Devil's Veil 3

IOSHA:
A Balanced Approach to Compliance

It was early morning when Daniel Craw pulled onto the worksite. Craw winced as he stepped out of the truck. Last night’s moisture was this morning’s humidity. Today’s going to be a hot one. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. He liked the heat, and the excessive damp would keep the dust and concrete settled well into noon. There were enough damned problems with the construction project as it was. The ground had gone soft in several areas, caving in over pockets of debris that were improperly disposed of by prior crews. Damned bastards. He chewed the words in his thoughts a bit before spitting a thick wad of phlegm into the dirt outside the work trailer. Damned lazy bastards.

Craw ducked his head as he entered the trailer. He stood an impressive six foot, six inches tall, with muscles to match. He had worked labor most of his life; he had started with seasonal farm work, had spent some years travelling to anywhere more work was to be had, and eventually washed up in construction. His back, arms, and chest showed the evidence of some twenty years. They had the brown of weathered white flesh, were criss-crossed with a maze of abrasions, and still felt a sympathetic tremor when he watched one of the young bucks working a sledgehammer or a pry bar.

One of those fresh idiots had better have left me some java. Craw made his way to the common area of the trailer and picked up the scent of coffee as it came punching through the more dominant odors of boot mud and body sweat. A full pot was on. Craw grabbed a Styrofoam cup from a nearby dispenser and filled it. Tastes like dirt. He finished it and poured another. Like goddamn dirt.

A third cup of coffee was poured, and Craw retreated to his office. He had earned his safety certificate two years ago. Working behind a desk with a stack of binders that would never be cited was a hell of a lot easier than running a forklift for four-hour stretches in summer heat. Nevertheless, Craw had learned them all inside and out. The manuals, the spec sheets, the rules, the guidelines, even the pamphlets: Craw knew them all by rote. There was no point holding the reins if he wasn’t going to steer.

*****

The first opened email of the day told him how the rest was going to go. Complaints. Craw reached into the bottom shelf of his desk and fished out a heavy-duty Thermos. It was usually filled with alcohol, and, this being a work site, was filled with vodka. He poured a finger’s worth into the cooling cup of coffee and stirred it with a pencil. It tasted vile: vodka, coffee, and wood shavings. He drained it in one go, poured another shot of vodka in, and replaced the Thermos.

The emails from the previous day were categorized by relevance. Priority messages were those that, if not properly responded to, could result in the closure of the entire site. Important messages were anything coming from the higher tiers of safety, management, or administration, no matter how trivial or wheedling. Craw had learned a long time ago that it was easier to nod at the foreman when he was yelling than to try to educate the damned fool as to what was actually happening. Unimportant messages were anything from the labour and trades pools that did not directly affect productivity or safety ratings.

Unofficially, there was a fourth category of damned obstacles. Craw nursed grudges the way extraverts nurse drinks, and the damned obstacles gave him a ceaseless supply of idiots to vent his spleen on. Health and safety regulations gave him unlimited ammunition. He cited rules, wrote tickets, docked or delayed pay, and visited general hell on those he labelled as damned obstacles. It was a very large list.

There were three priority messages, which Craw took as a bad sign. A normal week could crawl by without even a single priority message. This week started with three. Fucking disgusting, he thought. We all know the problem… those last bastards didn’t do proper diligence. Didn’t even try. Still, it was better to read the priorities and address them rather than risk a closure. Even a temporary one would halt production, could cause reductions in pay, and might reflect poorly on him. Better to take a look.

As suspected, the first two were about the pockets of debris that were raising havoc on the surveyor’s estimations. That was easily dealt with: Craw had already identified and reported the problem, and the site was just waiting for the okay on excavation and fill to sort the mess out. The third one was more difficult to categorize. It reported a serious problem but read like it had been written by an infant. And not a very intelligent one at that. The third priority message complained about a mold on site that was being blamed for both health concerns and property damage. It was a perfect shit storm of safety complaints, and Craw was unsure of how to proceed.

Reasoning that people might lie but the terrain never does, Craw put on his hard hat, grabbed a kit full of on-site equipment, and headed out the door, slamming the last shot of vodka as he left the trailer. He threw the cup to the ground, confident that it would soon be pressed into a muddy nothing by the boots coming and going from the common area. The third complaint echoed as he considered its implications: Theres mushrooms in the foyay, he iterated, being sure to preserve the spell check errors for posterity. The mushrooms are very pretty but there makeing us sick. Damn. Welcome to the show.

