I woke up to water dripping, a hammer smashing in another room but I couldn't stay awake. I was in and out of consciousness and a projector shined onto a slide in front of me.
"Wake up, Patient 1-5-5-3." It said.
I faded but it was still there.
"Wake up."
Keeping my eyes open was next to impossible but when I opened them again the screen read,
"You leave us no choice."
There's nothing quite like the feeling of having battery acid for blood for a few seconds to wake you up in the morning. No, for real, the pain was so intense that I could feel the veins bulging from my head and neck. I tried to scream but my jaw was locked shut by the pain. After the electrocution was done I couldn't help but unleash that scream. Now the screen read,
"Good, your awake. Now we can begin."
"Begin what?" Blood began dripping from my nose and I spat it off my lips, "I'm not doing anything you-"
Electric power flowed through my system again and my body almost burst. My bowels exploded all over me and I was left sobbing in the electrical chair as the hammering started in another room. Screams followed and I couldn't help but ask weakly,
"What is that? Who are you people?"
A moment passed and another slide came onto the projector which read,
"That is Patient 1-6-7-7's lobotomy, and we are not gods, nor kings; only man." The projector added, a slide for each word as it read, "Just. Like. You."
"What do you want with me?"
"We want to fix you."
I couldn't help but laugh a bitter laugh. However, I just kept laughing. I tried to make myself stop but couldn't, I began to shake and my speech was slurring. Did I get brain damage from too many knocks to the head?
Once I stopped laughing I moaned, "I'm perfectly fine."
"What you have to do is simple. Tell us, chronologically, all that you can remember."
"I'm not even that powerful-"
"Irrelevant. You are still a Vector of disease."
"Alright," I lied, "when I was ten I pissed on your mother's grave that's what I did!"
A red buzzer went off above where the door would be and the slide changed, reading,
"You are hooked up to a lie detector. This is your only warning." A second passed and then it read, "What is your name?"
"Morrígan."
"We shall call you Ariana Reeves."
"Why ask for my name when you were just going to give me one? Smh."
"All in due time Ms. Reeves. Now, what is the earliest you can remember? The quicker we get this done the quicker we can let you return to society."
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The earliest I could remember was a dream before school one day. Darkness was all around, save for an uncanny light on a woman by a stream. She wore a black dress and brooch, Celtic in design, and washed the blood off of some coveralls and a pair of glasses. Glistening in the light was a sliver and onyx circlet and a silvery neck torc with ravens on it. Her hair, eyes and teeth were obsidian when she smiled at me.
Then I woke up and went on about my day. I was a student then, dealt with bullies, had a boyfriend but life was so much more tolerable than it was now. Even if this was the day my world turned upside down.
Everything was normal until everyone was called into the cafeteria. Our principal was an old, fat fart. It's amazing how he's lived so long, his cheeks were red as makeup due to blood sugar so high he was usually irritable. He was a child when Kennedy was assassinated, and an aging person on 9/11 so he had a little experience with giving or receiving speeches about national calamities. Even then, he had his own style and his own beliefs. Thinking about him now makes me kinda miss him.
He had walked up to the podium, looked at the speech the committee above him had outlined and then crumbled it up and threw it in the small trash can behind him. He started,
"We're all adults in this room, albeit some are younger than others but that's neither here nor there." That was a snide jab at us young adults who were used to it by now and he continued, "I'm sure you all have heard of the incident in Raccoon, Kentucky. Walls and army personnel were stationed to quarantine everything inside. Today, we are going to show you a few slides to highlight how serious this situation is."
A smiling blonde boy was the first image put onto the screen.
"This," he pointed at him, "is someone in the city before lockdown. This boy got sick and developed electric powers, cool huh?" Some of the jocks in the back nodded their heads with curious looks on their faces.
"Wrong. My sources say his brain couldn't handle the messages his body was sending him, so he quickly developed psychosis and committed mass murder in a shopping mall."
The principal showed several slides as he talked: a smiling brown haired girl, her family and then police outside her home.
"This beautiful woman appeared to be asymptomatic until questioning after she snapped. She had the ability to transmute the air around her and went on unnoticed for months. She also developed insomnia so severe the sleep deprivation caused her to hallucinate. She later decided to recreate the Russian sleep experiment after locking everyone inside the family home. Turning the air into an unknown stimulant that her family became dependent on when police got them out."
The next slide had a woman and her crippled child in a wheelchair outside a sign reading "Pike County".
"To top it all off," the principal finished, "we have these two here. The mother was a chemistry professor who retired to take care of her son in Kentucky. What others do not know, is that her brain began to swell and her intelligence was heightened at a cost. She experimented with her son's blood and succeeded in curing his condition… at a cost."
It seemed like he added this last part because he couldn't say much more. Like he would get in more trouble than he already was but added cryptically,
"In Kentucky urban legends, they say near Crybaby bridge crying can be heard. Near Fisherville they have what's called the Goatman who cries out in a child's voice… and those who help them were never seen again. Now imagine, if a condition such as this was contagious inside a quarantined town?"
He closed,
"These are very dark times and school is being closed until further notice. We have had one or two minor incidents like this in our city. I would hope that you all stay safe until we see each other again when this all blows over."
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I chuckled bitterly, in that dark, quiet room, "Would it surprise you if I told you it didn't get better?"