PURGE - Melt Book 6: (A Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Survival Series) Read online
Page 2
The trio steal a car large enough to transport Midge home. As they’re leaving, Petra gets a text from her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Sean. The house is under attack and he and Petra’s grandmother, Mimi, are pinned down.
Petra solicits the help of a nurse, Cassie, to sit with Midge and Betsy then she and Jim take off for home. Cassie’s hand is bandaged. She was the nurse Petra saw entering the hospital when the burn victims were admitted.
Back at the compound, there’s a gun battle. Mimi is hit. But Jim and Petra kill the intruders.
Cassie calls to say the hospital is going into lockdown. Petra tells her to leave the parking lot immediately and drive back to the house slowly so Midge isn’t injured.
Aggie, who has been MIA since she killed Arthur Foss, returns home. She has visited the salt mines their father, Bill, had marked on his maps and believes she has found a place for them to hide out until the crisis has passed.
Realizing just how sick Midge is, and worried that the job may prove too much for Nurse Betsy, Petra solicits another nurse to come and help them.
Sean, whose folks are rich, agrees to foot the bill.
When Cassie, Midge, and Betsy arrive home, Petra kills Nurse Cassie. There’s an infectious agent out there; they don’t know how it’s spreading; the hospital is on full quarantine; she believes Cassie was infected. Unlike Aggie, who was plagued with misgivings when she shot Arthur, Petra has no such qualms. She has been transformed from a nervous Nellie to a “shoot first, ask questions later” warrior.
BOOK FIVE: RAZE
Alice Everlee is evacuated to Charles Sullivan III’s Red Hook, NY mansion, where her husband Bill is being treated for his life-threatening wounds.
When Pete, who’d made it through the collapse of the New York Subway system, dies of his MELT-related infection, Charles and his entourage decamp to yet another mansion further north. Charles’ fear of germs is so profound that when they depart Red Hook, they blow the mansion and everything in it to smithereens.
As soon as she has access to a working phone, Alice calls everyone she knows. None of her children respond. She decides they must have rid themselves of all plastics, per her instructions, which would mean they no longer have their phones. She eventually reaches her assistant, Fran, who’s thrilled to hear from Alice. Fran and Professor Baxter urge Alice to return to help them with the effort to halt MELT. Alice demures. Bill and the kids need her more than K&P.
Now at a “safe” distance from Manhattan, Alice nurses Bill. When he wakes, he asks Alice where their son Paul is. Alice is furious that Bill left their upstate cabin and put their son in danger.
Charles Sullivan, while extremely rich, is developmentally delayed. He insists his staff cater to his every whim. When Alice refuses, he puts her under house arrest. She reveals that their pilot has a lesion on his hand; MELT might have followed them to the new house. Charles and his retinue decamp once again, leaving Alice and Bill to their fate. The next morning, Alice watches as another of Charles’ houses explodes, loads Bill into a van, and heads for home.
Klean & Pure’s Manhattan complex has been decimated. The remaining K&P team have relocated to a New Jersey laboratory. Convinced Michael Rayton is the saboteur who meddled with MELT, Professor Baxter has banned him from all meetings.
Michael, who in addition to his duties at K&P is a CIA operative, recruits FBI Agent, Jo Morgan, to be his eyes and ears during K&P briefings. Over time he comes to suspect that Jo isn’t keeping him in the loop. He charges his lover, Fran (Alice’s assistant) to find out all she can about the Professor’s movements. If fully briefed, Michael believes he’ll be able to solve the highly-technical puzzle that this new version of MELT poses.
The K&P team have samples of MELT-infected fish, rats, and human cadavers on site for investigation. Professor Baxter wants to assess the action of MELT on the body. It is, after all, eating human flesh as well as the buildings across the water.
The lab that houses the specimens goes into meltdown and the team are evacuated. Michael returns to the lab to conduct some ad hoc experiments, hoping that his show of bravado will yield answers, return him to Professor Baxter’s good graces, and secure him a place on K&P’s science team.
