Tag: quarantine

quarantine 1

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The air of the cavern-like dining hall was literally filled with insects: butterflies, dragonflies, beetles, but no bees or horseflies. The ground was carpeted with small, harmless furry animals: rabbits, mice, ferrets, gerbils, and everything in between. But the benches were
also filled, with humans.

Mycha started to walk through the fray.

“This is the Harmless Animal Sector, pretty self explanatory,” she explained, as she dodged a butterfly and stepped over a rabbit. “We don’t have to worry about them much. They know that one foot, or antenna, out that door and who knows what could happen? If someone happened to swat them or, god forbid, step on them, it would be such a tragic
accident. But after all, only an accident, of course.” Mycha’s smile made the air seem colder, and harder.

Next was the Semi-Harmful Animal Sector. It was bigger and felt a little less homey.

They walked through multiple sub-sections: stinging insects, biting insects, venom-less snakes, wild dogs, birds of prey. There were even more in the wings, Mycha told him.

After that, Mycha, who smiled too often and too cold, took him to the Dangerous
Animal Sector.

And this section felt like a prison. The air was somehow even harder. The walls were grey cement, the only furniture was hard and metallic, and hardly anyone was around, especially not in animal form.

Mycha motioned Neal into a smaller hallway decorated with its own set of locked stainless steel doors. Mycha pushed him through a smaller door at the end of the hallway. It was lead to a stairway and a small observation room with a one-way window. Even before he looked, Neal didn’t want to see through that window. Mycha gave him another chilly smirk.

“They were waiting for you. How nice.” She held down the intercom button.

“Bring her in, Vanessa.”

“Acardi, call me Acardi. We’re not on a first name basis, Barton.” Mycha released the intercom and shook her head, still smiling.

“Oh, Vanessa, always so formal.” But Neal wasn’t watching Mycha anymore. He was
looking through the window, and he knew he would regret it.

The guard called Acardi came through a cleverly hidden door on the far side of the room, roughly pushing a girl, short and almost too thin to be healthy. Neal guessed that it wasn’t by choice.

From the high observation window, he felt like he was watching a movie. No, dolls.

He was watching a game of make-believe that felt all too real. [He dissociates here] He was far away, so much bigger than that small, struggling figure, but he felt so close.

But he kept his jaw steel and his face hard. Mycha was grinning.

“You know, it’s your first day, let’s get closer.” Neal wanted to shake his head quickly and back away, like the shy kid he had been just a few years ago, but he [suppressed the instinct and] instead he gave his sadistic colleague a curt nod and followed her down a narrow metal ladder that took them to the stage of the scene that had started just minutes ago. And Neal looked where he knew he would regret.

Acardi had forced or maybe allowed the short, thin, handcuffed girl to fall to her
knees. Neal pursed his lips.

“Those handcuffs look…different,” he noted. Mycha shrugged.

“Iron, stops them from shifting as long as they’re touching it.” Neal nodded but he
wanted to scream.

“This is the fox that’s been causing all the trouble,” Mycha smirked. “Used to be a
Semi-Harmful animal, now she’s a little bit more, and gets her own…special treatment.” Acardi kicked the girl with her rubber boot. The girl barely flinched. She looked so broken; Neal doubted they could break her anymore.

“No moving,” Acardi ordered. The fox’s eyes were clenched shut and she didn’t
move. Acardi nodded at the door. “Subject ready.” Neal wanted to shiver but he was already
cold, hard, steel. A man in a white lab coat came through the door with a petri dish, a
scalpel, and some tweezers. The fox’s back was facing Neal, so he was forced to look where
he would regret. The man pulled the stretched and bloody collar of her T-shirt down to
expose her shoulder blade. He made an unceremonious incision. The blood started again,
Neal supposed, to flow. The fox flinched her eyes shut tighter but made no sound, and she
did not move. The man was not done. He pushed the tweezers even less ceremoniously into
the incision and pulled. The flesh ripped. The girl’s lip curled up, but still she did not move
and she made no sound.

“Flesh sample,” Mycha grinned.

Neal knew his eyes were wide, but at least his jaw was still steel. He wanted to
throw up.

The flesh sample went into the petri dish and out the door with the man in the white
lab coat who was too bored for the blood that poured down the back of this small
unmoving fox-girl. Acardi forced the girl off her knees. The blood still ran on pale skin like
wax, but it was too fast for dripping.

Neal wanted to do something that he hadn’t done, or even thought about, for years, almost a decade. Neal Grover wanted to cry

quarantine 3

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Neal was drifting in and out of sleep in his austere grey room with a bed that looked like a cot. He didn’t want to think about the scenes of that day, but they kept drifting into his sleeping eyes and kept insisting that he scream at them, silently, one more time. 

He was alone, waking and sleeping. Even Acardi had learned silence and inaction and in his silent screaming, he was alone. 

He woke to a scurrying in the vents. He groaned and rolled over. On top of all this, the compound had a vermin problem. The next moment, the scurrying seemed closer, like it was on the ground next to his bed, whatever it was. 

And a hand closed over his mouth. He meant to yell, but the hand was clamped tight over his lips.

