Decontamination

Out here in the middle is where the lean green smell is the strongest. Tons of chlorine, helicoptered over the lake weekly, sinking fathoms down and eating all the impurities hiding from the light of the day.

People think that the smell is from the chlorine itself, but it isn’t--it’s the smell of decomposition. It’s the odor from the gases that emanate and bubble up through the water when the chlorine dissolves and devours the impurities it comes in contact with. I love that smell, even though it makes my eyes water. It’s the scent of a job well done.

The air is cold, and the sky is grey. I drop anchor, and then I slide over the side of the raft, into the water, and it feels like breaking into another atmosphere.

I have feelings, but I keep them to myself, pack them tightly around my spine and let them galvanize me, like the acid inside of a battery, burning cold and clear.

The valve at the base of my neck opens up, the oxygen rushes out of me, and I descend. The loose skin balloons out from my neck, becomes porous near the tip, and bubbles of air float back to the surface, where the light is already fading away.

All Fibs are made for this job, but very few have the courage to actually do it. The best attribute one can have in this line of work is the natural ability to categorize, to know that you’re the one that’s able to call a germ a germ, call a virus a virus, determine what a disease is and then determine the best way to eradicate it.

I’m still sinking, and the valve trailing behind me is still working hard, filtering oxygen in and out.

My chin is against my chest, and before I know it, the city has opened up below me.

Towers with open window frames and doorways, made out of light blue cement, treated to resist erosion, covered in mosaic dulled by time. I’m scanning for a good place to land, but there’s no street, no ground, just roofs and walls and the occasional short ladder hooked to the side. I reach out and snag one of them, slow myself to a halt. There are words stenciled beside it in black paint:

220 FT BELOW

100 FT ABOVE

WEST COMPOUND

NO DIVING

STAY SAFE

LOVE RECKLESS

Now comes the fun part.

I freeze, pretend to be a bit of debris floating along, just another impurity even though there’s none left in the water.

The world is dark blue and silent.

Shifting.

I hear it--there.

A flash of skin, translucent and pale, darting behind a doorway.

I bend forward and kick off the side of the building, missile myself towards the face of the opposite compound, breaststroke my way through the empty space.

Once I’m inside, I unhook a glowstick from my belt and crack it, releasing a lime-green glow. There are bulbs built into the wall behind waterproof glass, but whatever power source there was ran out a while ago.

Something floats in front of my face, and I swat it away, hold the light up to it.

A heart shaped locket, open on the table, wearing away at the edges, but intact. Two kids and a mother sitting at a kitchen table, tossing apple-sized ampoules of orange juice at each other, seaweed trailing over the lip of the vase bolted to the kitchen table.

From at least a decade ago, judging by the color still left in their skin.

I stay still again, trying to track the thing I saw only a glimpse of. My hand grasps the edge of the doorway, and I ease myself into an empty corridor, holding the glowstick in front of me, sending refracted light up the cement walls.

Slow, slower, closer.

I pause, peek inside a doorway to my left, trying to catch the faint sounds traveling through the water.

They’ve stopped, faded off into nothingness.

I swim another inch forward, raise my glowstick again, and in front of me are several pearlescent fleshy mouths, bellowing with anger below milky-white eyes.

I lurch back, hand scrabbling to my belt, but the thing is already gone, moving through the water, turning a corner and floating down a stairwell. If I can just trap it- -

My feet and hands are aching from propelling me through the water so fast, but I can’t let up. There’s only so far it can run.

I swim into the stairwell, the glowstick bright between my teeth, hand-over-hand pulling myself along the metal railings, pulling myself down, down, down. 120 FEET ABOVE. 100 FEET ABOVE. 80 FEET ABOVE.

The screaming, pale white face is seared into my brain, and I think of the launcher holstered to my hip, with one wax bullet inside. The hammer pierces the wax, and the compressed air shoots it forward. High potency acidic solution, enough to purify and disintegrate everything in a ten-foot radius. I imagine firing it right between those pale, unseeing eyes.

I recognize that face. I’m used to seeing it by now.

The blind eyes, skin pale and sloughing, chin stooped low. Everyone down here had that face, after the chlorine in the water changed from a confidential, trace amount to an open deluge, when other measures needed to be taken.

That’s another skill you have to bring to this job as a Fib--the ability to look at nature, and the natural world, as being above qualities such as good and evil. There’s no sense in meeting a natural disaster with anger and sorrow. No room for shifting rock and cleansing fire to have a conscience.

So many other Fibs backed away from the fight, ended up joining the losing side, because they decided to have a conscience. Because they forgot they were special, and that the above world needed us more than we needed them.

Needed someone willing to do a job, and do it well.

Green light filters between my teeth, and I’m grinning so hard my face hurts, down in the depths where nobody can see.

By the time I reach 40 FEET ABOVE, I can hear it again, see a trace of glimmering flesh trailing from around another stairwell corner. I creep closer, slide my hand down to my belt holster. It’s been too long. It’s been far too long.

I spit out the glowstick and it floats in the space between us, sending shadows spinning across the walls.

I take aim.

The cloud of flesh tenses, then bolts.

I lunge forward to follow, before I realize it’s not running away.

Something soft and smothering plasters itself to my face, and air escapes my screaming mouth.

Then all is silent again.

My limbs tense up.

Something--aching and sweet.

The ghost is gone.

The ghost--ghosts--are in me.

Red and blue. Rage and sorrow. Searing heat and extreme cold.

Memories.

Thousands of harmonic howling deaths.

Water slips down my throat, and I choke.

They did this.

They did this to me.

My hand, the one holding the launcher, is moving, inch by inch, towards my head.

I realize that I’m still the one moving it, fighting for every inch.

I will not let them win.

I will win.

I have a job to do.

My thumb presses down on the button, and I shut my eyes.

The bullet misses my head, torpedoes down the stairwell and out of sight.

All of the muscles in my body relax.

I laugh in a voice that isn’t mine, and then I cry in a voice that isn’t mine, the impurities flowing through my body, all the impurities that need to be disintegrated, dissolved, destroyed, and I move to swim towards the light but my arms won’t work and my legs won’t work and the only light is the glowstick, floating down into the murky depths of the stairwell, end over end, twirling and green, until it floats into the radius of the acid, and then the acid eats it up, and then there is nothing.