GWOT V - The Black Parade
Apr. 27th, 2022 08:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drewkittyGWOT V - The Black Parade
I spent a couple of days at the Project, waiting for transportation to my next assignment.
My mission was complete. So I didn't bug people.
They bugged me. They wanted their stories heard. Even if I would never tell them.
There was a photo pasted on the wallpaper prominently at the entrance to the Mortality Center. A blow-up of an old black and white photo. It showed a line of scarecrows stumbling down a gangplank to a dock.
Then the ferry logo in the foreground stood out.
It. Was. In. Color.
The frame snapped into perspective.
It was a color photo.
All the people were black. Not race black. They hadn't been born that way.
Horribly burned. Stumbling forward. Trying to support each other.
Some were children. A child was carrying a smaller child. A old weather beaten man, from his ruined thick layer of clothing and singed scraggly beard a homeless man, was carrying an infant in his arms.
The background was the ferry dock. They were getting off the ferry on the Oakland side.
They had stumbled through the hell that was the City post nuclear attack. They had stumbled somehow to a working ferry, which someone had piloted across the Bay.
There was a stand explaining the exhibit. I really didn't want to read it.
I did anyway.
###
This photo was taken by a ferry dock worker in Alameda one hour after detonation.
Thirty seven people are pictured in this photo.
As of Day 82, all were confirmed deceased.
###
The Mortality Center was somewhere between a mad science project and a demographics study.
What actually killed these people?
Homeland wanted to know. They had reasons. Their own test subjects. Valuable data for the subjugation and enslavement of China.
Now it was under California control. But the science continued, to this day.
Radiation, it turns out, is highly individualistic in how it kills people. It breaks your cells. But which cells?
Burns complicate the situation. Some of the people pictured would have survived conventional burns of that intensity. But add the radiation, and they were finished.
Turned out they were a very high priority for evacuation. Some of the children flown out via the Air Bridge ended up in hospitals from New York to Florida.
They got the works. Anti radiation drugs, fluids and supportive care, bone marrow transplants, even feeding tubes.
All the children in the photo died. It just took longer, was more painful and more expensive.
Not all the children flown out died. The data had cut off with the Resistance. Careful exploration of sharing scientific data was discussed, but not yet begun.
###
There was a darker reason - darker than burnt flesh - why California continued the research.
We had a nuclear monster for our continental neighbor. We had fears of trans-Pacific fallout. Mostly affecting fish, but that affected food supplies.
We also had something else.
###
"Captain [18], how do you feel about nuclear war?"
It was only much later that I realized that I had been interviewed. And to my utter horror, passed with flying colors.
###
The Americans had lost interest in San Francisco, especially when everyone knew who had really done it.
They had their own research projects on the edges of dead cities. Bigger ones. Chicago. Cleveland. Detroit.
And all the human subjects they could ever want, in the ruined cities in China they had conquered with ruthless repeated applications of nuclear fires.
Our. Neighbor.
###
That night, I dreamed. It's never good when I dream.
The dead wanted to talk to me. They didn't want to plead for their lives. They were past that.
They wanted something much more prosaic.
They wanted no company. No more. No more canned sunshine in dead cities where even Death was dead.
###
Now I had plenty of company for the ghosts who followed me around, the murderers of Alviso, with me as their murderer in turn.
The Black Parade.
It was worse than war. Worse than war crime.
In war, at least you know. You see the flags, hear the speeches, then the sirens and the explosions. You know why you die.
These people had been going about their ordinary business in a world at peace.
Then they were literally nuked by their own nation.
As suddenly as a car wreck.
As a pretext. As stupid politics. As an excuse.
There was likely some truth to the notion that nuking SF pulled what would have been the fangs of a swifter Resistance. Anti-war city? No city, no anti-war movement there.
Maybe there are some people who serve California.
I'd certainly gone through hell for ordinary folks. I'd thought I was in their service until yesterday.
Now I knew who I served, with the captain's bars and the thousand yard stare and the California Republic flag and the oath of the scout-soldier to sustain me.
