Last Day

Blaine huffed as he rolled out the bed, the words of the mechanical voice still echoing in his head. He had been awake for some time now. Awake. Half asleep. Not unconscious. Throughout the whole night he maintained some level of consciousness unit he didn’t and the night seemed to drag on forever and never end but before he knew it, it was over.

As soon as his feet hit the floor he went into automatic.

Bathroom. Piss. Wash face. Walk out. Eat. Change clothes. Exercise. Check machines and cameras. Shooting Range. Lunch. Check inventory. Read.

Blaine’s hands stopped right as he touched the side of the book and the mechanical voice rung out.

“One Hour Left.”

His heart started hammering and his stomach seemed to disappear. He stood frozen. He knew exactly what to do but it still scared him. He knew this day would come but the thought of going out there terrified him despite all of his training.

Four years ago

Dalton

The first time Blaine saw the word he could care less about it. The second time he felt like he had seen it before but couldn’t remember where. The third time it piqued his interest.

“Mom, what’s Dalton?” he asked her over his bowl of cereal as she poured her usual cup of coffee. She froze for a second before turning back to him.

“Nothing sweetie,” she smiled “just a little project your father and I have going on.”

Blaine decided that if his mom thought he didn’t have to know about it then it didn’t matter that much. He finished his breakfast and gazed out of the window as she drove him to his first day of high school.

Blaine always liked school. He liked the challenge that it gave him. He liked school, even if the people in the school rarely ever liked him.

“Fag!” The scream echoed the halls as Blaine’s side hit the lockers.

He stood up straight and waited a few seconds before he kept walking. Of course the same idiots who went to his middle school went to the same high school as him. The same idiots who he had once called his best friends. The idiots who always bullied him after that one time he had said that he thought Logan Leerman was cuter than Mila Kunis.

Blaine wasn’t- he had never truly said it out loud but after the first time that his ‘friends’ shoved him into a locker and called him a fag the whole school new. Blaine wasn’t really out, hell, he had just started realizing himself that he liked boys the way most boys liked girls when the insults and abuse started. He wasn’t out. Not completely. Not until he told his parents.

Blaine never reported the names or the shoves. Mostly because if he did his parents would hear. And if his parents heard about it then they would worry. That’s what he told himself- he never reported it because his parent’s would worry. But really, if he told then his parents would know why it was happening, and if they knew, if they knew then Blaine didn’t want to know how they’d react.

His family was not all too conservative. They were well off- better off than most families. They had an appearance to keep, and a gay son would not help it.

He went through the same day every day. Wake up, go to school, come home, do homework, eat with his family (the table felt a bit empty with Cooper having recently gone off to college), read, play video games, or watch tv, and go to sleep. Every day at school he would stand the screams and shoves. Every day he would go through them alone. Every day until he came. Kyle. Kyle the transfer student.Kyle the kid who helped Blaine up after he was shoved into the lockers. Who whispered in his ear that he was gay too and that thank god I’m not the only gay kid here.The one who ate lunch with him and hung out with him. The one he asked out to the Sadie Hawkins dance ‘just as friends’ he assured his parents. Kyle the boy who got beat up with him after the dance as they waited for his dad to pick them up.

He never saw Kyle after the ambulance took him away. His parents decided to move Blaine’s mom told him, thought it was better not to have him too near the place of the accident.

Blaine stayed in the hospital for a few weeks. That’s where it happened. The police asked him to tell them what happened. His parents were in the room as he recalled the nights events. He saw as his moms eyes teared up and her hand flew to muffle the sob as he said why they attacked him and Kyle. Saw as his dads eyes glazed over and his jaw set.

“Oh Blaine!” his mom cried as she went over to hug him, quickly apologizing when she realized how it must’ve hurt him. His dad simply muttered something about having to go to the office as he walked out after the officers.

His parents decided not to send him back to school. He would be homeschooled from now on. Learning at home, being home all day, it gave him more time to see how his dad could no longer look him in the eye. How he would never address him directly.

“He’s just…. Figuring things out at his own pace” his mom assured him with a small smile.

They still had events and galas to go to. Of course they did, they were the Andersons after all.

Blaine was allowed to go now that he was 14 and mature enough.

Sometimes he wished he couldn’t.

Times when his parent’s were asked how their children were doing and his dad talked about how Cooper was doing so well in law school and then trailed off, leaving his mom to talk about how Blaine was so good at learning and his tutors always talked so highly of him and oh you should hear him sing his music tutor won’t stop going off about him.

Blaine just stood by his moms side and looked down at the floor humbly. Looked down at the floor so he wouldn’t see the contempt or pity in the eyes of the person his parents were talking too.

Learning at home also left him more time to see what was going on around there. Left him time to wonder about the big section of the house he wasn’t allowed in. Time to see that the door leading to that section had a label titled Dalton. That nearly everywhere he looked he could see the word Dalton. That people were always walking in and around the house talking about Dalton.

