Game 2Game 2 Outline| Game 2 |
Game 2 Outline |
"Good morning," you whisper. "Did you sleep well?"
Irene sighs, sadly, not opening her eyes. "I slept like a baby," she says. "I had a dream, too."
"Oh?" you say.
"It was ... we were ... oh, never mind," she says, carefully pulling away and sitting up. "Did anything change? Are you turning back?"
Your ears droop. "No, nothing so far," you say. "I just feel sleepy."
"And that's not turning back?" she says, with a sudden grin. "I've never seen you awake!"
"Oh, that's not true!" you retort, tail wagging. "You remember that presentation you made at the teleconference last week? I was awake for that, you bet!"
"You remember that?" she says, half-amazed. "It was just sales figures..."
"But it was you."
There words hang in the air for a moment.
"I ... let's check the TV," she says, abruptly. "Maybe there's news, someone who knows what happened."
Chastened, you reach for the remote. Perhaps there is news, you think, as the set powers up.
Then you bolt upright. There's nothing but a test signal. Anxiously, you stab the next-channel button - test signal, test signal, static, test signal, static, test...
"Wait!" Irene yells. "Go back!" Hurriedly, you click back to the static, as Irene leaps to her feet and rushes up beside you. "Look, there's a message!"
You give Irene a glare for wasting time on a joke, but one look at her face and you realize she's serious. You whip your head back to the TV and squint, trying to make out some sort of meaning amid the static. "I don't see..." you begin
"It's green letters on a red field!" Irene announces. "It ... it says ..."
"What is it?"
Irene stiffens. By some unknown instinct, you find yourself standing silent, tense, as the pause stretches. Finally, she begins to read in a strained voice:
To any humans still alive and unharmed: this is the government. Do not fear - this message has been encoded in a form which those affected by this epidemic will not be able to detect. The news: we have stopped the spread, and all infected are now contained in a fifty-mile radius centered on the city. At 1300 hours - 1:00 p.m. local time - we will enter the city to begin to liquidate remaining vectors of the disease within the affected area. According to our experts, we can expect the infected to sleep through the hottest part of the day, and that almost all infected will be asleep by 11:00 a.m. At this time, this message shall be replaced with directions to shelters where you will be safe until cleanup is complete. Do not, under any circumstances, allow any infected to discover this message or the location of any of the shelters.
"...and it repeats." she says.
You stand stiffly, your ears twitching, fur bristling, alternately baring and unbaring your teeth. You feel no agression towards Irene - you can feel her beside you, as solid an ally as can be - but the words still vibrate through your mind, rebounding with a thousand terrible echoes, "contained", "liquidate", and "cleanup" shedding their various euphemistic clothes and screaming trapped, attacked, slaughtered...
You take a deep, hissing breath, forcing yourself to calm, and turn to Irene, who is checking her watch. "Six thirty," she says with a mock lightness. "Four and a half hours to the second message, and two more to the deadline."
You take another breath, exhaling the tension with the air, and drop back onto the couch. Irene pivots, and disheveled and red-eyed as she is, you can see the iron in her stance. "So, the sixty-four thousand dollar question," she says: "what shall we do?"
Written by Robin Z
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