Brian stared intently at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, prodding at his suddenly upturned and dark-colored nose. He had gone the past few days without paying any attention to his appearance, but he was never going to make that mistake again. At least, not until he got too short to see over the rim of the sink. He had lost several inches already, and he was starting to feel like a 12-year-old - in more ways than one. Strange patches of thick hair that weren't there before, overpowering sexual urges that needed release at least a couple times a day, and an overwhelming feeling of shame about it all - it was a lot like going through puberty all over again. And it sucked the first time.
"I can't believe I went out there like this," he said to himself as he tapped a claw-like fingernail against the side of what was really starting to look more and more like a snout. His facial hair, normally trimmed down to a thin layer of stubble, was not only growing at an alarming rate, it was starting to fill out more evenly across his entire face. He looked like he'd just had the first layer of makeup put on for a role in a bad werewolf movie. "I mean," he continued to himself - mostly to hear how ragged and inhuman his voice sounded now - "there's no way anyone could look at this and think it's normal! So why wasn't anyone giving me weird looks at the dog park?"
"You didn't look like that yesterday," Catherine said as she sauntered through the open bathroom door, her tail swinging lazily behind her. "Your changes are accelerating rapidly, just like mine did. The retrovirus must be fully permeating through your body by now." Even after everything that had happened, it was still bizarre for Brian to hear such big words (or any at all, for that matter), coming out of a dog's mouth. "Besides, most people have got better things to worry about from day to day than what some stranger looks like." She gave a wolfish grin. "Especially right now."
Brian was used to the feeling of his wife being a step ahead of him. But he really wished that, at a time like this, she would just tell it to him straight and not leave him guessing as to what was going on. "What do you mean?"
"You're not the only one who's changing, you know. By now, it's probably spreading all the way across town."
"What?!" Brian yelped, his momentary shock soon turning into suspicion. "Have you been... doing the same sort of stuff with other people? Or... other dogs?"
"No, honey, no," she replied. "I would never cheat on you like that, even with all these new instincts that make it seem so appealing." That didn't seem to be reassuring to Brian, but she kept on with her explanation. "It's not an STD, if that's what you were thinking. The virus is airborne. Anybody that you and I have been close to has probably got it by now, and anybody they've been close to, and..." She trailed off there, the implication obvious.
"Wait," Brian said, "so everybody's going to..."
"Everybody already is," Catherine replied. "A lot of them are probably running just behind you. You might not have been able to see it earlier, but I could smell a little bit more of those pheromones on people every time we went out for a walk."
Brian rushed to the nearest window. Since he first found out about his own changes, he'd been refusing to go outside. The blinds were all drawn, so he poked a slat up with the tip of a claw and carefully peeked at the scene on the street in front of their house.
At first glance, everything looked normal. There were no rampaging canine monsters, nobody running around in a state of panic. It seemed to be a perfectly fine spring afternoon, with people milling about, kids playing on the sidewalk, and of course quite a few people walking their dogs. It took Brian a second look to notice anything unusual. There were a few people who seemed nervous and fidgety, but that could be for any number of reasons. Brian hadn't seen so many people wearing masks outside in years - were they trying to conceal something on their faces? And finally, given enough time for his eyes to wander, he noticed one woman who seemed completely oblivious to her incredibly hairy arms - maybe even more furry than hairy.
Brian stepped back from the window in a daze. Catherine had followed him into the living room. "Did you know this was going to happen?", he asked, his voice hoarse.
"Once they brought me back to the base, and I could start to detect that scent on people, I knew."
"Then why did you agree to come home with me? You could have just let them quarantine you, and whoever else was exposed, and none of this would have happened."
Catherine's reaction to that was as serious as Brian had ever seen her. "That's why I had to get out of there. If a few people inside a military base start changing uncontrollably... they can just wipe them all out and pretend it never happened. Well, they can't do that now, can they?" She looked up at him with steely eyes. "I'm a survivor, Brian. I didn't crawl halfway across the Arctic on four paws just to get dissected in a lab and forgotten. I had to get out of there."
Brian could only think of one rebuttal to that. "What about all these other people?"
Catherine's expression softened back into a smirk. "They'll learn to love it. Just like you."