John Gilstrap - At all costs

With her jet-black hair, huge brown eyes, and pleasing shape, Carolyn was the only female on a crew of thirty-seven horny, single young men. That she undoubtedly played a major role in their fantasies as they sought relief alone in the darkness of their motel rooms didn’t bother her a bit. Truth be known, it was kind of a turn-on.

“Don’t have any trouble walking this morning, do you, Carolyn?” Parker persisted, drawing another big laugh.

“If you can still use your hand, then I can still walk.” That one brought the house down.

Nick Thomas, site safety officer on the Newark project, and the man in charge of this last meeting before the operation went hot, struggled to regain control of the room. “Okay, okay, okay,” he said, pressing the air with his palms. “Could we get back on topic, please? Jake, Carolyn, take a seat. Where’s Tony Bernard?”

The folding metal seats in the conference room appeared to predate the building itself, and the two remaining at the back of the room were the worst of the lot. Guaranteed butt-busters. Jake tried sitting for about two seconds, then opted to stand.

“Tony’s sick,” he announced, rubbing the place on his lower back where the chair had dug in. “That’s why we’re late. We were trying to roust him out of his room, but he’s heaving his guts out. Trust me, you don’t want him here.”

The concern on Nick’s face was immediate and obvious. They’d rehearsed this operation a hundred times and had calculated the work-rest cycles based on a full contingent of entry workers. He turned to Sean Foley, the project manager, who’d been scowling from the corner behind Nick.

“We go, anyway,” Foley grunted. An MBA marketing type, the boss had little time for the entry workers’ cowboy mentality to begin with. He’d be damned if he was going to pull the plug on a multimillion-dollar contract just because somebody got sick without permission. The room fell silent.

Nick took the cue as his opportunity to continue. He flipped on the overhead projector, and the pull-down screen was filled with a line drawing labeled “Magazine B-2740.”

“Okay, troops, this is our home for the next twenty-eight weeks. Assuming that this place is identical to its five hundred brothers and sisters here at the Newark Mass Destruction Emporium, we’ve got interior dimensions of one hundred feet across and seventy-five feet deep.” As he spoke, he moved a rubber-tipped pointer to highlight items of interest on the screen. “These little squares you see on the drawing are the reinforced concrete pillars. And in case I’m going too fast for the Aggies in the crowd, pillars are things that hold the roof up.”

A chorus of whoops arose from the crowd as two Texas A amp;M graduates extended birds high into the air. A graduate of Oklahoma State, Nick never missed an opportunity to pull their chain. As the laughter died down, he placed a color photograph on the machine.

“As you can see here, the place is built like a bunker: an igloo design with reinforced concrete all around and five feet of earth piled on the top and sides. God only knows how much dirt there is in the back. A lot. There’s only one way in or out of this place, folks, and that’s through these blast doors in the front.”

None of this information was new to anyone in the room, and Nick knew it. Every detail of the Newark cleanup had been rehearsed in an identical magazine, far away from the exclusion zone. But this was show time, and a person couldn’t be too prepared. Of the thirty-odd people gathered in the conference room, only eighteen would even leave the command center once the operation started; and of them, only six would actually enter the magazine. No one knew for sure what they would find, but by all indications, it was going to be ugly.

At one time or another, Magazine B-2740 had housed everything from high explosives to the full spectrum of chemical warfare agents. As for the present, speculation abounded, but all anyone knew for sure was that the place “had a lot of shit in it” (the words of the EPA inspector who saw a container of mustard gas near the entrance a year ago and panicked). Being more specific was Enviro-Kleen’s job.

The worst concerns for everyone were the nerve agents VX and GB, both of which they expected to find in large quantity. Toxic at an exposure of 1/100,000 of one part per million, the stuff scared the hell out of Jake. Translated to layman’s terms-Aggie terms, according to Nick-that ridiculously low number was the equivalent of one drop of nerve agent dissolved in the total quantity of air breathed by an average adult over a twenty-seven-year period.

“Just remember,” Nick concluded, “a little dab’ll do ya.” Suddenly, his demeanor switched from safety guy to professor. He pivoted on the balls of his feet and pointed at Adam Pomeroy, the newest addition to the Enviro-Kleen team. “Mr. Pomeroy!”

Adam’s head jerked up from the doodles he’d been drawing on his spiral notebook. At twenty-three, he looked sixteen and had already been voted most likely to contract a venereal disease. “Huh?”

“Tell me the mechanism of injury for VX agent, please.”

Adam looked like he was back in school, raking the ceiling with his eyes as he searched for the answer. When he got it, he smiled. “It’s a cholinesterase inhibitor,” he said proudly.

“And what does that mean?”

The smile went out like a snuffed candle. “Um…”

“Mr. Parker.”

Glenn smiled. He’d been in this business for eight years now and rarely got caught short. “It means that impulses can’t pass from one nerve cell to the other.”

“Excellent. Jake, what do you do in the event of an exposure?”

Jake rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on, Nick.”

Carolyn nudged him with her elbow. “ You come on, Jake,” she said harshly. “This is serious stuff.”

A rumbling “Ooo” passed through the crowd.

“You swell up and die,” Jake answered finally.

“ Bzz,” Nick said, mimicking a game show host. “Wrong. Thanks for playing, though. Carolyn?”

“Atropine, self-injected in the thigh.” Precaution being her middle name, she’d actually practiced the procedure, using sterile saline. It wasn’t nearly as difficult as she’d feared.

“Very good. Mustard gas. What happens when you’re exposed to that?” This one was for anyone to answer. Jake raised his hand. “Jake.”

“You swell up and die.”

“Yes! That one you got right.”

There was more laughter, but with a nervous edge to it; like everyone knew that show time had arrived. Nick turned serious again. “Please be careful, people.”

Magazine B-2740 rose out of the Arkansas forest like some ancient native shrine, its smooth, reinforced concrete face rising twenty feet over the crumbled access road. As he struggled into his suit, just at the line where the support zone met the decontamination zone, Jake couldn’t help but wonder what future archaeologists would think of this place a thousand years from now. What conclusions would they draw from the giant cave dwellers who called this neighborhood their home?

Dressing for a Level A entry like this required a group effort. The air packs came first, worn on top of two layers of clothing: the shorts and T-shirts they wore to work, under the obligatory royal-blue Enviro-Kleen uniform. Latex inner gloves came next. The final step was the entry suit itself, with its built-in five-ply gloves and booties. Leather work gloves finished off the ensemble, along with calf-high neoprene work boots, size huge, with splash deflectors to keep scary shit from getting inside and rotting either the suit or its occupant.

With his own air pack in place now, Jake fitted the holster for his portable radio around his waist and cinched it tight, threading the hands-free microphone through the straps of his air pack and into his right ear. After he clipped the customized transmit button to the right-hand shoulder strap, he mashed the mushroom-shaped button with his gloved palm. He looked like a Roman legionnaire saluting his emperor.