The Point of
the Pit
By Matthew
Maldonado
The
Pit was huge.
It
was a thousand feet long at the least, more than twice as high, and just about
half as wide. Its shape was that of a sloping rhombus, one vertically parallel side
leading down to another. It was open at both ends, each the mouth of a long and
winding hallway that was as equally tall and wide as its entrance. Dark metal
rails lined the roof of both the hallways and the Pit itself, leading from maw
to maw across the stainless steel ceiling. The wall to the left of the tracks
was covered from bottom to top in rust-red circles, perpetually-winking lights
flashing in their centers. The opposite wall was blank and shining and void
save for a rectangle of clear glass set at the very middle.
Behind this glass lay a room lined with button-laden
panels and glowing computer screens. It was dominated by a long, plain table
surrounded by even plainer chairs. A sleek, neon-accented vending machine stood
next to the room's one and only door like a silent thug plotting ambush.
Fluorescent bars washed the room in stark white light, painting the few living
occupants in dismal monotone.
These
occupants were dressed in loose gray coveralls; an insignia consisting of twin
red spheres inside a red circle rested upon the breast of each garment. There
were three coveralls and four men; three employees and one guest. Two of the coveralled men were stationed side-by-side at a pair of
monitors; the third sat opposite the guest at the long table. A white paper
sack lay between this latter pair; next to it were a couple hamburgers, each
lying in the center of the crumpled petals of their white wrappers. The two at
the table were talking animatedly to one another about sports; the two at the
screens remained silent and watchful, eyes locked to the readings.
Their
silence was broken by yellow, shining along the rim of both their screens.
"We've
got yellow," they muttered in unison, the words caught by their headset mics and sent to places unknown. "Repeat,
yellow in the Pit."
"Yellow?" asked the guest, eyes wide, brows
up and arching on his forehead.
"Means
we've got a delivery in the Pit," said his table-sharing companion. "Nothing to worry about."
"Ohhh." The guest stood. "Does that mean they're coming
down?"
"Yes
it does," his companion replied, grinning. "Come have a look?"
The
grin was returned. "Of course."
Both
of them joined the coveralls at their stations. All of them peered through the
glass into the brightly-lit Pit, with its shiny steel walls and its multitude
of blinking circles. The yellow was still there on the rims of the screens, now
accompanied by the muffled sound of some loud and grating horn, echoing against
the walls of the Pit and into the ears of the only witnesses to what happened
next.
The
horn was suddenly silent, as if struck down dead. Another sound quickly took
its place: a thick and heavy rumbling, like the growling of some giant's
famished stomach, punctuated by high shrieks and faint squeaking. Accompanying
this gastric growl was a noise altogether unnamable, a husky, shifty sound, as
of the grating of two curtains together, amplified to enormous scale. As the
four men watched and waited, the sound grew louder, the rumbling more palpable,
the grating-curtains sound rising into a buzzing drone. The room vibrated; the
vending machine trembled next to the door, its plastic-wrapped contents at
first shaking, then quaking violently as the sounds built further and further
up. The coming rumble closed in on the Pit, swelling into a grand, god-like
quake, seeming to shake even the Pit itself as it drew ever closer.
"Here
it comes," said the standing employee, grinning at the guest, who returned
the expression--but not without a certain trepidation.
"Just watch."
They
all watched--the seated employees, with their blank, uninterested faces; the
standing worker, eyes flashing from the Pit to his companion; and the guest,
whose nervous eyes were locked on the mouth of the left-hand hallway.
The
quaking, shaking rumble, the metallic shrieks and squeaking, and the anonymous,
shifting drone reached their peak just as their source sped into view.
A
series of massive racks slid down the length of black tracks and into the Pit,
greased wheels squeaking tremulously under the weight of their massive cargo.
There were at least eight hundred of the racks (each the same rusty red of the
circles on the left-hand wall) speeding down the rails, swinging and lurching,
metal whining, moaning, groaning, and shrieking in inanimate anguish. Like
snakes they writhed in motion, stretching from sloped ceiling to sloped floor,
swinging and clanging and hissing, red-brown like long-dried blood.
The
cargo of these long, wailing racks shifted noisily. A hundred thousand naked
bodies, undeniably human and questionably dead, hung from hooks and clamps and
from within blood-caked wire cages latched to the linked shafts of the racks.
The heady, shifting drone came from these hanging, bleeding bodies and their
near-constant friction. Blood, ripe-red and fresh, dripped
down the legs of the hanging, swinging bodies in thin, trickling trails.
It was under this grisly cargo that the racks squeaked and squealed like
petulant children under the weight of obligation.
"This
is a yellow delivery," said the first of the seated coverall employees
(whose badge identified him as "Paul"). "Great
big racks of dead bodies on meathooks."
