I wondered if they could tell if I was terrified. I drove slowly behind this man, but my hands were shaking. I couldn't make them stop. I hoped they couldn't see the truck jolting around from the outside.

  They had me pull off on the road and put the truck in park. Again, we stepped outside, our hands in the air. "Are guns necessary?" Again, I tried to sound loud. Authoritative. It didn't come out like that, though. I sounded like the frightened 18-year-old girl I was.

  "We have to take safety precautions. I'm sure you understand." He didn't yell at us this time. I nodded. Of course, I understood, but it was terrifying. My feet felt like they were stuck in place until each soldier fell into line behind us, jamming their rifles into our backs. It made my spine sting a little bit. I didn't have much skin between the bumps of my spine and the surface. When I stood up straight, you could see each bump protrude. They forced us into a small room, somewhat of an office, with fairly bright lights. I stared up at the ceiling, trying to see the bulbs. How did they have electricity? Breelyn was looking up, too, as if it were a foreign thing to us. They had locked the door to this box room we were in, and we had barely noticed someone opening it.

  "Windland found a way to power the town. That's how we have electricity: we generate it. Water, wind, the sun," I looked over at a child standing in the doorway. I would say he's roughly around eight years old.

  "Where the hell did that thing come from?" Emma brought her hand up to her mouth as if she hadn't meant to say it.

  "Thing? It's a child," Breelyn waved to him. He stared at her, waving back.

  "Windland has power, you said?" He looked back at me as I spoke. I kneeled to speak to him on his level. "Wind turbines?"

  "Yes. My dad's an army general. He said they replaced something special and got everything running again. We only went a week without power. My dad says we have to keep the rest of the world out to preserve what's left of the town. He thinks we're the last living place in Missouri. There's no other army base like this that-"

  "Kody, hey!" The man who was yelling at us when we first arrived was now snapping at his son. I wish he had come a little bit later. Maybe we could have gotten some answers out of this kid. "Leave these girls alone, they could be sick," He pulled his son out of the room. He came walking in himself, wearing a mask. A woman in a lab coat was next to him, holding a handful of plastic-wrapped objects. It looked like Covid tests, but she also had IV kits with her.

  "Are any of you twenty-one or older?" The woman spoke. She looked around at each of us, but we shook our heads. I was the oldest. Breelyn was a couple of weeks younger than me, but she's already eighteen. Phoebe and Emma were still seventeen. "I can't really do much without parental consent," She whispered to the man. He didn't flinch at all. The legal age of an adult had been raised to twenty-one right before the beginning of the end. I didn't realize people still followed those rules.

  "Go on ahead, I'll take care of that. Times have changed, Ellie." He walked out, shutting her in the room with us. She looked fairly tense, but who wouldn't be? Nobody trusted anyone anymore, and for a good reason. I'm surprised more people haven't turned rabid like the animals.

  "You can test me," I rolled up my left arm. I remembered getting my blood drawn so much as a kid. I knew the arm they preferred and how they prepared it. I rubbed the vein a bit so she could see it better. "I don't mind at all." Ellie knelt, ignorant of me, and set the plastic containers on the ground.

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  "I'm going to prick you and take some blood," She took out a small paper square from her pocket and ripped it open. It was an alcohol wipe. She rubbed it over my vein. "Then I'll need to swab your nose, kind of like a COVID test. I'll prick your finger and take a saliva test too. Four tests shouldn't take too long. We will have to keep you girls overnight to guarantee you're healthy." Even if we wanted to protest, we couldn't. We came all this way, and we weren't about to back down. I wanted to ask her what she had seen and heard about the sicknesses and why they were getting so bad, but whether I knew it or not, I couldn't do anything about it. I could be cautious around people, too, but either way, if I was going to get sick, that was a problem for when it actually happened. What I did know about it was that those who got sick were either young children, babies, and elementary schoolers, or older adults and the elderly. We, teenagers and the young adult population, seemed to blow over. We've yet to lose someone our age to sickness down in Hartland. We were being murdered, though, left and right, we ran calls on stab wounds and gunshot wounds for people in my school. Sickness, though, come to think of it, we haven't even run one call on a teenager or young adult.

  It took her around forty minutes to finish all of the tests on us. They escorted Phoebe back to the truck to grab our blankets, but left us in this bright, empty room with no windows. Even the door was one solid sheet of metal. At least we were safe here.

  We all lay in a line, our heads at the opposite end of the door, but none of us could sleep for the first hour. I was so tired, but sleeping anywhere other than my home made me very uneasy. Even though we were completely sealed off from the outside, I was still nervous. "What if they find a trace of something in one of us, and they just exterminate us all. Nobody will ever know we were here, and we're just screwed forever?" The three of them turned their heads to look at me, but I kept staring at the ceiling, a smile on my face.

  "What's wrong with you? Don't say that. Don't speak it into existence," Breelyn laughed. It really was a possibility, though. I liked to think of every world scenario possible, but that scenario didn't seem too bad. Being wiped off the face of the earth. Nothing left to remember us by. It's like a clean break. Not to mention, they had our guns, so what could we do? Four fairly small teenage girls versus a highly skilled army general? I liked our odds, but odds also said that he would have a gun on him every time he came in here. I spent the next hour thinking of possibilities until finally I couldn't keep my eyes open anymore.

  I felt like I had blinked for a little too long when I opened my eyes and shot straight up. I heard footsteps. I shook everyone around me, getting them all to wake up and stretch. Breelyn flipped back over and pulled her blanket over her head. Emma covered her face with her hands, but Phoebe was already up. "Someone's coming!" I whispered. They got up with a very slight amount of urgency, but by the time the door opened, the general was standing in front of us... in civilian clothes? His son was standing next to him.

  "You girls are free to go. We have you in the systems now, and all of your tests came back clear, free of the anomaly. Your name is Amelia, right?" He made eye contact with me. He held out all of our IDs in his hand. I took them back from him, scared to look away in case he would all of a sudden change his mind. I nodded, still a little drowsy from my small amount of sleep. "This is the only gate that opens around the whole town. If you girls decide to leave, you'll have to come back through here. Your weapons are in your vehicle. We decontaminated all of your items. The people in this town have been tested. Wherever you go should be safe for the most part, can't guarantee that though if you've already made some enemies in the past," I figured that was supposed to be a joke. He had a very slight smile, so I laughed a bit. It sounded kind of awkward. "We took it upon ourselves to ask around, making sure you guys were real. Stay safe, kids." He stepped away from the door. The sun began to rise.