The Cure

The bark of the tree was digging into her back through her thin white cotton shirt. Her heart was thumping so fast she could feel it in her ears, but she tried her best to breath as quietly as possible. Sweat was pulling under her heart shaped locket and dribbling down her forehead. Her jeans had ripped while she was running and her feet were throbbing. She had on her house slippers when they knocked on her door and there was no time to change before she ran out the back door.

She knew they would have filled the neighborhood with their soldiers, but if she could just make it to the woods she had a chance of making it. She dropped the dishes she was doing and bolted out her back door. A woman with a stun gun was walking towards her, her face void of expression. With a quick turn to the left, she missed the electric zap pulsing from the tip of the stun gun and ran towards the woods. When she had moved in she planned on putting in a fence. Now she was glad she hadn’t.

Her heart rate was slowing and the adrenaline that had fueled her body was subsiding. She wanted to move, but wasn’t sure if any of those soldiers had followed her. From what she had heard they don’t always go after the runners.

The crunch of a shoe on fallen pine needles was just a few feet behind her. With all her might she flung herself up. As her feet started to propel her forward she felt a small tingling sensation in her left side. The tingling turned into a burning rippling through her body. She turned to see what or who it was as she fell onto the ground. The women who she had avoided earlier caught up with her.

Another electric shock crashed through her body to keep her from getting back up. That was the last thing she could remember.

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“Carolina Fernandez.”

A voice that sounded like an automated phone call was saying her name.

“Carolina Fernandez.”

If she kept her eyes closed maybe they would leave.

“Your vital signs all indicate that you are awake. If you do not respond, you will be considered brain dead and be disposed of.”

Her eyes popped open but she didn’t sit up, “I’m awake!”

“We know.”

Carolina looked at the aggressively white hospital room as the smell of bleach stung her nostrils. She was one of a dozen people laying in hospital beds. She still had on her clothes from earlier but she had on a thick black cuff on her wrist that was reporting all her information into the computer next to her bed.

“Confirm your identity.” A short woman with a tight bun was staring at a clipboard. “You are Carolina Fernandez born December 30 in the year 2020 making you 25 years old.”

“Yes, that’s me.”

“Your blood type is?”

“Umm…B positive I think.”

“Everything is correct. Please use this bucket for your items and put on the gown that is there. You must not be wearing any clothing under your gown and need to take off all jewelry.” She plopped a white round bucket onto Carolina’s lap and walked over to the person lying to the right of her.

“Wait!” The woman turned back around. “I’m sorry, just, um, well, I’ll be getting this stuff back, right?”

“No.” She promptly turned back around and continued asking her questions to the next person.

Carolina looked to her left and saw that the other confused people were changing or had already changed into their gowns.

“This shit is insane.”

“I heard-“ The voice came from the soft looking boy who looked barely old enough to drive. “Well I read online that if you don’t do what they say they either shock you or kill you. So my advice is just do what they say.”

“Thanks man.”

He nodded and threw the gray gown over his body before taking his underwear off.

Carolina copied what others were doing around her. First she took off her slippers, then shirt, then jeans. The grey gown that the woman had given her itched her skin as she put it on. She didn’t want to take off her bra and underwear but she knew the boy’s warning was true. With as much grace as she could, she shimmied out of the rest of her clothes until she was naked under the gray gown.

“Oh!” Her hand instinctively grabbed her heart shaped locket for comfort but quickly remembered she needed to take off all jewelry. She had no rings to wear and she only put on earrings if she was going somewhere, but the heart shaped locket that her mother had gotten for her 16th birthday only came off when she showered. She took it off to look at it one last time and used her nail to pop it open revealing a picture of her family on one side and her family dogs on the other. The picture of her family had to be small to fit in all 5 faces, but her mom, dad, brothers, sister, and a 16 year old Carolina were all smiling. Her dogs, Duke and Scooby, had passed away a few years ago, but she managed to fit a picture of them as puppies into the otherside. She kept saying when she settled down she would get another dog. Now she would never get the chance.

Warm tears were pooling in her eyes but she didn’t want to cry, not here. Not in front of these people.

She carefully placed the locket in the bucket as one tear managed to slip down her cheek.

With a deep breath she placed the bucket on the ground and got back into the bed. The people who had been dressed for a few minutes were being wheeled away. Carolina had adjusted back into the bed and waited.

She had heard the stories on the news starting a few years ago about a new drug, the cure, that completely numbed you emotionally so you could focus on work. It ruined your sex drive but it made you more productive than any other drug out there. A few of her friends had tried it and gotten hooked. They said it was better than cocaine, all the ups with no crash afterwards, but it soon turned into a crippling addiction. It was leaked, on purpose or not, that a fringe cult calling themselves “The True Reformers” had created the drug. Once people were hooked the only way to get it in large quantities was to join the cult. Her friend Andre felt he had no choice but to join. He needed the cure to function at work. She hadn’t seen him or heard from him in 3 years.

Then about 2 years ago, whole small towns started disappearing. Her cousins that lived in a small town in Oklahoma stopped posting online or answering their texts or calls. Slowly missing persons posters started popping up in stores and online. If people went to the towns to look, they found them abandoned. People had left, or been forced to leave, in the middle of dinner or watching tv. It was eerie, and people kept looking, but life had to go on.

Everyone wondered why the government hadn’t stepped in sooner, but The True Reformers picked towns and places that they knew the government wouldn’t bother to rescue. She never thought that they would try a city as big as Boulder, Colorado, but when she saw the people in crisp white jumpsuits, she knew exactly who it was that had brought her to the hospital.

Two men in white jumpsuits started to roll away the boy she had talked to. She gave a subtle wave and smile to him before he was turned away from her. Another two men came to her bed. She looked down to avoid their eyes as they unlocked her bed and started rolling it away.

As the two men pushed her through the hallway, the harsh bright overhead lights were whirring above her. She saw the boy go into a room on the right and she was wheeled into the room on the left. The two men locked her bed in place in the middle of the room before leaving.

She heard the faint click of the door locking behind her. On the wall in front of her were reassuring posters telling her “No More Pain” and “Numbness Prevails” but she was not comforted by these words.

A woman in a jumpsuit unlocked the door and swiftly hooked her up to an IV of an opaque liquid. She sat on a stool in the corner and Carolina watched as her eyes moved between the clock above the door and her IV liquid.

The warm liquid quickly spread throughout her body making everything feel heavy. Her eyelids started to fall and she was fighting to keep them open. It was getting harder and harder to fight. She let them close for just a second and then there was darkness.

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Carolina slowly opened her eyes and quickly realized she was back in the same room that she had been in before.

Her body was quietly tingling with numbness that she thought was from whatever they used to knock her out wearing off. She calmly looked around and saw the boy from earlier was still sleeping. This calmness was better than any high she had ever experienced. Her thoughts moved slowly through her head as she became more aware of what was going on around her.

The same woman who had hooked her up to the IV was standing next to her asking, “Carolina Fernandez?”

“Yes.” The word fell out of her mouth and her voice sounded so plain.

The woman took out a syringe needle from a metal tray, found the right spot in her arm, and swiftly poked the needle into her arm. “Do you feel any pain?”

“I feel nothing.”