He casually pressed a button on his panel, bringing the morbid line of racks to
a bellowing halt. He turned to the guest, who was opening his mouth to say
something, and interrupted him with, "Before you ask: no, I've got no clue
why we get daily shipments of corpses down here in the Pit. Normally all they
send us are big crates full of fruit or computer equipment or skin mags. But every
The
guest shut his mouth and stared silently out the window, at the macabre curtain
of metal and mutilated flesh hanging before him. After a couple minutes, he
looked back down at Paul. "What do you do with them while they're in
here?" he said, voice hushed in the wild fear that the ripped and torn
cadavers on the racks would hear him.
Paul
didn't bother looking up from his panel, where he was deftly adjusting
settings. "Count 'em," he said brusquely.
"That's what those sensors on the wall are for. They analyze each object
and count 'em up. I just keep track of the system,
make sure it's not screwing up, and I tend to the rail system, and make sure
that that's not screwin'
up." He took another cigarette sip. "Frankly, I'm just a watchdog for
a trouble that hasn't come in the five years I've been working here. It's easy
work. I tend to a delivery every half an hour, press a few buttons, monitor a
few systems, and get paid about fifty bucks an hour to do it." He smiled at
the guest. "Not bad, eh?"
The
guest returned the smile. "Not bad at all..." He rubbed his chin,
eyes once again locked on the contents of the racks. "...you sure they're
dead?"
At
this, the other three men shared a troubled look.
"We
don't know," Paul finally said.
The
guest stared. "You don't know."
Paul
glanced at his coworkers. "Well, some of us aren't so sure about it."
He picked at his cigarette. "Me, I'm pretty sure they're as dead as ol’ George, God piss on his wretched old soul." He
jerked his thumbs at the other men, who gave the guest nervous grins.
"These two jackanapes have a difference in opinion."
The
guest turned his attention to them. "And you guys think they're alive?'
The
other man sitting at a control panel (his name was Armand) gave a quick, curt
nod of his dark head. The third man, the one standing, grinning lips smacking
around a wad of obnoxiously pink bubble gum, presented the guest with a jesterly tilt of the head usually reserved for pernicious
carnies playing their tricksy games among the tents
of the arcade.
"We
sure do," the gum-chewer confirmed ("sure" transformed into
"shore" through the filter of his masticating mouth). "Old Paul
here just thinks the way he does to keep his conscience good and clean."
He gave the guest a sleazy wink. "Me 'n Armie
have filthier souls than old boy Paul.”
Armand
"Armie" Dallinson
scowled. "Don't put my soul in the same slop as yours, Vince." The
guest caught the look of intense irritation on the dark man's face. "I
just think they're still alive, that's all."
"Yeah,
yeah, yeah," drawled Vince, gum popping and clapping in his open mouth.
"Then why do you still work here, Armie? How
come you still ship 'em down the Line every day? Why
do you keep it up when you know perfectly well those people on hooks and spikes
are still in the land of the living?" He smirked down at the man, who
looked back with rising anger. "Well? Whatcha
got to say for yourself, Armie?"
"I
have a family to feed, you know that," Armand said, face flushed with
scarlet, embarrassed anger. His dark eyes flickered from the guest and to Vince
and back, and then, in a low, almost equally-embarrassed half-mutter, he said,
"and besides, they probably deserve to be hanging there in the first
place."
The
guest blinked at Armand. "Why do you say that?"
"Yeah, Armie, whatcha thinkin' in there?" Vince cackled. Paul gave the braying, abrasive man a
dark, annoyed look, but said nothing. "What keeps Armie
Dallinson on the job?"
Armand's
scowl had reached canyonesque levels. His chin rocked
at the end of his face, squirming uncomfortably as he struggled to find the
right thing to say.
A
quick glance at the guest, whose own visage was brimming with honest curiosity,
decided him. His jaws ceased their seasick motions, and the thunderheads
gathered in his face slowly broke apart. He opened his mouth.
"Well..."
***
The
room was tiny, the size of three coat closets and configured in the shape of an
L. It was really a crawlspace, hidden beneath a short flight of stairs in the
middle of a creaky suburban house. The only light in the whole building came
from this half-pint hideaway. A sole light bulb cast dusty brown-orange light
across an even dustier old desk. The clutter on this particular piece of
furniture was such that one would be hard-pressed to look over it without
craning one's neck--not that one would be inclined to do so, seeing how there
was nothing beyond the steep piles of papers, magazines, books, pencils, pens,
markers, the occasional action figure, music discs, movies, and general trash
but a blank wood wall.
The
owner of the desk, and the room, and the stairs, and the house, was a man with
bone-pale skin and small, watery eyes. He sat at the desk, amid the rambunctious
clutter, scribbling with a black marker on a sheet of white Bristol board. Each
stroke of the dark, stinking stylus brought the growing picture a step closer
to completion. Had anyone been watching, they would've noted that the artist
was merely inking a picture he'd finished drawing sometime earlier. The
picture, messy and frenetic as it was, was nonetheless clear in its message: a
man in futuristic fighting gear (complete with flight boots and space helmet)
held a bruised and battered man over his head. He was preparing to toss his
prisoner over the edge of some jagged precipice and into dark oblivion. The man
in the power suit, clearly the hero, looked noble and determined; the beaten
man wore a look of terror, his gaunt and ugly face slick with sweat, nose as
ripe and red as the circular insignia emblazoned upon his dark jumpsuit.
