Tales from the P.A.D.

P.E.T.S.O.

The Paranormal Anomaly Department is not the only organization in the world that deals with things outside of the ordinary. Throughout history, different groups working for different purposes have taken an interest in anomalies. Hitler and the Nazis had their special division, the Russians and Americans had an anomaly race alongside the space race, and there have probably been countless other such groups lost to time. Today, there is one group of interest that rivals the P.A.D. and could very well end the world if they had their way. I am referring to People for the Ethical Treatment of Supernatural Organisms, aka P.E.T.S.O.

P.E.T.S.O. was born of ignorance. They see anomalies that look and sound like innocent people and animals and think that this makes them the same. They think that having anomalous properties doesn't make them less deserving of rights. They could not be further from the truth. If not for the fact that they keep the anomalous a secret to protect said anomalies, I fear that life as we know it would have ended long ago. We agree on nothing else but that ordinary people cannot be trusted with the paranormal.

We are always on guard against them. Sometimes they will attempt raids of our facilities. Sometimes they will try to sneak their members into our organization as new recruits. Most dangerous of all, however, is their insidious propaganda. I've seen it firsthand.

I was a low-ranking guard at Site 12 at the time. My job was to monitor the cameras watching the anomaly in cell 13A. I was not alone in this task. There were three others in the room with me at all times watching the anomaly from different angles, and periodically our boss, Agent Ramirez, would come in to get a status update and keep us on our toes. She was cold, aloof, and intimidating. All it would take is a sideways glare from her to get you sitting straight up and focused on the task at hand. She was a woman of few words, but when she spoke, you listened.

The anomaly we guarded had the appearance of a young girl no more than ten years old. It had the voice to match too. Perhaps it was once human, but any trace of that was long gone by the time we had it locked up. We still treated it as fairly and kindly as we could. We did not keep it restrained and provided it with toys to play with. The only thing we withheld from it was access to people. It was because of how it affected others that we had it locked up in the first place.

It apparently enjoyed playing the game of tag. We don't know how long it had its anomalous properties or how many died by its hands, but it eventually came to our attention as all these things do. We discovered that if it touched a person and declared them to be "it," then that person would die in exactly one hour on the dot. The way they died varied and would always appear to be an accident. A car might lose control and hit them on the sidewalk. A window washer would drop a bucket and it would land on the person's head. A mugger might stab them to death. Whatever the method, it always happened after exactly sixty minutes and it was always lethal.

I didn't know at the time how long it had been in custody, only that it had been there for longer than I. None of us working with it were new. We had all seen things and knew better than to pity the anomaly. Rumor was that Agent Ramirez was the sole survivor from the team that retrieved the anomaly, but we were all too afraid to ask if it was true.

For two and a half months, nothing of note occurred. I clocked in, quietly watched, and clocked back out. I was starting to get comfortable. Once the next Monday came around, our quiet workplace exploded.

When I say it exploded, I mean that in the most literal sense. A P.E.T.S.O. strike team had used plastic explosives to infiltrate the site. Ramirez ordered us to stay put before drawing her pistol and rushing toward the echoing sounds of gunfire. Seconds turned into minutes as the base reverberated with the ratatat of bullets and the occasional scream when one of those bullets found its mark. There was eventually a final shot, and then there was silence. We received radio confirmation that the threat had been neutralized and that all anomalies were still in containment. We had won, or so I thought.

Later that day I was called aside by Agent Ramirez to monitor an interrogation of one P.E.T.S.O. operative that we had managed to take alive. I stood outside and watched through the two-way mirror as she began her interrogation. She sat down across from the operative, a shaken white woman no older than thirty who had a still-bleeding cut on her left arm. The audio through the speaker mounted outside had a bit of static distortion, but it was still clear to me what was being said.

"We can do this the easy way or the hard way. You know what we have. You know what we can do."

"I know, I know," said the operative as she stated at the cold metal table. "I'll tell you what you want. I have no reason to lie and I know I can't keep secrets. I just want you to hear me out."

Ramirez crosses her arms. "What was your team's goal."

"We just wanted to save Sarah."

Ramirez looked puzzled. "Who is Sarah?"

The operative fought back tears and gulped before answering, "She's my daughter. It's not her fault."

"What is not her fault? Be clear and stop crying. Speak." The woman struggled to calm herself. "Now."

"She always loved playing tag with her father. They had so much fun together. I don't know what caused it, but all the trouble started after he left."

Ramirez and I both realized around the same time which anomaly she was referring to. "You are speaking of the anomaly in cell 13A. How did you acquire knowledge that it was here?"

The woman was unable to hold back her tears anymore. "She's a girl, not an it. She's my Sarah. You know what it's like to be a mother, don't you? You have tounderstand. You have to..." She trailed off as her sorrow overcame her.

Agent Ramirez tried and failed to get her to stop crying, and so the interrogation was finished. The operative had cooperated, and so she was simply held in an empty cell without applying any advanced interrogation techniques.

I was ordered not to speak of what was said to anyone who didn't need to know. It was certainly shocking to me at the time. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew the anomaly probably had parents, but to see firsthand the ordinary human who had created and raised it was something else. That information was compelling enough that I didn't think too hard about anything else that was said. I doubt it would have gone differently, but perhaps I could have been more prepared.

Two weeks went by where I would watch over the interrogations conducted by Ramirez. The captured P.E.T.S.O. agent was compliant. Although most of the information she gave could not be verified, some of it matched theories we already had and none of it was demonstrably false. She was a veritable goldmine, and the higher-ups wanted Ramirez to keep her talking as much as possible. With each interrogation, Ramirez would ask less and listen more.

One day at work, she came in and ordered all of us to leave. She claimed it was for maintenance. The others all left without a word, but I stayed. I knew.

"Go on," she said.

"Don't do this."

"She is just a little girl. You know this isn't right."

"It is not a girl."

"She's the same age as my own. They could have been playmates." I didn't know that Agent Ramirez had a daughter. It made sense, though. I wondered if anything the P.E.T.S.O. operative had said was true. Maybe she wanted to be captured just to get access to Ramirez. She had known just what to say and who to say it to. She may have been cold as ice, but ice can still crack.

"Just walk away. Take some time to think about this. You'd be throwing away your life." I wanted to keep her talking as I slowly reached for my gun in its holster.

"And if I didn't act, I would be throwing away my soul." She raised her own firearm at me just as I retrieved mine.

We stood, our eyes locked, as we silently dared the other to make a move. Five seconds passed, and the silence was broken. The facility's halls echoed one final time with the bang of a single gunshot.

I was transferred out to a new site. Nobody had witnessed the event and it was swept under the rug. I'm recording these events for posterity's sake, and at this point, I don't even think anyone else involved still works at the P.A.D. While I never learned of what happened to that operative, I sincerely doubt that she survived the rest of that day, let alone that she could still be alive now. Whether she lives or not, P.E.T.S.O. lives on, and we will continue to fight the good fight until we have won. When you treat monsters like men, you make monsters of men.