GWOT Just A Taste

GWOT Just A Taste

It has been a busy week.

###

We are deep in the Logistics bays. The guard has searched us both and passed us through. We will be searched with equal severity as we depart. Yes, even me. I can carry all the weapons I want - and I do - but no one is exempt from suspicion of theft. Not even me.

"I count fourteen boxes. Do you agree?" the manager asks, wearing her white apron as mark of office.

I count again. "I concur."

I sign in the second blank on the form, and she carefully stocks the boxes on her enclosed roller cart. Enclosed because even the sight of this item has been known to enrage people. She will keep it under her control until she locks it up in her work area.

###

The meeting is very tense. We have decided to run this meet at a suburban street corner where the houses have conveniently burned down. We brought two vehicles; they brought two vehicles.

There is no muzzling. But Brooke is very ready to spray and pray, and so is her counterpart behind the dual barrels of the .50 caliber heavy machine gun.

"Do you have the items?"

We do. We have manufactured fourteen Kearney Fallout Meters, with instructions and even videos. They are literally worth their weight in gold. One reason we salvaged microwaves, to heat gypsum.

"Do you have the trade?" I ask in reply.

The ruby red bottles in their original manufacturer boxes are displayed. We check them with our Geiger counter, unnecessarily.

Both sides trundle their ill-gotten goods to their transport vehicle. We have both thrown in bonus items. Little things.

I look at last year's Police Activity League calendar briefly as the armored police fighting vehicle drives away.

###

The birds are nervous. They know what's about to go down. And they are mad as hell about it.

Arturo has very carefully sharpened his axe. But when he kills the first one, the pen becomes a flurry of clucking and feathers.

I am wearing leather gloves, and help with the first stage of butchering.

We are careful to catch the blood. Nothing can be wasted here.

###

We have posted additional guards on the kitchen and cafeteria area. The smells are heavenly. That is the point.

The PA system lights up. Marketing.

"May I have your attention please. May I have your attention please. Dinner will be served at 3 PM in the main cafeteria, courtesy of the [CLIENT] for all employees, contractors and affiliates." A pause. "Second helpings will be available at the normal meal charge."

There is an impromptu cheer that wafts across the site.

I have arranged for shift reliefs so that all the guards can take a turn.

Amazingly, someone has even managed to decorate. Butcher paper and crayons tell us to have a Happy Thanksgiving.

There is even a plan for an alcohol issue. But no one can get drunk on one drink or shot.

###

"Medical emergency, main cafeteria. Medical emergency, main cafeteria. Code 3 for child choking..."

I sprint for the stairwell. So does Sharon.

"... cancel, say again, cancel. Will a stretcher bearer team respond to the main cafeteria, Code 2. Cancel on emergency, stretcher bearer to continue."

I slow to a fast walk and still arrive in under a minute.

Janine is holding an eight year old child and apologizing to her for squeezing her under her gut and pounding her on the back. She still needs to go to infirmary to be evaluated, but the Heimlich maneuver has saved yet another life.

###

I sneak past my guards into the kitchen. We have put an extra guard on the trash today, one of several extra duty assignments.

No part of these turkeys will go to waste. Bones have not been served. They will be boiled into soup instead. You don't really want to know what will happen to gizzards, but the cafeteria will find ways to make them tasty.

We compost all other waste. But these bottles are being carefully stripped of their labels.

I don't want people to know what we went through to get them cranberry sauce. Let alone that we used fourteen different kinds of stuffing because each was salvaged from someone's home ... we usually recycle cardboard, but these boxes are being rolled inside out and made into fire starter logs.

###

An unusual sight some distance away outside. Under a tarp, a table has been set up. Two guards watch benignly as eight prisoners are walked (or in three cases wheeled) to the table, and served.

We said everyone. We meant everyone.

###

Betty, Sharon and I are standing watching.

Somehow I am in the center.

Simultaneously, as if it were planned -- which knowing them, it was -- they lean in and give me a kiss on either cheek.

I start to glare and don't have an angle of fire to glare at them both simultaneously. I would back up but my back is against the rail.

I suppress a growl.

"Just a taste...." Betty says teasingly and wanders off to spread some holiday cheer in the most ancient fashion.

Sharon remains, moving just a little bit away.

"Thank you, sir," she says after a moment and dismisses herself to her duties.

Perhaps I should go after her.

I watch the reflection of our lights in the windows.

The glazed windows, covered with heavy transparent film, still starred in places where shrapnel from that first truck bomb struck it - but did not shatter it or spray glass fragments across my client's employees, and anyone else unlucky enough to be present at the time.

I keep watching for a time. Normal people, normal joys.

I keep waiting for the radio to interrupt. "Echo 18, call the Command Center... set Alert Two for ... emergency in the ... alarm sounding at ..."

I check to make sure the radio is on, and the correct frequency. It is, and it is.

I am the one out of tune.

I'm already dead. But I have a few moments left in which to walk, talk, feel and make a difference.

With my luck, these moments will last years.

If that is what it takes for normal people to enjoy a touch of holiday cheer in the midst of Apocalypse, it is a small enough price to pay.

GWOT Nightmare Fuel

GWOT Nightmare Fuel


We are having an abbreviated meeting of the Ammunition Technical Working Group. But what we are discussing is so horrific that I have limited the group to myself, Wyatt, Janine and George.

I am well read. Wyatt literally has nothing better to do. Janine has been through a fire captain's courses in hazardous materials. But George was not only a soldier, but took advanced training as an NBC NCO.

Nuclear Biological Chemical, Non Commissioned Officer. In other words, the unit expert on horrible shit.

