Excerpt: Switch

She'd always seen movies about things like this, and she always thought those movies weren't accurate and that cops weren't always so cold - especially to people who have done nothing wrong. Then again, the police officers who had escorted her from quarantine, to interrogation, weren't mean. They walked quickly with her through the bland, cement, hallways, of the quarantine facility, and they carried themselves with a forced confidence. Were they afraid of her? She couldn't even kill the spiders in her bathroom. How could she be frightening? The officers weren't mean, but they were cold. In their fear, they treated her as though she weren't human. They treated her like she was one of the, well, nobody really knew what the creatures were, but she was treated like one of them.

They sat her in a fairly comfortable chair, at a standard particleboard topped table, in a simple room with cement bricks painted white. There were no posters or windows or decoration of any kind to distract her. It was just her, the furniture, and the two officers who sat at the opposite end of the table. They stared at her with cold, calculating eyes, and one of them reached into their pants pocket and pulled out a tape recorder.

"State your full name," Officer Kinsley said shakily. Neither he, nor his partner seemed very experienced in this particular area of the job.

She rubbed her arms protectively as she eyed the man and woman in the room with her. "Natalie Emanuelle Lyle." She said quietly.

"Date of birth, and age."

"August 29th, 199? (whatever would make her 16 at time of publication). I'm sixteen"

"Home address."

She listed off the address of her home in the lush suburb of Edina, Minnesota. The home where her parents no doubt were right now, sipping on cocktails with their friends since it was just before dinner time, and waiting for some kind of news on what was going on with their daughter who might have the infection. The infection from camp. No doubt her step-father would blame her mother, going on about how all of the movies, something happens at camp, and that it was a stupid and foolish idea to begin with. She loved her parents, but she wasn't missing them very much.

"Tell us about Pilgrim Point Camp." Kinsley said slowly. He shook even more when he said that. He was a local officer. That place was no doubt full of fond memories from his childhood.

"How much do you want to know?" Natalie asked, and for the first time met his eyes with her own.

"We need to know everything, so start from the beginning." Kinsley glanced at his partner and they both nodded. "Yeah, everything. Don't leave a detail out since you arrived. They want us to put it all into our report." They wanted her to start from the beginning so that they wouldn't get in trouble for not doing their assignment correctly. There were no doubt a lot of interviews that needed to be conducted since the attacks.

"Alright, then I'll start from the beginning."