*Media pic of the Bureau of Lycanthrope Affairs (BoLA)

Someone on the floor dialed a code red. It meant that a lycanthrope was getting violent with one of the staff. Meadow grabbed her taser from the locked drawer in her desk and quickly left her second story office for the first floor. She was the acting supervisor that day and was responsible to address and de-escalate any altercations on the main floor where the public and clerks were situated.

Even before she opened a side door, behind all the cubicles and desks that made up the first floor staff, she could hear a male lycanthrope yelling obscenities and banging things around beyond the plexi-glass divider that separated the office workers from the public seating area.

"What do we do?" A frightened co-worker asked the moment she saw Meadow. "You can't go out there. He's a lycanthrope and he's in a rage. Someone said he's partially transformed."

"Ms. Fields, I need you to calm down and follow procedure. What does the blue book tell you to do? Follow the blue book," Meadow repeated to the older woman in a calm but assertive voice.

"Oh yes, oh yes," Ms Fields repeated. "The-the blue book."

She turned immediately and headed to the back of the office where several colour coded binders stood on top of a long series of cabinet files. The blue book was an emergency manual for such a time as this. Meadow, as the day supervisor, was responsible for the mess outside and the office clerks were responsible to follow the blue book instructions so that they could safely extricate themselves from a violent situation.

Meadow reached the access door to the public waiting room where a security guard stood manning the door from the safety of the office side.

"Mr. Arsenault, do we have any clerks out there?"

Meadows priority was the safety of the staff.

"Yes, a young man. A trainee."

"Is it Mr. Kim or is it Mr. Hamal?"

Who mattered. Mr. Kim was very pliant and easy to direct. However, Mr. Hamal had proved to be quite stubborn and didn't like to take orders from women. Perhaps, today would be different under the circumstances.

"It's Mr. Kim, I think," he offered with a bit of a shrug.

The two men couldn't look any different and it irked Meadow that the security guard was so unobservant.

"Did someone call it in?"

"No, not yet Ms Rask."

Meadow frowned. The blue book clearly stated that the moment a client became violent with anything more than words, a call was to be placed to the police. A taser could subdue a lycanthrope for a short while if they had not changed. However, if things escalated to the point that they transformed. Well, no taser in the whole of the country was powerful enough to put down that creature. That's why the police would be necessary. These were not ordinary police. This was a joint task force of lycanthrope and human officers who were specifically trained for violent lycanthrope situations.

"Open the door, and then call it in the moment you close the door behind me."

"Understood," was all Mr. Arsenault said before punching in a code and popping open the door to the public sitting area.

The noise out there was a bit deafening. The man in question was thrashing the steel chairs around and yelling profanities at the top of his lungs. Meadow saw straight away that he had indeed begun a partial transformation. This was dangerous for everyone left in the room, even the other lycanthropes. A male on a rampage could do just as much damage to them as he could to a human.

Meadow spotted Mr. Kim, who was crouched down in front of one the clerk windows.

In a calm and quiet voice, a voice meant to cut through the noise and racket the lycanthrope was making, Meadow spoke to the trainee. "Mr Kim, get up slowly and walk this way right now."

The young man's frightened eyes met hers and he looked both stricken and glad at the same time. Meadow made a small motion with her hand for him to come to her. The moment he began to get up, she distracted the lycanthrope by calling out to him.

"Mr. Wendall McBride, I'm Meadow Rask. I'm the supervisor on today. Would you please put those chairs down and we'll have a talk. I'm sure I can help you."

He turned his head in her direction and let loose a deep growl that might have frightened the most seasoned BoLA employee but not Meadow. She preped the taser as she took a few steps forward and placed herself directly between Mr. McBride and Mr. Kim, who hadn't quite made it to the security door.

"I don't know what's happened, but I'm confident I can help straighten things out. It's my job and I'm very good at it," she tried to encourage him. It was hard to know if he was beyond reason or not at this point.

He threw the steel folding chairs directly at her as he let loose another bone shaking growl.