The
style was poor, the drawing shaky and out of proportion in several areas, but
the passion and effort put into it were evident by the care the man took in
doing well with what he had. He slid the marker across the paper slowly,
gingerly, making sure every stroke made was the stroke that worked best for the
picture. After every line, he examined and re-examined the picture, analyzing,
strategizing, planning his next move. His care was extreme (as it always was
when he was working on a cover), and it filled the musty old crawlspace with
the heat and tension of exertion.
That
heat died upon the arrival of three sharp sounds.
Knock knock knock.
The
man at the desk froze, and the air with him. While heat had fled, tension not
only remained but increased exponentially. Sitting stock-still in his creaky
wooden chair at his creaky wooden desk in a creaky wooden room, he waited,
making no sound himself, for further noise of knocking. His hand hung over the
page, marker poised above the paper; his eye slowly slid across it, making sure
his hand had not faltered in panic at the noise. It had not, and the artist
inside him relaxed.
Knock knock knock.
He
slowly, quietly, laid the marker down on the desk. He made no further motion:
his neck did not shift, his legs did not so much as quiver in their joints.
Even his eyes remained unblinking, and his chest hardly heaved for breath. He
dared not move, dared not make more sound than his minute breathing and
hammer-on-anvil heartbeat.
For they were
here.
Maybe, he thought, mind aclutter with quiet fear
and noisome panic, maybe they will go
away if I do not move, and do not squeak. Maybe maybe
oh maybe oh GOD.
His
arm ached, tortured with the urge to reach over to his desk lamp and turn it
off, to kill the heat and light it emitted, creating an unwitting beacon for
the eyes and thermal vision of those that were knocking, knocking on his
chamber door. His arm remained still, but war waged within his old and
anguished nerves, indecision creating quarrel in a mind already under siege by
aching anxiety. He wanted to reach up
and slap the switch on the lamp, to bathe in comforting darkness, hidden away
from his unwelcome guests in a cape of black.
Knock knock KNOCK.
His
hand remained where it was. Sweat slipped from his nostrils onto his lips, from
out of the sparse forests of his hair and onto his forehead; from his cheeks to
his neck, where it spilled beneath his shirt in rolling round droplets. His
teeth grit against one another, beartrap mouth
clamped shut around his twitching tongue. He allowed himself a single swallow
and a single blink, but not the movement of his hand across six inches of
detritus-drowned oak to turn off a light that was probably about to get him
killed.
KNOCK KNOCK
CRASH.
There goes the front door, he thought, as a stampede of rock-heavy footsteps
pounded their way up the stairs above him and down the stairs to his left.
Calmly,
unerringly, his hand reached out and soundlessly shut off the lamp.
Awash
in the darkness, at the back of the room, he waited in his chair, listening to
his house creak around him. The footsteps were slower, softer now, as their
makers carefully made their way through the comic man's crumbling house. Blank
eyes staring into blanker darkness, the hidden man, as still and silent as the
living can be, could see his unwelcome guests in his mind's eye. They were clad
in blue, from their thudding boots to their blank helmets. Their padded,
battle-ready uniforms were bulletproof, shockproof, waterproof,
flame-retardant, resistant to cuts and scratches, unstainable,
not machine-washable (dry clean only)--but, most remarkably, they were
hopelessly blue, the color of a clear summer sky as it transitions to night
after sundown. The only break in the monotony was in the black, full-face
visor, the black rubber soles of their boots, and the scarlet, circular
insignia on the breasts of their uniforms.
Company Security, he thought, trembling in his chair. They found me. He was far from
surprised. Despite his alias, despite his efforts to distance himself from his
works, despite living like a recluse in the worst house in the worst
neighborhood, despite it all, they'd found him--but that was what Company
Security did best. How better to serve the Company--and the United States
government--by rooting out those pesky dissenters, hidden deep in their urban
burrows like scared, petulant rabbits? Hunting down the rebellion was Security's
most infamous task--aside from brutal, private executions, which no living
person had actually seen happen (but the bloodsplattered,
gore-ridden aftermath was evidence enough for most).
Right now, he thought, sweat dripping down the sides of his
skull, if they find me... He shut his
eyes and silently shook his head. No, no no no no
NO. He cut that thought away from his mind and
disposed of it, like fat from the meat. He would
not think it. If he stayed still and quiet, under the old and rotting
stairs, behind the false wall that served as his hideaway's door, he'd make it
through.
He
just had to keep it up until they were gone.
Several
firecracker bangs shot through the house. The comics
man did not so much as shift in his chair; he kept soundly still, listening to
the Security Officers as they made their thudding way through the house. He
heard them open and slam cupboards, doors, drawers, shelf covers and even
windows, each one opening and closing with a clamorous BANG! that made the moldering, termite-eaten building tremble in
its foundation.
