Cigarettes, Viral thought. And sweat. And definitely a buck ton of Febreze. The carpeted hallway of the Ramada Inn's fifth floor smelled, to Viral, like the forgotten vestigal of the Las Vegas strip. He'd stayed in a hotel themed with homages to big tops gone-by, replete with floor to ceiling murals of painted clowns and caged taxidermies of jungle cats. Though Viral had yet to taste a tab of hallucinogenics on his tongue, from that tender day during his 11th year he'd incipiently known the trauma wrought by dropping acid at a circus.

Pulling the handle of a mauve Samsonite shell behind him, Viral followed the tapered torso of Alan to room 535. Upon hearing the click of the room's magnetic lock, Alan pushed the door inward and flicked the light switch to his right.

"Sweet. Minibar," Alan said. Alan kicked his assigned Samonsite into the crevice between the bedframe and the wall, then reverse swandived on to the mattress, which gave with the tension of a trampoline left to rust in the Upper Peninsula.

"I'd prefer if we agreed not to take items from the minibar. The markup is excorbitant," Viral said.

"Whatever, Treyna's got the whole building on her card," Alan offered.

It was true, Viral thought. After hearing the news from Officer Avril that Emir from the Fear Mongers had tested positive for the Coronavirus, Agent Treyna had facilitated the evacuation of the entire Oberoi Ramada, all 7 floors of it. The manager, an oily haired macaque Viral recognized as Dravidian, had held his chin high up toward the cracked, vaunted ceiling of the hotel's lobby as Monica did her damnedest to broker a deal for the hotel's clearing. Apparently, the South Asian man's family had also valued summer sessions at Hostage Negotiation camp because the bargain he drove was harder than a betel nut.

Unused to the stiff resistance from brown-skin men who'd normally cowered at the mention of FBI, let alone CIA, Monica had given away more than Viral imagined she had hoped to. In addition to commanding unrestricted access to Agent Treyna's Amex, the Ramada's proxy management representative squeezed a guarantee from Treyna that his family could stay in the rooms on the 7th floor. The rest of the hotel, however, had officially become the domain of the federal government.

While Monica had retreated to the David Blaine Bistro to cement the details of American occupancy of a, still technically, owned extension of the once great Indian brand of luxury accomodation, Oberoi not Ramada, Officer Avril and Dr. Hackman went with the hotel manager to a luggage store near Edison owned by the manager's perported brother-in-law. Four hours later they had returned with a dozen identical mauve Samsonite shells exclusively sized for an Airbus model ordered by a since bankrupted Indian airline named after a beer.

Dr. Hackman had taken the initiative to pack each suitcase with individually wrapped and itemized containers of gender neutral toiletries while Officer Avril put in work on a P-90X session in the corner of the hotel conference room.

Viral made a decision to not mention to Alan the amount of questionable bacteria that coated the hotel comforter on which the Canadian sprawled. Six months spent living with Lron in the college dorm had taught him that roommates did not take well to lectures on hygeine from each other. Viral cautiously unzipped the Samsonite and removed the clothes he'd added to his wardrobe since joining the custody of Agent Treyna's Deleware Project cohort. He smelled the pocket of the cargo pants he'd been forced to purchase after Farooq had thrown up in it. He was surprised at its vague, not soothing but not unsettling either, odor of wheat grass.

Viral closed the the top drawer built into the room's main console and gingerly slid the suitcase beneath his queen sized bed. He was surprised to see Alan watching him from the edge of his own bed.

"Are you always so, like, circumspect?" Alan asked.

Viral noticed Alan hadn't even bothered to remove his brand new LeBrons before settling into what would be his new home for the foreseeable crisis. Very un-Asian, he thought.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"I like to stay organized," Viral said, dabbing a dollop of Purel he'd taken to carrying in his pocket.

"Fluck, y'all got a view?" a young smoker's voice boomed, boueyed by the smack of the front door's collision with a hard rubber nub set to keep the yellowed drywall from chipping.

