He brought down nearly $2000 a week from a variety of vice related activities:  selling dope, pimping ho’s, and illegal street racing.  He had won seven cars in various races from Asheville to Rocky Mount.

The Lab Tech building is a giant brick hulk that sits on the Elon/Burlington border. Lab Tech is one of the main medical analyzing facilities in the Southeast.  You get a mole removed; they send it here for tests.  You get the piss test at work; the piss comes here for testing.  They run any kind of test on any type of body part or body fluid that you could imagine.  The building is a virtual breeding ground for every kind of bacteria, virus, microbe, germ, etc. in the world.

Numerous scientists work in this facility.  They are paid generously for their skills to run tests that are capable of telling if your tumor is just a big glob of fat, or if it’s full blown cancer.  The facility houses some of the most impressive and expensive testing equipment that money can buy.  The machinery is real cutting edge stuff.

Despite all of the technological wizardry the building can’t do everything all by itself.  No, it still requires someone to do the dirty work: take out the trash, clean up the spills, clean the toilets, and discard of the occasional hazardous materials bag.  So, amongst all of these college degree toting white people you have a handful of blacks thrown in there to take care of all the clean up responsibilities.

Barstow figured that 3rd shift would probably be the easiest.  He could check in and finish up all of his duties in about 2 hours and then find a nice quiet place to either watch SportsCenter or take a nap until his shift was over.  Hardly anyone was in the building after 9 p.m. and he wouldn’t catch any static for his porch monkey-like behavior
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One night Barstow finished up his work early and he suspects nobody would bother him if he went to the cadaver room.  You know, the room with all of the dead people.  Yes, they come here too.  Mainly to see if their cause of death was drug induced.  If so, then the insurance companies don’t have to pay.  If they don’t test positive, well, at least it was worth a shot.

Around 1 a.m. there is a sonic boom that comes from somewhere outside the facility and all of the power instantly shuts down.  All of the doors within the brick palace close violently and lock.  Everything is on complete lockdown for security purposes.  No warning.  Just one second he is sitting there doing the crosswords and the next minute he is trapped in a dark room filled with dead bodies.  It’ll probably come back on in a few minutes he figures.  At 2 a.m. the power is still off.  At 3 a.m. the power is still off.