The
man fervently gnawed on his lip, eyes half-squinched
closed, salty saline droplets slipping from his pale, sunken eyes. He knew that
the Officers would find nothing out there; everything he needed to survive was
hidden in addenda to his cozy annex (the mouth of which was the workroom he
presently sat in, weeping, terrified, on the verge of the end of his life, of
his work, of all that he’d tried to do for the world). There wasn't a single
sign of habitation in the rest of the ruined house; he'd made sure of it. His
hope rose like hot air, filling him from paunched
stomach to hairless skull.
The
brutal noise of gunfire burst from somewhere upstairs and down into the ears of
the comic-creating man. He nearly jumped; instead he clamped down with tooth
and jaw. Blood spilled from his freshly-cut lip, drawing jerky, scarlet lines
down his chin, across the valley of his neck, soaking into his filthy
undershirt, clinging to his graying chesthairs. More
gunfire, and the sound of breaking glass, shredding wood, flying porcelain.
Bathroom, he thought dully. They're
in the bathroom upstairs.
Faint muttering of voices and the sound of footsteps,
just overhead. Not a muscle moved.
He didn't even blink, and refused his lungs oxygen. He gazed unseeingly,
listening hard, viewing nothing but darkness and hearing nothing but
thickly-muffled gibberish. Sweat covered him in a hard, cold layer, an icy
shell. The voices continued to come from above, one louder than the others (Security Leader, he thought), the other
two quieter, more submissive. Clearly a discussion between a superior and his
subordinates.
Please leave, please, oh please, please
leave me. His tears fell in salty
torrents. Please go, please leave, please
oh please oh please FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GO GO GO GO PLEASE OH PLEASE JUST GO
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GO.
More muttering. Someone shifted their weight from one foot to the other.
PLEASE.
A sharp bark, followed by more footsteps. They headed away, down the stairs, across the
landing.
Out the door.
Silence, in the house. Pure silence. The man sat like a stone in his chair,
heavy and still, shiftless. His ears reached out, groping for sound, for sign
that the Officers were coming back, that there were some still in the house,
that they were far away. They groped, and found nothing. No sign, not of
absence nor presence. Simply nothingness.
Time
passed, slipping away, dying.
He
unfroze. His eyes blinked. His lungs filled, swelled, exhaled, shrunk. His
shoulders untensed and lowered. His hand came up to
his chin, wiped away blood.
The
chair creaked beneath him.
He
froze up in his chair again, eyes darting wildly in their sockets, one hand
over his mouth and the other gripping the arm of the chair.
There
was a thin, arid sound, like the crepitus of long-dry
bones, a puff of sawdust, a spray of splinters, a flash of movement--suddenly
the man let out a rasping, rattling wheeze. His hands clutched at his throat,
gripping and squeezing. Blood gurgled up over his tongue and spilled between
his teeth and out his mouth. His legs trembled and jerked, rattling against the
floor, knees knocking up against the desk as he gurgled like a draining tub.
A
steel spike, ten inches long and lined with a serrated frill, jutted from his
chest, just under the pectoral muscle. Blood jetted around the baroque blade in
thin, crimson streams, spraying the abysmal mess of the desk with shocking red.
The drawing in front of the man soaked in an ever-growing pool of blood, white
paper retreating before waves of sinful scarlet.
Thin
rays of gloomy-gray sunlight wafted in through the hole made by the invading flechette, sending silver light dancing across the spike in
curving, wavy streaks. The man's eyes were locked on the cold, lifeless weapon,
gaping dumbly at it as his blood flooded the floor.
Thuds,
heavy and hard, rocked the building, sending dust cascading from the ceiling.
The man shook in his chair, writhing, mouth gnashing around silent shrieks shot
from a thrashing tongue. Each thud was monstrous to his dying ears; each marked
another enormous crack in the crust of the world as it was shredded by chaos;
each was a thunderstroke of Vulcan's hammer upon his
sparking anvil; each was a hoof of the Reaper's steed, pounding into the dirt,
coming, coming.
Coming.
The
thuds stopped just outside the false wall. There was a fearsome grating as a
boot slid across the bare concrete floor. Breathing, faint and steady, was
barely audible to the comics man, with his throat choked with blood and his
ears full of death's sirens.
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.
There
was a pause--and then the click-whir-hum of activating machinery--and then a
razor-thin beam of bright-red light cut through the wall, right at the top, and
worked its way down to the ground. It returned to the top, cut all the way to
the right, then straight down to the ground again. A massive rectangle of wall
fell to the floor, leaving a hole just the right size for the Officer to step
through, rifle at the ready.
The
Officer froze two steps into the room. With a flick of the thumb, the rifle's
halogen lamp turned on with a quiet hum. The beam cut into the darkness, bright
and blue-white. It danced across the inside of the room, then focused on the
man inside it. The Officer moved closer, carefully, watching the target through
the rifle's thermal scope, until the flechette was
plainly visible. The Officer gave the steel spear a quick nod, as if
acknowledging a job well done, and lowered the rifle.
The
man gurgled and choked, wide, red eyes locked on his attacker. His
gravel-on-sandpaper breathing filled the room with its gruesome white noise.