Viral jumped at Smooshy's entrance then followed the point of her finger to the window beside his bed. Pulling back the shear curtains Smooshy let the light in on a vista of the near empty Ramada parking lot some fifty feet below. Looking in the distance behind a veil of smog Viral made out the silhouetted stacks of plants and pipelines that comprised the circulatory system of the mid-Atlantic, corporate megalopolis. What began in Boston trickled into New York before swelling through Delaware and Pennsylvania, then trickled into Maryland and finally collected like sewage in DC. A near perfect allegory for the circle of consumption and shit that kept the American organism churning toward its uncertain future, but promised demise.

"Nice booty shorts, ma," Alan said, casting a nod and a leer toward Smooshy's backside.

"Thanks, perv," Smooshy said, leaving Viral's side at the window and joining Alan's on his bed. Blessed with near perfect spatial acuity, Viral figured the distance between their thighs to be about 7 inches.

Measurement made, Viral caught himself lingering on a closeup of Smooshy's sun-kissed upper leg. The mound it made over her femur's lock into her hip joint humped the probability of which way a bead of sweat would slide given the proper momentum. Was it thirty percent outward, and seventy percent in? In, of course, being the favored direction, the more coveted route by nature, and God's id, as the pathway to the promised patch; that garden made of soil rich in pheromones like the one in which he and Gyn had put their hands.

He heard Alan laugh, then Smooshy said stop it. She elbowed him in the ribs then laughed too. Had he been...tickling her?

"Why do you look so worried, Viral?" Smooshy asked.

He felt a flush in his cheeks, became aware of the sweat collecting in his arm pits. "It just feels kind of hot in here. That's it," he said.

Alan rocked himself off the bed with the grace of a quarterback no stranger to getting up from off his back. He put his eye up close to the thermostat then placed first a hand then his ear at the grate near the foot of the long bureau beneath the TV.

"Dead as a door-knob," he said.

Typical, Viral thought, of the Indian management to cut the AC as phase one of cost saving measures.

"Better to cultivate us in this petri dish," Smooshy said.

Viral's body language asked Smooshy what she meant, while Alan fiddled with a nickel in the screws that kept the grate in the wall.

"You don't think it's a coincidence that the one black kid in our bigger group just happened to be the first to catch the 'rona?" she asked.

From his knees curled over the grate in the corner between the closet and the drawers Alan said, "I'm Canadian. I don't see race."

"Why should it matter which one of us gets sick?" Viral asked.

"It shouldn't," Smooshy added, pulling her knee toward her chest and her shoes on to the bed. Super not Asian, Viral thought. Smooshy continued, "But the chances of Emir getting the 'rus over any of us, especially the Asians--" she covered the side of her mouth with one hand and jerked a thumb in Alan's direction.

"I'm Canadian," Alan called, breath now heavy after removing two of the grate's screws.

"-- is slimmer than Helen's wrists."

"So..." Viral started.

And Ada continued, "So of course American cops would unconsciously decide that the first one of us to experiment on would be the black one."

"But experiment what?" Viral asked.

"Who knows? Who cares?" Smooshy added. "It's what I would do. Shoot, I have done it."

Viral saw Alan perk his head up from over the edge of the bureau.

"Every collection of people can be broken down into a network..." Smooshy stopped.

Alan and Viral caught eyes, confirming with the other that they'd caught Smooshy's hesitation, too.

"Uh, Smoosh?" Alan said.

"I can't believe I missed it. But it's so diabolically brilliant," she said, almost to herself.

Both versed in the prelude marked by fumbling ambiguity before erupting into Eureka, Viral and Alan kept silent.

"That clever bitch," Smooshy finally said.

"Me?" Alan asked.

"No, perv," Smooshy said, dismissing him with her hand. "Treyna. It wasn't Adam Smith she was doing on us by separating us into competing groups."

"You said Zaibatsu--" Viral started.

"I know what I said," Smooshy said over him. "But I'm man enough to admit when I'm wrong."

Alan's brow bent into unamused confusion.

"Well not really wrong," Smooshy said, still sitting on the bed, but both her hands animated. "Monica's still motivating us through competition, and scarcity, but it's much less about capitalism than I thought."

Viral felt the sun falling behind him more quickly than the hours of the dusk approaching; the crow's nest of his SS Doom & Gloom stirred by activity of a sighting in the near distance.

"It's not just the Wealth of Nations she's ripping off, " Smooshy said about Agent Treyna. "She's going On the Origin of Species."

"Darwin?" Viral asked.

"Survival of the Fittest."