For Erin, the first hint that something was... off in her neighborhood was the whispers. Not the words that her neighbors were whispering to each other, and occasionally to her - something about a bad stomach bug that was going around lately? And not the paranoid glances that they always gave when they brought up the subject, as strange as that was when they were just talking about a case of the flu. It was the way those whispers sounded in her ears that was different. The words came in loud and clear, even harsh to her suddenly sensitive hearing. She could make out those hushed conversations from the other end of her driveway.
But the stuff about a new disease spreading throughout the town? That didn't worry Erin at all. Even if it turned out to be the next big pandemic... so what? She'd just get to work from home for a few more months before they came up with a vaccine and everything went back to normal. The rest of the world could shut down and she'd still be sitting at home alone like always.
Alone. The more she thought about it, that word brought back bad memories. She'd spent most of the lockdown wishing she had a boyfriend to be holed up with, imagining a perfect lover with handsome blond hair and a sweet, devoted personality who could make the long days pass by happily. The loneliness got to her enough that she went to the local animal shelter one day and adopted a golden retriever puppy, completely on a whim. She named him Scout, and spent a few months dealing with the consequences of her impulsive decision until Scout was a well-behaved adult dog.
When the bars and the restaurants were finally open again, Erin hit the dating apps and tried to find someone who would fill the hole in her life. But a few years had passed now and she'd had no luck. Maybe all that time spent fantasizing about her ideal man had made it impossible for any real date to compete for her affection. But every guy she ever started to get serious with always had some sort of fatal flaw, and it wasn't superficial appearance stuff, either. Rude to the waitresses. Going on and on about themselves for the whole date. Casually racist. She was getting tired of cataloguing all the ways a man could be trash.
And every time she came back home to an overjoyed Scout greeting her and an otherwise empty house, Erin was struck by the irony of it. She'd heard a few of her friends mention the concept of a "golden retriever boyfriend" - always loyal, easygoing, and bouncing with fun energy. She had all of that when she came home, literally, but she couldn't find any of it in her love life. If only there was a man who could be just like Scout on the inside. Then she would really have all she needed.
Now history was starting to repeat itself. Another new virus had people talking. But Erin didn't begin to realize what she was dealing with until the first time she tried driving out of the neighborhood to go on yet another date. The authorities had set up a roadblock and were checking people to make sure they didn't have the new virus before letting them pass. That was weird, but what really surprised Erin was that they never made her take a test - no swab stuck disturbingly far up the nose, not even spitting in a cup. The cop (she didn't see his badge, but was that a military uniform?) just looked her over with his flashlight, as if the symptoms of this mysterious illness were so severe that he could tell if she had it or not just by looking.
And after all that rigmarole, when she finally got to the restaurant, her hookup texted her to say he was canceling. He'd come down with something and didn't feel well. She ordered her food, ate quickly, put most of it in a doggy bag, and walked out, steaming with frustration. As soon as she got home, she called her boss to say that she'd be working remotely from now on - there was no way she'd be going through that checkpoint every single morning and then again to get home. Surprisingly, her request was approved right away - they'd been such hardasses about letting people work from home ever since the pandemic ended. No one even asked her why she wanted it. Maybe it was already obvious.
So there she was, stuck at home again with Scout by her side. She had no idea how long it would last. Last time they said "two weeks to flatten the curve", and she knew how well that had worked out. She was prepared to stick it out for the long haul. Just her and her dog and her thoughts - and, since there would be no more one-night stands for the time being, a lot of pent-up energy to deal with.
It wasn't long before Erin was sitting in the privacy of her bathroom and furiously masturbating. That "golden retriever" metaphor had never left her mind, and she kept fantasizing about what the human equivalent of Scout would be, trying to picture him in her head. She could almost get his handsome, smiling face to appear in her mind before it snapped back to an image of the dog and threw her off her rhythm again. Come on, she thought to herself. One more time and that'll push me over the top.
