Biohazard

DES MOINES, IOWA
1

Did I like it?

Did I get off making offerings to that monstrosity?

No, I did not. The guilt was thick on me like an infection, it was rotting me from the inside out. My dreams were sweaty, disturbing, goddamned ugly if you want to know the truth…people lined up, people I knew and didn’t know, people I’d admired and, yes, even loved, all waiting for me to decide who lived and who died. I’d wake up seeing their eyes, accusing and hating. I felt like a guard in Birkenau or Treblinka, deciding who went to the gas chamber and who didn’t. You think that was easy to live with? That it didn’t eat my guts out? You can’t do what I did without losing part of yourself and after I’d been doing it for a year, I couldn’t honestly remember the sort of person I’d been before.

But I didn’t do it alone.

My posse did it with me. A communal guilt. We were like soldiers doing a really terrible job…we just didn’t talk much about it. It made things go down easier that way. I had a lot of graves out there on my conscience, a lot of ghosts trying to claw their way out, and, Jesus, I had to keep them down. Some how, I had to.