The Preparation | Teen Ink

The Preparation

October 2, 2017
By adriana.carter BRONZE, Augusta , Kansas
adriana.carter BRONZE, Augusta , Kansas
1 article 0 photos 0 comments

The government, cold and corrupt, the only way they can fix their mistakes is to cover it up with more of them; this time they had gone too far. It was a beautiful idea if all the dead families weren’t taken into consideration. Survival of the fittest. He had it written out like an advertisement for death.

“Reese you need to wake up; you’re going to miss the bus,” Diane said to her daughter, turning the knob to her room to find it locked.
“Ray’s coming to pick me up for school,” Reese snaps back.
“Ray?” Diane pauses and then resumes, “The 20-year-old Ray? Reese, you’re an 18-year-old girl; you shouldn’t be hanging out with 20 year olds. Why don’t you hang out with people your age? You just turned 18; you’re just a baby.”
“Mom, I’m not a little girl anymore. Stop treating me like one,” at this time Reese unlocks her door and opens it to find her mother standing on the other side. “I really hope you don’t do this to Marney when she’s my age because if you do, you’re not going to have anyone.”
Reese storms off downstairs and out the door.
Marney hears the argument between her mother and older sister and comes out of her room.
“Everything okay?
Diane smiles it off and walks over to Marney
“Yes, baby. Everything is okay. You need to go and get your backpack, you’re going to miss the bus.”
Marney gathers her things and heads out the front door. On her way out Diane yells,
“I might have to work late tonight at the Station, but I shouldn’t be longer than 5:30.”
  “Okay!” Marney yells as her voice fades out into the distance and is covered up by the fall winds.
Diane is a police officer in their little town of Dexter. She works a typical 10-4 shift, sometimes she has to stay later to work on her files and try to get her quota in. At least, that’s what Marney and Reese think. Diane has a special job that not even her own daughters know about. She is an undercover investigator for the government. For the last year and a half, she has been gathering information on different families and returning them to the boss of her branch to give to his boss. It’s a big process, but it all works out in the end as long as she gets the money she needs on payday for bills. She has no idea what they need those files for, but she has a job and must do whatever she needs to do. She’s been a “police” officer for about 8 years. Diane has seen a lot of messed up situations, but none compared to what is to come her way.
Ramsey Wilson; cold as ice. If a person is to ever have beef with somebody, he is definitely not the one you would want to have it with. He is tall and handsome, no doubt, he’s got dark- green, intimidating eyes that can manipulate anyone into doing just about anything. He has dark brown hair, he wears it short and is clean cut, he always seems to wear the same suit or same kind of suit.
“Richardson. My office please.” Ramsey Wilson, Diane’s boss, says to Diane the second she steps into the building.
Diane paces into Ramsey's office without even being able to set her stuff down at her desk.
“What are your plans for the day?” Ramsey asks with his feet kicked up on his desk
“Well, I was thinking about going back to the Browns’ house to gather some more analysis.”
“Okay. Well instead of that, I need you to go and pick up some files that Kernel Doug has shipped from overseas, they should be in our post office here on the base.” 
“Okay. May I ask what they are for?”
“They are the files you did a few months ago that we sent to my boss and we are getting the results back,” Ramsey says with a reassuring smile.
Diane says okay, and she starts for the door.
“What do you even do with those reports I return back to you once I have finished note taking the families?”
Ramsey’s smile slowly turns upside down and he answers “What?”
“Well, I mean I’ve been going to all sorts of families for the past year and a half, and I was just wondering what the purpose was?”
Ramsey stands up, walks over to Diane, gets in her face, and says “in a sort of whisper as if he didn’t want anyone to know what the were talking about.” “Those files are crucial to our branch, they are essential. If you cannot understand that, then we can find someone else that will.”
She stares at him for a second without saying anything because it was as if someone else had said that. She’s never seen that side of Ramsey, ever.
Diane steps out the door and walks over to the base’s post office since it wasn’t too far. When she arrives, Diane walks upstairs to the right to pick up the package in Ramsey's box. She saw the label it read “The Preparation.” She wouldn’t have been that interested in the name if it wasn’t for the little discussion Ramsey and Diane had before she went to the post office, at the time she just brushed it off and went back to the office. Diane went into Ramsey's office and left the package on his desk for the day. As the day came to an end, she heads outside to her car and realized her keys weren’t with her. She must’ve left them in Ramsey’s office this morning. She had to ask the janitor to open the door because Ramsey wasn't at the office anymore; he usually goes home at about 4:00. When she walked in, she couldn’t see her keys anywhere. They weren’t in the seat she sat in, and the keys were not on his desk. She decided to look on the floor for it and somehow she ends up by his desk looking around. Diane then hears his computer make a noise as if he was getting a notification or an email; she looks up. It’s an email from an unknown sender that read: 
“It’s almost go time. Just waiting for the mother to get home. Both of the children are home.”
Diane doesn’t understand the email and disregarded it. Then she saw the mysterious package on Ramsey’s desk and decided to finally take a peak. She opened it to find a small stack of papers that were filled out from top to bottom that had all sorts of different families names. As she started flipping from page to page she realize that in the middle there was a divide that separated some of the names. They each had a heading, one was labeled “superior families” and the other the “inferior families”. She looked down the long list and saw her family on the inferior list. These names have been the names she has been analyzing for the past year and a half. Then she saw something that gave her chills, down along with all the other “inferior” families, was “The Richardsons, 1322 E. Arnold St.”
She quickly looks at that email once more to make sure where the email was sent from and sees that it was sent from a nearby library not too far from their house.
Diane starts rushing home, pulls her cell phone out and calls her kids to let them know what's going on. She then she throws the phone out the window because she knows that her phone calls can easily be traced. Freaking out, Diane arrives at her house, and locks the door, runs upstairs, and grabs her gun. She knows what is about to happen. She gathers both Reese and Marney to have a small, but fast, talk.