Just then, the bathroom door swung open. She'd forgotten to close it all the way, and now Scout was nosing his way into the room, sniffing the air like he was looking for something. No, not you, Erin thought in frustration. She wanted him to leave the room again, but he just padded over and started licking her face like he always did. And the scent of Scout's dander suddenly made her sneeze. That was odd. Now would be a terrible time to develop a late-onset allergy to her own pet. Maybe she was catching that new virus, like everybody else seemed to be. Her nose tingled, but she didn't sneeze again. It just felt... different somehow. She shooed Scout out the door, locked it behind her, and picked up where she left off.
But her nose wasn't the only part of Erin's body that felt wrong to her the next morning. She was expecting to start feeling sick pretty quickly, but this wasn't sickness. If anything, she felt like she was in better health now than before. She had so much energy all of a sudden - when Scout wanted to run around and play, she could keep up with him for hours without getting tired. But that couldn't be the virus's doing. She figured she must not have been sick after all.
Every day, Erin took Scout to the local park. Sometimes she would spend hours there, throwing one tennis ball after another, then getting down on all fours and rolling around in the grass with him - until the sun started to set and she realized she'd lost track of time. She expected half the neighborhood to be doing the same right about now. The park had been the one space left to socialize during the pandemic, and it was always full of people walking their dogs and looking for an excuse to hold a conversation from six feet away. That was what had convinced her to adopt Scout in the first place. But each day, there were fewer and fewer people in the park, and more and more dogs running around, with no one apparently watching them.
With that last little bit of human contact severed, Erin quickly lost any interest in making herself presentable each morning. She stopped shaving her body hair, which was now growing in thick and heavy - sometimes in places where she couldn't remember ever needing to shave before. She let it all grow wild and free, and she could smell how it trapped the sweat on her skin every time she got down to business on the bathroom floor. She didn't stop taking showers every day, of course, but the body odor just kept getting stronger no matter what soap she used. Thankfully, there was no one to clean herself up for - the only one who was getting close enough to sniff her lately was Scout, and he certainly didn't seem to mind the way she smelled. He only got closer to her as the long, lonely days wore on.
That was exactly what she wanted in a man, to a T: somebody who would push in closer, not pull away from her, when times were getting rough and hairy. Her masturbatory fantasies became more intense, and sometimes more literal. She imagined a guy who would physically cling to her as often as he could, the same way that Scout was doing lately. And she stopped keeping her dog out of the bathroom when she was doing it. He clearly wanted to be with her, to know what she was doing at all times, and she couldn't see any harm in letting him watch. It made those fantasies feel more real, anyway, to have someone in the room with her. And there was something so nice about the way Scout smelled lately...
It wasn't until Erin noticed the tail that she figured it out. The moment she found that fleshy little stub fighting to get out of her sweatpants, she knew something was very wrong. The thick blonde hair that was growing in all around it, a complete mismatch for her own dark brown curls, only sealed the deal. She recognized the look of it all instantly - she'd spent more than enough time, sometimes an uncomfortably long time, staring at Scout's furry rear end recently. And it matched the light color of the hair that was cropping up everywhere else. She was becoming like Scout somehow.
And then... well... it was as if her body had been waiting for her to notice what was happening before it kicked its changes into full gear. Her thick patches of hair spread out across her skin until she was covered in a fur coat. Her fingers became shorter and stubbier and practically useless for normal tasks, while her nails sharpened into pointy claws. And even the shape of her skull was changing, a dull pressure constantly forcing her nose and jaws further forward until a long snout stuck out from her face. It was unmistakable now - she was turning into a dog, bit by bit with every passing hour. Erin knew that she should have been horrified by the idea, or at least trying to find out how to stop it. But in the haze of her isolation from the world, where every pointless day bled into the next, it hardly even seemed real. And if this was all just a strange dream, she was in no hurry to wake up from it.
With every new canine feature that appeared on her body, Erin willingly gave up a little bit more of her dignity. Even the baggiest of sweatpants rubbed her new fur the wrong way, so she just stopped wearing clothes altogether. So what if someone caught a glimpse of her naked body through the window? The thicker her fur got, the less there was to see anyway. And her urge to masturbate, which was already a constant presence in the boredom of her uneventful days, kept getting stronger with every inch of height she lost. So she stopped bothering to hide herself in the bathroom when she did it. She just gave in to the desire whenever it crossed her mind, which was several times a day.