During the course of Michael’s experiments, he discovers an unmanned computer terminal and is able to reach out to his colleague Xiao-peng Zhang of Xi’an Jiatong University, China, to brainstorm possible reasons MELT has gone off the rails. Zhang suggests there’s been a structural change made to MELT, but their conversation is interrupted by a soldier who attempts to make a citizen’s arrest. Michael reveals that MELT is a biological weapon that was created overseas, but at the behest of the United States government. Fran disables the soldier and she and Michael race to catch Professor Baxter before she leaves K&P’s New Jersey compound.
Jim Asher, Alice’s elderly neighbor, and his wife Betsy have taken the Everlee children—Midge (who’s in a coma), Petra, and Aggie—into their home, following the destruction of the Everlee’s cabin. Petra’s boyfriend, Sean, is still in the picture.
Sean, whose parents are richer than rich, has offered a team of local doctors and nurses double their annual salary to come to the Asher home to nurse Midge. Furthermore, Sean claims he knows how to procure large quantities of over-the-counter drugs, which will be useful once New York has gone into a post-SHTF freefall.
Jim and Sean go to a drug buy. They score a massive duffel bag of opioids. On the way back home they’re stopped at a police checkpoint. The authorities are looking for anyone who might have been infected with MELT. There’s a state-wide quarantine being enforced. Sean’s stiches have opened and bleed onto the road during the police stop. Jim covers for Sean, claiming the blood is his. Sean takes off. Jim’s arrested and removed to a “health camp.”
The health camp is a rustic affair: nothing more than a few wooden huts and several thousand feet of razor wire. The main gate is manned by soldiers, the perimeter is patrolled, and there are snipers in the surrounding trees. Food—in the form of expired MREs—is airdropped in, daily. There’s no running water or latrines.
In the health camp, patients are divided into three groups. There are the “Healthies” (name says it all), the “Sickies” (those with frank signs of infection from MELT), and the “Specters” (a group that is neither healthy nor sick. They are “(ex)s’pected” to fall ill and are in partial quarantine). Jim is adjudged healthy and joins the Legion of Protection, a group of men who maintain order in the camp.
Jim’s duties include burying the Sickies who’ve died overnight. He’s rewarded with real food, served in the Army’s private galley, which is housed in a sanitary encampment a few thousand feet west of the health camp.
While collecting the dead, Jim spots Paul Everlee in the Specter’s zone. He promises he’ll find a way to get Paul upgraded to the Healthy end of the camp.
Jim’s supervisor, Eddie the Enforcer, is a brutal man who maintains order by bullying and beating the inmates. Jim gradually comes to learn that the Legion isn’t only maintaining order but starving the Sickies and hastening their end. When Jim witnesses a guard removing a Sickie before their death and wheeling them to a nearby grave, he quits the Legion, claiming that his time in Vietnam has left him with an aversion to violence and gore.
Wanting to make himself useful and ingratiate himself with the head of the Legion of Protection so he can spring Paul from his limbo-like prison, Jim decides to create working latrines. He pulls together some reluctant volunteers and begins digging.
When he turns in for the night, he overhears a brutal assault on a young woman, Hedwig, whom he met when first being transported into the camp.
Unable to stand by while Hedwig is assaulted, Jim sets Eddie’s hut on fire, grabs Hedwig, finds Paul and races to the camp perimeter.
Hedwig is in deep shock and unable to fend for herself. Between them, Paul and Jim get her under the fence to freedom.
A guard spots the commotion by the fence but rather than allow his friends to be rec
aptured, Jim lies in the dirt and feigns sleep. Paul and Hedwig are freed, but Jim remains a prisoner of the camp.
On to Book 6 in the MELT Series: PURGE
CHAPTER ONE
Is this thing on? Are we transmitting? We are? Well, good then. Let’s get this show on the road.
This is Widget and Goobz coming to you at the top of the hour and the top of the dial from an undisclosed location with The Raw Truth.
Well folks, we’re into the second week of this disaster and still no action from the one-percenters. Seems to me like there ain’t nobody in charge. Leastways, nobody who’s willing to put their ass on the line and get things moving.
We need food, clothing, housing, medication. We need a whole new city for the displaced people who are surging up New York’s highways like a pack of locust.
And I don’t use that metaphor lightly. They’re stripping malls to the bone, clearing out warehouses as well as retail outlets, squatting in empty homes, refusing to pay motel bills, messing up the highways. I tell you, we haven’t seen anything like this in my lifetime. Not in this country anyways.