I will have to rope in others eventually. Biological warfare defense will involve our vet surgeon - who is already inspecting animals slaughtered for food, our cafeteria staff and some familiarization for others. We are already experts on fallout, courtesy of San Francisco. But today's discussion is of site and individual defense from chemical warfare agents.

Why? Because I've figured out something really horrific, based on the foregone conclusion that Wyatt and I and others have reached.

Someone who would nuke cities would not even blink at using chemical warfare.

"The problem is detection," Janine was saying. "A modern fire department would have chemical detector paper, gas sensors, access to technical experts on speed dial - I have some electronic copies of recognition guides and the ability to deploy canaries, I mean guards."

Yeah. Minefield detectors, semi sentient, single use.

"It's not just detection, and yes, symptoms can be used to identify agents. You need filtration of buildings and vehicles, protective equipment including suits and masks ... and most of the stuff you have is over the counter garbage. Even basics such as plastic sheeting and duct tape are in short supply."

George doesn't like this discussion. That's OK, I don't like it either. But I like the idea of a chemical agent IED detonated in front of a building air intake even less.

There is an unpleasant reason why we have perimeter and gate guards. I figured out the canary problem less than a week after the Firecracker. Our procedure for battening down the hatches for civil defense - for example against NUCLEAR ATTACK NOT AN EXAMPLE PICKED AT RANDOM - included shutting down ventilation fans and securing all but a handful of building entrances. Even our loading docks had been built with shower and hose bibs and drains to a separate external system. The CLIENT has always known it was a dangerous world, even if the official excuse was the limited extent to which we handled hazmat.

Second order concerns led quickly to conversations I didn't want to have. Defense against chemical air attack. Who would be doing that? The same people who are using helitorches to light inconvenient houses. You know, Homeland. And planning to fight them was the same as fighting them, which was the same as dying horribly.

I'd had to sketch the rooftop pintle mount five times before the machinist had caught on that we really, actually needed to elevate through a full 90 vertical degrees. The best he could do was 74, good enough.

A sitewide shelter in place with ventilation shut down? We had that procedure. It wasn't labeled as such, but it would work against chemical attack.

"Decontamination," I said, and there was a whole paragraph in the one word.

Training. Equipment. Care for casualties when none of the meds we had were effective for the purpose. Control of run off. Priorities.

George shuddered.

"If we had the gear, and we don't, you can get killed so easily ..."

Janine interrupted.

"That's a Fire Brigade responsibility. Hazmat. Chemical agents are a deliberate hazmat. Decon is something we train for."

"Not like this. You touch a spot, you flop over in convulsions and do the funky chicken. A spot on the person you are decontaminating. Or your own gear. Or the decontam gear itself as you are shutting down. Or the underside of your own rig, if you drove over a puddle. The best training you can do is simply not enough."

"We do the best we can."

"This is one subject in which the best you can, the very best that can be humanly done, is 5% to 10% casualties. One out of ten to one out of twenty, very simply dead."

That of course was the problem. In military use, on the battlefield, chemical warfare added to the friction of the fight. Everything would kill you anyway, so this was just one more damn thing.

Against untrained civilians - i.e. us - some would live to flee, and the rest would die horribly. Perfect atrocity weapon, as Saddam Hussein could have told you before he watched _South Park_ in his prison cell and hung for his crimes.

The other chemical warfare problem was more subtle. Interference with agriculture. One man's fertilizer is another man's poison. Animals concentrate toxins, pretty much by definition.

So we needed to establish both biological and chemical surveillance, which expanded on the kind of pH monitoring and animal health monitoring done by a careful farmer and took it on a sharp left turn into horror.

Another turd in the punch bowl, again mine.

"We need a capability to fight in the NBC environment."

Janine scoffed. "You can't wear a bunny suit and look tacticool." George nodded.

But what you can do is have a full face respirator, closely fitting Tyvek hood and coveralls, and rifles and equipment marked with colored tape as 'dirty' i.e. used in a contaminated environment.

In the idyllic pre-Firecracker days, the Feds had been pushing all police SWAT teams to become all hazards capable, with thoroughly mixed results depending mostly on local agency budgets as supplemented with grants.


That was beyond our scope. But the average guard was frankly getting better training in close combat than the typical department had the resources to give its SWAT officers.

What we didn't have was a baseline of prior training - military or police - to build on. Any training on NBC skills would have to come from somewhere, and in most cases, direct combat effectiveness.

This gave me two ideas.

"1) Identify members of Reaction Team who are former military. Put them through a refresher course and issue them NBC gear. Make from them an NBC-capable Reaction-Reaction Team."

"That could work..." George speculated.

"
2) Same concept, but prior service guards and also all supervisors. The latter group will help us map out whether it's worthwhile to spread the training further."

Now George and Janine frowned.

"[Echo 18], I know you think the world of your guards. But some of them can't pour piss out of a boot if the directions were printed on the heel. Look at Shane Shreve. He's ex-military."

Decidedly ex. As in ineligible for future military service.

"Point. But this is only certain guards. And supervisors."

"Shall we forget about the _supervisor_ who managed to give herself smoke inhalation discharging extinguishers into a trash dumpster fire? Or would you prefer the _supervisor_ who twisted his ankle running to a medical?"

"Or perhaps the _fire engineer_ who forgot to turn his radio on during the perimeter camp fire? Or the stretcher bearer team manager who couldn't show up for her own auto da fe?"

"Shots fired," Wyatt muttered.

"The point is, these skills are _hard_. Not because they are difficult, but because they must be precise and perfect every time."

"We need a training chemical."

That's when the thought hit me.

"This discussion is tabled. I need to do some brainstorming."

We were going to sneak this training in, and break entirely new ground in violating a whole section of Federal law we hadn't breached yet.

Riot control agents, the proper employment and use thereof. See 'improvised.'