Deftly squeezing between stacks of metal templates on wooden pallets, and through narrow gaps between the machinery, the injured man raced back toward the other end of the building.

The crowd of runners, already close to exhaustion, now had to turn and run back the way that they had just come.

Chris, who had been at the very end of the runners, suddenly found himself at the front, as the crowd reversed direction.

Running with all of his might, as best as he could through the tangle of machinery, Chris hoped against hope that he would not be the first person to reached the injured man.

After a moment’s hesitation, watching the strange happenings, Georgio raced after the injured man, around the side of the factory building.

Chris reached the rear of the factory at last and began to draw near to the injured man who was running straight toward him.   Blood still poured from the man’s jagged stump, leaving splashes of red across the walls and floor, and across the machinery and bottle tops as he ran.

Seeing Chris, the man reversed on his heals, cut around one machine, to neatly skirt Georgio who had been about a metre behind him, then ran back around the side of the building.

Rita, the only person in the section who had not joined in the chase, stepped down from her seat of pallets and found herself face to face with the injured machinist, who was running straight at her.

“Grab him!” Georgio shouted to the young girl in Greek.

Rita, however, was in almost as great a state of shock as the man baring down on her, and so, she fainted onto the floor in front of him.

For a moment it looked as though the injured man were going to run straight across the blonde girl, however, Georgio put on an extra burst of speed and managed to overtake the man in the very nick of time.

Expecting to see the man struggle with the foreman, and possibly injure himself even more, Chris was relieved to see the man collapse into Georgio’s arms.

Two of the crowd lifted Rita out of the way, then Georgio instructed Chris, “Grab his legs, we’ll take him to my office.”

*      *      *

Georgio scattered papers onto the floor with one arm, then, with Chris’ help, placed the injured man on top of the large desk in his office.

Turning toward the crowd, which had followed them from the other end of the building, Georgio said in Greek, “Someone go get his hand out of his machine.   They’ll want it in case they can stitch it back on.”

“You want us to touch it?” asked the forklift driver in horror, seeming more shocked at the thought of picking up the severed hand, than by the accident itself.

“For God’s sake, it isn’t going to bite you!” said Georgio.   “It’s a hand, not a mouth!   If you’re afraid, you can scrape it into a cardboard box.”

The forklift driver headed off, then Georgio said in Greek, “Someone get a hose to spray down the machines.   The buyers wouldn’t like getting assignments of blood-stained tops.”   As an afterthought he added, “Wash down the tops too, they’re still all right.”

Georgio tied a tourniquet around the man’s damaged arm, although it had virtually stopped bleeding anyway, then said to Chris in English, “The shit’ll really hit the fan when management finds out how much time we’ve lost over this.”

Pointing toward the man lying upon the desk, Chris said, “He’s not exactly jumping for joy either!”

“There’s no need to be bloody sarcastic about it!” Georgio shouted as Chris started to walk back out into the work area.

On the right-hand side, beside the rubber doors leading to the next section, stood the blackboard announcing the number of days since the section’s last major accident.   At the bottom of the blackboard was a ledge on which sat a small duster and a few trailings of chalk.

Chris ran the duster along the message, then used a small piece of red chalk to correct the message so that it said: “THIS SECTION HAS NOW GONE 0 DAYS SINCE ITS LAST MAJOR ACCIDENT!

THE END