We can all agree on these basic facts: evacuation was a cluster-you-know-what. The containment is a joke. And the cleanup hasn’t even begun.
Heck, seems maybe the “spill,” as they call it, isn’t done yet either.
Who’s in charge of fixing this unholy mess? The people who started it? No. They’re long gone.
Believe me when I tell you, they knew this was coming.
They took off in their jets and yachts and what-have-you just as soon as the proverbial horsepucky hit the proverbial fan. This cataclysmic fracking mess ain’t touching them or theirs and you and me know that’s the God’s honest truth. They’re off in the Azores or the Maldives or some island you ain’t never heard of, laughing their asses off. Them, with their offshore bank accounts and tax havens and loopholes around the law that keeps good, honest workers like us stuck behind the wheel of a big rig, doing what needs to be done.
Not saying I’m a driver, people.
You know me better than that.
Never divulge what doesn’t need to be known.
And you don’t need to know where I am, who I am, or what I do, ’cept as it pertains to whether or not I can deliver the truth. Head on over to the website to see all the documentation to back up whatever I say, because there’s no guessing going on in The Raw Truth. We deal in facts.
Ain’t that right, Goobz?
Goobz is nodding at me. He doesn’t want to be on the air. He just keeps us rocking.
I lost my place there, people. Bet you do that, too, if you’re of a certain age. Walk into a room and can’t remember what got you there. Imagine doing it in front of thousands of your fellow Americans. Me and the Goobman have been up for a lot of hours to bring you these bulletins so if we’re a bit punchy, you’re going to have to roll with it.
Goobz is telling me to move on. It’s a hand gesture you’d recognize but I can’t describe on the radio.
So.
Right.
Yes.
I’m not a trucker.
I wouldn’t be ashamed if I was, mind.
Those men keep this nation running. If it weren’t for the long-haul truckers you wouldn’t be getting your double-pump-chai-latte-whatever it is that gets you going in the morning. And before you go laughing at the yuppies…
Goobz, do we say “yuppie” any more or will that get some flake bent out of shape?
Goobz is giving me the thumbs up from the other side of the studio. We can still say yuppie.
Hey! I’m going to lean in real close so y’all can hear me say this: you can say what you like, no matter what kind of butthurt someone says they feel about you mouthin’ off.
You just got to be prepared to take it, too.
You call them a yuppie. They call you a redneck. We’re square as far as I can see. No harm done.
Just words.
It’s when you go after them or they come after you and you interfere with each other’s God-given right to be an American any way you choose; that’s when we part company.
Liberty for all means liberty for all, folks. That’s Widget’s way of looking at the world. Liberty for all.
Goobz is givin’ me his hand roll, people. He’s calling time on this Soapbox Moment from Widget.
Where was I?
Right.
This crisis.
I’ve been reading your comments on the interwebs. Keep ’em coming.
A lot of you good folk want to believe that the cavalry is on the way. I'm here to tell you that there ain’t no cavalry and there ain’t no whatever passes for a cavalry these days, neither.
Whatever happens in the coming weeks and months, happens because of us.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock—and a big rock at the bottom of a cave at the bottom of the ocean—you know that this is the largest man-made disaster ever to hit the United States. The impact of this chemical spill…yes, sir, that’s what they said set this all in action…a “chemical spill…”
Now if you listen to me regular, you know I’m not one for sarcasm. It muddies the waters.
But I’m saying “chemical spill” with those little quote marks around it because this disaster is like three Hiroshima’s going off on Manhattan all at once. You can’t call this a “spill” with a straight face. This is a disaster. A multi-pronged, evolving, mind-bending disaster.
Every day we see some new horror.
You’ve seen the pictures. You’ve heard the pundits. You maybe even live someplace where refugees have been streaming through your town.
But you still don't know how bad this is.
I’m going to tell you how bad it is and how bad it’s going to be in the days and weeks to come.
Cuz I have my finger on the pulse, people.
I have reports coming in from all over and leaks from people who know what’s going on. I can’t name names. That would drive them away. The point of Widget is to get to the truth, so I’m going to protect my sources, as they say.
Here’s what I know.