Despite the spear, despite the blood oozing from him in thick streams, despite
the way his lungs filled like guzzling stomachs, he managed to hold his head up
high and look into that blank, black faceplate, pride painted all across his
pale features--pride at what he was, what he was doing, why he was doing it.
The look held for all of ten seconds before he succumbed to a violent coughing
fit, vomiting gushes of blood into his lap.
The
Officer tilted her head, activating a microphone inside the helmet.
"Target uncovered and neutralized," she said, voice husky and cold.
Chilly blue-green eyes the color of dead ice gazed remorselessly at the comics
man as she reported in. "I repeat, target uncovered and neutralized by
Security Leader Royle, on mission number
twelve-twenty-eighty-six. Gathering infidel and heading back Home."
The
man let out a horrid squawk at this last sentence, and tried to get up out of
his chair. The blade shone in the halogen beam, weaving silver reflections
across the walls and ceiling as the comics creator struggled to rise. Even
mortally impaled, his rebellious will held strong. He fought to lift himself up
out of his rickety chair.
Officer
Royle tilted her head again, soundlessly deactivating
the microphone. She glanced at the struggling, jerking man, then proceeded to
calmly cock her rifle, pressing a couple buttons on the side. The silver-gray
gun clicked, whirred, hummed, and chambered a single glass dart. Royle aimed, peering over the top of her gun, and planted
the dart into the man's neck with a swift swoosh
and plunk. She watched him jerk as it
hit, watched the foam flood from his mouth, eyes rolling in his trembling head,
back arched unnaturally.
She
watched as he writhed, flopped, twitched, twisted, trembled, shook, and
shivered--and finally collapsed, as still and lifeless as his hope.
They
had found him.
It
was all over.
Light.
He
tried to wince, to shy away from it with closed eyes and scrunched face, but
neither the lids of his eyes nor the muscles of his face so much as twitched.
He wanted to blink, at least, to spare himself from the glare for just a
second, but even that pleasure evaded him; his eyes stayed open. He tried
moving his arm to block the light, but that, too, failed him. His neck refused
to operate, as well.
Helpless
and immobile, he stared unwillingly into the light, watching it as it faded,
melting from the center outwards. He could see shiny gray steel behind the
glaring white wall; nothing more for now.
As
the light slipped away, he tested his other limbs. None responded to his will.
He began to fidget internally, uncomfortable with the paralysis and its
meaning. He'd been shot and imprisoned for spreading seditious materials and
threatening the welfare of the Company. He had been prosecuted for a simple
Orwellian offense: thoughtcrime. He'd dared to think
against the values of the Company, and to put his thoughts down on paper--and
then, in the worst of all offenses, he'd dared to spread his thoughts to the common people.
He'd
dared, and now what? Here he was, wherever he was, immobile, in the hands
of the vile Company. He'd always known the time would come, one day, when the
government Orwell had warned against would take him into their maw and gnash
him to shreds, but he'd never thought it would come so quickly or be so
frightening.
The
light was gone. He stared straight ahead, looking right at a steel wall that
spread out in all directions. Near the top of his vision there was a long
rectangle of glass, and cutting up
through the bottom his vision was a long, rust-red-and-orange spike. Red liquid
of varying viscosity coated the shaft.
The
spike nauseated the comics man, so he focused instead
on the glass rectangle set in the wall above him. Blue-white light lit the room
behind it, highlighting the four faces within in cold colors. They seemed to be
talking about something, and took no notice of the paralyzed man fifty feet
down. He tried his mouth again, to call out to them--to beg, to wail, to
scream, to protest, to rave--but it didn't so much as twitch.
The
spike taunted him on the lower edge of his vision. It jutted from somewhere
below his sightline, and oozed with what had to be blood. It looked like it was
made of age-old iron, rusted to the point where the whole surface was dark
orange-red. The point at the end was blunt.
The
man tried to imagine just where that spike was coming from--and with a stone-like
sinking of his stomach, he realized it was coming from him. The rabid-looking red-orange spike was piercing him in the
same place that the flechette had--it was probably
even the same hole, kept fresh and open by the ungodly lance.
It was piercing him.
The
thought surrounded him, building around his mind, flanking it, pressing in all
around, clawing at his skull, dragging him down, down, down into screams, so
silent and so alone.
So silent and so alone.
***
Vince
stared at the ceiling, chewing his gum like cud, a thoughtful look (or at least
as close to a thoughtful look as someone like Vince could manage) on his face.
"So, whatcher sayin', Armie, is that all the poor saps on the hooks are
traitors?"
Armand
nodded. "Traitors and political prisoners, spies…stuff like that. People
who deserve it." Next to him, Paul was busy at his station, monitoring
what appeared to be a series of constantly-shifting graphs. "That's what I
think, anyway." He sat back in his chair, looking expectedly at the guest,
chewing on his lip.
The
guest nodded. "Seems reasonable. The government's got to do something with traitors." He stared
out at the racks, watching them hang there like clanking strings of macabre
baubles. He looked at them and felt no remorse, traitors or no. Death held no
meaning for men like him; life was not precious and death was not pitiful in
the mind and eyes of the guest.