Craw made his way to the area set aside for the intended foyer of the new building. The timber for the frames was in place and the ground had been tamped to a uniform flatness, with one important exception. In the far corner of the room – due East as the compass had it – was a crater some three meters in diameter with an indeterminate depth. It was filled with brackish brown water. A pinkish algae covered the surface and the whole thing reeked of some terrible combination of vinegar and bile. Goddamn thing smells like a hangover, Craw thought as he looked it over. A partly demolished pillar of concrete stood in the middle of the abomination, adorned by a cancerous mass of fungus spilling from its center.

A press of crew members had gathered around the edges of the pit. Craw recognized some from working with them – Bill Fitzpatrick, Ethan Avery, Peter Slocum – but was at a loss to place the newer faces. He couldn’t blame the young ones since they were following the lead of the old bulls, but he made sure to note the senior members for later. They might have legitimate reasons for not working, but then again, they might not. C’est la vie, say the old folks, he hummed, you never can tell.

Craw grabbed a nearby length of rebar and sank it into the fetid pool. It went in just under half a meter. Leaving the rebar jutting out of the sludge, he turned to the crew members and asked if any of them knew how deep it was at the center. Slocum answered first, stating that Avery and a new recruit had waded to the center several days ago. Avery nodded assent, but the new jack was nowhere to be seen. Small wonder, Craw thought, a hell of a thing to run across on your first tour of duty. Avery marked the spot on his coveralls where the water in the center had come up to, showing a thin line of blood-pink stain marking a ring around his waist.

It's pretty deep, then. Craw thought for a second on the likely consequences of heading into the pool and decided against it. The last thing he needed was to cover his entire lower body in God knows what kind of filth just to examine a goddamned mushroom. He told Avery to tape the area off while he headed back to the trailer to put on his slicks and waders. The others looked relieved as they calculated the time it would take for Craw to get himself ready. They anticipated an unofficial break, but Craw put an end to their daydreams by snapping his fingers and pointing out various duties that could still be done while he did his own.

It was near half an hour before Craw was ready to step into the morass. He made his way to the crater, the slicks and waders hampering his steps. He felt like a fool; Avery and his pet recruit watched Craw from the corners of their eyes as they took their time winding up the bright pink tape that Avery had used to fence the area off. Avery was especially slovenly that day, chewing on a bagel while flakes of poppyseed and cream cheese got stuck in his beard.

Choosing to ignore the pig-faced idiot, Craw slipped under the tape and stepped into the crater. He had room to spare, as Avery had wrapped the tape at damn near head height. About what I’d expect from such an intelligent looking specimen. The first step was a good deal deeper than Craw had expected and his right foot plunged in up to his knee. Lurching forward, he was just able to regain balance and prevent himself from falling in face first. He looked around, ignoring the amused stares he was sure he was receiving from around the site, and sighted the length of rebar he had used earlier to test the crater’s depth. Picking it up, he struck forward, more cautiously this time, being sure to use the rebar to test where he was stepping next.

After some time, and a few more close calls, Craw made it to the center. The colony of mushrooms at its center was a blasphemous looking thing. Four fully grown mushrooms sprouted from a pinkish-brown mass of congealing fluids, with curdled webs of membrane suspended across its surface. The mushrooms were a rusty brown with full, domed caps, and two spires atop each one. Periodically, a runny pink fluid was excreted from open, sore-like pores dotting their surfaces. The smell was abominable. Craw had to hold his hand to his mouth to prevent from retching.

“I’ll be damned if I know what these are,” he choked, turning to the bystanders who observed him from the safety of the lip of the crater. “Someone grab me a cooler, line it with some garbage bags, and bring it to that edge over there.” Peter Slocum, eager to abandon the jackhammer for a spell, ran off to go grab the requested equipment from the bed of his pickup. Craw held a do-rag to his face and leaned in for a closer look.

A ring of barbed wire had been mounted around the caps. Bits of cloth, plastic, and clumps of hair were suspended in the wire. He was sure that there were several bird carcasses at the base, where the mushroom stalks were thickest. Damn thing looks like a totem or something. The air was heavy with the scent of vinegar and intent. Craw felt like he had just walked into a church, only it was one where he didn’t recognize anybody, and everyone was waiting for him to explain himself.

He was jolted from the reverie by Slocum’s return, the man’s boots crunching through the gravel at the lip of the crater. Craw waded back, retrieved the cooler, filled it with garbage bags, and pressed the bags against the walls of the cooler as liner. He grabbed the fully developed caps by the stalks and threw them inside. The rebar proved helpful in prying up the slushy substrate, thick webs of pallid mycelium holding it together long enough for Craw to pile it into the cooler along with everything else. He left the carcasses where they were.

