The Refugees
Campfire Stories: Volume 2, Issue 5
Chosen prompt: ‘Discordant’ from the English language dictionary screensaver
After spending the better part of the morning nervously trying to decide what supplies to pack for moving out of their safehouse prematurely, the group heard a convoy of tracked armored personnel carriers rumbling up the street. A column of pure black vehicles. Not green or tan. Black. Taro had lived long enough to know that military vehicles are always green, tan, or camouflage. Not black.
The tadpoles skittered about inside the house, frantically packing the one cubic meter hard-sided boxes assigned to each person. The whole safehouse was a discordant symphony of thuds, scrapes, bangs, zips, dings, snaps, and clicks, with the chorus accompanying it being that of hasty footsteps, slammed doors, agitated yells, nervous cries, and barked orders.
In the middle of the house, in the kitchen corner, next to a radio making nothing more than white noise – the whole symphony orchestra and chorus of the house was nothing but white noise – sat the Babbelfish. The tadpoles were scurrying past him, darting this way and that, but not one took heed of his presence. Taro leaned against the wall, looking out the kitchen door and through the living room window. The military vehicles were black last time, too, he recalled, and the time before that – he went to his room to check the camera.
Taro looked closely at a screenshot from the video of his adventure outside to get supplies the first week. Zooming in, he could see that each military vehicle had a marking in common, “UCPC-,” and then a number was painted on the front and rear of each of them. The room suddenly began to spin for Taro. His heart sunk to the floor then bounced back up and got stuck in his throat. Taro knew what UCPC was. It wasn’t the military, and he wasn’t a military contractor – or he wouldn’t be for much longer unless he didn’t mind shuffling off his mortal coil – he needed to decide whether to continue playing along.
The radio crackled to life again, Taro could just barely hear it through his panic-induced fog.
“Mother, this is The Pond, over.”
“Mother. The Pond. Please report, over.”
Kelli poked her head into the room, “Hey, you haven’t seen Noemi, have you?”
Taro turned to look over his shoulder at Kelli. He could faintly hear a new sound in the cacophony. It sounded like a mouse skittering up the hallway toward the kitchen at the speed of a bullet train. Let’s give him partial credit here.
Suddenly, Kelli came flying into Taro’s room as if she had been hit from behind by a bull in Pamplona. She bumped into Taro – HARD – and he nearly fell over, losing his grip on the tablet on which he was viewing the photographs. The tablet flew a couple of feet and landed perfectly with the middle of the screen on the corner of the nightstand, rendering it inoperable and mostly useless. Taro was still in a daze and didn’t make a sound. He still stood there, back-to-back with Kelli, who was making a lot of sounds. Kelli stormed out of the room, and no one in the house had any questions about what she had on her mind.
Noemi’s voice rang out loudly and clearly, perfectly enunciating every syllable from the kitchen in that slow and monotonous drone reminiscent of a motorboat – a perfectly consistent and almost robotic meter of speech that was at once hypnotic and terrifyingly stern.
“Pond. Mother.”
“Mother, we have detained the requested guests.”
“Ensure that each of them is kept clear of any technology. Do not allow them in any room that has – you know what? Just put them both in sensory deprivation. I’ll-“
Kelli’s headbutt caught Noemi in the cheekbone. An upward elbow toward the throat followed quickly, but Noemi turned and got her shoulder up to block the strike. Noemi gripped the radio receiver harder, and her hand moved so fast that no one could see what was happening.
Kelli hit the floor with a sickening thud.
Noemi took a deep breath, let it out, then continued.
“Prepare a third SENDEP unit for Agent L, and she will need to be treated for a concussion on arrival.”
“Pond copies all.”
“Mother out.”
Noemi looked at Taro, who was still staring at a broken tablet in his room, then down at Agent L on the floor. She stepped over Kelli’s slowly reawakening body to the hallway door.
“Rob! Terry! Pack this one into the mobile SENDEP.”
The convoy came to a halt outside, and a dozen or so of the black-clad soldiers wearing UCPC patches went to the door of the safehouse. They stood in formation, in two columns, at parade rest in the driveway. The soldiers stood stock still, their discipline on par with a competitive drill and ceremony team. Not a movement. Not a sound. It was unsettling Taro even more now that he was confronting the embodiment of his greatest fear. Taro turned around and he could see Terry and Rob pushing something that looked like a tanning bed toward the front door.
“Hey Rob, where are we headed?” Taro choked out the words, his mouth still bleeding a little and in a lot of pain.
“You’re a smart guy, Taro. I think you know.”
“Universe City Pharmaceutical Company is the only UCPC I can imagine that could pull all this off.”
“Bingo.”
Noemi strode past nearly silently, opened the front door, and began barking orders like a drill instructor. Everyone except for Taro started moving around, like cockroaches when the lights turn on in a cheap motel. They moved very quickly, directly, and with a great sense of purpose that was obvious, even to an academic in complete shock and awe.
“Mother on deck!” A soldier stood at attention and saluted as Noemi passed through the front door, back into the house.
“At ease. Continue mission.”
The soldier scurried away, and Noemi stepped into Taro’s room.
Taro opened his mouth to try to say something. At about the same point that his lips parted, a needle plunged into his neck, and Noemi grabbed a fistful of the front of his shirt. He collapsed slowly, and she controlled his descent carefully. Noemi turned back toward the hallway.
“I need TWO!!!”
Two soldiers came to the door almost instantaneously. It was Noemi’s favorite magic trick, making people appear. She also liked to make them disappear, but that was beside the point. The thought brought a wry smile across a face that usually gave off all the expression of a death mask. The soldiers trembled.
“Pack this one up; ensure it is not damaged, or I will activate the termination clause in your contracts. Do you understand?”
The soldiers saluted to signal their agreement to fulfill the terms of their contract.
Upending Wordism 