Vince
was scowling. "Well, it sure makes sense, I guess. I just always thought
they were fired employees, or somethin'." He
gnawed on his gum and returned to staring thoughtfully at the ceiling, eyebrows
knit together. "You know, or somethin'." No
one paid him any mind, and he made no further comment.
There
was quiet in the room. Paul busily typed and clicked, Armand busied himself
with straightening his wrinkled coverall, Vince stared hawkishly
up at the smooth, clean ceiling, and the guest stared at the vile racks, eyes
drifting across the bodies. He looked at them, examined their scarred, chalky
flesh, riddled with splotches of red and purple-black bruises. Jaws hung open,
tongues lolling out like dead slugs. Eyes varied; some stared straight ahead,
some were turned in different directions, some were rolled and some hung from
the sockets on gristled cords. Blood dripped from
every available orifice, including ones that weren't normally present in human
anatomy. Hooks and spikes and claws and chains and clamps and cages with barbed
bars jutted every which way, half-hidden by thick layers of what looked like
corpses (none of them, not even Armand, were sure if they were dead or not,
even now).
As
he stared at the immobile human mosaic before him, absorbing its
every eldritch detail, a thought, like a windborne feather, spun and wound
through his subconscious, weaving its way across neurons in astronomical sparks
of electricity, until it effervesced in his frontal lobe in a flash of neural
lightning. It hung in his head, an orb of curiosity hanging as the fading
shower of revelation fell around it.
He
turned around, and looked at his companions. Paul and Armand were still at
their stations, poking away at their panels. Vince was over at the vending
machine, perusing the merchandise with his head in the nimbus and his hands in
his pockets.
"I
had a thought," he began slowly, hand stroking across the rise of his cleanshaven chin. The orb flashed and crackled behind his
dark, sable eyes.
They
all looked at him with querying looks. Vince idly slipped his Slider through
the slot on the vending machine as he looked at the guest. A candy bar dropped
from the racks and into the dispenser tray. It lay there, untended and ignored.
Armand's fingers lay poised on the instruments of his station, looking
expectantly at the visiting party. Paul's head was half-tilted in the guest's
direction, left brain seeped in the technicalities of his job, right brain
poised to listen to whatever was to be said.
The guest, well-aware that he had everyone's
attention, rubbed his chin, stubble bristling against his fingertips, and
continued. "So," he
said, addressing them all but really only talking to Paul and Armand, "you
get shipments in here every day?"
"Yeah,"
Paul said, idly flipping switches and pushing buttons. "Every half hour,
actually. We have twenty-five minutes to transfer each set of racks from our
station. After the contents are counted and recorded, we send them down the
tunnel at the bottom." Here he pointed out the window, at the Pit's lower
maw, silver, gaping like a too-stretched orifice. "And we never see them
again."
The
guest's eyebrows rose. His fingers ceased rubbing. "Never?"
"Never,"
Paul confirmed, nodding sternly.
"So..."
The guest turned fully to Paul, leaving Vince to look at his back. The
rat-faced man scowled a little, mouth twisted in a tiny tilde sneer, and bent
down to get his candy. "So you don't have any idea what happens to the
racks after you send down the tunnel?"
"Not
a clue." Paul pressed a final button and turned to the guest, lacing one
leg over his knee, arm draped over the back of his work chair. "But like I
said, I'm not the only man here with an opinion." He gestured at Vince,
whose scowl turned into a smirk. "Vincent over there's entertained many a
visitor with his 'theory' on that, as it happens." He gave both Vince and
his guest a smile dripping with sweet saccharine.
Vince
returned the smile, teeth glinting like shined flint, looking almost triangular
in the monotone shadows cast by the glaring flourescents.
Armand shifted nervously in his chair. A tingle of anxious static crawled
across the guest's flesh, raising bumps across his skin. Both of them could
feel the grating, red-razor tension that hung between Paul and Vince like taut
steel wires, waiting to snap in an explosion of frayed metal. The dislike and
the contempt, hidden under a paper veil of courtesy, flashed between the
coworkers in miniscule sparks. Armand, a frequent witness to these underlying
emotions, had begun to liken their silent conflict to that of soldier versus
snake, good versus evil, God versus Satan.
Vince,
smirking like a slinky tomcat, slid a chair from the table and over to the
other three men. He sat down with an exaggerated sigh of content and stretched
his shoulders in a way that reminded Armand of pictures of a rooster he'd once
seen: one with the bird ruffling its feathers, standing tall, proud, and
deceptively large. The only thing wrong with this rooster was that it had the
eyes of a snake, the smile of a shark, and the body of an oily, vile man.
Vince
took a large bite out of his candy bar and said, through masticating teeth and
crushed chocolate:
"Well..."
***
The
racks slid down their tracks, sliding past the cracks, the cracks in the walls.
Past the cracks, down the tracks, slid the racks, bodies swinging to and fro to
the sound of silent music, macabre and moldering.
The
racks rocketed down their rails, the grinding hum of bodies shifting together
overpowered by the screams of tortured iron and steel, scraping together,
shooting sparks and spewing smoke, friction turning the wheels of the racks
red-hot. They shot down the tunnel, orange iron demons carrying a vile cargo to
the depths of hell.
