Strain Read online

  “This is our best hope if we want to save your life.” Xolani’s fists were tight at her sides, as if she wanted to punch something. Rhys suspected “something” was Darius. “But we didn’t come out here with a squad equipped for recruiting. We’ve got two subjects to try to expose and only so many males who aren’t either in strictly monogamous relationships or inflexibly heterosexual. Gina doesn’t sleep with men. I could do it, or at least try, but female-to-male transmission of just about any viral infection found in sex fluids has a far lower rate of incidence than male-to-female or male-to-male. Same problem with Jamie. He’d be willing, but he’s anatomically female.”

  “Not to be picky, but I’m in a committed relationship, too,” Titus drawled, still relaxed and sounding slightly amused. “And I’m not queer.”

  Xolani smirked, and her aggressive posture eased. “Yes, but luckily you’re an open-minded man who will do what it takes, and your woman is a wonderful, caring person who understands this sort of thing.”

  Rhys stared at them all as if they’d gone insane—which he was fairly certain was the case. “You people are sick. Jesus! You know, this is a really shi—crummy time to be playing a stupid joke!” He flinched, pure instinct telling him to expect a hard cuff or a rap across the knuckles for even beginning to utter a swear.

  “It’s no joke.” Xolani strode up and down the aisle runner. “We need to get the Alpha strain spreading through your body before Beta starts to work. We caught a break, there. Alpha was engineered to replicate in the RNA faster than Beta, because Beta has a long incubation period to ensure maximum contagion before anyone caught on. What we need to do is expose you to Alpha, immediately and repeatedly. We have no idea just how much of the virus is present in sex fluids, so we need a lot of it. Daily exposure, multiple times a day. Multiple partners would be even better.” She reached the end of the aisle and pivoted on her heel to face Rhys. “Five or six weeks at least, which is on the long side of the amount of time it takes to see if someone is infected. It’s not perfect, and the longer we wait, the less likely it is to work. It could be that your exposure to Beta and Gamma already has you producing antibodies to Alpha, especially if we delay. You need at least one male sex partner, and you need him tonight.”

  “This is crazy.” Rhys’s fingers tingled, and his head buzzed. He wasn’t certain he wouldn’t pass out again. He should pray, he thought distantly. If Father Maurice were alive, he’d be shouting a sermon at the top of his voice right now, telling them to repent of their wickedness and condemning Rhys for allowing himself to be led into temptation, even if he hadn’t done anything.

  Of course, Father Maurice had been full of crap most of the time. Rhys still recalled the burning shame and resentment he’d felt each time Father Maurice had berated him about unnatural lust and perversion after he and Gabriel had been caught almost kissing. Gabe had felt right. Safe. Closest to him in age—except for Cady, of course—Gabe had been Rhys’s best friend and constant companion in those first few years at the monastery. That near kiss had been the most thrilling moment of his young life. He’d never understood how it could be considered a sin.

  Rhys stared at them all but mostly at Darius. Was he honestly supposed to have sex with him? Or one of the others? He didn’t know Titus or those other men. He didn’t really know Darius, either, but—

  “It should be you, Darius.” Xolani gave Rhys a sympathetic look. He struggled to know how to respond to it. His outrage and annoyance over what still felt like a horrible prank were at odds with his gratitude for her kindness. “Titus or someone else will do it if we have to. I’ll do it if we have to, though I’ll give him long odds for success if it comes down to that. But look at him. It’s you the kid’s imprinted on. If anyone can make this easier on him, it’s you.”

  “I’m not a kid,” Rhys snapped.

  “Well, I’m not doing the honors with that other guy,” Titus muttered.

  Darius overrode them both, his voice cold. “And if I don’t think we should be spreading the Alpha strain?”

  “You want to sentence him to die unnecessarily?” Xolani stared him down. “Fact is, Darius, Bravo Company may be onto something.”

  “I can’t believe you’d argue in favor of that.”

  “I’m trying to survive in a world that’s gone to shit. We don’t have time to be squeamish. We’ve lost people. We need to begin replacing them if we want to keep our fighting force effective. This kid’s going to die anyway if we don’t help him, so really, where’s the risk?”