Sloshing back to Slocum and Avery, who had apparently found time in his busy schedule to stare gaping at the ruined stump, he handed the cooler up over the lip of the crater. “Get that into the back of my truck. I’ll run it by head office, try to get some kind of answer before shift’s out. For now, just make sure all this is roped off. No one in, no one out. And make sure no one starts using it as a garbage bin, got it?”

Slocum nodded and helped Craw climb out. The two of them headed back to the trailer: Craw wanted to hose off before bringing the clothes anywhere near a habitable area, and he thought Slocum would do well to do the same. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Avery and the new kid setting up a barrier of thin metal posts. Good to know the damned fresh idiot is doing something today.

CSHO: Safety Report

Air conditioning blasted from the dash while Craw sat fuming in the driver’s seat. The radio cheerfully announced a record-breaking heat wave for the third consecutive day. Peering out from under the bill of his trucker’s cap, he watched two figures make their way out of the restricted area. Each of them was kitted out in a full body coverall, with latex gloves and cotton masks covering their faces. Poor bastards. Be lucky if heat stroke don’t catch up with them, make them throw up right down their necks. It had happened to him once, during the hazmat safety course; he had vomited, but recovered the practise dummy and made it to the emergency with over a minute to spare. Not my best day, but not my worst.

The two men on duty carried a heavy bag between them. They had spent close to an hour scooping and scouring the cement column of the hellish fungus. A third member stepped in as they left, running a pressure washer over the whole platform. The putrid remains of some unknown animal scattered into crimson grit once the blast of water hit it, and the person manning the pressure washer hooted excitedly as he trained the stream over the debris.

It had taken close to a week to get the samples tested, and another week to book the disposal company. Craw hated every second of wasted productivity. He took some satisfaction in noting that there were more than enough forms to account for the misspent time, but he was getting fed up with the whole routine. It had been a bureaucratic pissing contest from step one. Matters were made worse by the fact that the crew had completely ignored his instructions and had almost immediately begun throwing garbage into the crater.

It had been with some relief that he observed Avery, Fitzpatrick, and a few of the new jacks taking efforts to clean things up before the end of their shifts. It was to no avail. Some kids had already snuck onto the site and stacked fresh roadkill on the column in the middle. Craw had asked the crew to have the mess taken care of but had been completely ignored. Several nights later, barbed wire and bits of bright police tape were strung every which way over the whole damn thing. He had decided to just leave well enough alone until a third-party could come along and wash it all away.

Now here he was, two full weeks later, and a half dozen men staying home sick. All because of one goddamned spookshow. Craw had no doubt as to the cause of the outbreak of sick days. He rolled down his window and spat in the general direction of the crater. The cowboy manning the pressure washer was done hooting for the time being. Craw rolled up his window and raised the volume on the radio. Hell of a thing to happen. No matter. Get the hole cleaned up, drain the excess water, fill it in, and move the fuck on.

CDC: BSL-4

Two more weeks had passed, and Craw had barely seen a full day’s work. The cleanup crew had left ages ago, must have been over a week now, at least, and work was to have resumed as normal. He understood the boys’ hesitation to come back to the site but felt no sympathy for the lack of effort he was seeing today. Site management had been forced to pay a visit, sending one of their more erstwhile drones to lay out the rules moving forward. Few were in attendance, and of those who couldn’t find something better to do, not a one cared to listen.

There were some laughs when Bill Fitzpatrick showed up halfway through the talk, giggling nervously by way of introduction and seating himself in the back. He was shifty the whole way through, constantly fidgeting like some fresh idiot and making the occasional whimpers some people make when they think they want to speak but have nothing to say. Craw had gotten up at some point during the debacle and wrested Fitzpatrick from his seat, murmuring some kind of threat. Bad enough the guy was stoned. But there? Then? It had been too much. Furious, Craw half escorted, half dragged, the deadbeat to the door.

He had meant to put the boots to the guy after work, but he had clean forgot about it for several days after the incident. By the time he remembered his intention, Bill Fitzpatrick had been missing from work for any number of days. Craw had considered going to the man’s house but deemed it too much of a hassle to deal with the man’s wife and kids. Too much like work, which was precisely wasn’t getting done since that bastard from management had showed up.

It had taken Daniel Craw ninety minutes longer than normal to get to work that day; it took him another fifty longer than normal to get home. Traffic had been a nightmare, and, despite its clearing up in time for that weekend, didn’t look to be any better by the evidence of the last week. Since then, Craw had tried several mornings to leave early enough to get to site on time to no avail. He had forsaken the morning ritual of grabbing coffee and a breakfast from whatever drive thru was least occupied, and he barely bothered listening to traffic radio anymore. Not that doing so wasn’t without the occasional merit.