"They've sent a baby to pacify me, have they?" Mr. McBride's words were saturated in disdain.

"I'm not here to pacify you Mr. McBride."

"What are you here for then little-miss-riding-hood?"

Meadow could see that he was just a few breaths away from a full transformation and she was very far from the security door by comparison.

"I'm here to help you or subdue you," she told him point blank.

"Subdue me!" He both roared and sort of laughed at the same time.

Meadow drew the taser from her side, where she'd been hiding it, and shot him three times. The first jolt surprised him, the second took him down and the third prevented him from getting back up.

While he was withering in agony on the floor, after being hit with 9,000 volts, which was enough to kill a man several times over but only enough to temporarily drop a full grown lycanthrope on the edge of transforming, Meadow calmly addressed the crowd still scattered about the room.

"Please evacuate the building through the front door exit."

She repeated the same line two more times and then that was all the time she had. Mr. McBride began to rise to his feet with the taser clips embedded in his flesh. They had ceased to give off any voltage at this point. Meadow hit the release button and the last metal coil fell out of the barrel of the taser. She then flipped the safety and slowly stepped back toward the security door never taking her eyes of Mr. McBride.

"Oh, you got balls little lady," he congratulated her with a bitter laugh as he shook himself and staggered to his full height. "And I'm going to crush you and them together. Right now."

"Mcbride," a booming voice shouted across the nearly empty room.

Meadow jumped. She'd been concentrating so hard on the lycanthrope in the middle of the chaos that she had failed to see the special police taskforce enter the building. The lycanthrope turned to see who was calling his name in such a disrespectful tone, but the room filled with smoke in the self same instant. Someone on the task force had let loose a smoke grenade right under Mr. McBride's feet. He was quickly engulfed.

Seizing her moment to escape, Meadow made a mad run for the security door. She banged on it several times but no one opened it. Looking back over the smoke filled room, she knew she couldn't reach the main exit safely. So she banged on the door again with her fist and kicked it with her foot.

"Mr. Arsenault, let me in," she demanded through gritted teeth. She kept her voice low and even in the hope not to attract Mr. McBride's attention. His heightened senses would enable him to find her even in all this smoke.

Someone hit the lights, plunging the room into darkness for a few brief seconds before the small green and red emergency lights at the exit and security doors flicked on. At that exact time, before the emerg lights came on, someone tackled Meadow to the ground and clamped a hand over her mouth.

She fought him with all her might, nearly knocking him off her too, until the dim green and red lights illuminated the smokey darkness. Then, and only then, did she realize the one who tackled her was in riot gear. Meadow stopped struggling and lay still under his heavy weight. He covered her entirely and pressed her into the cold tiled floor when something went flying over their heads and hit the plexi-glass room divider near them. The glass just shook but didn't shatter.

The special task force member got Meadow up on her hands and knees and the two of them half crawled and half slunk their way around the room in a clockwise direction. He was heading for the front entryway while the other task force members tried to distract and subdue the lycanthrope.

Something else came hurling at them and this time it was Meadow who pulled the officer down to the floor with her to prevent him from being decapitated by a flying metal chair. The chair hit the wall above them with such force that it was lodged into the drywall. Gyprock exploded from the wall and rained down on the two of them. Meadow tried not to breath it in. If she coughed even once it would give her location away to Mr. McBride, whom the force still had not subdued.

The officer pulled off a glove and with a few quick stoke of his fingers removed much of the drywall dust from Meadow's eyes, nose and mouth. But this couldn't prevent her from breathing the light powder in. It clogged her nostrils and her throat right away and her eyes watered as her body convulsed with a cough she tried desperately not to let out. The first and second cough she could suppress but not the third. However, the officer pushed her back to the floor and held her face to his padded tactical vest and was able to muffle the coughing that shook her entire body.

He never rose from his position until she had the coughing back under control. Then, and only then, did he grab her by her right arm and haul her up to her knees so they could finish following the wall to the safety of the front exit.

