Heliomastis

I don’t know what the rest of the world has, but in America, we have seen this television commercial for years that proffers a medical alert product that has been marketed to the elderly population. It is a device about the size of a pack of gum, which hangs from the person’s neck, which the user can push the button on it to alert an alarm company to summon a medical response if the person were to ever have something happen to them. In the advertisement, the alert company always shows an old lady lying on the floor of her home, in distress, and when she pushes the button, declares “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up!” The next scene is always showing an ambulance dramatically rushing to the fallen person’s aid.

My mind works in fantastical ways, sometimes. I once thought of how the same alert device could be used if, say, a person accidently blew up like a balloon and buoyantly rose to the ceiling. The affected person could push the button, and when the response company would call through the device and ask what the problem is, the victim could say something like, “I’ve floated, and I can’t get down!”

“911, what is your emergency?”

“It’s my wife,” the man said, shaking voice portraying fright and shock. “She was coughing…I thought she was choking…but then she just blew up!”

“Sir, calm down,” the emergency dispatcher said evenly. “Are you saying that your wife just exploded?”

“No, it was her chest. She got coughing just after we finished dinner, and, well, her breasts started blowing up, like a pair of balloons. We couldn’t stop it; we tried everything we could think of. We had to tear her shirt off before she suffocated! And now she blew up so big that she’s floating on the ceiling! And no matter how hard I pull, I can’t get her down!”

“Alright, sir,” the female dispatcher said while typing the information into her computer. “We will be sending out an emergency crew as soon as possible. What is your address?”

“Thank you,” the man said, relief flooding through him. “We live at 123 Lake Hylia Drive, just around the corner from that new store called the Wren Spot. Just tell them to hurry. ”

The dispatcher disconnected the call, finished typing in the pertinent information, and swung the radio microphone over to her mouth. “Unit 69, this is dispatch.”

“Unit sixty-nine, we copy,” came the radio response. “EMT’s Sven Svensen and Luther Kane on duty.”

Another woman tapped the dispatcher on the shoulder. “Janelle, what do we have?” asked Lucy, her supervisor. Ignoring her, Janelle held the button on the mike down. “We have a situation at 123 Lake Hylia that doesn’t require an advanced life support team. We have another lady on a ceiling.”

“Really? Another floater?” Luther exclaimed incredulously. “That’s the third one tonight. The last one had to be extricated with the Jaws of Life just to get her out of a car. And the one before that had to be strapped to a backboard and taken through the doorway one breast at a time just to get her out of the apartment, and it took four of us to hold her down and get her into the rig. Do we get back-up on this call?”

“Sorry, Unit 69, all response teams are occupied. Even police and fire departments are getting swamped with similar calls. Do your best, and be careful. We almost lost a couple of paramedics earlier today. The floater they were carrying out of a house almost carried them away into the stratosphere. Call when you are in route to St. Pongo’s Hospital.” A second of static spoke that the conversation was done.

Luther dropped the microphone to the ambulance’s radio back into its cradle. He turned to Sven, the driven. “Do you remember the days when we could look forward to a night of responding to calls of overdoses, heart attacks, people with difficulty breathing, and the occasional old lady that had fallen and couldn’t get up?”

“Yup,” Sven said, activating the lights and sirens. “Wasn’t that long ago. Now it seems like we are seeing a dozen cases of balloon tits per night.” He put the truck into gear and roared into the traffic.

“At least we don’t have far to go,” Luther pointed ahead, holding the GPS that he had programmed the victim’s address into. “Six blocks past Stacky Street, make a right turn. Just past the bridge over the Tlink canal is Lake Hylia Drive.”

“Got it,” Sven said. Cars began to move to the side of the road, out of the way of the EMS responders, and three minutes later, the ambulance rolled up to the front of the house. A frantic man ran out to greet them.

