In the event of a nuclear explosion turn the knob counter clockwise the instructions read. Braxton frowned, clearly this job would be more difficult than his parole officer had made it seem.
"Believe me, Braxton, if my seventeen year old son can do this job," the officer had said, "I'm positive you can."
He now stared at the reactor partly wishing that he had stayed in jail like a good boy.
"Braxton, buddy, you excited to work here?" A strange voice called out behind him.
"Oh yeah! BEST JOB EVER, right??" Braxton called out loudly, without looking to see where the voice came from.
Suddenly he was tackled from behind and put in a head lock. He couldn't breathe! When he was struggling to escape the headlock, his arm reached forward, slamming the knob to the right. Finally Caden, his prison cell buddy, got off of Braxton. Just then, loud beeping began and red lights started flashing blindingly bright.
Braxton's heart was pounding so hard he was sure it was going to jump right out of his chest. He hadn't gotten to the part in the manual that explained what happened when the knob was turned to the right. Frantically he tried turning the knob to the left. As he was toying with it, he spotted workers sprinting towards the exits.
"Dude, I think that they're running an evacuation drill." Caden shouted over the blaring alarms. Braxton shrugged then began speeding for an exit like his life depended on it, which it probably did.
"Someone pulled a trigger for a counter-nuclear bomb," Braxton overheard someone saying when he passed them, "but there wasn't actually an active bomb for it to counter-activate, so it is probably just gonna blow."
With a sinking feeling Braxton realized he had just single handedly set off the largest nuclear explosion known to man kind. Well there wasn't much he could do now, so maybe he should try and stop it? He made a U-turn and fought his way in the opposite direction of the crowd flooding outwards. Frantically he ran through the power plant trying to find the off switch to the catastrophe about to happen. The person who had built the plant must not have been very bright because he couldn't find one.
Braxton finally came to the conclusion that the only way to stop the counter-explosive was to set off the nuclear explosion that it was supposed to stop. He found the knob he remembered from the manual and turned it to the left as instructed. Nothing. Suddenly, the lights stopped flashing red and and the noises changed from an inconstant beeping to a loud, high-pitched drone.
Unsure if his idea had worked, Braxton hunkered under some heavy machinery, waiting for something to happen. Suddenly everything went eerily quiet. Apparently, this was the calm-before-the-storm moment in time. Minutes later the reactor blew sky high.
And that was the last time anyone ever allowed a prisoner to operate a nuclear power plant.
The End