Blaine was curious but his mom said it didn’t matter so he didn’t think too much about it.

He looked at the date on his phone.

September 8, 2012.

His 15th birthday.

He didn’t have any friends so his parents, or more like his mom, woke him up with some gifts and a promise to take him to his favorite restaurant. His father went with them out of courtesy even though he had missed most of the family dinners since the Sadie Hawkins incident.

Another thing Blaine got out of learning from home was news. He usually finished all his work early so he watched tv. He watched the news, because it was he only thing on tv that had a cheesy and predictable story line. He followed the news. Especially the news about a treatment to cancer being found. He didn’t follow it because it made him glad, he followed it because something about it seemed off to him. He figured he would become a doctor because science was okay and he knew his father would like it. So he studied doctor like stuff. And with what little he knew he couldn’t help but feel that there was something wrong with the medication against cancer.

He shrugged it off, figuring that actual doctors would do something about it if it was wrong.

That’s when Dalton started appearing more frequently.

Finally Blaine decided to bring it up again.
“
What’s Dalton?” he asked his mom as she poured her coffee before heading to work. She froze again, but this time she didn’t smile at him and tell him it was nothing. She sighed and sat down.

“I guess I should-“ she chuckled “well, I guess it’s time you knew isn’t it?”

She looked him in the eyes as she breathed out “It’s a safe house.”

He sat there for a few seconds.

“You’re kidding right?”

His mom gave him a sad smile.

“I wish I were honey but-“

“Why would we even need a safe house?!” he interrupted her “I mean it’s not like you actually believe all those 2012 rumors right?”

“Honey,” she closed her eyes for a second as if holding back tears “They’re not rumors.”

He started laughing “It’s- this is a joke right?”

His laughter died as his mom slowly shook her head from side to side.

“Do you- You’ve been watching the news right? You’ve heard about the cancer medicine?”

Blaine nodded, not sure how this was related to anything.

“The medicine- it was tested on rats first and it worked, marvelously. When your father and I found out about it we decided to back it up and invest, being one of the first families to do so put us on their good side. We got reports of how it was working, when it was being produced, how the test subjects were reacting. It’s been years that this has been in the making and it all seemed so perfect. None of the animals were having negative reactions and so we started testing it on humans. We did many trials and all of them worked so well. Then the animals started getting a little bit… crazy.”

Blaine raised an eyebrow at this, not sure what she meant, he was shocked at the chuckle that came out of her mouth.

“I guess it’s not funny but, you know those zombie movies that you watch sometimes?’”

“No.” he was just about sure that she had to be joking now “they’re not- it’s not. This can’t be happening, they aren’t real.”

“I thought so too but we tested the medicine on some monkeys after the rats and right before the human trials. After the trials were closed and the medicine started being distributed we put all the monkeys in an open area. We’re not sure how it happened but one of the monkeys got sick and died. This was after the medicine got mass marketed so there was no way we were telling anyone, we were just hoping it was a coincidence. Then more monkeys started getting sick. We have no idea what went wrong but one of the monkeys that died was not cleared out of the area and an hour after its death it started moving again. We weren’t sure what it was but then again we’d just seen a monkey come back to life, we weren’t thinking that straight. The monkey seemed okay enough, a bit slow if anything, then it started attacking the other monkeys. Then those monkeys died and came back and went crazy and soon enough all of them had turned into these things.” She paused and looked away for a second as if unable to look him in the eye “We had to fumigate the whole dome of course I mean- we couldn’t just let those things keep- keep living if that’s what they were even doing and-“

“Mom” Blaine interrupted her hectic rant realizing that she wouldn’t get so bent up over something if it wasn’t real “It’s okay, I get it, it’s the only thing that you could have done but- I mean I realize this happened after the human trials but once it did you stopped the trials right?”

His mothers eyes filled with tears.

“We couldn’t” he could barely hear her whisper “we- we thought it would be better if we didn’t tell anyone until we saw what it was, we tried to stop the trails but they wouldn’t. We did autopsies on the monkeys and saw that everything inside of them was completely decomposed, as if it had been dead for months and not weeks or hours. The brain had turned completely black but it showed traces of recent use, except, it wasn’t the whole brain, it seemed that they were only using the part with basic instincts- eat, survive.” She rubbed at her eyes and Blaine saw for the first time that they had giant black bags “By the time we- or I should say, the doctors in charge- figured this out and informed us about it, we tried to put a stop to the spread of the drug but it had already been mass produced and sent all over the world.”

“But you stopped it right?” Blaine started panicking “You stopped it spread.”

“Of course honey, as soon as we found out we stopped it, but it had already been administered of hundreds of people.”

“As long as it’s not out there anymore it’s all right though, right? I mean- no one else is getting it.”

