The Virus by Steven Spellman

Lenard. Even as he spoke, other men were
searching the house. Two or three climbed up the flight of stairs
that led to Delilah’s room. Lenard turned toward those men as they
rapidly ascended the steps.
    “Hey, this is private
property!” Lenard yelled “You get the hell out of here right…” An
excessively painful hold upon the soft of Lenard’s shoulder halted
his heated demand before he could finish. He winced in pain as the
grip forced him to return to the chair. The agent who had spoken
with him loomed over him with his hand still on his shoulder,
though he had let up on the pressure.
    “Mr.
Hanson, we are federal agents. We need to speak with your
daughter, immediately …it is a matter of
national security.” The agent drew his face close to Lenard’s as he
spoke (as if that were necessary, considering Lenard’s shoulder
felt as if it had been all but broken). Lenard, still grimacing
from the smarting in his shoulder, opened his mouth, but only he
and God knew if he was going to cooperate or if still had enough
fire in him to merit another painful hold, because before he could
get any words out, his daughter’s ear-shattering scream filled the
room. Obviously, the men had found their target. The agent holding
Lenard’s shoulder stood upright just in time to watch two
specially-trained men restraining a very animated Delilah with a
good measure of difficulty.
    They brought her down the
stairs with perhaps more difficulty (and certainly more expletives)
than would’ve been rendered by a hardened terrorist. She was taken
outside to one of the black trucks waiting there. The agent placed
his hand again upon Lenard’s shoulder (the very same spot as
before, no less) and kindly advised him to remain calm.
    “Your daughter will not be
harmed,” was the only consolation he offered Lenard as they both
listened to her panicked screams die out behind the thick armoring
of specially-plated SUV doors. She yelled for her daddy to help
her, but to no avail. All Lenard could do was look on and
impudently demand answers that he may never be given from men he
had never seen before. Meanwhile, the truck into which Delilah had
been loaded, drove off of the Hanson property, accompanied by five
or six identical black trucks. Delilah, now in the back seat of the
truck, behind a thick iron grating that separated her from the
cockpit, was still kicking and screaming—quite literally—for
immediate release.
    One of the agents was
sitting in the back with her, so naturally, he found himself the
recipient of most of her verbal and physical duress. She spat, she
clawed, she yelled, she thrashed, and basically did anything that
would make this whole fiasco as uncomfortable for the strange
suited men around her as it was for her. After sustaining more than
one or two bloody scratches from his fiery patron, the agent in the
back gave Delilah a single warning that she should calm down or
else. Of course, she didn’t calm down, so the ‘or else’ came in the
form of device that looked like a very miniature flashlight. The
first opening the agent got in between Delilah’s hazardously
hysterical thrashing, he pressed the device hard against her neck.
Five tiny syringe heads pierced her skin, and almost
instantaneously, her limbs went slack. She slumped down with little
more than a weak whimper onto the truck door nearest her. Her head
bumped helplessly against the window with the truck’s movement for
a few moments, until the agent sat her limp body up straight where
her head could lay back on the seat, and so, with her head back and
mouth agape, she gave no further problem.
    When she returned to
consciousness, she was lying on a bed in a dimly-lit white room.
Immediately, she tried to return to her screaming and thrashing
fit, but somehow, her body wouldn’t cooperate. She calmed down
enough to lift her head and see that she was restrained. A thick
leather strap bound each of her ankles, another, her midsection,
another, her