Gas & Blood (Damned of the 2/19th Novella) - Rough Draft Finished

The First Crack in the Wall

FSTS-317/NATO Site 93
Classified Location
Edge of the 1K Zone
Fulda Gap, Western Germany
28 April, 1986
2230 Hours

Sergeant Bonnham stared at me and Stillwater as we walked, naked, back into The Fort. Stillwater stood there for a moment, looked at Nancy a little confused, and Stokes moved up and took his arm.

"Ant, honey, are you all right?" She asked.

"Yeah, yeah," He said, pulling his arm away, "I'm all right. Just thought I saw something."

Nancy and I exchanged glances right before I got in the decon shower. I saw her move over to him, walking him back to the cot to sit him down.

I stood in the shower and thought about what I'd been told eight hours before, what Blackbriar had said, and what the GRU officer had told us. Out of the frying pan, and directly into the fire. I took my time washing my hair, trying to keep any of the water from getting in my mouth. It had a metallic taste, and part of me wondered how many people were mixed in the corium, components of Chernobyl, and fine particulates I was inhaling.

They'll be part of you forever, I thought myself, knowing my thoughts were gloomy.

A long time ago, before I'd been turned into Special Weapons, I'd have been embarrassed about showering with only a clear plastic divider between me and the rest of the world. I knew that anyone who looked would be able to see me with perfect clarity as I washed my balls. Special Weapons had stripped away all my modesty, Atlas had ground away the rest. I had no problems stripping naked in front of complete strangers now.

They'd ground away the man and left nothing more than a weapon.

I still couldn't believe what had happened. A full blown core explosion in a nuclear reactor. I knew that the radiation was sweeping over Europe. It wasn't much, not realistically, but already the news reports were acting like it was a wave of invisible death that would kill everyone and everything as it devoured the entire continent.

In reality, birth defects and outbreaks of cancer would barely register unless an in-depth statistical examination was performed. But confirmation bias would create panic, and the anti-nuclear, Green political groups would fan the hysteria.

We privately figured that tens of thousands of women in Europe would get abortions in the next several months. That a measurable percentage of the next generation would be aborted by mother terrified by the propaganda. I could visualize those women, faces lined with worry, tear streaked, pleading with a doctor to abort their baby out of the fears of mutation that the activists would gleefully fan. I knew that those same groups would point at the women aborting their babies as claim that every single one was a mutant, that they had been forced to abort their children for medical reasons, not by the very hysteria they had caused.

I hated them. A slow burning hatred for every single anti-nuke activist who used dodgy or bullshit science, made-up statistics, and proclaimed themselves to be experts, who acted like Luddites and would secretly be ecstatic by the number of abortions that would happen.

All those babies.

It wasn't the mothers I hated, not the doctors. It was the people who knew good and goddamn well they were lying, the politicians that would use the accident to further their political careers, and the news organizations that I knew would follow the old maxim "If it bleeds, it leads" and fan the flames even further. I hated them. I knew the news organizations would encourage mistrust of doctors, scientists, and actual experts.

Because real science was complicated, and people preferred easy, and easy was stupid.

The timer went off and the water shut off. I left and Stillwater took my place.