Quarantine

The rumors started circling around about everything that was going on. Grim had heard at least twenty different stories about a girl who had freaked out in school yesterday. He cringed from how bad this town is. Instead of them worrying if the little girl was alright, they wanted to talk about how they hoped that their child wasn’t there or that their son or daughter wouldn’t do something like that. He wanted to puke at how shallow some of the people were being.

He was even thinking about why he decided to work at the diner where the whole town went to gossip. No one called at talked about it on the phone. They all met up at Avery’s Diner to talk about the newest rumor or to catch up with friends as Devon’s mother called it.

It had always been like this with the women of Four Trees. They came here with their mothers as they grew up. When they were old enough and had daughters, they brought them here with them. This was the spot to go to talk because Four Trees’ mother would give them all free coffee or free water. The only thing that Ramona charged them for was the soft drinks, but that was a recent thing since she was needing more money to fix the machine.

“You know all this is happening in this town. I had called my cousin in Waterville and asked her if anything like this was happening. She told me that the only thing they have going on is the flu and the cold,” Meredith said with a cautious tone in her voice. She always said things like this if she was working up to a point.

Grim could hear her clearly since she was sitting right next to the entrance of the kitchen. He felt like turning on the radio, but he would still have to keep it low enough so he wouldn’t bother the customers.

“I asked my brother who lives out there two, and I got the same answer,” a female voice agreed. Devon probably knew who this was, but he couldn’t see her face. Her voice was kind of hushed compared to Meredith’s, making it hard to name to owner of the voice.

“I think it’s some kind of new drug. The old man flipped out, and he was most definitely on some drug. Maybe it’s an experimental drug that they are just now starting to test on humans. The little girl had gone into the hospital a few weeks before this incident,” Meredith continued. “It makes sense. There are already medicines that cause hallucinations.”

Grim wanted to slap her just for thinking that was possible. She was one of the firm believers of the wall and getting the flu shot. He knew that something was up with the wall and the shot. A part of him blamed her for pushing it through because since she was backing it the whole town did. Only a few people of the town had the courage to not give in to all her wants and desires. There were even fewer people who had the courage to stand up to her. Grim was one of the rare ones as the town calls it, but he also knew when to keep his mouth shut.

“What’s got your mind locked up?” Big Rudy asked, standing next to Grim.

“The town of Four Trees,” he replied simply and earned a laugh from the older cook. A small smile formed on Devon’s face. “This whole mess in general. They act like that what’s going on won’t happen to them.”

“You need to give them more credit. Just because they won’t say it out loud doesn’t mean that they aren’t afraid of being affected by whatever it was,” Rudy pointed out. “They are just so much of a chicken that they won’t admit.”

Devon nodded as he took in his co-worker’s words. He could understand it for several reasons. He didn’t tell anyone about the shock from the tree the other day. He still didn’t want to believe it. Luckily, no one saw what happened, or at least he didn’t notice anyone that would have saw him. He wanted to make sense of what happened and wanted to talk to someone about it, but he knew that everyone would look at him like he was crazy and treat him as if he was some sort of disease.

“Oh, you know that I’m right,” Big Rudy said, laughing.

“I didn’t say that you were wrong,” Devon replied, shaking his head slightly.

The sound of Meredith talking again caused Devon and Big Rudy both to cringe. Her scratchy voice was starting to get worse than nails on a chalk board. The two cooks wished that she chose some other spot to sit, but they were really going to need to learn to deal with it, seeing how there was nothing that they could do about it.

“I think that they need to take the drug off the market and find something else that they know already works,” Meredith said like she was some sort of queen. She didn’t like that it was going on in ‘her’ town, and she was going to get it pushed out. The only thing that could stop her from achieving that would be the government.

Meredith’s theory was wrong, of course. It would be a shock to her that she supported the ideas and allowed it to come in. She was just one of those people who thought in the here and now and not actually thing about what is going to happen in the long run. She held grunges and tried to make her ‘enemies’ look like fools for pissing her off. She was just overgrown baby that threw fits when she didn’t get what she wanted or when she was made to look like an idiot.

One of the people that she hated the most was the guy who was cooking her food. She always wanted to find a way to get him fired from doing something wrong. Devon knew what she was up to and always made her food the best he ever cooked, just so that Meredith Jameson would not have anything to complain about. He had learned her tricks from growing up in Four Trees, and he knew just how to deal with her which seemed to piss her off more than anything else.