Firehouse Oasis 118

1. Bobby

It started with the disease. Idiopathic Adolescent Acute Neurodegeneration, otherwise referred to as I.A.A.N.

One year later, 98% of the United States' children were dead.

The other two percent though? The less said the better, was the opinion of most adults.

Bobby wished that not talking about it could make it stop being real for him too. But alas, every morning he still woke up in the same damn green scrubs.

What they didn't want to talk about is that those that survived were the ones they were afraid of, not the disease. Because the kids like Bobby, the ones who survived, they came out the other end different. They weren't kids anymore, they were Psi, at least according to the government.

As far as he knew, there were five different ways to be different, and they were color coded as such. Green meant you came out with heightened intelligence, blue meant you could move and manipulate objects with your mind, yellow meant you could manipulate electricity, orange meant you could manipulate the minds of others, and red meant you could manipulate fire.

So about a year and a half after the disease had first started, all the surviving kids had been rounded up and transported via school bus to 'rehabilitation centers'. Which was absolute bullshit, because there was absolutely no rehabilitation happening at Thurmond, which was the camp Bobby had been shipped off to. At Thurmond the only things in sight were aggressive guards with too much power, high watch towers and barbed fences, and a whole lot of grunt work for the kids to do.

Bobby hadn't seen a red or an orange in several years. He hadn't seen a yellow in almost as long either. They'd been taken away after his first year at the camp when they'd repeatedly performed increasingly violent escape attempts. At 19, though, he was old enough to know that 'took them away' almost definitely meant that they'd been killed. At least, that was likely the case for the reds and oranges, the yellows had supposedly been transferred to a yellows only facility better suited to keep them contained.

So the camp was only made up of greens and blues at this point. Well, except for him.

At thirteen, he'd been loaded off a bus at Thurmond and almost immediately watched some kid be dragged off while one of the guard dogs still bit at his leg. The guards, otherwise known as PSFs, yelled about an 'orange', and kids screamed bloody murder. He'd dared a peak over to the other bus where the kid had come from and saw a soldier lying in a pool of blood and more blood splattering the kids near her corpse.

It had been clear that being an orange wasn't a good thing, but he hadn't known the color system yet. He hadn't known that he too was an orange, that he probably deserved the same fate as the others. He'd just been thirteen and scared and knew that orange wasn't something he wanted to be here. So when the doctor had asked him if he'd been assigned a color, he'd said, with all the confidence he could muster, that he was green. A strange look had passed over the man's face but the doctor had just nodded and marked him as green.

Now though, six years later, he was still hiding amongst the greens like a fox in the hen house. He damn well knew that he should be honest, just march up to one of the guards and tell them what he was. He deserved it, after what he'd done to his family, he definitely deserved it. Still though, his survival instinct was a bit too strong and he just couldn't manage the courage to sign his own death warrant. So everything went on as normal.

That was, at least, until the white noise.

It'd been a normal day, he'd been marching with the rest of the greens back to their bunk for the night when it started. The white noise wasn't new, it was a sound they played over the speakers that only the Psi could hear, and it was a debilitating sound on the best of days.