  Darius looked grave. “At what cost, Xolani?”

  She crossed her arms over her chest and set her jaw. “We do what we have to do.”

  Rhys would have been more annoyed at being left out of a conversation that concerned him so intimately if it had made any damn sense. His eyes ping-ponged from one to the other as half their words went over his head.

  Who the hell was Bravo Company?

  The muscle in Darius’s jaw jerked. “Fine. Someone find me a cup and a goddamn turkey baster, then.”

  “Dammit, Darius!” Xolani looked like she wanted to punch something again. “We have no idea how long the Alpha virus will survive in sex fluids once exposed to air. Beta’s short-lived when airborne. Moreover, it’s an unstable virus prone to radical mutations. Even if it doesn’t die prior to transmission, there’s no predicting what it will do under those sorts of uncontrolled circumstances.”

  Darius looked back and forth between Titus and Xolani.

  “Get out, both of you. Let me talk to the kid alone.”

  Xolani looked like she wanted to argue, but Titus gave her a tight shake of his head, and she swallowed it down. Pulling her scarred face into what Rhys suspected was meant to be an encouraging smile, Xolani ruffled his hair in a quasi-maternal gesture, as if she hadn’t just moments before suggested that she’d have sex with him if necessary.

  Then they were gone, and he was left alone in the dark chapel with Darius’s forbidding presence. He wasn’t sure if he was grateful for the lantern someone had brought into the room; it made the shadows even creepier. The rev he’d bludgeoned to death earlier had been removed and burned with the others, but the bloodstains remained on the floor. In the dim light, the brownish-black smudges looked oily and ominous. They filled Rhys with a horrified fascination. Short of this bizarre scheme and Darius’s good graces, that blood might end up killing him.

  “You’re a virgin, aren’t you?” Darius sat on the altar with an utter lack of reverence, the same altar at which Father Maurice had made Rhys kneel during prayers for seven years. Rhys’s mom and Gabriel’s parents had tried to protest Father Maurice’s insistence on religious observation, but no one had been willing to fight over it once he’d grown volatile.

  They’d tolerated a lot for the safety of numbers.

  Rhys had listened at that altar three times a day from the time he was twelve as Father Maurice went over well-told tales emphasizing the importance of obedience to God’s will, of chastity and purity and self-denial. He’d listened to endless rants about how immorality and sexual deviance had resulted in the destruction of civilization as they knew it.

  He’d listened as Father Maurice had all but blamed him personally for a plague that, if Xolani was telling the truth, had seen its first scattered cases not long after Rhys had mastered a two-wheeled bike.

  Now his only hope of survival was to agree to be part of the wickedness Father Maurice had condemned.

  With Darius.

  He swallowed hard, trying and failing to see Darius’s dark shape as something other than terrifying. “Of course I’m a virgin.” At nineteen years old, with no eligible partners and no prospect of ever encountering any, he’d resigned himself to living and dying that way.

  Darius drummed his fingers on the altar in a rhythmic patter. “Do you want to do what Xolani is proposing?”

  “I don’t want to die.”

  “That’s not the same thing.”

  “Well, then, no, I don’t
want it. I think it sounds sick. But I don’t want to die, either, so what am I supposed to do?”

  The drumming stopped, and Darius rapped his knuckles against the wood in a hard, sharp strike. “Well, I don’t want to fuck an unwilling kid, so I’d say this is a shitty situation for both of us.”

  Rhys folded his hands in his lap, as much to stare at them in embarrassment at having insulted Darius as to hide the fact that, despite himself, he was getting a boner. Wasn’t that pathetic? Even as warped as the whole situation was, apparently all his body heard was sex.

  “Sorry.” He was glad for the shadows that kept his face from looking as red as it felt.

  “Sick, huh? I suppose that means you don’t even like men?”

  Oh, God help him, could his head actually explode from too much blushing?

  “Actually, I do.” He squirmed on the moldering velvet padding of the pew, thinking of Gabriel. Daring, defiant, larger-than-life Gabriel, who’d left him behind. “I mean, I know some people think it’s a sin and all, but . . .”

