Once the initial terror had faded, Athena slowed down to the speed limit; going a hundred miles an hour in a residential area was a surefire way to get ticketed and/or obliterated. She only kind of half believed what she'd seen, but Zoe was apparently entirely convinced.
Zoe's knuckles were pasty white despite her vacation tan as she gripped the armrest, nearly numb with panick. There had been a harpy in her house! An honest-to-God creature out of Greek myth! She'd never have believed it if she hadn't seen it with her own eyes. Only a lunatic would have imagined such a thing to be...possible...
"Oh fuck," she gasped, her voice trembling. "Oh fuck. We...we have to go back. God dammit, we have to go back!"
"Go back!?" Athena yelped. "Are you crazy? Weren't you the one yelling 'drive, dammit?' Why would we even consider going back?"
"Because it means my mom wasn't nuts," Zoe said, the full weight of the situation hitting her. "Dammit, that was Mikey. I don't know what the hell happened, but this all matches up with my mom's story. Oh shit." Athena stopped the car at the freeway entrance. "Are you serious?" she asked. "Do you really mean to tell me that you think that thing was your brother?"
Zoe nodded. "And she waved hi to me," she said. "She thought I wouldn't see anything wrong with the situation. Look, I'm not going to ask you to come with me, but I need to go back to my house. You can take off as soon as I get out, and I'll get my things back at school or something. I just need to know whether that's really my family or not."
Athena nodded, suddenly more scared than Zoe was. Just what the hell was going on here? She turned the car around and drove back towards the Madison house, her stomach tying itself in knots. After a few silent, nervous minutes, they finally pulled up by the curb. "Look," Athena said. "I'm too scared to go in there, but I'm not just gonna bail on you. I'll watch the house, and you give me some kind of signal if they're not killer bloodthirsty mutants. If you're good, I'm going home, but if I don't hear from you within fifteen minutes, I'm calling the cops." It wasn't a suggestion, it was a statement, and Zoe nodded, hugged her friend goodbye, grabbed her backpack, and headed up to the house.
She stepped inside and shut the door behind her. The harpy was there, waiting for her, and beside her hovered what could only be the pixie her mom had been referring to. She set down her backpack and stepped over to the young bird-girl. As strange as it was, she couldn't deny that the face was essentially a girl version of Mikey's. She flipped open her cell phone and sent a short all-clear to Athena; she could hear the car peel rubber mere seconds afterward.
"Mikey?" she asked. "Jon?" Both of the strange creatures nodded, and Zoe crumpled to the floor, overwhelmed. "Just what in God's name is going on?" she said, fighting back tears. Jon and Mikey embraced her and explained all about the stone, its abilities, and the range limit that had been entirely forgotten until now. By this point, Zoe's skepticism had evaporated, and she fully believed them; after all, it made as much sense as the rest of the situation. She began to cry in earnest, overwhelmed by the worry and terror she had experienced, and simple thankfulness that her family wasn't dead.
Mr. and Mrs. Madison got home a little later, and Zoe offered her apologies for the phone call a couple days before. She and her transformed siblings explained about the state of the rest of the world, leaving out the part about the stone, and although their parents were skeptical at first, a few calls to the surrounding area revealed that nobody outside the county had ever heard of the transformation virus. This, of course, raised a lot of questions, but it was decided to put them off for the night.
By Jon's count, the changed part of the world had existed for a total of three days when Zoe arrived back. By the next morning, the outside world was beginning to take notice, and by that evening, the country had officially flipped its lid. Emergency meetings were called, pundits sounded off, and the people of Jon and Karyn's hometown just hunkered down and hoped things would get back to normal soon. The government gave up on finding an explanation right off the bat, and settled for quarantine, enforced by a blockade.
But by the end of Zoe's second day home, there was already talk of giving up on that; as it turned out, someone who had been recently exposed to the virus had flown down to Mexico on the day of Jon's change, with a layover in Atlanta, the busiest airport in the world. Although only a small fraction of the people in the airport came anywhere near him, none of them had ever been exposed to the virus before, making them easy prey, and they were going to various places all over the world.
By the day after Zoe's return, outbreaks were being reported all over the globe. Most of the TV pundits and a number of actual politicians seemed to feel that it was too late to prevent the spread and, given the comparatively harmless nature of the contagion, it would probably be better to simply encourage proper preventative hygiene and accept and learn to live with the inevitable.
Zoe herself had more immediate concerns; she had unquestionably been exposed to the virus herself, and Jon had told her that the infectious period was around three days long, and she could change at any time during that period. Zoe didn't want to change; while it might provide some sense of solidarity with her new sisters, she liked her body the way it was, and she was afraid of ending up a sex-changed micro-midget like Jon, or even worse, something like Mikey. How could she play if she lost her hands, too? She couldn't bear to think about it. If nothing else, she desperately hoped that she would keep her fingers.
She hoped this crazy new life she'd been thrust into would be a good one.
