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Jamie kicked off her shoes as she wandered idly into her bedroom. After an exhausting day at work, and with her friend's birthday party that evening, she'd decided about half way through the day that her brief window of time between the two events would be spent taking a well-deserved nap. Her loose-fitting white T-shirt and slim jeans weren't what she'd usually wear to bed, but she was tired past the point of caring. It had been a busy day at the party store where she worked, but she was the only member of staff working at the register.

I was attending college out of state. Away from home for the first time, just a little bird stretching her wings. Of course the down side to that was that I was away from my family and friends. I was alone in a strange place, without any familiar faces. So I was glad when I was befriended by Leslie and Cindy. We just seemed to click. Before too long we were thick as thieves, always together whenever our schedules allowed. One day they told me they had a shared interest in ballooning, and asked me if I would like to go with them on a balloon ride.

I don’t know what the rest of the world has, but in America, we have seen this television commercial for years that proffers a medical alert product that has been marketed to the elderly population. It is a device about the size of a pack of gum, which hangs from the person’s neck, which the user can push the button on it to alert an alarm company to summon a medical response if the person were to ever have something happen to them.

She just keeps getting bigger.

At first we didn't know what had happened.  A panicked call came in about an emergency in the pharmaceutical lab in the outskirts of town, shortly followed by reports that a building collapsed in the same area.  People in the department thought it might have been a terrorist attack designed to cause a biological outbreak, but they wouldn't have let them build it anywhere near the city limits if there was anything dangerous in it.  Regardless, we went in expecting the worst.  What we found was... different.