“No sounds,” the reedy voice whispered. “It’s very secret. You act like a guard, lead me down the hall. I am handcuffed. But I lead you. Then you’ll sleep better. You’ll see.” A scrawny girl handed Neal a pair of iron handcuffs, then turned away and offered him her hands. His hands were shaking as he closed the iron over her thin wrists, but what choice did he have? 

Neal Grover only paused to pull on a pair of jeans and tuck in his white undershirt before following this strange girl down the hall, wherever she led him.  

She made him push her along a couple times so it looked like he was leading her, but it didn’t matter. The halls were deserted. Neal didn’t know his way well enough even to know what sector he was in when the girl stopped abruptly in front of a door that looked exactly the same as all the others and passed him the handcuff key. He freed her wrists and she opened the door with another key from her pocket.

She slipped in, barely opening the door, forcing Neal to edge his way through awkwardly behind her. 

The room was well lit and furnished with a round table and chairs whose occupants were of all shapes and sizes. Among them was Vanessa Acardi. A man with a beard that was barely more than stubble stood up and looked expectantly at Acardi. She nodded.

“He’s the one.” Neal tried to keep himself steel, but his eyes never obeyed. Now they were wide with alarm. The man nodded curtly at the scrawny girl who had brought Neal here.

“Good job, Norv, as always,” he complimented. Norv smiled crookedly.

“See. Rat’s are good for something.” She turned her smile sideways to Neal. “Aren’t they?” Neal was too confused to respond, and whether he would admit it or not, he was scared. 

“What’s going on?” he snapped. The man’s figure commanded the room as he looked at Neal with direct, but not harsh, eyes. 

“My name is Viktor Nicklaus Hartmann and this is the Resistance.”

quarantine 2

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Neal was sitting in the break room, still wanting to cry. He had no duties yet, so he was waiting, but he wasn’t sure what for. Vanessa Acardi came into the small room and got herself coffee as stiff as she always was, but that didn’t stop Neal, or the words that tumbled out of his mouth desperately, almost tearfully. 

“How do you do it?”  Acardi turned towards him and raised her eyebrows.

“Do what?” she asked.

“What you just did. When that guy just…” he shook his head, “and you just stood there.” The guard thought about it as she stirred half-and-half into a small styrofoam coffee cup. 

“Just like you did,” she answered.

“What?” 

“Like you did,” she repeated. “Stand still, say nothing, do nothing.” Neal shook his head.

“But how do you just let that happen, right in front of you?” Acardi opened her mouth, about to answer, but changed her mind. She paused with her eyes on this new guard, scared and desperate, and she looked almost sorry. She apologized with a sad smile. 

“You learn,” she said, and left.

quarantine 0

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Part 1 – Breaking the Dragon from Her Cave

The Fox Escapes

The air was hard. Neal Grover breathed in steel air conditioning and let his heart run under his steel-tipped jaw. First day. He was stationed at the quarantine island.

He had heard stories about the terrible disease that raged there, so many different stories that he had sometimes doubted that the disease could be real. But that was ridiculous. Why have a quarantine island and no disease? He could never answer why such an island would need guards in the first place. But it wasn’t his job to ask questions, or to answer them.

His cold walk brought him finally to the overseer’s office. The overseer was a man in his late thirties that could only be described as gruff. He seemed disgruntled even before he caught sight of Neal. He didn’t look any happier to see a new guard. Neal took a deep breath. Steel, he reminded his jaw. Steel, he reminded his heart.

“Name?” the overseer snapped.

“Neal Grover, sir.” The overseer rolled his eyes.

“Sir…yes you are new. They never bother with that courtesy anymore.” He sighed wearily. “Past experience, Grover?

“None, sir.”

“Good, fresh out of the academy. They are getting thin. The guards I get are greener and greener each year.” Neal’s eyes darted around the room. He wasn’t sure if he was expected to answer or if that would make this already disgruntled man even more disgruntled. The overseer shook his head. “No matter, we’ll train them, always have, always
will. Mycha!” he called. A guard sauntered into his office in answer

“That’s alright, Mycha, don’t hurry it would make my day too easy.” Mycha only grinned in answer. She crossed
her arms.

“What do you want, Boss?” she asked. The overseer pointed at Neal.

“This is Grover, Neal Grover. He’s fresh and untrained. Take him for a tour and show him the ropes.” Mycha grinned in answer.

“Easy enough. Where’s he stationed?” The overseer sighed and looked at his
scribbled notes.

“I hate to do this, but we’re short staffed in the Dangerous Animal sector. He’ll go
there.” Neal blinked rapidly. Dangerous animals? This was a Quarantine island, not a menagerie. Mycha shrugged.

“Your job, not mine, Boss.” She turned back to Neal. “Come on, Grover, you’ve got a lot of touring to do.” She left the room quicker than she had sauntered in, leaving Neal to scramble to catch up. His jaw loosened as urgency overtook his first-day nerves.

“Wait! Hold on.” Mycha turned back to him. “What does he mean, dangerous
animals? I thought this was a quarantine island.”

“Okay, Grover, I’ll cut you a break today, since you’re greener than grass on the
other side of the fence. Lesson one, newbie, this is not a quarantine island.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s a place we hold a very special type of person.” They were walking through a
different hallway with hard air and grey walls.

“What kind of person is that?” They reached an iron door, locked from the outside.

“It’s where we keep shapeshifters,” she said and swung the door open.