SIDE From the Office of the Director

Director Tom Thompson sighed as the new Deputy Director finally entered his office. Rob Paterson was fourteen minutes late.

"What have you got for me, Robbie?" Tom said the moment the door closed fully.

"Things are going better than expected now that we have gotten through the initial hick ups," Rob said.

"Don't bullshit me, Robbie. I had to make your predecessor a scapegoat after we nuked Springfield and still didn't stop this. If it comes to it, I'll blame this one on you too, somehow." Deputy Director Paterson nodded, but it wasn't very convincing.

"Alright, is the perimeter secured?" the Director asked.

"Yes, it's airtight. Between the National Guard and the regular army, we have checkpoints on every highway, road, and trail leading in and out. We have boots on the ground patrolling and eyes in the sky too. I can confidently say that no one will drive or walk out of there without us stopping them and interning them." Rob said confidently.

"Good, good. Have all of the... traitors been rounded up?" Tom asked next.

"As far as we can tell, they are all dead, sir," Rob said grimly. "They fought to the **** and managed to delay the **** on the hospital by several hours."

"That's what gave the ones in the hospital time to set up some defenses. Was General Hays captured?" the Director said next.

"No, sir, she was killed fighting us along with the rest. That was the worst part of this. We had our suspicions of the general but didn't realize that so many of the regular troops had been infected also." Rob said, looking down at his hands.

General Susan Hays had been the base commander at the nearby military base. She had initially said that she could handle any issues in the area herself. And was upset when troops from the outside started showing up on her base. After the President himself called General Hays, she stopped protesting. The special forces, which had been assigned to surround and capture the hospital, were attacked by soldiers from the base the night before they were to go in. The attackers were all female soldiers from the base, and even though they didn't have the combat experience that the men they attacked had, they managed to kill nearly as many as they lost. This had shaken everyone involved, but also showed them that they couldn't wait any longer. Over fourteen hundred of the nearly eighty-four hundred soldiers assigned to the base were female. If they hadn't caught on to the outbreak for a few more weeks, there was no telling how much further it would have spread. The director thought that if they had gone in a month later, it could have been full scale combat and far too much chaos to keep more infected from escaping the area.

The director looked at the request General Hays had sent out two weeks earlier, requesting to set up a national training center for female soldiers at the base. A program that would prepare the best and brightest from around the nation for career advancement. The proposal checked all the boxes that politicians these days love and almost certainly would have been approved in no time. "So we dodged a grenade but took a bullet there," the Director said as he crushed the stress ball in his other hand.

"I suppose so, Tom," Rob said soberly. "We have things under control now and are currently rounding up and detaining every man, woman, and child in the area. We are currently housing women at the base, including the remaining female military personnel originally stationed there, and are using other small camps for men and children."

"That's 160,000 people. Can we handle it?" Tom asked.

"We will make it happen. We have no room for error here. We don't see the men and children as threat vectors, so we are just holding them for now. We are processing the women as quickly as possible, given how careful we have to be with them. Not only do we have to be absolutely certain that they are clean. But we also have to prevent another potential outbreak." Rob replied.

Tom pumped the stress ball in his hand. "How many infected?"

Rob opened a manila folder. No information on the details of the threat was being put on digital devices. "Fourteen hundred and ninety-three dead infected and... seventeen captured alive. About two-thirds of them were military personnel, the rest were civilians. Some of the civilians were on base, but many were caught in the town. We fear that there are still many more at large. Apparently, they had been spreading within the nearby town for a month now. Our dead include three hundred fifty-four army, three of our own agents... and two hundred and thirty-one uninfected civilians."

"My God," said the Director, the latest numbers of infected were twice what had been reported the day before. And the civilian casualties were also disturbing. "What's the breakdown of the infected? How many women and how many men?"

Rob paused, "Sir, I thought you knew. They were all women. And most of them fought to the ****. Guns, knives, bare hands, they refused to be taken alive. The few we did capture were incapacitated. Even now, they are chained up and in straitjackets. They struggle to get out or harm themselves till they are exhausted and fall asleep. When they wake up, they go into a frenzy again, and they refuse to eat. Medical advises that we put them into medically induced comas."

The director took some time to think. The former Deputy Director had run the Springfield operation. He had been removed from duty within an hour of the infected prostitute turning herself in five days ago. Now the Director was in charge of this operation. He knew that if he blew this, he would lose his job. Or worse yet, the infection would spread, and he could lose himself.

