Lethal Wind

Sa sat down at his desk and looked at the film.  Carefully he traced his finger down the dashed lines as though he were reading Braille.  He ticked off the sequence of A’s, G’s, T’s and C’s, reading the alphabet that made up DNA.   It took him a half hour to read the three hundred letters before he reached the bottom of the film.  As he stood up from his chair he felt the cold sweat of fear drip down his back and arm pits. He had been taught, cultivated and preened to do this very project from his start in the lab, and tonight he had just finished the last step.  He should have been glad.  Ready to celebrate.  He wanted to call Carolina and share his joy, but not tonight.

They had asked him to create the ultimate weapon.  Not one that would require a soldier to fire.  Not one that would kill one, or a hundred or thousand people; one that would have the ability to wipe out a whole nation or race.  Ironically, one that could fulfill the task of ethnic cleansing.

The phone rang on the wall beside his desk startling Sa back to the present.  He looked up at the clock.  It was nine o’clock already.  Slowly he placed the film back on his bench as the phone rang again.  His feet betrayed his emotion as he trudged for the phone and with a shaking hand, reached for the receiver.  The phone rang again as Sa watched his hand as though from a distance.  He watched as the hand lifted the receiver and pulled it close to his ear.

“Sa?”

Sa heard the voice.  The now familiar, yet spine tingling voice of his contact.  “Yes?”

“Do you have the virus?”

He had the ultimate weapon sitting on his bench.  He thought about his parents, and his mother’s screams as she was forced back at knifepoint.  His father’s shouts as he struggled against his ropes to try to free the woman he loved.  He remembered the look in his mother’s eyes when she saw him peeking around the corner and then her strange silence as the knife sliced across her throat.  Sa’s hands shook again and sweat burned his eyes.

He looked around the room he was standing in.  The state-of-the-art equipment he had been given access to.  The desks of the few friends he had made in the lab.  Jason’s desk with his stacks of journal articles and Heather’s desk with her mirror and picture of her boyfriend taped to the wall behind.  He looked at John’s bench with its confusion of equipment and half-completed experiments.  He looked at his desk and the picture of himself and Carolina standing at the beach proudly holding their surfboards.

He knew he was prepared to give this all up.  A lesson had to be taught.  They couldn’t be allowed to do to others what had been done to him.  Sa straightened up and wiped his sleeve against his forehead.

 “Yes.”