Unit 5A9 Is Saving Lives

Short psychological horror story

The dry grasses swelled over the concrete slabs and whispered out into the nowhere space between the borderwall and the final block of Unit 5A9. The grown ups weren’t allowed play there, the barracks firing bullets at random if they approached. But they tolerated the smaller children, watching silently through binoculars and drones as they made chains of wild poppies and made pets from field mice.

Alice was six by that hot dry summer of 2059, running barefoot through the crumbling tenements with the other feral children. No one could afford the shoe ration, as the Protectors didn’t like to encourage people to leave their homes unless it was necessary. There was a bright red poster neatly pinned to the side of 5A9’s council offices, mouthless figures holding up bundles of wheat and triumphant flags. Above the picture, in hard white lettering, were the words Alice had been able to read before her own name.

UNIT 5A9 IS SAVING LIVES

Unit 5A9 was saving lives. In the official figures, no one had brought a foreign virus or infection into the unit for over 21 years. All 19,061 of the diseased citizens had been taken to the Safe Zone to be terminated. The citizens of 5A9 were law abiding, hygienic, and risk averse. The minute a neighbour developed a cough or a cold, the community knew to do their bit and inform the Protectors straight away. They knew to call for a surveillance drone when someone had secretly removed their mask or left their homes without a legal permission. Children under ten had been voted exempt from punishment, begrudgingly, although many parents decided to keep their children locked in private anyway. “We all have to do our bit,” Mrs Harrissey at №82B had sniffed. “My boy George has never left our flat, he hasn’t. We care about others in my household.”

“You’re just worried he’d sneeze in public and get terminated,” Alice’s Mama had snapped back at her, wringing the washing over the railings. “No wonder that boy is so sickly, never a day in sunlight or fresh air.” Mrs Harrissey’s forehead had turned bright red at that, storming back to a slammed door.

“Mama, what happens when someone terminates you?” Alice asked, wondering if what the boys playing out in the fields said was true or just silly stories made up to frighten little girls. Her mother sighed, taking a little too long to answer.

“Well, if you are found to be infectious, the Protectors come and help you,” Mama said. “They take you in a special van to the safe zone and make you safe by terminating your citizenship. That way you can’t leave the zone and make more people poorly.”

“What if you get better?”

Mama didn’t like this question, Alice could tell. “Well, sometimes a disease is sleeping in your body, and that’s called latency. And the Protectors want us all to be safe, so we make sure you are kept safe forever far away from the other people. We’re saving lives.”

Alice wondered whether she should ask Mama more about the Safe Zone, or what lay beyond the borderwall. Adults tended to answer questions in a way that didn’t answer anything at all. The teachers simply said that Unit 5A8 was behind the borderwall, which wasn’t very helpful at all. If you asked them why the soldiers wouldn’t let you play close to the border, the answer was that it was dangerous. If you asked them whether grown ups took off their masks in the bath, the answer was that would be dangerous, too. And anything that was a mystery was always answered with the blanket fact that they were saving lives.

“Why did Grandma die if we are saving lives?” Alice had asked, on that hot August day as the soapy water ran glistening over the tenement steps. “Couldn’t we have sent her to the Safe Zone?” Her Mama had glared at her, saying nothing and wiping her hands on her apron. “Your Grandma wasn’t a diseased person, and no one in this family has ever been,” she said sternly. “Don’t you ever speak of it again.”

And so Alice had sullenly wandered the streets down to the nowhere space, and picked at the cottonheaded grasses and threw their seeds up into the blue sky. The wind was picking up, the sea of sward and wilting poppies whispering towards the borderwall. Alice suddenly froze. There was a great helicopter coming in over the borderwall, all silver and red, fluttering like a bird as it was waived through the airspace. It hovered, high over the wastelands, then closer and closer, slowly lowering down at around fifty paces away. The blades had slowed, and out stepped a man in a foreign looking suit, his hands covered in rings. Alice looked up at his face and screamed.

He wasn’t wearing a mask.

The man looked straight at her, his eyes cold and hard. “Get rid of the child,” he said briskly to the other strange men, tying a mask around his mouth. “God knows what will happen if they find out we don’t wear them anymore.”