They
slowed as they reached their destination. It was not the brimstone-laden,
burning, churning depths of Lucifer's lair; instead it was almost a carbon-copy
of Paul and Vince's Pit. It was exactly the same, right down to the shiny steel
sides--but in place of the multitude of sensor-circles there was a wall of
folded metal beams and bars, clinging to the steel like newborns, curled and
contracted around themselves. The beams--and half of this second Pit--were
splattered with blood, dried stark maroon in waves, splashes, curving arcs,
Jackson Pollock tapestries of crusting liquid. The splatters stretched up
almost to the top, where there were still the faintest dots of red spread
across the shining expanse; and all the way to the bottom, growing thick and
dark
The
racks slowed, stopped, and swung slightly with the remnants of momentum. Its
cargo hummed and clanked, settling into an inclined line as it locked into
place, the clamps shutting closed with echoing CLANGs.
There
was a silent pause. The bodies were still. The racks were still. Even the blood
was still, congealing on blue-white limbs and orange-red iron.
A
chittering of clicks, like the sound of buzzing,
biting insects, erupted from the beam-laden wall, rebounding off the sides of
the Pit and down the tunnels. The beams and bars unfolded themselves,
stretching out from the wall, gears grinding as they extended, flexing and
turning as they reached out towards the racks, groping for them with insectile appendages.
There
was a hiss, shots of steam along the tops of the racks, and a groaning grind
from the bottom of the Pit. With great creaks and tiny squeaks, cage doors shot
open and clamps released, freeing nearly thirty-thousand bodies into the air.
The
beams and bars reached, groped, stretched, water shifting in hydraulic joints,
gears clanking together, claws click-click-clicking--and clutching, thin metal
phalanges wrapped around unmoving necks, arms, legs, waists, heads, worn-away
treads cutting scalloped shapes into the yielding, bruised flesh. The insectoid arms clamped and drew back, retreating back to
their wall, prey in hand. Bodies hung from the trembling limbs, dangling in the
air, bearing looks of shuddering intensity, frozen in place by death or drugs;
who knew?
They
hovered over the Pit's third great maw for mere seconds before the arms
released them, huffs of steam and squeals punctuating the action. As soon as
the bodies had been freed, the arms screeched and closed back in on the racks,
ready to do it all over again.
Down
they dropped, turning slowly, limp limbs bending gracefully in the air, hair
flapping around their heads in matted halos. They fell, and fell, turning and
spinning, dancing as they dropped towards doom, wind flapping in their wounds.
The
bodies poured down, down, and the dull thuds came together to form a disgusting
music, a rising symphony of cadaverous impacts. Each note in this evil
orchestration was a crescendo, the low whistle of the plummet building up to
the sound of impact--sometimes a thud,
sometimes a gong, sometimes a smack, and, on the occasions when the
bodies would land head-first, a splat
followed by the drip drip
drips of descending droplets of bright blood. Heads split, eyes popped,
limbs cracked, and bodies fell, hitting the steel, jittering slightly, clinging
momentarily, before slipping down the slope, joining their companions in the
great black rift that slit the Pit from end to end.
They
slid in, and were seen no more.
The
arms were busy above, lifting bodies off hooks and spikes, out of clutching
cages and from the ensnaring chains, working their way down the racks, tossing
the bodies down into the depths with quicksilver speed. Occasionally a body
would cling to the side of the rift, gravity and momentum having failed to
fully deliver it, and an arm would descend and nudge it in. Sometimes it would
be one body, sometimes a clump of two or three, and, on at least one occasion,
six or seven limp, staring bodies piled on the rift’s rim in a tangled knot of
jutting, blue-gray limbs, skin pallid and matte. All were pushed into the rift
without pause, tumbling in like unstrung marionettes.
The
crescendos faded away, tempo dying down as the ritardando
grew and grew. The noise slowed and thinned, until it wasted away,
disintegrating into silence. The clockwork arms drew back to the wall, curling
and folding back into place, clanking and chittering
as they did so. The racks quietly dripped blood, hanging, empty, from the black
tracks above.
Silence.
There
was an awful, eldritch grind--then a rising, shrieking squeal--and then the
noise of a great engine, rumbling and roaring itself awake, rising ponderously
from an ungentle nightmare sleep. It snarled from somewhere beneath the second
Pit, belching up a vile plume of oily black smoke that stretched up from the
rift like a rising snake. It met the ceiling and billowed outward, rolling and
gathering against the steel, hanging over the rest of the Pit like a faux
thundercloud.
There
was a flash of color, the blur of movement, and a strange, wet, squelching
sound.
A
torso, ragged at its wound of a waist, slid down the wall of the Pit, down the
sloped bottom, and back into the rift. As it did, long, streaming ribbons of
blood spewed from the shadowed hole, adding a whole new coat to the painted
walls. It leapt from the rift in great splatters and jets, sent flying by
unseen machinery. It wasn't long before ragged scraps of flesh and chips and
chunks of sliced bone joined the blood, flapping and spinning in the air like
gory confetti. Occasionally whole limbs would go flying out of the rift, legs
and arms spinning clumsily, heads spiraling as they corkscrewed high up--then
came down, jaws hanging and eyes rolled, dropping back into blackness.