Not too long ago, the idiots had left the mic on while on break, and, by the sounds of it, had spent their morning drinking gin and tonics. They had come back on air, slurring their speech and trying to say the news. Craw winced as he tried to remember. It was really quite funny, some business about a lost kid, or a house fire, but he couldn’t piece it together this time. He took another sip of whatever had been left on his desk from the night before and stared blankly for several seconds at the monitor in front of him. He wasn’t too worried about being caught with his dick out, I’m wearing underwear anyway, and the work site was almost completely abandoned after the last pileup.

Daniel Craw was a fair man of uncompromising principles, and so he had already decided that Avery and Slocum were only half to blame for that one. The two were sharing a ride, a pretty little pickup, that came into the site at about three times the speed needed to park anything. They hit one of the new jacks as he was trying to get out the passenger’s side which was a mistake anyone could make, really, took his leg off, sent it spinning into the mud. It was the funniest thing Craw had ever seen in his entire life.

Then Avery and Slocum come pitching out the driver’s door, pants around Avery’s ankles, and nothing on Slocum anyways, excepting flakes of rust red debris all over their hands and mouths. So the boys started hooting and calling out jokes about blowjobs while the new jack pisses and moans about his leg, and Avery stands up, looking all sly, and lurching to the crater, and Slocum just lying there staring at the sky talking about when it’s gonna rain. Well, that spoke to everybody, so the site took an hour to breathe and to get its bearings and to wait for the rain.

Fuck. They was probably just chewing on fingers anyways.

*****

Daniel Craw was fully fed, bathed, and properly attired when the CDC came calling. It’d have been a blasphemy not to have been. Things had got close. It knew better than to gather its appendages too closely... knew this from before. From old, cold days when the nights spun the snow white slumber song. He invited the crew in, let them look around, showed them with pride that he had boarded up the doors to the cellar and the garage. Just like the radio, one of the radios, had said to do. He assured them with a cocksure smile; he held the reins, they could steer. The chaplains from disease control agreed he had done a good job; there was a surge of agreement from somewhere shallow in his cells.

The appendage was a survivor. It would need to be nursed more carefully than the others.

WHO:
Thirteenth General Programme of Work (revised)

Nine weeks now since the appendage Craw had been almost entirely saturated with the porous microcosm; nine fulsome weeks since a nebula of mycelium had supplanted the vestiges of its addendum. Having attenuated the inconvenience of identity, it strove for the infiltration of still more attendants.

“Open your mouth, sir. This will only be a second.”

The prophet Gorge had gorged well. Where before it could be satisfied with the trinity of meat, water, and night, it had since subsumed the inorganic to its symphonic stride. Ten thousand strong and one city wide, tooth and string packed snugly inside.

Shauna Beck waited impatiently for the evacuee to comply. The bright yellow of her encapsulated suit contrasted sharply with the evident decay of Parish Site 02. A lineup of close to a hundred women, children, and men, stood waiting in three separate lines as she and her colleagues inspected the incoming survivors. Things had not gone well at Parish Site 01, and it was not at all apparent who was to blame.

Metals and minerals danced across microbial palates; a wildness of experience apparently inexhaustible. Yet, there remained chemicals profane, yet to be gleaned, yet to be tamed. The transparency of glass and the dead tissue folds of plastic proved frustrating still.

What remained of Craw opened its mouth. The action was more of a stimulus response than a choice. He refused the woman wearing the hated hazardous materials suit the courtesy of eye contact. The contraction and dilation of his pupils had long since proved to be an unnecessary expedient in any case. Beck took one shuddering step backwards as she reached for the service revolver that had been given to every response unit member upon their deployment to the site.

“Everyone, stand back! Sir, I need to ask you to close your mouth, take my hand, and come with me to the treatment facility. It’s just over here.”

Beck pointed to the parking lot that lay between the nested perimeters of chain link fences and concertina wire that separated the inspection area from the response site. The treatment facility, an optimistic euphemism describing a group of soundproofed white vans; the response site, where the survivors waited for water, food, and other amenities. Regardless of the stage of their contamination, most infected could be identified by telltale patterns, rashes, or growths. In the event that they exhibited no overt symptoms, a quick epithelial swab could be taken and checked for the presence of fungal spores.

The man in front of her remained motionless, mouth wide open, teeth long since replaced by questing stubs of pinkish grey flesh. What had once been a tongue now served as substrate, and the entirety of his throat was overgrown with a thick network of pale mycelium.

Beck flipped the safety, drew the hammer, and fired.