The guard led me over to a small shed-like building attached to the hangar. He punched in key commands and a metal door slid open.

“You enter the quarantine zone through here,” said the guard. “We’ll lock the door behind you.”

“Is there a phone in there? How will my family be alerted of my whereabouts?”

The guard shook his head. “Don’t worry. That’s all been taken care of.”

I clenched my fists and swallowed my anger. I brushed past him, heading into the quarantine zone.

“Okay,” said the guard. “We’ll open the next door after we’ve sealed this first one. If you don’t enter the hangar, we’ll come in there and exterminate you.”

He punched in the key commands again and the door slid closed, sealing me off from the outside.

The room was a cold concrete square. A metal door slid open, granting me entrance into the airport hangar. The open doorway revealed a pitch black room. The darkness was impenetrable. A stench wafted out from the hangar’s entrance. It was like a mixture of rotten meat and shit combined. The smell made me not want to go any further. The guard’s voice cut through my thoughts: we’ll exterminate you. I lifted my t-shirt above my nose and stepped into the room.

The metal door slid closed behind me. The lights above flickered on and the sight was unbelievable. Horrible. This was the quarantine facility?

The floor was a sea of corpses. A few wrangled on the ground in their own vomit, moaning, but the majority of them were dead. In the furthest corner across the hangar was a heap of bodies, the mound like a pile of garbage at a scrapyard. Instead of rubber bags and broken bottles, there were bloated limbs and the occasional head, frozen in its last contorted gasp of life. They were empty husks, their skins saggy and hollow like deflated balloons. A snapshot of my future.

My stomach churned. I spun around and banged on the sliding door. “You have to let me out of here!”

I banged on the steel door with my fist until it was red and aching. “Shit!”

I leant my head against the wall. What the hell am I going to do?

An odd gurgle echoed from behind. I turned around and scanned the bodies. “Is someone else in here? Hello?”

Emerging from behind the tent was a pale dismembered hand clenched between the mouth of a wrinkled old lady. The woman had long sweaty gray hair with patches of red blood stains. Her eyes were yellow and her nose was scrunched like a vicious wolf. She crouched on the ground, her arms hanging between her legs. She dropped the limb from her mouth, swallowing back a piece of flesh. She pulled her dinner closer to her and growled at me.

“Trust me,” I said. “I don’t want any.”