First up they told us it was a chemical spill. Bummer that it happened in a metropolis, but hey, that’s what the fire department is for. Some idiot somewhere forgets to unplug a centrifuge and BANG, a laboratory goes up in smoke.
It happens.
Goobz, sorry brother, I need a Soapbox Moment.
Goobz is giving me the thumbs up.
Americans work 137 more hours per annum than Japanese workers, 260 more hours than British workers, and 499 more than the French.
Boy, I’m moving to France. How about you Goobz?
No?
Goobz says he doesn’t like wine. He’s staying here with his Schlitz and Pabst Blue Ribbon.
He’s cussing at me, folks. Good thing we don’t mic him up. He’s got the mouth of a sailor.
Where was I?
Right. The “accident” theory.
Okay, how about this? The average productivity of the American worker has increased 400% since 1950. Either our standard of living should be four times higher or our work weeks one quarter of what they are now, but I’ve talked to a lot of people in this great nation of ours and that’s not what I’m hearing.
Give me one more minute, Goobz, I’m getting there.
In England you get paid vacation as well as paid sick leave.
In France, you get a whole month of paid leave.
Let me say that one more time for the people in the back: IN FRANCE THEY PAY YOU TO STAY AT HOME FOR A MONTH.
And let’s not even get started on paid maternity leave.
And what’s my point? Here it is, people: if there’s an accident, there’s someone behind that dropped flask or overflowing reactor or failed experiment. Accidents don’t happen in a vacuum.
Am I saying this could have been avoided?
Well, I don’t rightly know the answer to that because the management at Klean & Pure Industries has gone silent and isn’t retur
ning any of my calls or emails.
But maybe…
Maybe some overworked lab assistant fell asleep at the wheel.
Think on that for a minute. If this all started with a “spill” could that spill have been avoided?
Well, it’s a theory.
Now. If you’ve been listening to The Raw Deal for more than a minute, you know I don’t believe that theory for one hot second.
I’m just putting it out there in case they hang some poor sucker out to dry.
Before you go jumping on the bandwagon baying at the butchers to lynch some intern or lab assistant, ask yourself this: were they given the training they needed? Did they have management back up? How tired were they? If they had the kind of annual vacation the French have, would the “accident” have happened at all?
Petra solicits the help of a nurse, Cassie, to sit with Midge and Betsy then she and Jim take off for home. Cassie’s hand is bandaged. She was the nurse Petra saw entering the hospital when the burn victims were admitted.
Back at the compound, there’s a gun battle. Mimi is hit. But Jim and Petra kill the intruders.
Cassie calls to say the hospital is going into lockdown. Petra tells her to leave the parking lot immediately and drive back to the house slowly so Midge isn’t injured.
Aggie, who has been MIA since she killed Arthur Foss, returns home. She has visited the salt mines their father, Bill, had marked on his maps and believes she has found a place for them to hide out until the crisis has passed.
Realizing just how sick Midge is, and worried that the job may prove too much for Nurse Betsy, Petra solicits another nurse to come and help them.
Sean, whose folks are rich, agrees to foot the bill.
When Cassie, Midge, and Betsy arrive home, Petra kills Nurse Cassie. There’s an infectious agent out there; they don’t know how it’s spreading; the hospital is on full quarantine; she believes Cassie was infected. Unlike Aggie, who was plagued with misgivings when she shot Arthur, Petra has no such qualms. She has been transformed from a nervous Nellie to a “shoot first, ask questions later” warrior.
BOOK FIVE: RAZE
Alice Everlee is evacuated to Charles Sullivan III’s Red Hook, NY mansion, where her husband Bill is being treated for his life-threatening wounds.
When Pete, who’d made it through the collapse of the New York Subway system, dies of his MELT-related infection, Charles and his entourage decamp to yet another mansion further north. Charles’ fear of germs is so profound that when they depart Red Hook, they blow the mansion and everything in it to smithereens.
As soon as she has access to a working phone, Alice calls everyone she knows. None of her children respond. She decides they must have rid themselves of all plastics, per her instructions, which would mean they no longer have their phones. She eventually reaches her assistant, Fran, who’s thrilled to hear from Alice. Fran and Professor Baxter urge Alice to return to help them with the effort to halt MELT. Alice demures. Bill and the kids need her more than K&P.
