"Lemme try to think where to begin," Shelby said, sitting down on a rock in front of Michelle.
"How about what the hell you guys meant by 'how much time does she have left', huh? I think that's a wonderful fucking place to start!" interjected Michelle, who was growing tired of waiting for answers.
Shelby sighed, taking a deep swallow from a nearby bottle of Jack Daniels. "Look, you remember when we were kids? How we'd hear stories of weird shit going on out at the lake? You remember, right? people disappearing, fucked up animals, bodies being found?"
Michelle nodded, a feeling of dread knotting itself into a ball in her stomach. Then she heard the words she truly feared. "All the stories, hun? All true. Not designed to scare kids to keep them from fucking out here on the weekends. Not made to teach us the evils of drugs and alcohol. They were all true."
Michelle began to cry softly, tears running down her face. She wiped them away angrily, but found herself unable to keep from crying. "Go on," she told them in a choked voice.
"Over there, across the lake," Shelby gestured to a point obscured by darkness and a low-lying fog that hung on the water, "that used to be a military outpost. But not for the army or navy. For the NSA-the National Secuirity Agency. Real black ops shit." She took another long drink from the bottle, "You alright, Michelle? You want me to keep going?" she asked, he words slightly slurred from her rapid consumption of the high-proof beverage. Michelle simply nodded, a far away look in her eyes.
"Their big project was to create some sort of a super spy, one that could be deployed either domestically or internationally. one that could blend in seamlessly, yet take down a ton of people if his or her cover was blown. A lot of their work involved bioengineering, or biological chemicals." Again, Shelby took a long drink from the bottle, letting out a large belch.
"Eventually, either government funding dried up, or they moved the whole thing. Other people say that some sort of major accident occurred. Nobody really knows, at least nobody that's talking about it. But one thing's for sure: a lot of their materials got dumped into the lake when they left. Now the remnants of the chemicals are in everything out here. The lake, the ground, the trees,....when it rains, the rain is tainted by it, and when it evaporates, the air is tainted by it. Hell, you were probably infected within an hour of us coming out here; drinking the water just sped up the process a bit." Shelby laughed quietly, somewhat under her breath, a soft chuckle. It seemed insanely inappropriate, and rather out of place, given the topic.
"But if I was infected since the moment I got here..." Michelle paused, trying to gather her thoughts, "wouldn't you guys be infected too?"
Shelby chuckled again. " I kinda wondered if you'd catch that bit of logic, hun. Yeah, Tom and I've been infected for a long time. We've been coming to this place off and on for a couple of years now. Tom showed it to me."
"So then, what's going to happen to me?" Michelle asked, her heart pounding a triphammering beat. She wanted to scream, to run down the shoreline again, to get away from this horror movie she'd fallen into. At the same time, she wanted answers. So she stayed, fighting her fear and her instincts.
"Well," Shelby said, hopping off of the rock," it'd be much easier to show you." She was grinning maniacally from Michelle to Tom and back to Michelle again. Handing Michelle the bottle (nearly half empty by this point) Shelby told her, "You're probably gonna want this in a minute."