“She’s stuck on the ceiling!” he called, waving his hands. Both emergency medical technicians grabbed their gear; Sven handling a tackle box of medical supplies in one hand and a laptop computer in the other, and Luther grabbing the backboard laden with heavy Velcro straps. These calls to help these poor women, which some people referred to the victims as Heliumgirls or Floaters, were coming more and more frequently. There was nothing an EMT or paramedic could do but gets these women to the nearest hospital for treatment and deflation. So they knew what they would find when they were shown through the open front door to the house.

From the doorway, the emergency responders could see all the way through to the living room. The nicely-kept house in a middle-class neighborhood was well-lit, and so was the pair of legs that could be seen dangling from the high ceiling. At first glance, it looked like someone had committed suicide by hanging themselves from the rafters, but on closer inspection, the legs and feet were still moving. Those legs rose to a demure business skirt, which ended at a woman, naked from the waist up, attached to a pair of weather balloon-sized breasts that were keeping her connected to the painted drywall above them. “Mam,” Luther said, smiling slightly at the joke (since he was taking to a pair of overinflated mammaries), “are you okay?”

The woman laughed, embarrassed but nonplussed. “My back hurts a little from being stuck in this position, but, with the exception of my boobs blowing up like freaking helium balloons, I guess I’m okay.”

Since they now confirmed a positive case, both responders reached for filter masks. “Alright, sir,” Sven said to the shaken husband, “We may need your help in getting your wife down from up there, and then we will need to take her to St. Pongo’s for treatment. But first, let me get her name, and yours as well.”

“My name is Dan Melonowski,” the man said, calming a little, “and this is my wife Helia.”

“Alright, Mrs. Melonowski,” Luther called to the floating woman. “My partner and I are going to grab your legs and try to pull you down. We will need to strap you onto a backboard so that we can load you into the ambulance. We will throw a sheet over you to keep you covered as best we can until you are into the back of our rig. Are you okay with that?”

She wiggled her feet and flailed her arms slightly in acknowledgement. The men couldn’t see her face behind the twin blimps, but a muffled voice could be heard. “I’m okay with that,” she answered. “You do what you need to. Call me Helia,” she chortled vaguely, “but just don’t call me BlowupGirl.”

It had all started two months ago, and to most at the Centers for Disease Control, the epidemic had yet to reach Critical Volume. But the head of the CDC, Doctor Bo McMorpherson, was hopeful that the pathogen was confined to the urban areas of Florida and wouldn’t spread any further. Steps had been taken to contain the outbreak, but a cure still hadn’t been found, since the origin of the virus had yet to be discovered. The virus was created in an unknown lab and used as a bioweapon, and had been rampaging from Miami to Daytona since then.

The virus had been released in powder form during a football game at Kreizen College, inside the dome over the field. With no wind to dissipate the inhalant, the invisible cloud was carried through the indoor sports arena’s air conditioning ducts and proliferated over the crowd. On live television, hundreds of women became immediately affected. Cheerleaders were bursting out of their uniforms, their breasts inflating to giant proportions. The girls in the college band were floating away from their bandmates; women in the bleachers were literally rising to new heights, screaming all the way up. Men were grabbing onto their wives or girlfriends, trying in vain to prevent them from floating away. Panic ensued, with people running for the doors, only to have the females begin inflating when they were outside with no dome over their heads to prevent them from going skyward. At least a dozen women were found a day later in the Everglades, having flown away with the trade winds before deflating enough to touch ground. One lady went out to sea, and washed up on Castaway Cay in the Bahamas two days after the event, having been kept above water by her new ‘floatation devises’.

All of the victims had been brought to the nearest medical facility, St. Tom the Immortal Hospital, in Fort Lauderdale. The first patient that was floated in by ambulance was a woman named Melanie, accompanied by her boyfriend Phil. She was examined by Dr. Maxx Curvy, who designated her a Patient Zero. Tests were performed, and samples sent to the CDC in Atlanta, but not before the pathogen was spread through the coughing of the inflicted patients to an emergency department full of nurses, doctors and technicians. Before a quarantine was declared, fifteen more women were hanging from the hospital ER’s ceiling by their grossly-inflated tits, unable to descend.