Near the door they encountered broken glass and could not crawl anymore. So, the officer pulled Meadow off her feet in one swift motion and sprinted for the open door. Both elated to be so close to the exit and terrified at the same time, Meadow wrapped her arms around the man's neck and held on with all her might. Over his shoulder she could see that Mr. McBride had taken on his full lycanthrope form. It was hideous and it looked like he'd lost all control of himself. 

As they came out onto the safety of the street, bombarded by sirens, flashing emergency lights, and the roar of a growing crowd of onlookers, Meadow knew she had just barely escaped death that afternoon. She clung to the officer's neck all the tighter and kept her eyes fastened to the glass entrance way they'd just exited. She wouldn't feel safe until Mr. McBride was fully subdued.

The officer set her on the open door at the back of an unoccupied ambulance. Two EMTs were there right away peppering Meadow with several questions about how she was feeling. Asking if she was in any pain. But all Meadow could do was cling to the officers wrist and keep a sharp watch on the door.

"Don't leave me," she pleaded with him as he stepped back to give the EMTs more room.

He gave her a nod and remained where he was.

"Take a look at her hands and knees," he told the EMTS who weren't getting a thing out of the young woman. "She was crawling through the dirt and glass. She may have some abrasions."

"Did she take any hits?" One EMT asked. "Any chance she hit her head?"

"Not after I got her, but I'm not sure if she was injured before that," he confessed.

He watched the frightened woman stare unblinking at those front doors. "Give me something to wash the drywall from her face?" He asked the second EMT. She climbed into the ambulance and then returned with a portable eye-wash station and tried to carefully wash the BoLA employee's face.

Meadow kept batting the woman's hands away though. She didn't want anything to get between her and her view of the front door. But, it only took the EMT a minute to catch on and she did her best after that just to work on cleaning around the victim's eyes until she was ready for the eye wash station.

It took six officers to pull and drag Mr. McBride out through the front door. Meadow lept to her feet and grasped her officer's arm with both her hands. He watched with her as his colleagues manoeuvred the riled up lycanthrope into a secured vehicle. It took three or four minutes before they got him in the police van and then a few more minutes before a motorcade escorted him to a lockdown facility several miles away. In that time, the woman at his side never once let go of him.

Another officer arrived afterwards to ascertain the health and condition of Ms. Rask. "Officer Lehto," he said with a nod as he came up on the four standing at the back of the ambulance.

Meadow released her officer's arm and sat back down on the edge of the ambulance allowing the EMT to finally properly wash out her cakey eyes.

"I'm Sergeant Serrano," he gave her a good look over but she couldn't tell since the EMT was washing out her eyes. "I'll need you to come with me to the office and make a statement."

"Is everyone alright, Sergeant Serrano?" Meadow asked as she flexed her fingers trying to shake out the tremor there.

"Only minor injuries to report, I believe. Mostly from people scrambling to get out of the way. They'll recover a lot quicker than you since most of them are lycanthropes," he offered.

"I'm relieved to hear it," Meadow said with a slightly shaky voice. She coughed and cleared her throat in an attempt to get rid of the little quiver building there.

Eyes cleaned, as well as hands and knees sprayed and bandaged against infection after she'd scraped them across the floor and a bit of broken glass, Meadow stood up and looked both Officer Lehto and Sergeant Serrano in the eyes – eyes a full head above her since both men were over six feet tall. She took in their general build, height and their exceptionally handsome faces – she was looking at two lycanthropes and felt a little relieved. An ordinary man, no matter how well trained, would not have been able to keep her safe from Mr. McBride.

"Thank you both," she said quietly as she brushed off her top and tried to re-do her ponytail, which had gone askew in the struggle to get out of her workplace. There wasn't much she could do for it though given that her hair was covered in gritty drywall.

Sergeant Serrano nodded and then added, "Officer Lehto here can take you to the station if you are comfortable with that."

"Yes, of course," she replied right away and then gave her officer a small compliant smile as she followed him to his cruiser.

As she passed by the chaos in front of the Bureau, she couldn't help but feel like maybe it was time to find a new line of work.