“So, I have something I need to tell you girls, I'm not an actual police officer I'm a..”
At that time they hear a knock on the door. Reese starts to head for the door when Diane yells, “Reese! DO NOT open that door.”
Reese is confused and rolls her eyes and continues for the door. She opens the door and the actions being so quick, It was like the door opens and then bam. Reese is now on the floor, blood pouring out of her stomach. Two men step in the door wearing all black and masks to hide their faces. The taller bigger one with a shotgun steps over the soulless body and says as if he was happy to be what he was doing,
“Let the termination begin.”
Marney screams and runs upstairs. They start shooting toward her, but she is so small that she dodges the bullets. Diane pulls her gun out and starts shooting, from behind a couch. It was definitely a standoff. One of the men starts moving upstairs to head after Marney and Diane decide no matter if it is government controlled she needed to at least try and get ahold of the police; so she calls 911.
Picking up the phone, she realizes the line is dead. She starts to silently cry and is scared. She starts to lose hope and give in. Then she looks over at her daughter lying on the floor and remembers how just that morning they were arguing, and the last thing Reese said to her was that she wasn’t going to have anyone. Diane wipes her tears and turns around toward the man shooting at her. She looks down at her gun and sees she only has two bullets left.
She lifts her gun up and aims it towards his way, and fires. It hits him in the forehead and he falls to the floor.
“Where the heck are my neighbors right now? Why haven’t they helped me?”
Diane looks out her front door and hears gunshots all over her neighborhood. She can see her neighbors crying for help. She then realizes that it wasn’t just her family; it was all the other families who were considered “inferior”. She couldn’t believe that after all of these years of her being able to “trust” her job, they would turn on her just like that. It was a killing spree. She couldn’t help but feel guilty for all of this because these were the families she analyzed, all the blood she saw was on her hands.
Marney screams snap Diane out of her little trance, and she runs upstairs to see one of the men trying to break the door down that led to the bathroom where Marney had locked herself into. Diane pulls her gun out and shoots him in the leg and he falls to the floor. Screaming in pain, the man drops his gun and grabs his leg, holding it with pressure as if it will magically start to feel better. Diane runs over, kicks the gun out of his hand, grabs Marney, and gets into the car.
“What just happened?!?!” Marney says.
“So, the thing I needed to tell you, well... You see, I'm not a police officer.”
“Excuse me?”
“Yeah, I’m part of the government as an undercover investigator who investigates anything they tell me to investigate.”
“So you’ve been lying this whole time. This is YOUR job mom; you’re one of them. YOU killed Reese.”
Diane slaps Marney across the faces and says
“Don’t you ever say that! No. I am not one of them. I am done with them.”
Diane and Marney go to the base to speak with her boss. She figured he would be there after this evening's slaughter. Since everyone is being killed off, the base was very hard to get into, but Diane and Marney end up getting in somehow.
She is very accurate. He was indeed in his office to make sure “Operation Preparation” was running smoothly. She barges in the door, she physically feels her face heat up, her voice quivering she shakes, and cries.
“D-Diane... What are you doing here? I thought you would’ve..”
“Been dead?? Yeah. I guess you underestimated me after all. Huh, Ramsey?”
Ramsey starts to smile and turns to his big window in his office and looks over the base “Can you really not see the beauty in all of this?” He spreads his arms, “The plan is perfect. It’s for our country.”
“In what ways is this for our country?!”
“Let me just tell you, there have been reports of multiple terrorist attacks and there have been threats that they will come back and take out every single one of us until we are no more. With in-home shootings and stick-ups, and robberies we are weak. We started to analyze ourselves to see where we stand in the self-defense and combat and we scored so low as a country it was crazy. Our plan was that we would kill off the weak and leave the strong, survival of the fittest. The plan is going a lot better than we thought; we’ve already gotten rid of about 15 families, and we’re still going up; next month we’ll move up North and start the elimination around Dunston. So I guess you probably want to know why we chose your family. I mean, after all, you are one of us, so you probably thought you wouldn’t have been on the list right? Well, Diane, when push comes to shove, you’re just too nice, and there was no way that you would be okay with us killing a bunch of people, especially the people very close to you. So why have you around to kill the plan before it even starts? This plan is far too explicit and beautiful to let some buzz kill mother get in the way of it.
“You’re insane.”
“You will see the true beauty when it comes into play.”
“No. I am done. I quit, and now everyone knows the ‘true beauty’ of your messed up plan.”
Diane pulls out a tape recorder, runs out the door, and continues to run until she gets to the car and drives until she can no longer see the base. The people on the base just let her go, they didn’t think she was going to get far with the evidence she gathered.
A few months later the news was out and everyone was raging about the plan that was once considered “gold”. Everything is never going to go back to normal, but Diane and Marney like to believe that it is going to be alright, and they continue and hope to ignore their past. The government has left Diane and Marney alone, but it didn’t make sense on why they would; maybe they know not to mess with Diane because she was a lot stronger and “superior” than they thought. One morning a neighbor from down the street came up to the door and had talked to Diane about something that happened just the other week. Marney was headed to the bus stop, and on her way there Marney was picked up in an untagged black vehicle. It looked like Marney was sort of distressed and then she didn’t get dropped off until 8 hours later. The neighbor took the picture of the driver to see if Diane knew him. Once she saw the picture she started to cry. It was Ramsey Wilson.


The author's comments:

What inspired me to write this story was me, myself, and I. I had a dream similar to what had happened and I felt that it would be a really good story. Of course, not everything in the story happened in my dream, but I had to fill in the spaces and make it less of a dream and more of a story. 


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