The Disease (first post, comments appreciated)
I sat at my desk, feet up and leaning back, my chair squeaking as I rocked back and forth. There was a shipment coming in that day, and I had nothing to do but wait. My computer was turned on, and I was just staring at the screen, waiting for the little pop up alert on my email saying that the truck was nearing. As I stared through the screen my attention started to fade and my eyes began to fall. I could feel myself just starting to drift off when a notifying beep reawakened me. I leaned back a little farther and allowed my feat to fall. I hunched forward and read the message. Hey Bud. Trucks been spotted on the far side of the fence, going through security right now. Be there in a couple.
Letting a sigh escape my lips I rose to my feet, adjusting my pants so they covered the tops of my shoes and weren’t caught up on my socks. I started walking towards the docks, passing a series of desks, most of which were full of men and women hastily typing away about who knows what. Just serving the Man. As I made my way in between the workers I made eye contact with Guy, my work associate. I tilted my head towards the door through which was the docking garage. He closed what ever he had been working on on his computer, got up, and made his way over towards me. I opened the door and Guy proceeded me in.
“Big shipment this week?” he asked. Guy worked beneath me. There were no official rankings or anything, but I’d been in the business longer, and all of our employees and bosses went through me. Guy, more or less, was kept out of the loop. I don’t think it bothered him to much. He isn’t overly attached to the Company. Thats how a lot of the next generation are. They don’t understand the importance of our work.
“Nothing out of the usual. Think there’s a couple dozen, maybe thirty. You know how it is. Sometimes they pick 'em up as they go.” Every now and then as the shipment was on its way from the Collection Center a local office would add to the shipment. Usually everyone sent it to the Collection Center, but if there was a shipment passing through, it was cheaper for everyone involved to simply load ‘em up then to arrange for a transport to the Center.
Guy hit the big red button on the wall just next to the door. Immediately we could hear the grinding sound of the garage door opening. When I first started it seemed so loud, as though everyone for a great distance around must hear it, but over the years this worry left and now I know that it only seems so loud to those in the room, and that it seems like nothing more than a murmur to those at their desks. Through the slowly widening gap between the edge of the loading dock and the rising door blew in hot desert wind. Guy and I walked over. When we stopped our feet were on the edge of the docking station, and in front of us the cement dropped a couple feet till it met the pavement. The road could be seen snaking amongst the hills of sand and dried dirt. The sun beat down further drying the land, evaporating every last drop of liquid.
We could hear the truck before we could see it. But after a couple of seconds it emerged from behind the dune. It was all black, like they all were, a matte black that wasn’t broken by any other colors. Even the windows were tinted to the point where you could see in at all, even when you were up close. No markings adorned its side, except for a miniature old glory painted on either side. As it got close, within a hundred yards, it made a three point turn, and backed up to the dock. It came to a stop just an inch from the dock ledge. The divers never got out, but started to recognize who was behind the wheel by how expertly the parked. It was hard to get so close without hitting. Usually truck docks had those black pads, but not this one. We needed the trucks to get closer than those things would allow.
I stepped up and pulled a key from my pocket. It looked like a normal padlock key, but imbedded underneath the shining metal was a microchip. You could duplicate the key, but it wouldn’t work on the lock, because there was no way of getting to the chip without breaking it in the process. I inserted the key in the giant lock, and twisted. I pulled the padlock away so that Guy could lift up on the lever that allowed the truck door to be opened. I stuck the lock in my pocket and we both grabbed on to either side of the trucks door and hefted it up. Once it was at about head height its momentum carried it all the way up. Inside were twenty seven, just over a couple dozen, metal containers. Each was ten feet long, three feet tall, and four feet wide. Inside each was the Disease.
The Disease has always been with us, humanity that is. I guess it can infect all species. When the Disease was brought forth, it would act like a vampire and suck the life blood of society. It would be nurtured with sympathy, fed and cared for. Even though it provided nothing for the people, we were unable to bring ourselves to destroy it. So whenever it surfaced, it was taken into custody and transported, like I said, to the Collection Center, and then they were brought to us, at the Containment Center.
We walked in and unhooked the moving trolleys from the inside walls. We wheeled them up to the first containers and loaded them, each of us taking two. The metal containers had various dials and buttons on one end, and on the other was a circular whole, roughly three inches in diameter. Once we had loaded up our containers, we wheeled them out of the truck. The deliveries when the driver doesn’t park close enough end up taking way longer then they should because we each have to work together to pick up each container and carry it across, without the help of the wheeled trolly.
Once inside the garage we wheeled the trolleys over to the elevator platform. There we unloaded the four and headed back to get another load. After they were all on the elevator platform, one of us, I can’t recall such a trivial fact, pulled the lever on the platform and the steal grates we were standing on, along with the containers, began to lower. It was about a five minute trip to go down the three stories into the Earth. Both of us complained about how slow the elevator went, but it was always met with comments like “We don’t want to jostle the shipment,” or “It would be far to expensive,” or “We don’t have to deal with it so we don’t care.” The Man was only worried about the things that directly effected him, and thats it.
And so we waited. After the five minutes we reached the bottom of the shaft. All the sides were covered with the massive retaining walls, and into one of these walls was a door. This one had one of those round things that you had to spin to unlock the door. I saw them a lot on TV and movies on ships. I went over and spun it and then pushed the door open. We both then proceeded to move the containers into the adjacent room. It wasn’t really a room. It was more like a warehouse. We took our containers to the back and left them leaning against the wall. Then we went back to get more, then back and forth and back and forth till they were all in the back of the warehouse.
All the upper levels were full, and so we had to start filling up the ground floor. Popping out of the ground ever five or six feet, just enough room to place the containers to lie next to each other and someone could still walk in between them, was a metal tube, just the right size to fit into that hole on one end of the containers. Through that food traveled everything needed to keep the Disease in stasis. We dragged the containers side by side and then hooked the tube into the holes. I remember that Guy was moving the last one, I was hooking up a container, when Guy dropped it. It crashed to the floor and we both let out a brief string of profanity, before we noticed something that shut the both of us up. The top of the container had separated from the body. The lid looked like that of a coffin, slightly ajar, and I half expected Dracula to burst forth at any moment. Neither of us had actually ever seen what was inside. We were always told that it would just look like nothing of interest to us, because we didn’t know what to look for. All we were told was that it was a danger to America, and that we should just do our jobs, for the Man.
We looked at each other, and for a second we almost resisted the urge, but we couldn’t resist. Guy didn’t move, his feet glued to the ground. I got right next to it and knelt down, like a catcher waiting for a pitch. I reached out and moved the container. Inside was a child, a girl, maybe ten at the oldest. She looked like there was something wrong with her. They way those weird kids back in high school looked, the ones with parent volunteers following them around. A string went through a hole in her ear and was tied to a paper tag like those put on checked baggage. I reached in and tilted the tag so I could read it.
Specimen #4935/ Threat Level 4/ Contaminated: Down Syndrome class 2/ Sentenced to: Area 51 Containment Center.
That was the day I learned who the disease was.
The Disease is a story I wrote to be part of a short story compilation I'll be posting at wordsofhorus.blogspot.com. If you have any comments or would like to discuss something, or just subscribe so you can read future stories, please feel free to.
Thanks!
