Verde

Chapter 3: The Neighborhoods

     "They're so nice!" Dan was still grinning fifteen minutes after they had left The Coffeehouse.

     "I know," Elle hopped over a patch of grass sprouting through the dirt road.

     "We lived in the same tenement house," Cassidy had lived in one of the houses with Elle's family and the Carrel's all her life on Quarantine until the Verde facility.

     Cassidy was leading Elle and Dan back to the facility while they followed, talking about the Carrel's. Cassidy was silent. She was realizing just how long it had been since she had thought about the Neighborhoods, as the collective area outside of their facility had come to be called by the Verdes.

     They actually had a system. Each house sheltered multiple families, who didn't necessarily even know each other. Some of the families were just green-eyed adults taking care of children who weren't their own. Babies abandoned by infected parents. No family ever stayed together - the Pulse made it impossible.

     Each neighborhood was organized with the completely uninfected and Immune on the outskirts, but as people began to show signs of the Pulse, they were taken deeper into the neighborhoods. By Verdes.

     It was alright at the very edges of the settlements, but just a few streets in was were the crime started. The gangs. The infected people who showed some resilience to the Pulse, but used their extra breaths to terrorize the other residents of Quarantine - Immunes and infected alike.

     That was where the Verdes came in again - but no one went that deep into the Neighborhoods who wasn't a seasoned agent. Strange, how just a few years of comfort could erase your memory of hard times. It had erased Cassidy's memory of the rotting smell of death, the screams of victims, these very same streets of mangled houses and people -

     She stopped dead. Cassidy had been walking absently as she thought, and look where her feet had brought her.

     "What's the matt- Oh!" Dan stopped in shock, realizing that he was farther from the facility than he had ever been.

     Elle, on the other hand, had been here before, and Cassidy turned to see her own fear and recognition in her friends eyes. "It's our house," Elle's voice was barely a whisper.

     As her parents had gotten sicker, they had moved farther into their neighborhood, and Cassi and Elle, being Immune, had moved with them.

     In front of them, broken-down as ever, was the house they had lived in with the Carrel's. 

     "Elle," Cassidy's voice cracked. They had to leave.

     "Hey! Kids!" 

      That wasn't Elle.

     Cassidy whipped her head to the left. Two men, not more than a few years older than her, Elle, and Dan, were rounding a corner.

      Leering, they came closer, looking Cassidy up and down. Their sneers deepened as they took in her eyes. 

     "Immunes" One of them hissed. This far into a neighborhood, they had to be infected. And part of a gang.

     Cassidy turned and ran.

     Dan and Elle blurred in and out of focus ahead of her. She could hear the two men jeering behind her. They probably had knives, but if they were as infected as Elle's parents when they had lived here, they wouldn't be able to run.

     Of course, the gangs didn't care how deep they went into neighborhoods, even if they were still healthy. The men's footsteps pounded after Cassidy.