The head CDC virologists, Drs. Ozwick Doodleman and Joseph Staleknight, were the first to identify the unknown pathogen that was causing the unexplained inflation. Dubbed the Lopni-Infl8 virus, with the disease designation HeBE1, the scientists at the CDC began to try to find ways to crack the shell of the virus to start testing for a cure. What they found astounded them. The virus was lab engineered to affect only adult-age women, customized to stimulate their breasts to generate a biological gas from their mammary tissues that was light than air, causing their breasts to swell with enough contained volume of the gas to sufficiently produce enough buoyancy to cause the patient to float. The new disease was named Heliomastis Natantis, Latin for Floating Helium Breasts. Within days, the hospitals and emergency medical systems were overwhelmed with new cases of Heliomastis. The effect of the virus was varied, which made it even more difficult to predict the infection rate; some women inflated to giant sizes, needing forklifts and heavy ropes to bring them down, while others had their breasts blow up to the size of basketballs, causing them to barely hover above the ground. But all cases reported inflation and floating to some degree. And how long they stayed aloft also varied from patient to patient; some deflating within twenty-four hours, others remaining buoyant for several days at a time.

It took a month before the vector for the spread of the pathogen was identified. All humans with dormant female sex organs, such as men and children, were potential carriers, and the carriers could pass on the virus by simply breathing near the uninfected, so droplet precautions with the use of filter masks were put into place for hospital workers and emergency responders.

The hospitals began to segregate the patient populations. Whole wings of local hospitals were designated as Floatation Wards, while the non-inflated were kept in areas with separate ventilation systems. The affected women were not producing any kind of antibodies that could be identified for mass production toward a vaccination against Heliomastis. There were some women that had to be readmitted to the hospital weeks after their first infection, having had a recurrence and found inflating and floating again. There seemed to be no pattern or explanation for the cycles, and the scientists were left scratching their heads in frustration.

No terrorist group ever stepped forward to claim responsibility for the attack. The Federal Bureau of Investigations looked into the incident, as well as Homeland Security, but no leads were generated. The FBI turned the search over to a little-known division, called the Tether-Deflate-Ballast Foundation, which had done many inflation-related investigations for the FBI in the past. The division leader, Amy Mangrowing, had a list of persons or groups she suspected were involved with the bioterror attack. There was the Italian separatist, a Shy Dude named Berggie Rathani, who called himself ‘The Martian King’, who was capable of orchestrating the event, but so was That Canadian Guy, Axel Rosered. Could that Loner Brit Be the one, Jay Spiderhaunt Grey, who was an Expansion Fan and tried to play Blowup with any woman that wandered into his web? There was the terrorist group out of Malaysia who called themselves KeldorFeign, led by a Dwarf Priest named Alorok Opik-Oort, who was responsible for the Blimp Gas attack in Japan last year. There was even the Australian who simply called himself ‘The Inflator’, with his wife ‘The Inflatrix’, who had done some helium pranks around resorts in the Indian Ocean over the years.

But one name stood out from all the rest; the name that Amy would stake her career on as the culprit, instigator and one-man army in this biological warfare. The mysterious person, known only to the inflationists and floatationists circles as ‘The HeliumFloater’. Finding this person, though, would not be so easy.

Luther left the ambulance company station that evening, tired at the end of his 24 hour shift. He had taken the time to change out of his uniform and take a long shower before changing back into civilian clothing. It was his routine, because he didn’t want to risk bringing home any viruses or bacteria that he was exposed to during his stint as an EMT. He ran the risk of exposure every day as part of the job, but protecting his family was a priority. His twin daughters, Koa and Taylor, were too young to be affected by Heliomastis, but his wife, Bambi, fell into the population at risk for the affliction.