His mom looked away again “Yes honey but, that one monkey managed to do whatever it did to all of the monkeys in the dome in less than a week, hundreds of people were given the medicine. As it is we can’t lock them up in hospitals without raising suspicion and even if we could, no one would know if they’d infected anyone else and then that person infected someone else it’s just-“

“Mom” Blaine interrupted her again “exactly how long have you been working on this safehouse?”

His mother blinked at him in confusion “Why do you ask?”

“Well,” he looked for the right words “it- it takes a long time to make these kind of things doesn’t it? And from what you’re telling me it doesn’t seem like you’ve had much time to-“ he stopped short at his mothers laughter.

“Oh,” she sighed “yes well, we’ve actually had the safe house for a while, Dalton is just kind of an upgrade for it.”

“I’m not sure what part of that sentence I’m more confused about.” Blaine found everything getting more unbelievable yet more real at the same time.

“Well,” his mother started elaborating “your father, actually, your father and I, we’ve always been kind of aware that a time might come when we’d need a place to… hide.”

Her explanation only confused him more.

“See, we’re constantly investing in medicines and there are always the animal rights activists to worry about and if not then maybe a spiteful scientist who we wouldn’t fund- I know it sounds a bit paranoid but we just wanted to make sure that we were safe.”

“Okay…” that in itself wasn’t too unbelievable but still- “if you already have the safe house then, what’s Dalton?”

“Dalton,” a little frown appeared on his moms face “it’s- the safe house we had was just in case and would last for a month maximum, Dalton is an operation to make the safe house last longer and be more comfortable to live in. We also decided to add a few more things that would make it more appropriate for these specific… circumstances.”

“So you’re saying that there’s going to be an apocalypse and zombies will take over?” Blaine was surprised at how the words that came out of his mouth sounded.

His mom laughed “Yeah, I guess that’s what it is putting it simply.”

Blaine nodded slowly, letting it all sink in. How long had his parents known about this? Drug trails take years and if it was already in the market- then again it was a cure for cancer, they probably rushed through everything. He sat there, one would think that learning such a thing would completely change your life, alter your view on the world. But it didn’t. Not in the least bit. If anything, he felt a little more let into the big secret, but nothing else was different.

“Wouldn’t it be better to just tell everyone what’s happening? I mean, no one’s really sure how long it takes for the effects to appear on humans right? Maybe it won’t even happen. Wouldn’t it be better for everyone to know so they could make their own safe houses and prepare themselves?”

A sad smile appeared on him moms lips “Blaine, honey, if we tell people what happened then everything would turn into chaos. What we’re doing is to keep you safe, keep you from the horror that we’re pretty sure will happen. If people find out about it riots will occur before the actual spread of whatever terrible virus the cure turned into. We just,” she sighed “we want there to be a bigger fighting chance for you once everything happens.”

“So, we’re going to be safe right?”

Blaine could swear he saw tears in his mothers eyes

“You don’t have to worry about that honey, just, keep doing everything the same way you always have and when the time comes everything will be explained better.”

And so he did.

He did his work, ate his food, watched the news. He couldn’t help but grimace when the “cure” was mentioned over and over again. Slowly he saw reports start to appear of people who had taken the cure that became sick. Later of how those people died. The shock came when no news came on of zombies appearing. When he asked his mom all she said was that the affects had taken place but they were trying to keep it out of the news as long as possible.

A week later a whole town was told to be under quarantine. Then the town was destroyed by the government. Riots broke out, people demanded to know what was happening and a few even connected it all to the drug.

Blaine sat in the house, acting like nothing was happening, knowing that soon enough his life would be confined to the walls of the safe house.
Three Years Ago

It was a normal day, as normal as any day could be when all you did was pretend that everything was okay.

He went through his morning as usual, eating breakfast, kissing his mother good-bye as she left for work, sitting down at the computer and going through that days lessons. He sat on the couch to work on a particularly hard math problem that had been left for homework. He turned on the tv and lowered the volume, it’s soft hum filling the air as another report about the zombie infestation came on. It had been the only thing on the news for the last month, cities falling one by one, most of the population changing overnight and a few people waking up to chaos.

He started erasing the work he had done for the hundredth time when the front door slammed open and loud voices filled the air.

“You said there’d be more time!” his fathers unmistakable voice rang out.

“”I thought there would be! Do you think I planned this whole thing out?!” His mother wasn’t usually one for screaming.

His parents stopped as they saw him sitting on the couch, the eraser still poised on the paper. His mother ran over and wrapped her arms around him.

“Oh honey!” he could feel his cheeks getting wet as she started crying. She grabbed his shoulders and held him away from her “Are you okay?”

Confusion spread over him.

Of course he’s okay. Why wouldn’t he be okay?

“Yeah mom. What- What’s going on?”

She looked him straight in the eyes as she whispered so low that he had to strain to hear the two short words.

“It’s time.”