Ted Stark listened to the chatter on the radio as the town rolled by. The radio was busier than Ted had ever heard it, and it was difficult for him to keep track of everything that was going on. Riots, traffic accidents, heart attacks, missing persons, lost children, suicide attempts, break-ins, muggings, looting, murders, fires, hostage situations... everything that could possibly go wrong seemed to be going wrong all at once. The entire police force was on duty, or at least that portion of it that could be located and rallied. To make matters worse, there was some buzz about a possible riot at the prison; if the prison guards couldn't control the riot, officers might have to be pulled from the town to help out there, somehing the city could not afford right now. The mayor had apparently even been in talks with the state and federal government over the possibility of the military stepping in. Ted hoped it would.
"Man," said Roger Winston, Ted's partner, as he brought their car to a stop at a stop sign, "it's a war zone out here. Things are getting out of hand, brother."
"I know," said Ted, "and it seems like it just keeps getting worse and worse. I'm exhausted already, Rodge, and we're only a few hours into this thing... I keep wondering where it's all going to end."
"Not sure I want to know that myself," Roger said, pulling away from the stop sign.
This neighborhood they were driving through actually seemed pretty quiet compared to the rest of the city. There were no pressing emergencies in sight... just nice houses and pleasant tree-lined streets. It was a nice break from the hurly-burly of the day, and if Ted could have forgotten about everything that was happening everywhere else in town, he might have been able to relax.
"Where am I?"
Ted's mouth went dry. He looked over at Roger, who suddenly looked frightened and confused. "Rodge?" he said, though he already knew that the man he was looking at wasn't his partner; he'd seen enough switched people that day to know the look.
"Who are you?" the person in Roger's body said. "Where am I? What's groing on?"
"Okay," Ted said, "okay, calm down. Take a deep breath. I'll explain everything, but first you have to stop the car."
"Car?" not-Roger said. "I don't know how to stop a car. I want my mommy." He began turning the steering wheel wildly, like a child pretending to drive, and the cruiser began veering wildly down the road, driving onto people's lawns and back onto the street, knocking over trash cans and knicking mailboxes, and nearly missing several trees.
"God," Ted cried, "oh God. Stop doing that. Keep the wheel still. Look under your feet... you should see two pedals, and..."
"My feet?" the person said, still turning the wheel like crazy. "My feet don't reach the pedals. Where's my mommy?"
They nearly missed a car driving in the opposite direction, which had to swerve to avoid them. The sound of a car horn faded into the distance behind them. In desperation, Ted unbuckled his seatbelt and reached out for the steering wheel...
...but in the process he found himself colliding with the person who had replaced his partner. He braced himself as a flash of light swept him away.
When it cleared, Ted found that he was lying down on his stomach, his eyes closed. The warm sun beat down on his back, and a gentle breeze swept through his hair. He suddenly felt like he was miles away from everything, from the whole mad plague of body-switching that had swept through town and the chaos that it had wrought. For a moment Ted let himself believe that he was in bed still, that it had all been a nightmare... a strange, strange nightmare. But he knew that wasn't the case.
Opening his eyes, he took in the scene before his eyes. He was lying on a yellow blanket settled in the grass, belly-down, with his head resting on his folded arms. Large buildings rose up around him, and tall trees shook lightly in the breeze. It took him a moment to place his surroundings, but when he did, he realized that he recognized them; this was the campus of the local college, somewhere near the library. Ted had worked as a security guard here for a couple of years before he'd joined the force.
"What do you think got into Carrie?" a woman's voice said off to his side. Ted pushed himself up onto his elbows and looked in the direction of the voice. Lying on the same blanket, in the same position he had been in a moment before, he saw a young blonde woman wearing nothing but a bikini.
"I don't know," came a voice from his other side. "She's been under a lot of pressure lately. She must have just lost it." Ted turned and saw another bikini-clad woman; this one was a brunette, and she was lying on her back.
"Yeah, said the blonde woman, lifting herself onto her elbows as Ted had, "but we were just laying here. We weren't even talking, and she suddenly just stands up, looks at herself, and runs away. What's that all about?"
"Maybe she just got to thinking, y'know?" said the brunette woman. "She has so much going on right now. Jess, her dad, her cousin, her job, that chem final she's been so worried about, her project for civ... it's gotta be weighing on her."
"Becky," the blonde said, "you hung out with her last night, didn't you? Do you have any idea what's going on?"
Ted turned to the blonde and saw that she was looking at him expectently. "I, um... I don't know," he said. "Stress, I guess..."
The blonde girl frowned and picked at a blade of grass for a moment; then she sighed and flopped back down.
Ted looked at the girls on either side of him, lying peacefully in the grass; apparently they were sunbathing, given the blanket and the bikinis. They seemed perfectly oblivious to everything that was happening in town. This Carrie girl they'd been disussing... she must have swapped with someone. Had the girls been aware of the swaps, they would have been able to figure out what had happened to their friend; clearly, though, they didn't have a clue.
