Mark & the SAV-2-I Variant

Dr Mark Edward Hall DDS was fifty years old, and he had always thought it was funny that, exactly one month after his divorce from his cheating wife, Linda Stanford, had been finalized, his father’s childless, estranged brother had willed his entire $12 billion fortune to Mark, to spite Mark’s father. The only term for him to inherit the fortune required Mark to promise not to give his father, Jack Hall, any money for exactly one year. Since Jack and Mark’s mother, Hillary, had retired comfortably, the promise was easy to keep. Linda tried taking Mark to court for a cut of the fortune, but since she had been open about her years of infidelity during the divorce proceedings, she had been laughed out of court.

Seven months after the year was over, the seventy-nine-year-old Hillary had died of a heart attack, and the eighty-one-year-old Jack had followed. Mark was rich, but alone except for his childhood best friend, Jermain Wallace, and Jermain’s wife, Emily Nguyen-Wallace.

Mark had been divorced from Linda for 6 years when the SAV-2 virus struck. He found it highly amusing when he heard that her second husband, the man with whom she had cheated on Mark for years, turned out to be one of the 3/4 of the male population that was turned gay by the virus. A mutual friend who was also one of the men turned gay by SAV-2 said that, like every other man affected by the virus, her new husband got queasy at the thought of sex with a woman. Linda was now divorced for the second time, and Mark, though he knew that he was never considered handsome, had no problem getting dates.

Mark grew up in the small town of Crawford, Texas, just west of Waco. With Dallas-Fort Worth being less than a two-hour drive from him, he knew that it was only a matter of time before this new variant hit home.

Anyone looking at his house would think that he was upper-middle class, but not wealthy. He drove a hybrid Toyota pick-up, and he liked to cruise around on his restored classic Harley-Davidson with attached sidecar.

Mark was reading the news on the Reuters app installed on his phone. The latest variant of SAV-2 was turning women into voracious nymphomaniacs who desired nothing more than becoming sex slaves to the first man to claim them by having vaginal sex.

This variant had the even more shocking effect of giving any man who had sex with a woman infected with this new variant a gorgeous feminine body with a penis that was very tiny when flaccid, but enormous when erect.

If he had been reading Fox or any of the many other “news” sites that liked to scare the public, he would have assumed that it was a hoax, but he still hopped onto the Associated Press’ website. The AP published even more articles about the new SAV-2-Intersex (SAV-2-I) variant.

Reports from around the world said that if a woman contracted the new variant and she did not bond with a man through vaginal sex within two or three weeks, she would become something akin to an animal controlled by lust. Women in such a state could not speak. They acted like animals with the intelligence of the average dog. The process appeared to be torture because women understood what was happening as they lost their minds. Several women have killed themselves to avoid becoming what many were now calling “fuck dolls.”

The major cell phone providers quickly set up an alert similar to the Amber Alert to notify their customers when a case of SAV-2-I was recorded in their community.

Though they had divorced after Jermain became fully homosexual after SAV-2, he was still close with his ex-wife, Emily. Emily taught journalism at Baylor University. Mark and Emily had always gotten along, and she had taken Mark’s side when Linda had cheated on him.

Everyone acknowledged that he had always had a tiny crush on Emily, but they also knew that it would never occur to him to try anything with her while she & Jermain were married. After being hit with SAV-2, Jermain had given Mark his blessing to ask his ex-wife out if that was what Mark wanted, but he had always been shy.

Mark was not surprised when Emily called him on a cool October afternoon and asked if he could come over and help her replace her kitchen garbage disposal. She only lived fifteen minutes away, so he slipped on a battered old Star Wars t-shirt over his worst jeans and headed out the door with his toolbox in his hand.

Mark’s dad had always made him help fix things around the house when he was a kid, and he had helped pay for his dental school working as a handyman even though he did not enjoy the job. However, he was a frugal man when it came to home repairs, so he usually fixed things himself.

He stopped to glance in a mirror to make sure that his thick red hair looked okay. Today was one of those days when he was pleasantly reminded of how the SAV-2 virus had de-aged him from a pudgy fifty-year-old man to a fit man who looked to be about twenty-five years old. His maternal grandfather had not been an attractive man despite his two beautiful daughters who somehow looked like him, and Mark looked like a 6’6” version of his grandfather. He did take some enjoyment from the fact that his blue eyes had often appealed to women.

Maybe today would be the day that he finally asked Emily out on a date.