Now at a “safe” distance from Manhattan, Alice nurses Bill. When he wakes, he asks Alice where their son Paul is. Alice is furious that Bill left their upstate cabin and put their son in danger.
Charles Sullivan, while extremely rich, is developmentally delayed. He insists his staff cater to his every whim. When Alice refuses, he puts her under house arrest. She reveals that their pilot has a lesion on his hand; MELT might have followed them to the new house. Charles and his retinue decamp once again, leaving Alice and Bill to their fate. The next morning, Alice watches as another of Charles’ houses explodes, loads Bill into a van, and heads for home.
Klean & Pure’s Manhattan complex has been decimated. The remaining K&P team have relocated to a New Jersey laboratory. Convinced Michael Rayton is the saboteur who meddled with MELT, Professor Baxter has banned him from all meetings.
Michael, who in addition to his duties at K&P is a CIA operative, recruits FBI Agent, Jo Morgan, to be his eyes and ears during K&P briefings. Over time he comes to suspect that Jo isn’t keeping him in the loop. He charges his lover, Fran (Alice’s assistant) to find out all she can about the Professor’s movements. If fully briefed, Michael believes he’ll be able to solve the highly-technical puzzle that this new version of MELT poses.
The K&P team have samples of MELT-infected fish, rats, and human cadavers on site for investigation. Professor Baxter wants to assess the action of MELT on the body. It is, after all, eating human flesh as well as the buildings across the water.
The lab that houses the specimens goes into meltdown and the team are evacuated. Michael returns to the lab to conduct some ad hoc experiments, hoping that his show of bravado will yield answers, return him to Professor Baxter’s good graces, and secure him a place on K&P’s science team.
During the course of Michael’s experiments, he discovers an unmanned computer terminal and is able to reach out to his colleague Xiao-peng Zhang of Xi’an Jiatong University, China, to brainstorm possible reasons MELT has gone off the rails. Zhang suggests there’s been a structural change made to MELT, but their conversation is interrupted by a soldier who attempts to make a citizen’s arrest. Michael reveals that MELT is a biological weapon that was created overseas, but at the behest of the United States government. Fran disables the soldier and she and Michael race to catch Professor Baxter before she leaves K&P’s New Jersey compound.
Jim Asher, Alice’s elderly neighbor, and his wife Betsy have taken the Everlee children—Midge (who’s in a coma), Petra, and Aggie—into their home, following the destruction of the Everlee’s cabin. Petra’s boyfriend, Sean, is still in the picture.
Sean, whose parents are richer than rich, has offered a team of local doctors and nurses double their annual salary to come to the Asher home to nurse Midge. Furthermore, Sean claims he knows how to procure large quantities of over-the-counter drugs, which will be useful once New York has gone into a post-SHTF freefall.
Jim and Sean go to a drug buy. They score a massive duffel bag of opioids. On the way back home they’re stopped at a police checkpoint. The authorities are looking for anyone who might have been infected with MELT. There’s a state-wide quarantine being enforced. Sean’s stiches have opened and bleed onto the road during the police stop. Jim covers for Sean, claiming the blood is his. Sean takes off. Jim’s arrested and removed to a “health camp.”
The health camp is a rustic affair: nothing more than a few wooden huts and several thousand feet of razor wire. The main gate is manned by soldiers, the perimeter is patrolled, and there are snipers in the surrounding trees. Food—in the form of expired MREs—is airdropped in, daily. There’s no running water or latrines.
In the health camp, patients are divided into three groups. There are the “Healthies” (name says it all), the “Sickies” (those with frank signs of infection from MELT), and the “Specters” (a group that is neither healthy nor sick. They are “(ex)s’pected” to fall ill and are in partial quarantine). Jim is adjudged healthy and joins the Legion of Protection, a group of men who maintain order in the camp.
Jim’s duties include burying the Sickies who’ve died overnight. He’s rewarded with real food, served in the Army’s private galley, which is housed in a sanitary encampment a few thousand feet west of the health camp.
While collecting the dead, Jim spots Paul Everlee in the Specter’s zone. He promises he’ll find a way to get Paul upgraded to the Healthy end of the camp.