  Darius waved him off with an impatient flap of his hand. “Shut that down. I don’t want to hear what your preacher had to say about it.”

  Rhys looked down at his hands again. His erection wasn’t subsiding. “Sorry,” he repeated.

  “Is there . . .?” Darius sighed, running a hand down the ponytail that hung to his shoulder blades. The altar creaked as his weight shifted. “Shit. I wish this could wait until we get back to base. If there’s somebody else here you’d rather have your first time with, I could talk to them. See if they’d be willing to do it. If I can at least give you a choice in that . . .”

  The rest of them were even less familiar to him than Darius, who was a complete stranger himself. The rest of them hadn’t saved him seconds before he was about to die. They hadn’t been so concerned with his safety that they’d climbed fully clothed into the shower with him to try to get the blood off.

  “No.” He looked away, suddenly feeling vulnerable, humiliated by the fact that, twisted as it was, some part of him—a very singular part, at least—wanted this. It shouldn’t be arousing. It should be the least arousing thing imaginable, because it was sick. What Xolani had proposed was a humiliating, degrading farce, but his cock didn’t seem to care.

  If and when he had sex, he wanted it to be for a better reason than being forced into it because he had no choice other than dying. Now he understood what had offended Darius earlier. After all, Darius was only considering doing this to save him, not because he wanted to. He didn’t want Rhys. That stung, pricking his vanity for some absurd reason. It would have been nice to at least be desired. Maybe Darius didn’t even like men as a rule. “I don’t want anyone else.”

  “Then this is how it’s gonna go down.” Darius paused. That measuring gaze pinned Rhys, stripped him down to all his deepest secrets. “You need to understand: If you’re not infected with Alpha, you’re infected with Beta or Gamma. Either you become one of us or you die. We can’t have you running around, no matter what strain you’ve got. The reasons you can’t be let loose infected with Beta or Gamma are plain, but even if it’s Alpha, you’ll still be too dangerous to leave uncontained. One cut and you could infect any survivors you come across. You’d be strong enough to take captives and set yourself up with a harem and slave labor somewhere out of the way. So no matter what happens, boy, you’re with us until you die, whether that’s a few weeks from now or when you’re an old, old man. You understand what I’m saying?”

  Rhys shook his head. “I don’t— No.”

  Darius glowered. “I’m saying if you back out, I’ll kill you. I don’t like it. It’s a little too close to raping someone under threat of death for my comfort. Hell, I suppose that’s exactly what it is. I don’t consider that much of a choice to give someone. But if you don’t agree to this tonight, or if you agree to this and back out, sooner or later I’ll end up putting a bullet in your head. I’ll have to. Now do you understand?”

  Worried for a moment that he might faint again, Rhys waited for the dizziness to pass and nodded, his mouth dry and the sour taste of terror on his tongue.

  “All right, then.” Darius pushed himself up off the altar. “We’re all in, both of us, or we’re finished. So for the next five or six weeks, or however long it takes, your ass is mine. If I give the word, you drop everything and do what I say. I don’t care if we’re in the middle of the fucking mess hall. If I tell you bend over, you do it. We clear?”

  Rhys didn’t know which reaction was the strongest: offense or fear or, God help him, arousal. His heart hammered in his chest as he stared at Darius wide-eyed. He should protest, he thought, licking his dry lips. He should tell Darius to go to hell, and then he should go pray for the serenity to accept his eventual death.

  Problem was, he wasn’t sure he could actually walk just now, much less kneel.

  “We’re clear,” he heard himself agreeing. His pride groaned in protest, and the thrill of terrified arousal redoubled.

  “Then come here.” Darius beckoned him toward the altar.

  “What, here?” In his head, Father Maurice’s voice screamed condemnation and accusations of debauchery and blasphemy.

  “Don’t question me, boy.” Darius’s eyes narrowed, somewhere between challenge and annoyance. “Come to me, or I’ll come get you. Think I can’t do it?”

  Of course he could. He was a Jug, right?

  His face burning with shame, Rhys pushed himself from the pew and came.

  Literally.

