Obama Care

by Jason Scimitar

51

  Fireman Greg Picket carefully dug into the mass of white dust that was the new floor of the Lambrecht Theater. A few bodies had been recovered, but the mother lode was expected approximately eight to twenty feet farther down. Plenty of human flesh was waiting for Picket’s constantly tapping shovel as he dug down below the building’s collapsed ceiling and walls. He anticipated a somewhat grisly undertaking ahead. Picket thought of his own much loved wife and daughter. He was lucky that none of them had the money to squander for tickets to the opening night of “Girls!,” because having them would mean that Picket and his family would be down there in the massive gore that rested only God knew how many feet below his pounding shovel. Soon, the fire department ordered small tractors with shovels to help in the recovery. A few hours after Picket his men had begun to dig, he was ordered to stand down as several new mechanical shovels arrived to replace him. “That’s good for now, Picket. We made our point that the fire department cares. Now, it’s time to back off and let the mechanical boys take over. Even so, it will be several days to reach the mother lode of bodies.”

  By that, the captain meant the mass of torn and dismembered bodies of the people trapped below in the crushing weight. The firemen wouldn’t remove them, because a team of forensics experts had been contracted for that process which was far above a mere fireman’s pay grade. They had been retained to exhume the dead just in case this turned out to be a crime scene.

  Before leaving, Fireman Picket took samples of stones, bricks, wood, metal, and dust for the bombing and arson squad who were part of the NYFD. Then, he took a taxi back to the fire station.

  The guys were worn out. They had been on duty at the collapsed theater for more than seventeen hours. Some had been there since 9:10 p.m.

  After they had been told to cease digging, they had surrounded the building’s corpse and waited in case of fires, but nothing came of it. The scene smelled somewhat of explosives, but most collapses smelt that way. The internal parts of buildings contained chemicals buried deep inside the walls which were riddled with petroleum distillates and resins, most of it from the paint, tar, and other elements that generally parked themselves deep inside building walls. These volatile chemical essences were released suddenly in collapses, giving the area a petroleum odor. In addition, any burned parts of the building from previous fires were reopened to the air. Old buildings have usually suffered several fires, most of them to contained to small areas, which left an odor of burning once they were opened to the air during a massive collapse.

  Before long, the contractors arrived to take charge of removing vast tons of broken materials including the dust that had settled between the bricks, plaster, and concrete inside the wreckage.

  Having learned from the disaster of first responders at the World Trade Center collapse on 911 and beyond, the law required all workers at the scene to be fully insulated from materials including a mandatory personally secured filter system through which rescue persons breathed without coming into contact with the dust filled air of the building’s wreckage. In this way, they were protected from lung and other internal organ damage as had been suffered by the NYPD at the world trade center. In fact, this was one of the reasons why the fire department no longer worked such scenes after the original possibility of fires had been eliminated. The firemen just had no interest whatever in risking their lives once again for a city that had proven itself as totally unreliable and heartless in protecting them from harm as had New York in the days following 911. Those days of complete trusting innocence were over at the fire department. The city had worn out its credibility with first responders. After that, New York City was not to be trusted ever again.

  On the way back to the station, Picket passed a political rally by the tea party. They were protesting some sort of government expenditure for the building of a project using TIFF money.

  Picket didn’t really care what the protest was about. It meant nothing to him. In Picket's opinion, they were merely a bunch of pompous intellectuals. Anyone who protested against the government was suspicious to Picket. After all his paychecks were from the government. Picket didn’t trust these tea partiers as far as he could throw them.

  “Look at those crazies,” Picket said to the taxi driver. “Always protesting, always carrying signs. Why don’t they just get an honest job?”

  “I dunno,” the cab driver said. “I hate them, too. They are another blight on the city. They never protested anything that meant something to a taxi driver or his family.”

  “Or the fire department,” Picket said. “We don’t get piddly crud from the tea naggers. We firemen are losing our salaries and pensions from these government money launderers, but those bastards don’t give a false whiz about us.”

  “They care about the rich and not much else,” the driver said.

  “Yea. They are ass kissers.”

  “Yea. They are. I have no fondness for them. If you are rich they are for you. If you are poor they are against you. A bunch of selfish bastards. That’s what.”

  “Yea.”

  The taxi let Fireman Picket off at his fire station. Picket paid him and left him a five dollar tip. He’d have both the fee and the tip returned to him by the city. He was no one’s chump when it came to being reimbursed, nor would he pay the bill from his own pocket. Picket only wanted what was honestly coming to him.

  He walked inside. He stared blankly at what was left of the fireman’s food that was sitting in bowls for all of them to eat, but most were not hungry. After small talk, he undressed, showered, and hit the sack. Most of the guys were already asleep in the dorm, trying to make up for the entire night they spent at the Lambrecht Theater making sure no fire broke out and that the adjacent buildings were themselves still structurally safe and sound. They were. None of them would be coming down soon. Hopefully they’d stand tall for another one hundred years.