Jim’s supervisor, Eddie the Enforcer, is a brutal man who maintains order by bullying and beating the inmates. Jim gradually comes to learn that the Legion isn’t only maintaining order but starving the Sickies and hastening their end. When Jim witnesses a guard removing a Sickie before their death and wheeling them to a nearby grave, he quits the Legion, claiming that his time in Vietnam has left him with an aversion to violence and gore.
Wanting to make himself useful and ingratiate himself with the head of the Legion of Protection so he can spring Paul from his limbo-like prison, Jim decides to create working latrines. He pulls together some reluctant volunteers and begins digging.
When he turns in for the night, he overhears a brutal assault on a young woman, Hedwig, whom he met when first being transported into the camp.
Unable to stand by while Hedwig is assaulted, Jim sets Eddie’s hut on fire, grabs Hedwig, finds Paul and races to the camp perimeter.
Hedwig is in deep shock and unable to fend for herself. Between them, Paul and Jim get her under the fence to freedom.
A guard spots the commotion by the fence but rather than allow his friends to be rec
aptured, Jim lies in the dirt and feigns sleep. Paul and Hedwig are freed, but Jim remains a prisoner of the camp.
On to Book 6 in the MELT Series: PURGE
CHAPTER ONE
Is this thing on? Are we transmitting? We are? Well, good then. Let’s get this show on the road.
This is Widget and Goobz coming to you at the top of the hour and the top of the dial from an undisclosed location with The Raw Truth.
Well folks, we’re into the second week of this disaster and still no action from the one-percenters. Seems to me like there ain’t nobody in charge. Leastways, nobody who’s willing to put their ass on the line and get things moving.
We need food, clothing, housing, medication. We need a whole new city for the displaced people who are surging up New York’s highways like a pack of locust.
And I don’t use that metaphor lightly. They’re stripping malls to the bone, clearing out warehouses as well as retail outlets, squatting in empty homes, refusing to pay motel bills, messing up the highways. I tell you, we haven’t seen anything like this in my lifetime. Not in this country anyways.
We can all agree on these basic facts: evacuation was a cluster-you-know-what. The containment is a joke. And the cleanup hasn’t even begun.
Heck, seems maybe the “spill,” as they call it, isn’t done yet either.
Who’s in charge of fixing this unholy mess? The people who started it? No. They’re long gone.
Believe me when I tell you, they knew this was coming.
They took off in their jets and yachts and what-have-you just as soon as the proverbial horsepucky hit the proverbial fan. This cataclysmic fracking mess ain’t touching them or theirs and you and me know that’s the God’s honest truth. They’re off in the Azores or the Maldives or some island you ain’t never heard of, laughing their asses off. Them, with their offshore bank accounts and tax havens and loopholes around the law that keeps good, honest workers like us stuck behind the wheel of a big rig, doing what needs to be done.
Not saying I’m a driver, people.
You know me better than that.
Never divulge what doesn’t need to be known.
And you don’t need to know where I am, who I am, or what I do, ’cept as it pertains to whether or not I can deliver the truth. Head on over to the website to see all the documentation to back up whatever I say, because there’s no guessing going on in The Raw Truth. We deal in facts.
Ain’t that right, Goobz?
Goobz is nodding at me. He doesn’t want to be on the air. He just keeps us rocking.
I lost my place there, people. Bet you do that, too, if you’re of a certain age. Walk into a room and can’t remember what got you there. Imagine doing it in front of thousands of your fellow Americans. Me and the Goobman have been up for a lot of hours to bring you these bulletins so if we’re a bit punchy, you’re going to have to roll with it.
Goobz is telling me to move on. It’s a hand gesture you’d recognize but I can’t describe on the radio.
So.
Right.
Yes.
I’m not a trucker.
I wouldn’t be ashamed if I was, mind.
Those men keep this nation running. If it weren’t for the long-haul truckers you wouldn’t be getting your double-pump-chai-latte-whatever it is that gets you going in the morning. And before you go laughing at the yuppies…
Goobz, do we say “yuppie” any more or will that get some flake bent out of shape?
Goobz is giving me the thumbs up from the other side of the studio. We can still say yuppie.