"That sounds like the right decision. I want a doctor who knows everything about the procedure in my office within sixty minutes of you leaving this meeting, understood?" Tom finally said.

"Yes sir," said the newly promoted Deputy Director. "One other thing, we have a layer of four different body scanners set up before detainees are processed to leave. Forty-seven of the dead and four of the captured women were found this way. Once scanned, they are interviewed and given a thorough body cavity search before being sent to facilities outside of the cordon for further observation. So far, we are only processing women. The sooner we sort them out, the easier it will be to stamp this out. So far as we know, none have fooled the body scanners, so that is a win for us."

The director scratched the stubble on the side of his face with one hand and squeezed the stress ball in the other, and said, "The thing I don't get is, why does one of them meekly turn herself in and almost fifteen hundred others fight to the ****?"

Major Alexandra Carter led the small group of five Hive sisters through the dense foliage at the edge of the base's old training grounds. They kept down when they heard the occasional aircraft overhead. Carter had made sure that Corporal Kelly and Private Nabakova had been part of her exfiltration team. They had been tasked with escaping and ensuring that the Hive survived if the authorities caught on to what was going on at the base. And Carter had decided that Kelly and Nabakova were far too sexy to fight to the ****, and would make wonderful partners in converting new hosts.

As they reached the chain link fence separating the base from the privately owned woods, they stopped and opened a large duffle bag. Carter, Kelly, Nabakova, and one of the others began to strip off their uniforms as the fifth grabbed a pair of heavy bolt cutters and began making a hole in the fence. A few minutes later, the five left the duffle bag and their uniforms behind. Now dressed in civilian clothes, they left the base and moved towards a nearby house.

The couple living inside were in their fifties. Empty nesters, they had bought the quaint little house and started semiretirement early. The woman wasn't particularly attractive, thought Kelly as she pounded her Master into the woman's pussy. But any host will do in an emergency. She didn't pause as she heard the sound of a single gunshot from the living room.

"The male has been dealt with," Nabakova said as she entered the bedroom. She was shedding clothes with every step.

"Finish converting her and be ready to head out at daybreak," Carter could be heard from down the hall.

"Don't worry, she will break soon," Nabakova said with a grin.

BREAK

The thermal camera from the drone followed the five figures as they stopped. The heat given off briefly grew more intense before returning to normal as they began moving again. It tracked them to the house and vectored in a team to intercept.

Carter was awoken by a shock jolting through her body. The TASER completely immobilised her. She could see a dozen men in the living room where she had dozed off on the couch. They worked in teams of two, one with a TASER and the other with a silenced pistol. She watched as they entered the bedroom and heard no gunshots.

A soldier soon ran up to the officer standing over Carter and said, "The house is cleared, six infected subdued."

Next Day

"So we caught four groups trying to escape the base and town through the woods. Excellent," the director said as Robbie sat down again. It had been a long night.

"Yes, and we found a splinter group that seems to have originated from a private girls' college, uh... St. Rita's, about forty-five miles south of the base."

"Jesus, that must have been a nightmare," the director said as a flash of dozens or hundreds of teen girls fighting and dying popped into his head.

"No, no, actually, there were just two students. It seems that they turned the Aunt of one of them, then went to a nearby town and went wild. It's a pretty small area, but we will need half of the military reserve to contain and sweep it."

"That's fine," the director replied. "It looks like we are just down to processing the women in the main containment area. With so many of them infected, the hard part is finding a place to put the ones that are still alive. We might actually have to tell the public the truth for once."

Robbie let out a short, sharp laugh, but then caught himself and frowned. "Hell of a thing to execute thousands of civilians just because a slug crawled into them. But so far, most of the ones we managed to separate from those things were still loyal to them. They do everything they can to reinfect themselves."

"Well, we did have the one case of one of those things dying on its own. The woman involved was fine mentally afterwards. The docs think that when the slug knows it is being removed, it can implant some sort of hypnotic command in the host to be loyal even after it leaves the body. The only way to truly free someone is to kill the parasite suddenly and unexpectedly. And once we swoop in and arrest them, the little buggers already know what will happen next." The director looked at Rob somberly. "Too bad we don't have enough resources to lock down the whole state."