I served the Black Parade.
The last of the innocents.
I spent a couple of days at the Project, waiting for transportation to my next assignment.
My mission was complete. So I didn't bug people.
They bugged me. They wanted their stories heard. Even if I would never tell them.
There was a photo pasted on the wallpaper prominently at the entrance to the Mortality Center. A blow-up of an old black and white photo. It showed a line of scarecrows stumbling down a gangplank to a dock.
Then the ferry logo in the foreground stood out.
It. Was. In. Color.
The frame snapped into perspective.
It was a color photo.
All the people were black. Not race black. They hadn't been born that way.
Horribly burned. Stumbling forward. Trying to support each other.
Some were children. A child was carrying a smaller child. A old weather beaten man, from his ruined thick layer of clothing and singed scraggly beard a homeless man, was carrying an infant in his arms.
The background was the ferry dock. They were getting off the ferry on the Oakland side.
They had stumbled through the hell that was the City post nuclear attack. They had stumbled somehow to a working ferry, which someone had piloted across the Bay.
There was a stand explaining the exhibit. I really didn't want to read it.
I did anyway.
###
This photo was taken by a ferry dock worker in Alameda one hour after detonation.
Thirty seven people are pictured in this photo.
As of Day 82, all were confirmed deceased.
###
The Mortality Center was somewhere between a mad science project and a demographics study.
What actually killed these people?
Homeland wanted to know. They had reasons. Their own test subjects. Valuable data for the subjugation and enslavement of China.
Now it was under California control. But the science continued, to this day.
Radiation, it turns out, is highly individualistic in how it kills people. It breaks your cells. But which cells?
Burns complicate the situation. Some of the people pictured would have survived conventional burns of that intensity. But add the radiation, and they were finished.
Turned out they were a very high priority for evacuation. Some of the children flown out via the Air Bridge ended up in hospitals from New York to Florida.
They got the works. Anti radiation drugs, fluids and supportive care, bone marrow transplants, even feeding tubes.
All the children in the photo died. It just took longer, was more painful and more expensive.
Not all the children flown out died. The data had cut off with the Resistance. Careful exploration of sharing scientific data was discussed, but not yet begun.
###
There was a darker reason - darker than burnt flesh - why California continued the research.
We had a nuclear monster for our continental neighbor. We had fears of trans-Pacific fallout. Mostly affecting fish, but that affected food supplies.
We also had something else.
###
"Captain [18], how do you feel about nuclear war?"
It was only much later that I realized that I had been interviewed. And to my utter horror, passed with flying colors.
###
The Americans had lost interest in San Francisco, especially when everyone knew who had really done it.
They had their own research projects on the edges of dead cities. Bigger ones. Chicago. Cleveland. Detroit.
And all the human subjects they could ever want, in the ruined cities in China they had conquered with ruthless repeated applications of nuclear fires.
Our. Neighbor.
###
That night, I dreamed. It's never good when I dream.
The dead wanted to talk to me. They didn't want to plead for their lives. They were past that.
They wanted something much more prosaic.
They wanted no company. No more. No more canned sunshine in dead cities where even Death was dead.
###
Now I had plenty of company for the ghosts who followed me around, the murderers of Alviso, with me as their murderer in turn.
The Black Parade.
It was worse than war. Worse than war crime.
In war, at least you know. You see the flags, hear the speeches, then the sirens and the explosions. You know why you die.
These people had been going about their ordinary business in a world at peace.
Then they were literally nuked by their own nation.
As suddenly as a car wreck.
As a pretext. As stupid politics. As an excuse.
There was likely some truth to the notion that nuking SF pulled what would have been the fangs of a swifter Resistance. Anti-war city? No city, no anti-war movement there.
Maybe there are some people who serve California.
I'd certainly gone through hell for ordinary folks. I'd thought I was in their service until yesterday.
Now I knew who I served, with the captain's bars and the thousand yard stare and the California Republic flag and the oath of the scout-soldier to sustain me.
I served the Black Parade.
The last of the innocents.
