DAY 18: Atmosphere of Tombs

“I was the last man to be evacuated.”

Dr. Tobias (physician/counselor, The Cornrow Central Hospital) sat across me in a leather chair. The chair was having a hard time trying not to spill him to the floor. He was a flabby man. And he was all ears.

Lately, I’d been having nightmares and I got to scream and scare the hell out of everyone in the hospital when I really got going. But I couldn’t help it. I was guilt-tripped; I had gone against the very laws of human empathy.

            “There was once a chance I didn’t take,” I said, as I propped myself up on the chaise lounge in the doctor’s office. “And this might be the only shot I got at taking the weight of my guilt, the bulk of it anyway, off my chest. One thing I would really appreciate if you understood is this: I wasn’t conferred with any authority; it wasn’t really my responsibility to make decisions. I just felt this compulsion and a kind of hunch that I couldn’t quite shake.

            “I used to be one of four ramp attendants employed by a private-run airfield that maintained a beat up landing strip for narrowbody aircrafts. The Rumpus Airfield was a wild conceit as airfields went. It probably boasted most of the facilities you’d find in a standard airport. A Control Tower, parking bay, hangar, one-story structure where cargo/shipment was repackaged which we called our Terminal building. That building was a real show off-I mean we had all the security gadgets of a real airport in there, screening machines and the works. We even maintained a cold room.

“There was a staff of four ramp attendants who ran operations at the airfield, operating equipments, cleaning cabins (if called for) and assisting the pilots. We specialized mainly in cargo aircrafts. Trouble came a-calling in a package or shipment as we called them around our circle. In a shipment labeled Dangerous Goods bearing urgent instructions:

                        Deliver immediately.

“And below that:

                        This shipment left our dock in perfect condition.

                        Upon arrival please check for damage and conflicts between specified and feasible quantity before signing.

“My colleagues and I, we checked the content of the cargo. This was normal procedure, nothing special. But again, the stuff inside the box made our scanners go bonkers and so we had to prove the content wasn’t nuclear or something like that, you know.

“The box belonged to Dugan Laboratories. We reported our findings okay and I thought the management ought to have taken care of it. My responsibility ends here kind of attitude. But somehow, I knew I could have done something.

“It was two weeks later, while skimming the pages of a daily that I saw tucked away at a corner the story titled, Scientist Dies After Sniffing Poison Gas. The incident occurred at the Dugan Laboratories. Only I knew it wasn’t poison gas. I had seen and held the tubes that contained the virus.

“The day the plague broke out, I was on duty. I saw it on TV when one of our guys who had gone in to get soda came out running and exclaiming, ‘You guys really need to see this.’ Well, we went in with him and we saw.”

Notes to myself:

The carnage this guy (who I’d call Reynolds) witnessed should be detailed in the rewrite.

This is to be a two-sided conversation with the counselor contributing to the narrative with questions and assertions.

This is a story of a scientific experiment gone wrong. It had nothing to do with humans initially (ha ha). But it’s meant to be a satire of how mad men and specialists  turn children to killing machines in time of war.