Erin barely even noticed the gradual shift in her masturbation fantasies. After all, she'd already been thinking about Scout a lot in those moments. Lusting after him as he really was, and not bothering with the stuff about a human version of him, hardly even seemed like much of a change. And she kept finding new things to appreciate about him. Not just the way he smelled, but the hundreds of little mini-scents she could detect on him that she never could have noticed before. She soon gave in to the temptation of pressing her growing nose up to his butt so she could take it all in. And there was the rough yet gentle feeling of his fur rubbing against hers whenever he wanted to cuddle, which was getting close to all the time now.
She studied every move Scout made carefully, using all of her heightened senses. She was becoming obsessed with him, yes, but she also needed to observe him, to understand how a dog was supposed to behave. She knew that most people, in her shoes (which no longer fit on her shrinking, morphing paws), would probably cling to anything human they had left, resisting the changes and refusing to accept doghood. But she'd had enough of humanity in her young adult life. To surrender all her responsibilities, all her frustrations, the office politics and the bad hookups and the 24-hour news cycle, and become a simple animal only needing to eat, sleep, and fuck... Well, she didn't have the slightest clue how or why this was happening to her, but it struck her as a divine gift, not a curse.
And it meant she could be with Scout. Her dog - and the words "her dog" took on a very different tone now - was exactly the perfect, patient gentleman she had always imagined. His arousal when he was around her was intense, and she could smell how it kept getting stronger with every passing hour. Or maybe her nose was getting stronger and picking it up better and better. And that red rocket of his was frequently on display. But he never forced himself on her. He seemed to be waiting until she was ready - physically as well as mentally. And when she had silenced the last remaining voices in her head that told her this was wrong, that tried to get her to resist... that was when Erin finally started to present herself to him.
To her surprise, Erin found that she now could understand Scout's body language and occasional growls and grunts just as clearly as if he was speaking English. And he clearly understood hers. She said to him something resembling "I want you", and he replied with a forward tilt of the head that roughly translated to "Let's do this."
Her first time being mounted from behind was like nothing Erin had ever experienced before. To think she'd spent all those years telling men that she wasn't interested in doggy style, that she wanted to actually see their faces during the deed. And it turned out she only needed to find the right guy - someone she could fully, deeply trust - to make it into the most appealing position she could think of. His front paws kneading against her fur-covered back as he pressed forward on her. The full weight of his body pushing down on hers, making her arms that were now more like front legs tremble underneath her as they struggled to hold them both up. Scout had always been a rather large dog, but now he weighed more than her and could easily overpower her if he wanted. And yet he was surprisingly gentle, even as he was forcing his way into her quivering canine pussy.
Erin's head spun. Scout's cock could hit all of her pleasure spots at once, putting every human penis that had ever been inside of her to shame. He hammered deeper and deeper into her, the pleasure and the heat building further and further until Erin stopped thinking entirely. For a minute, Erin felt what it was like to really be a dog - to act on instinct alone, to feel a sensation without words to describe it or morals to judge it. And she didn't want it to end.
But it did. Erin came crashing back down to reality as soon as Scout's load exploded inside of her. She was forced to remember that animals mated for procreation, not for pleasure, and they didn't take longer to carry out the act than they needed to. Scout laid down on top of her, pulling her down into a pile of fur and flesh while his knot - still firmly stuck inside of her - slowly deflated. But that was hardly a turn-off. She pawed limply at her crotch, grinding the last bits of pleasure out of the act until she finally tipped over the edge into her own belated orgasm. She thought about her adorable future puppies as she drifted off to sleep.
It was later that same night that Erin heard a strange scratching noise at her front door, a door that hadn't been opened in several days now. She got up and ran to the source of the sound, tempted to bark at any would-be burglar coming in. But instead, she found a piece of paper that had just been slid through the mail slot. And for the first time, Erin considered the possibility that she wasn't the only one experiencing all of this - that maybe this somehow was the virus that was going around. The paper was covered in a messy scrawl of ink, a message written by a very unsteady hand (or paw). It took a moment for her to decipher what it said, but she was pretty sure she got it: