Skewed Slightly to the Left: Rayford has some time to think

[Originally posted at Slacktivist.]

[Previously: Ray had planned to crash the plane before Nicolae could go through with his "Nuke a bunch of cities" plan but waited for Amanda to get off first, only to have it thwarted.  He was transported by armed guards, eventually ending up in a bedroom aboard the plane, but the account of how he got from the cockpit to said room has to be regarded as apocryphal as it doesn't match the surrounding narrative, then San Francisco exploded, then he and Nicolae had a chat.  And that might be all we've seen of him recently]

[Getting the order of everything right has been difficult for me even as I've been writing it, revisions are almost certainly necessary.  For example I was thinking that the destruction of San Fransisco was most recent, and wrote it as such, until I just reread Nicolae talking to him and realized it had to come after the bomb dropped.  And this, likewise, was written assuming that the destruction of San Fransisco was the most recent Rayford scene.]

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Rayford lay back on the bed.

"You weren't supposed to move a muscle," one of the guards said.  Rayford didn't know which one.  The four all blended together.

"That's impossible," Rayford said.

"Sit back up!"

"Tired of sitting," Rayford said lazily.

"I will fire!"  It was a small room.  There wasn't any background noise.  Rayford would have heard if the guard had whispered, yet for some reason the guard insisted on shouting.

"Do it.  Tired of living too."  Did that count as suicide, Rayford wondered.  Suicides go to Hell, don't they?  No, that was a Catholic belief.  Still, with the blood on his hands Rayford couldn't imagine going anywhere else.  He should have crashed the plane when he had the chance.

Amanda was safe, for the moment.  Small comfort when compared to the millions he could have saved, but it was all he had.  Cameron had been alive when he tried to get warning out.  Some comfort there.

The warning would give at least some people time to get to shelter, assuming anyone knew where a bomb shelter was this long after the cold war.  Maybe a handful of lives had been saved.

Rayford pulled his legs onto the bed, more shouting from the guard.  Perhaps more than one of the guards.  He didn't know.  He didn't care.

Curling up into fetal position wasn't really an intentional act.  He hoped darkness would engulf him soon.  More than that he hoped he wouldn't dream.


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