It was dark and gusty outside, and we were all holed up in a large old house on the edge of town trying to decide what to do. There were reports of a deadly new virus springing up on the edges of the state, though none reported near us, as of yet. There was a team of immunologists in one room, working on a vaccine.
The big danger to us was that people carrying the virus were bound to be blown into town by the storm, and the wind pattern would carry them right to us during the coming storm. A coworker showed me, in detail, how air currents tended to start a large swirl around the extreme northwestern tip of Louisiana, which, when looking at a map, rose like a tall thin mushroom along the Texas border, separating Texas from Mississippi, which was tucked in the middle of Louisiana. This swirl of air would hook down along where the outbreak was, then come over us in the eastern part of the state.
The doctors had found a vaccine, they said, and were going to start distributing it widely. They went back into their room, and a heavy mist began to seep up from holes in the floor. But, wait! When I peeked into the room, they were all wearing gas masks! Was the mist the vaccine, or was it the virus?
Quickly we locked one door to their room on the outside, and I ran around to another door, wedging it shut with my weight against it. We had to keep them in there until their respirator air supply ran out, so they'd have to breath the mist all around us, too, or until they explained exactly what was going on.
Over and over again they shoved against the door, which opened no more than a few inches, then slammed shut on them as i pushed back against it. They didn't know I was there, and were confused, but not panicked. Eventually, I realized that I was the only one left in the house, besides them. And I also realized the mist hadn't hurt me, so maybe it was the vaccine, after all.
Then all three of the immunologists pushed against the door, where I was slumped, now too tired to even really try to keep it open, and I decided to play dead. They shoved the door open wide enough to come out, stepping over my limp figure wedged against it on the floor. They put me inside the room where they'd been, and shut the door on me. Somehow I knew they'd try to come around and lock me in the way they'd been locked in. The other door was unlocked again, for now, for some reason, so I jumped up quietly, slipped out, and ran to the back door, out to the yard, and into my car, before they could come around and lock me in.
I got in my car and began to drive out to my remote farm house out in the country, where hopefully I'd be safe from people infected with the virus, or keep people safe from me, if I was infected, or just relax if I'd actually been vaccinated. The wind was still tearing through the fields of tall grass, that would be golden in sunlight, but were silvered by starlight and moonlight under a sky luminously gray-violet as dawn approached. The air felt fresh and cold, and I turned the heater on in my car. And then I woke up with the worst tension headache I've had in years. I wonder why.
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