Hey! I’m going to lean in real close so y’all can hear me say this: you can say what you like, no matter what kind of butthurt someone says they feel about you mouthin’ off.
You just got to be prepared to take it, too.
You call them a yuppie. They call you a redneck. We’re square as far as I can see. No harm done.
Just words.
It’s when you go after them or they come after you and you interfere with each other’s God-given right to be an American any way you choose; that’s when we part company.
Liberty for all means liberty for all, folks. That’s Widget’s way of looking at the world. Liberty for all.
Goobz is givin’ me his hand roll, people. He’s calling time on this Soapbox Moment from Widget.
Where was I?
Right.
This crisis.
I’ve been reading your comments on the interwebs. Keep ’em coming.
A lot of you good folk want to believe that the cavalry is on the way. I'm here to tell you that there ain’t no cavalry and there ain’t no whatever passes for a cavalry these days, neither.
Whatever happens in the coming weeks and months, happens because of us.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock—and a big rock at the bottom of a cave at the bottom of the ocean—you know that this is the largest man-made disaster ever to hit the United States. The impact of this chemical spill…yes, sir, that’s what they said set this all in action…a “chemical spill…”
Now if you listen to me regular, you know I’m not one for sarcasm. It muddies the waters.
But I’m saying “chemical spill” with those little quote marks around it because this disaster is like three Hiroshima’s going off on Manhattan all at once. You can’t call this a “spill” with a straight face. This is a disaster. A multi-pronged, evolving, mind-bending disaster.
Every day we see some new horror.
You’ve seen the pictures. You’ve heard the pundits. You maybe even live someplace where refugees have been streaming through your town.
But you still don't know how bad this is.
I’m going to tell you how bad it is and how bad it’s going to be in the days and weeks to come.
Cuz I have my finger on the pulse, people.
I have reports coming in from all over and leaks from people who know what’s going on. I can’t name names. That would drive them away. The point of Widget is to get to the truth, so I’m going to protect my sources, as they say.
Here’s what I know.
First up they told us it was a chemical spill. Bummer that it happened in a metropolis, but hey, that’s what the fire department is for. Some idiot somewhere forgets to unplug a centrifuge and BANG, a laboratory goes up in smoke.
It happens.
Goobz, sorry brother, I need a Soapbox Moment.
Goobz is giving me the thumbs up.
Americans work 137 more hours per annum than Japanese workers, 260 more hours than British workers, and 499 more than the French.
Boy, I’m moving to France. How about you Goobz?
No?
Goobz says he doesn’t like wine. He’s staying here with his Schlitz and Pabst Blue Ribbon.
He’s cussing at me, folks. Good thing we don’t mic him up. He’s got the mouth of a sailor.
Where was I?
Right. The “accident” theory.
Okay, how about this? The average productivity of the American worker has increased 400% since 1950. Either our standard of living should be four times higher or our work weeks one quarter of what they are now, but I’ve talked to a lot of people in this great nation of ours and that’s not what I’m hearing.
Give me one more minute, Goobz, I’m getting there.
In England you get paid vacation as well as paid sick leave.
In France, you get a whole month of paid leave.
Let me say that one more time for the people in the back: IN FRANCE THEY PAY YOU TO STAY AT HOME FOR A MONTH.
And let’s not even get started on paid maternity leave.
And what’s my point? Here it is, people: if there’s an accident, there’s someone behind that dropped flask or overflowing reactor or failed experiment. Accidents don’t happen in a vacuum.
Am I saying this could have been avoided?
Well, I don’t rightly know the answer to that because the management at Klean & Pure Industries has gone silent and isn’t retur
ning any of my calls or emails.
But maybe…
Maybe some overworked lab assistant fell asleep at the wheel.
Think on that for a minute. If this all started with a “spill” could that spill have been avoided?
Well, it’s a theory.
Now. If you’ve been listening to The Raw Deal for more than a minute, you know I don’t believe that theory for one hot second.
I’m just putting it out there in case they hang some poor sucker out to dry.
Before you go jumping on the bandwagon baying at the butchers to lynch some intern or lab assistant, ask yourself this: were they given the training they needed? Did they have management back up? How tired were they? If they had the kind of annual vacation the French have, would the “accident” have happened at all?