She met him in the kitchen when Luther arrived home. The little ones were tucked into bed already, and Bambi was wearing a silk camisole and shorts, perfect for the warm Florida nights. There was some small talk over his late dinner, and he checked on his sleeping children before they proceeded to the bedroom. She had missed him, worried about all the reports on the TV news about the Floating Plague (what the national news was calling it), and how she knew he had been working around the victims all day. She missed him, and wanted to show him just how much she appreciated his hard work in providing for the family.

Bambi waited for him to strip down to his boxers before she pounced. Pushing him onto the bed, she straddled his hips, covering his face with thick, wet kisses. Soon enough, he proved that his fatigue was no match for the power of her womanhood. She felt him rise in response, and began to kiss him even more passionately. Their breathing came out in staggered gasps, practically pawing at each other with a feral hunger.

And then it began. Riiippp. Her camisole began to tear down the middle, between her burgeoning breasts. Bambi pulled her face away from her husband’s. “What?” Luther asked, unaware. Then they heard it. A slight hiss was emanating from her boobs, and they were growing. Fast.

“No!” she exclaimed, crossing her arms over her chest in a futile attempt to hold back the growth. Her formerly C-cup breasts, perfect for her small frame, were spilling out the top of the camisole, deepening the tear in the shiny fabric. The garment split completely in two, despite her efforts to prevent it, and her mounting mammaries were now pushing into her chin, forcing her to drop her arms. Bambi was still straddling him, her titanic tits now floating up into her face seconds later as he moved to get out from under her. “What are you doing?” she said, panicking.

“My cell phone,” Luther pointed, “Its over on the dresser. I need to call emergency services.”

He wiggled out from under her half-naked form and scrambled across the bed. Luther was half-way across the room to retrieve his phone when she shouted for his to come back. She was no longer kneeling on the bed; she was no longer touching the bed at all. “I’m floating away!” Bambi screamed. “Pull me back down!”

Luther reached and was barely able to grab her ankles before she flew too high. The vaulted ceiling of their bedroom peaked several feet above the tops of her ballooning breasts, but the distance was closing. And the longer he held her, the more lift her boob blimps were generating. His weight wouldn’t ballast her much longer, and he knew it.

Slowly Luther was pulled off his feet, floating off the carpeted floor, and he began losing his grip on her ankles. “Don’t you dare let go of me,” Bambi cried, staring straight up at the ceiling past her weather balloon-sized gazongas as she slowly gained more altitude. Her nipples contacted the rough ceiling, bouncing once and slid upward, coming to rest in the highest spot in the room.

“Angel, do you trust me?” he said.

“Of course,” she answered, her voice shaking. “What are you going to do?”

“Well, obviously I can’t pull you back down, so I am going to need some help. I need to let go and get to my phone.”

She flailed her arms in the arm in frustration, trying to look sideways past the breast flesh that was pushing into her face. “Do it.”

Luther let go, dropping a few feet and bouncing on his knees on the bed. The uncontrolled bounce took him over the side and onto the floor, next to the dresser. He quickly grabbed the phone and punched in a set of three numbers and waited for a response.

“Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?” came the familiar voice of Jane, the county dispatcher.

“Jane, this is Luther Kane from Country Ambulance Unit 69. I can’t believe I am saying this, but I think my wife has contracted Heliomastis. She has floated, and I can’t get her down. My address is…”

Jane typed in the information and switched to her ambulance dispatch radio. “Unit Nineteenthly, we have an emergency situation at Number Five Foxmaster Drive, in the Archangel Dreadnought housing subdivision, next to Philco TV Repair. Be advised; it is a family member of one of you coworkers.”

“Unit Nineteen, we copy. EMT’s Biff Begirls and Jimmy Jacks on duty. Going lights and sirens now.”

“Be careful out there, boys,” Jane cautioned them. “We have another floater.”

Joe, known on the internet as The HeliumFloater, smiled at the chaos that was being played out daily on the national news broadcasts.

“Hmmm,” he mused, scratching absently at his chin. “Where should I strike next?”