Decontamination Day
Darrin was afraid.
The young civet sat restlessly in the iron-clad basement of his suburban home, sitting on an uncomfortable wooden bench across from his mother and sister. Silence. Deathly silence. Most of the thinking people in the land were doing exactly as he was doing; a few lucky ones even managed to find space in the few remaining acres of unspoiled wilderness to build shelters and escape the city entirely.
It was May 23rd, the day the government had, in an emergency session 20 years before, declared "Decontamination Day." This wasn't about any of the harsh chemicals that laced the air and water, however. It was about the people.
For more than a hundred-fifty years no one worried about the birth rate, but now it was clear: Ondland was overpopulated. Food and resources had to be rationed, crime was rampant, and the authorities were powerless to do anything.
So it was that in an emergency session, the congress had passed an act that declared that every May 23rd, for 12 hours starting at noon and ending at precisely midnight, there would be a period in which no laws would be enforced. People could do exactly as they wished and if they did it within those 12 hours, there would be no attempt to prosecute them. They called it Decontamination Day, but never explained what they meant by the name. Only when the first day came did that meaning become frighteningly clear.
As the clock struck noon on the first Decontamination day, in the year 4519 YB, the streets filled with revelers, rioters, and looters of every description. There were shootings and arsons by the thousand. The freeways were littered with the wreckage of stolen cars, and the shredded bodies of the drunken revelers who had crashed them at unthinkable speeds. Gangs went from tit-for-tat violence to all-out open warfare in the streets. As the sun set, grieving spouses and siblings set out to avenge their lost family members, and a wave of retaliatory killings and arsons rocked the nation well into the night.
Fully a hundred thousand lost their lives that first Decontamination Day. But really, what was a hundred thousand one way or the other in a nation of two billion? If anything, many of those who had died had been antisocial types, people of questionable goals and little self control. Others were foolish individuals with a twisted sense of justice who thought they'd be valiant and pick off a few undesirables, only to get brutally slaughtered themselves. Wasn't it good that they were gone now? The government seemed to think so. It was like the old aphorism, one death is a tragedy, a hundred thousand merely a statistic.
And so it continued, year after year. Those who were clever quickly discovered what they were up against and made or found some sort of shelter. Those who were exceptionally generous even offered to share their shelter- at the risk of being betrayed by a knife-wielding drifter.
By Darrin's time, Decontamination Day was not as menacing as it had been in those first years. There were always a few thousand people who managed to get themselves killed, but nowadays even the criminal types often took shelter. The population of Ondland was still steadily rising, and there was a bill in congress that if passed, would turn Decontamination Day into a Decontamination Week.
Darrin, at age 16, couldn't remember a time when there wasn't such a day. His parents only just remembered the first one. His father told him the harrowing story of how he narrowly survived riding home from school that day when the bus he was in collided with a stolen cement truck.
Darrin's father wasn't there in the basement with them; he'd died of pneumonia 4 years before. There was a time when pneumonia wasn't such a lethal disease, they said, but times had changed. Doctors were only for the wealthiest citizens, and Darrin's family was decidedly working class.
His mother looked anxiously at her watch. Only 7:53. They still had more than 4 hours before they would be safe. None of them said a word as Darrin's sister, 6-year-old Ann, reached for a piece of coarse bread and nervously began to chew on it.
Darrin, meanwhile, had to wonder if this was the only way. He was 16, and he knew perfectly well that there were ways to prevent pregnancy- all of which were still legal for the most part. They tried to teach him in school that none of them actually worked; the parent organizations had lobbied long and hard to get that point driven home, false though it was. Many students actually believed it, and Darrin had been lucky enough to learn from a friend that it wasn't true.
Joshua, a leopard he had known since kindergarten, had gotten his girlfriend pregnant at the young age of 13. There was the usual shotgun marriage, and both dropped out of school to try to get jobs to support themselves because their parents completely abandoned them. One day, he asked Joshua how he kept from getting his wife pregnant a second time. "Condoms," he said. "they told us they didn't work... I should have known better. Can't trust anyone over 25, Darrin."
