A high pressure hose smashed water across Tim’s chest, his face. It got up his nose and he sputtered in panic. He was naked and cuffed to a pipe with a plastic loop that cut angrily into his wrist. His mouth was taped shut.

A soldier in padded armor—it looked to Tim like a brown snowsuit, and it covered him from head to toe—came closer and jabbed something into his free arm. A needle. Tim thrashed in pain as another armored soldier swabbed his eyes, his ears and his nose. One long swab, slick with Vaseline, went up his anus and he tried not to clench.

Then they pulled back. Someone slapped a light switch and he was alone in near perfect darkness. He heard a lock slamming shut though his eyes were still swimming in the blackness and he couldn’t see where the door was.

He was deep in the basement of a civic building, that much he knew. They hadn’t let him see much as he was transferred from the back of a troop transport into this new prison. He’d glimpsed a façade of glass, a revolving door and then he’d been rushed down a flight of stairs and into this room. The soldiers had taken no chances with him. They’d torn off his clothes, hauled his pack away. One of them in a padded suit had wrapped duct tape around his mouth, sealing it shut in case he tried to bite them.

He knew he shouldn’t take it personally. They thought he might be infected—that was all. Nobody wanted to get close to a sick person—to a drooler. It only took the slightest bite or scratch to pass on the Flu.

They could have left the lights on, though. In the darkness, barely able to breathe for all the water in his nose, freezing cold in his nakedness, he found it extremely difficult not to hate them.

It only got worse hours later, when the door opened again. Sudden light blasted Tim’s eyes and he shielded them with his free arm. He saw someone throw a blanket and an MRE packet inside the door. He tried to protest that he couldn’t reach either item from where he was but they slammed the door shut before he could make a sound.

He blinked his eyes in the resumed dark and tried to calm himself down. There had to be something he could do to improve his situation. Anything. He reached up and found the end of the tape that covered his mouth. The soldiers had been thorough and wrapped the tape around and around his head, covering his lips and much of his chin. He was just lucky they’d left his nose exposed or he might have suffocated. With his free hand he scratched and pulled at the tape until he found the loose end. Carefully, trying not to tear out half his hair, he unwrapped himself. Some skin came off his lips when the last layer of tape pulled off and he could feel them bleeding but at least he could breathe through his mouth again. He started to shout, then, loud and long, protesting his innocence, demanding that he was clean, that he was an American citizen, that he had rights, goddamnit, civil rights, rights under the Geneva convention, rights under the Patriot Act at the very least.

The dark cell rang with his shouts but gave him no answer at all.

When he was tired of yelling he decided to make a try for the blanket. The MRE was too far away by half but he was pretty sure that if he stretched himself out as far as he could go—painfully so, it turned out, as the plastic loop dug deeper and deeper into the abraded skin of his wrist and hand—he could just touch the blanket with his toe. Grunting and straining and sweating he managed to drag it closer, just a little closer. Exhaustion rumbled through him and he sat down hard, his joints aching, his back cramping up. He let himself rest a few minutes then he tried again.

Finally he got the blanket close enough to grab with his free hand. He pulled it around himself greedily, the rough fabric cold against his skin at first. Slowly he began to warm up. Hunger attacked him then but he knew he couldn’t reach the MRE. It was just too far away.

He was trying anyway when the door opened again.

“A survivor, then. Good instincts.” A tall figure stood silhouetted in the doorway. Tim could just make out that it was a man in an Army uniform.

“I’m clean,” Tim said, as calmly as he could manage. “There’s no need for all this. I’m clean.”

The soldier nodded. “That’s what the test results say. No viral load, no antibodies. We could do a cranial CT scan to make sure, check your grey matter for spirochete holes, but frankly, I’m satisfied. You can bite me all you want.” He stepped into the dark room. Tim glanced around himself, saw that he’d been cuffed to a water heater tank. The room wasn’t a prison cell at all.

With a pocketknife the soldier cut through Tim’s plastic restraint. He grabbed up Tim’s hand in both of his own and studied the torn skin at his wrist. “Some people would have given in to despair. They would have just given up, huddled in the corner and waited to be killed. You fought even though you must have known your chances were infinitesimal. That’s a good sign. I like a man who isn’t ready to die.”

Tim pulled his arm back and rubbed at his wrist. “There are things I haven’t done yet.”

“Come with me, please,” the soldier said, and lead him up the stairs.