Annabelle had no training with a flashlight, and unintentionally glared the beam of light directly into the eyes of the young men who knelt next to the trench on her lawn. She shoved her metal hand into the pocket of her hooded sweatshirt, mentally chastising herself for forgetting her gloves as she looked down at the figures. The shorter, round faced member of the grey jumpsuit-clad dyad appeared almost childlike in his momentary fear, clutching what looked like a PSP to his chest as he stared up at Annabelle like a deer in the headlights. She almost smiled in sympathy at his awkward, messy blonde hair and obvious terror, but she remembered the comment about someone coming to kill her, and looked down to the figure that delivered it. The taller of the two men shuddered in obvious agony, his dark hair falling into his eyes as tears glittered on his muddy cheeks. They were both pale, even in the darkness, but this one was sheet white, as though he were going into shock. She blinked in a mixture of concern and distrust, and clenched her metal fist tighter in her pocket, burying it further.
“Her,” Sam croaked, looking up to Annabelle. Fred blinked, his free hand twitching toward his sidearm as he slid his console into one of his pockets. “She’s got the prosthetic, I saw her in the window.”
Annabelle paled at the revelation, and shrank away, taking a step back from them in the darkness. The attempt to shove her hand even further into her pocket caused her to unintentionally lift her hooded sweatshirt, like a bank robber motioning with a concealed weapon. It all but broadcast the truth of Sam’s statement.
Fred leapt to his feet in surprise, leaving Sam shuddering on the ground. He pointed his sidearm at Annabelle, who whimpered reflexively. It’s hard not to whimper when one points a gun at you, even if Annabelle could not immediately recognize what Fred held as a gun. The strange square device seemed to have a cutout for Fred to grip, but what constituted a barrel was a deep black square roughly the size of a can of soup. Like a snub nosed can of spam. She shivered, lowering her flashlight, and looked pleadingly between the prone man on the ground, who seemed to be slowly recovering, and the stocky fellow still pointing the spam gun at her.
“Please…don’t…fire that thing…”
A Black Stop is a simple, but grave protocol. In the event that an agent or element runs the risk of making contact with virgin soil, a Grey Stop is necessary to retrieve and/or contain said agent or element before it can contaminate an ecosystem or culture unfamiliar with it. One simply conceals their presence to the best of their ability and engages their necessary business. There are other reasons for a Grey Stop, a need for provisions, for example, and though such was the case in Sam and Fred’s situation, element retrieval was a strong priority.
If the agent or element makes contact before it is possible to contain or retrieve it, then a Grey Stop becomes a Black Stop, wherein all individuals and objects with which the agent or element has come in contact must be contained or destroyed. Exposure must be minimized, especially on Earth. Those bitches, as the manual states, be crazy.
Therefore, it was Sam and Fred’s solemn duty to contain or destroy Annabelle. Despite her clear concealment in the long sleeved, hooded sweatshirt, Sam had already noticed her through the kitchen window, and had seen that the venusium prosthetic had replaced the poor girl’s hand somehow. And while he was noticing her, he was becoming decidedly smitten with the first woman he’d seen in a while that wasn’t his mother, his aunt, or his supervisor, a feeling that only seemed to grow as she whimpered in worry, her eyes growing round and terrified, staring down the barrel of Fred’s sidearm. So, for Sam, destruction was not an option, and he needed to make sure that Fred was on the same page.
Sam slapped Fred in the leg, breathing deeply as he recovered. The nail and splinter sensation was slowly dying to a painful tingle, as though his leg had fallen deeply asleep. Fred’s already weak resolve to shoot Annabelle began to dampen, and Sam reached out to her as he began to rise to his feet. “If you want to live, you’re going to need to come with us.”
Annabelle blinked a few times as his statement processed through her stress-addled brain. “You mean…come with me if you want to live?” The Terminator joke she desperately wanted to make as a defense mechanism refused to come to her.
“Yeah, sure. Come with me if you want to live.” Sam looked down to her, brushing some mud from his coveralls and quickly tucking his own sidearm away into one of his coverall pockets. Fred followed suit, his eyes shifting between Sam and the girl, growing increasingly uncomfortable.
Annabelle chuckled nervously, and smiled at the taller man, who seemed to be regaining his color, but still shook with weakness from whatever travail had befallen him.
“Okay, but I’ve got to get some clothes or something.”
“That’s fine. We need some food.”