  “Oh God.” Was there still time to opt for death? Better that than the wet stain spreading across the front of his new jeans.

  Darius’s mouth twitched. “Plenty more where that came from, boy,” he murmured, not unkindly. “Now come here.”

  Rhys looked over his shoulder at the door the revenants had splintered earlier. “Someone might—”

  “Who cares? You think they won’t know that I fucked you?” Darius crossed his arms over his chest. “I could take you back to the kitchen and do you in front of everyone if you think they won’t.”

  “No!” Rhys shook his head violently. His eyes burned again, this time with the agony of humiliation. He wanted to call the whole thing off, but he didn’t want to die and—dear Jesus, please—even after that embarrassingly easy and unfulfilling orgasm, he still felt the pull of arousal tugging at his balls. “No, please.” He lowered his voice lest anyone, particularly Jacob, overhear his unmanly whimper. His hands and knees shook as he approached the altar.

  Darius reached down and opened the belt of his fatigues, then the fly, and pushed them and his boxers down his hips. Holy Lord, what was Rhys supposed to do with that thing? The sight of Darius’s thick penis ratcheted up his terror, and suddenly this wasn’t about his fear of God’s wrath or Jacob’s petty torments or the humiliation of having his first time under duress with someone who didn’t really want him. There was no possible way he could ever do anything with . . . that.

  Not that he knew exactly what he was supposed to do with it to begin with, beyond some vague ideas. Going into seclusion to escape the plague as a kid meant he’d missed out on a lot of schoolyard talk. His mother’s homeschooling—even the birds and bees for gay boys part—hadn’t quite covered this sort of situation.

  “Look at me, boy.” Rhys tore his eyes away from the heavy cock Darius was slowly stroking to full erection and met his severe gaze. “This doesn’t have to be a bad thing. You like men; I’m a pretty damn good-looking man. You could do a lot worse. I won’t be unkind unless you start giving me shit, and I won’t hurt you any more than necessary to get the job done. When it’s all said and done, if this works, you’ll be one of us. You’ll be strong and fast and less easily tired. You’ll be able to kill revs like the ones who murdered your sister in job lots.” Rhys tried to keep his focus on Darius’s eyes, but he couldn’t quite manage to break the half-appalled spell of that rhythmic stroking. “The people I lead, they’re good people, for the most part. Decent.
They’ll welcome you as family. You’ll never have some creepy old fucker preaching to you about right or wrong again, trying to make you deny your God-given urges. Now, you can be reluctant, if you want, or you can find the good in it. One way or the other, we’re doing this.”

  None of that sounded bad, and Rhys’s horrified soul seized upon it for hope. “What do I need to do?”

  “You’ll just suck me off tonight. Chances of passing the virus through giving head aren’t great, but there’s no way I’m doing a virgin who just blew his load up the ass. Problem is, time’s not really on our side here, so we have to get creative. Strip.”

  Trembling, agonizingly aware of the wrongness of doing this in the chapel, Rhys peeled the T-shirt over his head. He felt Darius’s eyes upon him, taking in his thin chest. Rhys had worked long hours trying to keep the monastery repaired and growing food in the small courtyard garden inside the gates, and there had never been enough to eat. Compared to Darius’s muscular build—or at least what he assumed was muscle from the firm bulk he’d felt pressed against him when Darius had pinned him to the door earlier—he felt scrawny and ugly.

  Darius smiled kindly, as though he understood the root of Rhys’s self-consciousness. His hand had slowed on his cock as though half-forgotten, and he began stroking again when the lack of stimulation—or maybe it was just the sight of Rhys’s skinny body—had the predictable effect. “You’ll have more to eat with us, too. Now the pants.”

  Stripping off the cold, wet denim and sticky underwear was humiliating. Even more so was the fact that he was already half-erect again. Darius seemed pleased to see it.

  “Well now, you’re a sweet thing, aren’t you?” Rhys didn’t think Darius was asking him. “Cute little ass on you. Bend over the altar.”

  “I thought you weren’t going to—”

  “No questions.” Darius’s gentle expression quickly became severe. “You do what I tell you when I tell you to do it. I’m helping you here, remember?”