if that were the case, why wasn’t he sick too? The dock doors had been standing open for a while now, letting plenty of fresh air into the confined basement.

“Do either of you feel sick?” he asked, and they both said they didn’t, which seemed to rule out the chemical spill theory. “Okay, I think someone’s going to need to drive into town and bring back help. Let’s go see what we’re dealing with.”

“Do you think that’s a good idea?” Marcus asked, and Mike understood his meaning. Do you think it’s a good idea for you to go too?

“We can deal with all of that later. Right now, we’ve got more important things to worry about. Let’s go.”

It was just as Theresa described. The sickly sweet smell of vomit mixed with the odorous stench of feces to assault their nostrils the moment the three of them stepped inside Overton House. The first-floor common area was a madhouse of noise and activity, with Rachel, waving a red binder over her head, desperately trying to direct traffic while Renata tended to the sick. Theresa raced over to comfort a poor student bent over on the floor, retching her guts out.

“Anyone who isn’t sick, I need you to go to your dorm rooms now!” Rachel shouted over the shrieks and cries and moans of dozens of terrified girls. “Room leaders! I need room leaders to come get a lantern and a flashlight from me! Hello! Is anyone listening? I need all healthy students to vacate this area immediately!”

“LADIES! LISTEN UP!”

Once again, Marcus’s thunderous voice bought a moment of relative quiet, during which Rachel repeated her commands. Traumatized room leaders lined up to collect their emergency lights, and then slowly made their way upstairs with their hysterical, sobbing bunkmates in tow. By the time the last healthy stragglers cleared out of the common area, nearly twenty sick students were left behind.

When Rachel saw Mike standing in the entryway, her relief to see him was quickly surpassed by her immediate need for additional hands.

“Thank god you’re here. I have to do a headcount. Find some buckets or trash cans or something. Anything to keep them from puking on the floor. It’s everywhere!” she said before disappearing up the stairs.

She wasn’t exaggerating. The tile floors were painted in body fluids, creating numerous slipping hazards. While Marcus disappeared into the kitchen in search of vomit receptacles, Mike went to the utility closet to fetch a mop. After clearing a walking path, which amounted to little more than pushing puddles of puke against the walls, Mike went to tend to a student in a stars and stripes bikini, curled up on the floor in a pool of her own vomit.

“Natalie,” he said, remembering her name. He kneeled beside her. “Tell me what’s wrong, honey.”

She cried and hugged her stomach. At some point, she’d evacuated her bowels, staining the back of her swimsuit.

“It hurts,” she said between hiccupping sobs. “Oh god, it hurts.”

He put a comforting hand on her forehead, alarmed by how warm her skin felt. She had a major sunburn over most of her upper body, including her back, shoulders, upper chest, and face. Looking around at the other afflicted girls, they all appeared to be suffering from similar burns.

“I’ll be right back,” he said.

He went to the utility closet to retrieve a handful of white, terry cloth hand towels, quickly running them under the sink and wringing them out before returning to Natalie’s side. He draped them over her burns, and their cooling effect seemed to bring her some mild relief.

“What happened to you, Natalie?”

Through tears and bouts of retching, she told him of the strange light in the sky. Her description of it jarred him, and he pressed her for details. Where in the sky had she seen it? How big was it? How long did it last?

Her responses corresponded to nothing in either his experience or education that could account for her injuries, save one. But the far-reaching consequences if he was correct were too horrifying to contemplate. A high altitude nuclear explosion.

Could that possibly be right? He’d heard nothing on the news about hostilities between the US and its numerous antagonists, beyond the persistent, background level posturing and saber rattling that was the status quo. Terrorism then? It seemed unlikely. He imagined such an attack would be targeted against a critical piece of infrastructure or a high-profile event.