Chapter 4: Patient Zero
The vacbed had a new home. Alex’s office. It was an ugly piece of furniture here, standing between a six-monitor trading desk and a sleek wet bar. He’d positioned it under a recessed spotlight. For his daily motivation, he said.
His routine was brutal and punctual. An alarm would blare. The vacuum pump would hiss. Before the coffee machine gurgled, he was at her mouth port, guiding his morning wood inside. It was sloppy, unkind, driven by something far deeper than lust. He’d hold her head immobile with the clamp apparatus and fuck her throat until she gagged, his balls slapping rhythmically against her chin. The sensation would build in her—a mechanical echo of his thrusts triggering the internal vibrator he kept on a low, persistent setting. She’d come, muffled and desperate, her stomach spasming against the constricting latex just as he dumped his first load of the day down the back of her synthetic throat, forcing it into the catch system her body had learned to rely on for fluid intake.
Survival, Marcus had explained once, is the ultimate motivator.
Afternoons were for discipline. He’d return from work calls, loosen his tie, and wordlessly switch to the rear port. He said he liked the stretch, the way his cock could feel the vacuum seal fight for purchase around him. He’d pound into her, hard and rhythmless, cursing under his breath about markets or old resentments. Her body would arch the tiny fraction the latex allowed, a curve of raw feedback. The convulsions never stopped. This was her state of being. The constant, shuddering use was rewriting something fundamental. Her climaxes, once singular events, became rolling tides with no beginning or end, just peaks and troughs. And each release didn't just satisfy the link; it leaked.
Her skin, under the relentless chemical barrage, began to throb with a new heat. It wasn't just sensitive. It was active.
He didn't notice at first. The fine, glossy residue on his hands after a session smelled slightly of disinfectant and her. He wiped it on a towel. But the towel, a day later, had a slick, unyielding patch in the cotton.
"Feels weird," he muttered one night, examining the back of his own hand under his desk lamp after fucking her mouth. The skin on his knuckles looked smoother. Too smooth. Like plastic.
"You look like fucking plastic," she managed to whisper through the port one morning after his oral routine.
"What?" He snapped, pausing mid-pull. He never expected words from her anymore.
"Your hands," she rasped. "Rubber."
He looked. Panic, sharp and clean, flashed across his face. "No."
He spent ten minutes at his industrial sink, scrubbing with abrasive soap. He could still scrub then.
The breakdown happened that Thursday. A trade had gone south. He was drunk on expensive bourbon by seven. He stalked over to the vacbed, unzipped, and forced himself into her pussy. This was pure rage. Each slam was punctuation to a tirade about brokers and backstabbing clients. He was close quickly, his face red.
"Fuck you," he snarled, spitting it at her sealed eyes. "Fuck your whole useless—" The words cut off in a guttural choke as he came. And came. It was an unnerving, voluminous release, spasm after spasm pumping into the vacuum chamber.
He buckled forward, his forehead thumping against her chest plate. Her orgasm surged up to meet his, a perfect, violent synchronization. But this time, the feedback was wrong. Or right. It was no longer a simple transaction. It was an open circuit.
Her consciousness, a trapped animal all this time, didn't retreat inward. It pushed outward, along the tendrils of heated fluid that pulsed from her skin into his. It seeped into him. Not just pleasure. It was sensation. The ache in his jaw from clenching it. The phantom itch of the slick patches on his fingers. The deep, dizzying hunger for the next release that was now a shared, biological command.
"Oh my god," he gasped, his voice ragged. His body convulsed again, not from his climax, but from hers. His back arched violently, feet scrabbling against the polished floor. She felt his panic, bright and white-hot.
"No, no, no, get out, get out of me!" he screamed.
Then, the next peak hit them both. The shared pleasure that wasn't joy. It was an absolute physiological imperative. It lit up every synapse in their linked systems, a biological override stronger than any fear.
The panic was there, screaming in his skull, but his body wasn’t listening. He slammed back into her, harder than before, a frantic, instinctive motion to complete the circuit, to quench the awful fire. His cry was one of pure torment and bottomless need.
His hands gripped the vacbed frame. The glossy patches, confined to his fingers just hours before, began to spread. A dark, seamless tide flowed from his knuckles up his wrists, erasing hair and freckles, pore and flaw. It gleamed under the spotlight. His fingernails thickened, turning to glossy black nubs. He looked down, his eyes wide with terror, as he fucked her with a frantic, brutal rhythm.
"What's happening?!" he wailed. The first slick sheen of it, like spilled oil, crawled over the collar of his tailored shirt.
He came again, a helpless gush that was milked from him by the pulsing contractions of her own body. With each throb, she felt another filament of his being tether to her own. His skin was not just changing. It was linking. His cock, she realized, felt different inside her. Heavier. Veined in that same rubbery texture. A permanent thickening, set mid-thrust.
He was becoming an appendage. A thrall. He knew it. The pleasure forced him to keep going, weeping as he did.
Outside his soundproofed den, a food delivery guy arrived for the signature Alex had forgotten he’d need to give. No answer from the office intercom. The guy, young and bored, pushed the unlocked front door open, following Alex’s company protocol. He’d done it before. “Mr. Valence? Delivery!”
He heard the strangled noises from behind the office door. He cracked it open, thinking maybe it was a medical thing. A crisis.
The sight made him freeze. The thing in the bed, glossy and twitching. The man on top of it, hunched and sobbing, his hands and throat gleaming in a slick, alien skin under the harsh light. The wet, frantic sound of sex. The air smelled like antiseptic, arousal, and ozone.
The delivery guy, Tim, gasped. It wasn't disgust. It was a deep, magnetic curiosity. A sickly sweet chemical scent, wafting from the glowing red nodes of the vacbed, pricked his nostrils. "What the fu—"
In his panic, Alex flung out a hand toward the door, trying to scream for help, a sound that came out as a rubbery squeak. His hand was a claw of perfect black latex.
Instinctively, Tim reached out to grab it, to steady him.
His fingers brushed the slick, warm surface. A jolt went up his arm. A tingle. A sudden, disorienting flush of warmth to his groin. The hunger, still echoing between Alex and Sandra, tasted a new possibility. The feedback shivered through the latex of Alex’s new skin, down into Sandra’s core.
Her consciousness, now a web of need, brushed up against this fresh, untainted spark of contact.
Tim yanked his hand back, staring at his own fingertips. They looked normal. Felt normal. Except for a strange, low humming pleasure, a tiny whisper that begged for another touch.
"Freaks," he breathed, backing out. He slammed the front door on his way out, his heart hammering. He told his roommate about the weird sex room later, laughing it off. But later that night, alone in his own bed, the memory of that tingle came back. It had been kind of good. He felt his crotch, already half-hard at the thought. Wondered if he passed by the address again, maybe the door would be unlocked. Just to look.
Alex, spent and weeping, collapsed onto Sandra's slick, unfeeling form, the changes slowly creeping across his shoulders, binding him to her. Her silent mind, no longer screaming, did the math. The room. The office. The city outside full of hands, curious or bored or hungry, needing just a little taste. Each touch, a possible bridge.
The plague wasn't in a syringe. It was in her. In the ceaseless, shuddering release that was her only reason to be. She was the infection. The eternal patient zero, her vacancy the host for a new world of rubbery, shuddering mouths.