Socially Appropriate Distancing - Part 3

Author: bigsmile21
Title: Socially Appropriate Distancing - Part 3
Date: 25 April 2020

It's been two weeks since Freddy's arrest. More of the country has acknowledged the threat of the new virus, leading to city-wide lockdowns. Grandview, for its part, has seen reduced public gatherings after Officer Hawkins' news briefing. People are adjusting to their new work-from-home life, families are spending more time together (for better or worse), and Grandview's main hospital has been able to keep pace with the developing cases.

Freddy has also been adjusting to his new life: the solitude, the restriction, and the humiliation. Officer Hawkins played up the conditions of the converted offices to the media. Or was he intentionally vague? Freddy had trouble remembering, his brain dull from boredom. Though he couldn't see, around his "cell" was someone else's pictures and clutter. Freddy was in one out of a row of cubicles on this floor. Across from him was a desk with files and a computer, turned off. Above him were rows of florescent lights.

He was sitting on the floor, secured to one of the cubicle walls. The walls were four feet high, beige, and there were three walls in total. The fourth wall of the cubicle was open. He was wrapped from the head down in the same type of rubber straps that had ensnared John at the party. He'd gone through various stages of escape attempts but movement and communication were limited.

He'd been hungry at first, but then woke up and wasn't. He couldn't remember going to sleep. Just being tired after his efforts at escape and waking up sometime later refreshed, but cramped. His muscles were sore from head to toe, with his head still slightly throbbing. There was something in his mouth, a plastic taste that he couldn't chew. A tube? Breathing was more difficult now, so he had to focus on breathing slowly through his nose. At times something moved down the tube and he felt mush drop into his stomach. He couldn't back the tube out or block the mush with his tongue. He felt less human with each new pump of mush, spaced what felt like hours apart.

Officer Hawkins was furious at Officer Case. The rookie cop had used notecards for his filing system, then lost the notecards. After two weeks, nearly all the cubicles across three floors of the building were filled with rubber-wrapped culprits. Worse, Officer Case had started moving culprits to sort them by his notecards. His now lost notecards. This was a mess. Hawkins had no idea which cubicle housed which person. Or where his Buddys were.

Fortunately, fewer culprits were being brought in nowadays. And even more fortunately, Hawkins had assistance from the mayor with securing resources to care for his captives. Test kits for the virus were sent, with instructions to transfer any infected individuals to the hospital. Anyone not infected would remain in isolation, firstly as a punishment and secondly to reduce the number of people who could get infected. Representatives from the company that developed the wrap-rifle advised on how to insert the testing kit through the breathing holes of the rubber, as well as how to maneuver feeding tubes safely. The feeding tubes provided a liquid-only diet. Bed pans underneath the culprits solved that problem. Culprits could now be kept for longer term. Officer Case was put on prisoner maintenance duty: culprits were secured to their cubicles, feeding tubes were installed properly, and bed pans were emptied and cleaned regularly.

Finally, with the situation under some semblance control, Hawkins began thinking through how he could break in his Buddys. Because of the shuffle, he was unsure which ones were those he'd originally flagged. He could grill Case, but that might raise suspicion. He had a few spare rounds of wrap-rifle casings, so he weighed the option of randomly picking a few rubber forms he liked and seeing if what was underneath matched his liking. It would be like a surprise present to himself. And if he didn't like what he saw then he'd re-wrap them and move to the next cubicle. He had three sets of headphones which he planned to place them on the unwrapped heads of his selected Buddys, re-wrap them, and set the hypnosis audio tracks to repeat. Given the long-term forecasts of the lockdown, his Buddys would be moldable clay by the time he decided to remove their wrappings for the next stage of training.

That plan could have worked. Except Officer Hawkins never showed up to the detention building the next day, or throughout the week. The public announcement from the police department was that Officer Hawkins had chosen to step down to focus on his personal health. In truth, no one at the mayor's office knew where he was. Hawkins was just gone. Maybe the stress of the new detention duties finally got to him. Or the scale of the national pandemic. Or he got sick and didn't want to risk endangering his fellow cops. Other officers stepped in to fill the void left by him, ensuring the detention facility and its captives were well-attended to. The officer in charge of prisoner care seemed saddened when interviewed by the media, outside the detention building, but happy that people were following the mayor's order to stay indoors and not risk exposure.

After the interview, Officer Case took the elevator to the basement, unlocked a door at the end of the hallway, and shut it behind him. Insider were three rubber outlines, those of John, Freddy, and Officer Hawkins. He hadn't lost his notecards on indexing prisoners, just wanted to secure John and Freddy for himself. And he certainly hadn't appreciated being put on babysitting duty by Hawkins. Each body was laid down on the ground, weighted down by cords and weights. Feeding tubes ran from their mouths to an open trough, where he'd pour down the liquid nutrients when he'd visit twice a day. As an added touch, each rubber-wrapped body had the outline of a pair of headphones. By the end of lockdown, he'd have his own Buddys properly trained.