Joshua and his family had died too. A year ago they had let a neighbor into their shelter just before noon. He pulled out a handgun and shot them all, then turned the gun on himself.
That was what the government forgot. The 4,000 or so people who would die today wouldn't be just faceless statistics. They were real people, they had names and families and dreams, and wild senses of humor and favorite movies. Not all of them would be just raging psychopaths and reckless drunken idiots; some of them would be- necessarily had to be- the innocent victims of these people.
What was wrong with encouraging less families to have children? Wouldn't that help ease the problem? And what of the so-called defectives that this day of horrors was meant to rid the country of? There were ways to help them now. In Helv, they had pioneered and perfected regimens of medication and behavioral therapy that turned most pathological criminals into good citizens. But neither the people nor the government of Ondland was interested in exploring their options; it wasn't the Ondlander's way, they said. Something about free will and the choices of individuals. They called the Helvic prisoners "Robots" and "Clockwork Willies," and lauded the Ondlandic system as one that held to the tried and true ideas of justice that the rest of the world had long-since abandoned.
But if someone's dysfunctional to begin with, what good is their free will going to serve them? Isn't that the whole point? Someone's shown that they're not going to be deterred by the consequences of their actions so something was clearly amiss in the way their will functioned. It wasn't just their problem because when they acted out, they menaced innocent people and drained the system, so it was ultimately in everyone's interest to do something to help them. Of course, whenever Darrin brought up this argument, he was reminded that the whole point of Decontamination Day was just that: these people were dysfunctional to begin with, and could easily pass these traits on to the next generation before they even commit their first crime, so they may as well be given an outlet to self-destruct in earnest. Never mind setting them to where they could function harmoniously without intervention; that was a conceit for effeminate Helvic art professors.
And what of the shortages in food? The lack of public funding? The rampant disease in working class neighborhoods? The poor quality of nearly every aspect of life? Places like Helv didn't have these problems. They weren't perfect, but at least the people ate three square meals and got 16 years of education for a reasonable price. At least they kept their birth rates in check with their resources. At least their people understood and agreed with the solutions rather than fighting them tooth and nail. They knew how to do it, why hadn't Ondland figured it out?
It seemed a terrible waste to Darrin. Society had the tools to fix so many of its problems, but wouldn't use them. But for pride, prejudice, and an arrogant sense of national identity, this day would never have come.
But the day had come, as it did every year now. A sharp banging on the door of the shelter jerked him violently from his train of thought and into the reality of it all.
"Please! You've gotta... you've gotta help me! They're gonna kill me! Please! Somebody!" A muffled voice cried out. Ann got up and walked toward the door; her mother ran after her and grabbed her. True, a six-year-old probably couldn't have opened the heavy iron hatch, but better safe than sorry.
Darrin, on the other hand, knew better. He ran his thumb across a picture of Joshua and his family that he kept in his right pocket, swallowing hard. "You'll understand some day," he said to Ann.
"Please! He's coming! He's got a gun! I'm gonna die!" the voice called out again. "No, please! Don't do it! Don't... Noooo!" There was a low staccato crack of four shots in quick succession, accompanied by the high-pitched ping of lead on iron. Ann clung to her mother, who held her close. "Nooo, oh, god, please!" the same voice moaned out, this time much weaker. An unearthly shriek rang out, followed by a wet gurgling sound, then a sharp rasping wheeze that came and went, fading slowly until it was completely quiet.
All was silent once again. Darrin looked at his own watch. 9:48. Just a few more hours and they could leave the shelter, cleaning up and straightening out the house, taking stock of everything that had been looted, and bracing for yet another day without hope or purpose.
Darrin put his face to his palm. Perhaps it wasn't worth it to cower like this. Maybe next year, he'd go out into the streets, knowing full well that he wouldn't last the afternoon. He'd take a rifle and a machete and go out fighting, futility be damned. Or maybe he'd join his mother and sister again, cowering in an iron box from a society spun out of control.