The Price Of Protection

Chapter 1: A Normal Life

The fluorescent lights of the community centre basement hummed with a low-frequency buzz that grated against Dick's nerves. It was a sterile, windowless room, identical to the dozens of others he had sat in over the last three years. In the centre, a circle of folding chairs held a motley collection of people-some were hollow-eyed, others were vibrating with an anxiety they couldn't suppress, and all of them were trying to forget the day the world ended for them.

Dick sat near the back, his posture relaxed, though his fingers were laced tight enough to turn his knuckles white. He stared at the scuffed linoleum, listening to the rhythm of his own breathing.

"It never really leaves you," Dick began, his voice low, steady, and carrying the weight of a man who had spent three years rehearsing the lie. "The smell, first. That's what they don't put in the reports. The smell of ozone, burnt plastic, and copper. It gets into your clothes, your pores, the back of your throat. You wake up in the middle of the night, three years later, and you think you're still there. You think you're still waiting for a train that isn't coming, or running from something you can't see, or holding your breath until your lungs feel like they're going to collapse."

A woman two seats over, a survivor named Sarah who had lost her husband in the first hours of the outbreak, nodded slowly. Her eyes were fixed on the floor.

"Everyone calls it the Blüdhaven Flu," Dick continued, his tone clinical, practised. "They call it a tragedy. An 'unprecedented viral mutation.' That's the official line, right? That's what we're told to tell the counsellors, the investigators, the news crews. Just a bad sickness in the pipes. A freak accident of nature."

He paused, looking up at the group. He felt the phantom pressure of a heavy, cold-steel hand around his throat, a memory so visceral it made his skin crawl. The NEST. The vats. The G-Virus. The truth was a burning coal in his gut, a secret he guarded with more ferocity than his own life.

"But I know," Dick said, his voice dropping. "I know how it felt to look at the wreckage. I know the feeling of knowing that the people who were supposed to protect us-the people who built the labs, who funded the research-watched it happen and decided that our lives were a fair price to pay for progress. It wasn't a flu. It was a design. And the hardest part isn't the survival. It's the realization that we're the only ones left who remember the fire was lit on purpose."

A heavy silence descended upon the room. It was the silence of people who had looked into the abyss and knew that the rest of the world was choosing to look the other way.

"You're always good at painting a picture, Dick," a man named Miller said from across the circle. He had been a dock worker before the city went dark. He was missing three fingers on his left hand-an injury from the evacuation that never quite healed right. "Sometimes, I wonder if you saw more than the rest of us. You always talk like you were standing in the heart of it."

Dick felt a flicker of alarm, but he kept his face impassive, a mask he had perfected over the last thirty-six months. "We were all in the heart of it, Miller. Some of us just don't have the luxury of forgetting."

He stood up, checking his watch. It was nearing three. Sherry would be getting out of school soon. The thought of her-the bright, resilient kid who was currently dealing with algebra and gym class instead of the horrors of an underground bio-lab-was the only thing that kept the darkness from swallowing him whole.

"I have to go," Dick said, offering a small, tight nod to the circle.

"See you next week, Dick?" Sarah asked.

"Next week," he confirmed, though he knew the support group was becoming less about support and more about keeping tabs on the narrative.

As he walked out of the community centre and into the bright, biting air of a Gotham afternoon, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. There was a text from Barbara: 'School's out. waiting by the gate. Don't be late.'