Looking further around th quad, Ted realized to his amazement that he whole campus seemed quiet. There was a girl sitting beneath her tree who was staring at her body and running her hads up and down her torso; there was a boy sprinting through the grass, a terrified expression on his face; there were a couple of people speaking heatedly outside the doors of one of the buildings, and from the boy's feminine body language and the girl's masculine body language, Ted guessed they must have switched. One distinguished-looking professor type was crawling around on the ground like a baby. Several, people, however, were walking peacefully across the quad, or speaking and laughing contentedly together, or reading quietly. One couple was rather shamelessly making out on a bench. Clearly they, like the girls who shared Ted's blanket, didn't seem to think anything was wrong.
It seemed impossible, given all that Ted had seen that day. How could anyone in town not know what was happening? But, then... maybe being on duty had given Ted a skewed perspecive on things. He'd been talking all day specifically to people who had switched, or who knew someone who had switched, and he'd been cleaning up the messes the swaps had made. But, then, like any cop, he spent most days taking care of domestic disturbances, arresting crooks, breaking up fights. He spend all day seeing the worst side of people. It was enough to give anyone a bad opinion of humanity, and indeed, a lot of the cops Ted knew had become very cynical during their years on the force. But Ted knew better. He knew that most people were good people, and that only a small minority of people committed crimes. Because he spent so much time dealing with crime, it was easy for Ted to believe it was everywhere, but he knew it really wasn't. He'd managed to keep that healthy, big-picture perspective many cops lost, and it had kept him happier and more optimistic than a lot of his coworkers.
Perhaps it was the same sort of thing here. There was rioting happening in two, three places around town, but there weren't riots in the entire rest of the town. A couple of buildings were on fire, but hundreds of buildings weren't. A couple dozen people had crashed their cars, but there were countless cars all over town that were driving around without incident. In some places, people were going crazy... in most places, they weren't. Most people either hadn't swapped, or they were dealing with it. After all, how many people had swapped so far, really? Hundreds? A few thousand? That was still a prery small minority of the people in town.
But now Ted had joined their ranks. He had swapped, and he was currently someone else. And it was time to figure out who, exactly, he had become. He'd spent enough time musing; it was time to get down to business.
Ted pushed himself up to a sitting position... and as he did so, he realized, to his dismay, that, just like his two "friends", he, too, was wearing a bikini. He suppressed a groan. Somehow it hadn't occured to Ted that he had become a woman. He should have known; he was sharing a blanket with two other girls sunbathing in bikinis, so it just made sense that he was a girl in a bikini, too. And hadn't the blonde woman called him... what was it? Betty? No, Becky. Becky. But that had flown right over Ted's head. Now that he knew he was a woman, though, Ted felt his stomach sink. Being another guy, that Ted could deal with. Being a woman? That was another story.
Still, it was the hand he'd been dealt, so he had to roll with it. He stretched, stood up, and said, "Hey, girls, I need to stretch my legs for a bit. I think I'm going to tae a walk."
"Have fun," the brunette girl muttered. The blonde girl just said something that sounded like "Mmf."
Ted set off across the grass. He felt uncomfortably exposed. He was, after all, all but naked. His bikini--a tiny pink string number--left almost nothing to the imagination. Of the three girls lying on that blanket, how had he ended up as the girl with the most smallest, most revealing bikini? There was something patently unfair about that. Ted felt the sun on his back, the wind on his skin, the grass beneath his bare feet... and the eyes of several guys on every part of his body. He blushed and lowered his head. Looking himself over, it was hard for him to imagine what they found so appealing. Ted had been something of a ladies' man in college, but he'd let himself go over the last few years; he was getting a little chunky. The sight of his out-of-shape male body crammed into an itty-bitty teeny-weeny pink bikini didn't seem remotely sexy to Ted. But he knew that, when everyone else looked at him, they saw a young woman, and apparently an attractive one, in some very sexy swimwear. Ted, however, wasn't sure he liked the thought of people seeing him that way any better.
He wanted to get back on duty. Perhaps the town was not disintegrating in quite the way he had imagined from inside his police car, but there were still a lot of people out there who needed help, and the police force was stretched thin. He knew, however, looking down at his body, that no one was going to take him seriously dressed like this. Once he got to the station, Ted could get a spare women's uniform. Even that might not be enough to get people to take him seriously; he'd heard horror stories from the women on the force, so he knew that life as a policewoman was a lot harder than it was for a male police officer. Still, it would help.
First, however, Ted had to get to the station, and he didn't fancy walking around town wearing nothing but a bikini. He needed to find some street clothes he could wear. And for that, he needed to find Becky's dorm room.
That wouldn't be easy. It was a big campus, and there were hundreds, if not thousands, of dorm rooms. He couldn't just go door to door looking for the right one. Perhaps, however, he could work an answer out of Becky's friends; he didn't really want them to know that he was a man instead of this Becky girl, as that would cause unnecessary problems and needless delays, but Ted was a cop; he had been trained in basic interrogation techniques. He was sure he could get the information from the girls without letting on that he wasn't the person they thought he was.
As he turned around to head back to the girls, though, he saw an older woman running across the quad, screaming... clearly another switchee. She wasn't watching where she was going, and before Ted could get her attention, he saw her trip over the body of the blonde girl and land, face first, on top of the brunette girl.
Ted didn't have to watch any longer. He knew both girls had been swept away and replaced by someone else. And with them had gone any easy way of finding a more suitable set of clothing.
