The Occupation of Emerald City: The Worker by Ken Brosky Read Free Book Online

job. A fat
old guy in his fifties with dirty gray whiskers who had a bulging stomach that
hung over his belt and an ex-wife who clung to his wallet. Close to a coveted
Green Party pension.
    Fuck this job? I asked him—Fuck you for not doing your
job.
    I stayed, along with Blake and Tasha, to run a skeleton
shift. Blake operated the primary furnace, I shut down the rest of the plant
and Tasha ran around the offices frantically trying to contact representatives
from the city. The train whistle blew at two minutes past midnight; we were all
in the control room trying to re-boot some of the systems that hadshut down during a very close explosion that hit the
military base just down the street. I felt it under my feet and when the three
of us ran outside to check for damage, we could see the thick flame rising up
from the base a couple hundred yards away, fading like a ghost and then it was
darkness again—no smoke, nothing but a broken, blackened building.
    The whistle blew again and I walked out to the back of the
building where the tracks cut across the empty concrete loading lot. The dark
shadow of the long coal train very slowly snaked its way around the obliterated
army base. The two large circular lights on the locomotive in the front
illuminated ten feet of track ahead. The locomotive was fifty yards away and
had begun to slow down, its wheels screeching.
    “It exploded,” I tell the interrogator. “Just … we were
watching it come in, and then one of the middle cars exploded. We ran back
inside.”
    “Did you see what hit it?” the general asks.
    “No,” I say. “It was pitch black, except for the lights on
the horizon. The fires, I mean. In the city. We ran to the center of the plant
just to be safe. It sounded like trucks crashing into each other outside.” I
wait for him to say something but he just stares at me. “I don’t know what else
I can tell you.”
    The general takes a drag of his cigarette. He’s calm,
thoughtful. “Then what did you do?”
    “I went back outside,” I say. “There were three hopper cars
laying sideways in the parking lot. The rest of the train was derailed, too.
Some of the coal was burning at the edge of the parking lot, and some more in
the field next to the parking lot.”
    “Did you find the … ah,” he snaps his fingers together a few
times. “The driver?”
    “The engineer? Yes.”
    “Did you ask him what happened?”
    “He was dead.” Strapped in his seat inside the crumpled
locomotive, his neck bent at an awkward angle. He was a young dark-skinned man
with a barrel chestand fat arms and dark black
freckles around his nose. I had spoken to him once during a delivery about
putting together a PC. He wanted something that he could use to talk to his
daughter in Africa.
    “Did you bury him?”
    “No,” I say. But I did bury something. Small gray discs that looked like hockey pucks, three of them
near the locomotive half-buried in the hard dirt. They were near the tracks,
and for some reason I took the coal shovel and spread dirt over each of them as
if they were unfinished graves. Or maybe they reminded me of tombstones,
jutting out of the soil halfway. I think they were bombs.
    “Then what?”
    I lick my dry lips. “We wheeled out one of the old conveyor
belts. Then we started shoveling coal to get it inside in case things got
worse.”
    Which they did. An hour later, a jet flew so low overhead
that I could feel my eardrums vibrating and I could see the open hatch in its
belly. Both Blake and I ducked for cover under the conveyor, the rubber belt
humming and moving directly above our heads. Instead of an explosion, pamphlets
began floating to the ground. We stepped out from under the belt and grabbed a
handful. They were all the same. On one side, it read:

 
    The
Coalition will not attack non-military targets. Please stay in your home.

 
    On the back, it had a picture of a tall commercial building
and words that read:

 
    Your
goverment poses a