The
grinding grew, the engine bellowed like an injured lion, machinery squealed and
buzzed, and suddenly the bottom of the Pit was filled with a tornado of gore,
swirling through the air as it was ejected at insane velocities from the
mechanical bowels. The gore came up, hung, and came back down, slipping and
sliding back into the rift, siphoned off to who-knew-where. Limbs tended to
come up several times: once attached to bodies; once not; once flayed; once raw
and white, devoid of covering, glazed with blood. Then they were consumed in
the great churning grind, lost in its massive, noisome snarling. Had this Pit
been hell, whatever lay beneath the darkness of the rift would have been Cereberus, the tri-headed hound of the underworld, guardian
of the deep trenches of death.
The
Cereberus machine let out its final growl, jetted its
final arcing splash of pureed flesh, and let out a terminal puff of
charcoal-black smoke before it wound down into silence, unseen tick-tock
machinations slowing and stopping, their clicking and clacking fading into
minute echoes that quickly and obscurely dwindled unto death.
A
loud and grating horn let loose its roar, and the racks, empty and cold, slid
down the tracks, into the maw.
Into darkness.
***
"Bull."
Vince
scowled around the stub of his candy bar. "Is not."
"Of
course it is." Paul was fully turned away from his panel now. He was
leaning back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest, wearing a look of
amused derision on his face. "Total
bull. That's all that was."
Vince
rolled his eyes and popped the last inch of chocolate, caramel, and peanut
butter into his mouth. Chewing purposefully, he shook his head. "What do you know, anyway? I could be right or I
could be wrong, no one knows. That's the freaking point." He swallowed, and smirked. "Which you seem to
have missed."
"Oh,
you're part right, and you're part wrong," Paul said, grinning at Vince
(and at the guest, and at Armand, but mostly at Vince, who looked at those
gleaming, smirking teeth and wanted to crush every last one of them into
powder). "You'd be all right if it weren't for a couple small details,
I'll admit that. So maybe not total
bull. We'll go with incomplete bull,
for now. How's that sound?"
Vince's
face was hard and waxy, caught in its expression by the force of his
irritation. "Fine," he snapped, tugging at his coverall with agitated
hands. "We'll go with that. But you gotta
explain yourself." He leaned back in his own chair, mimicking Paul's
position, right down to the crossed arms (the main difference was that Paul's
hands were open and limp, while Vince's were taut and formed into brick-like
fists). "'Cause you sure know more than you let on." He allowed
himself a snide, serpentile smirk. "Or so you
pretend."
"Unlike
you, pretending isn't something I resort to," Paul snapped. Vince managed
to convert his flinch into a petulant scowl before anyone could catch it.
"If I have something to say, I say it, and not a word of it ends up false.
You know that. You've been around me for years, Vincent, and I know you know. So don't you play games
about all this; let's get it all straight instead: I don't lie. You don't lie,
either, you just prance about in make-believe. You're a storyteller, I'm a
reporter. People like you more because what you say sounds more exciting, more
fantastic, more euphoric. You generate the fantastic, weaving as much
excitement and intrigue and surprise in it as possible so that whoever hears
your wondrous tale of flair and finery will be dragged into it like a hooked
fish. You don't tell lies, you just ignore the truth and give people what you
come up with on the fly."
Paul
smiled, pink-red lips parting to expose ivory-cube teeth, shining like bright,
baroque pearls. Vince tried his hardest to find even the smallest smidgen of
spite, malice, sarcasm, poison, bile, or disgust behind those snow-white
bicuspids--but even his hardest peering and his wildest mental machinations
could not create what was clearly not there. Thus, Vince was faced with a
starkly honest and friendly smile--something that neither Paul nor many of
Vince's other acquaintances had ever graced upon the man. He was struck mute by
that bold enamel crescent, shining at him from the face of a man who'd never
liked him and never spared him so much as a single note of praise in all their
years of parallel employment. He was completely flabbergasted by it.
"On
the other hand, you've got me." Paul gestured at himself. "I'm a
reporter. I see, I remember, I recall. Like a voice recorder. Hear, record,
repeat. Maybe I whip it up a bit, add the emotions that I felt, or perceived,
but for the most part I just tell it like it was. I lay down the facts, the truth, of what happened, why, where, and
when. A lot of the time people don't like me, because what I say scares them,
or angers them, or insults them, or depresses them. It makes them feel that way
simply because they know that the stories of woe and sadness, of tragedy and
defeat, of evil and tyranny, all of them are true. If there's anything that irritates a human being most, it's
knowing that the world isn't as nice as it should be, and that people aren't as
nice as they should be, either."
His expression had gone serious and sour, and he was looking at Vince like a
mother would look at an insolent child. Vince had to fight not to turn away
from that look.
"We
get it, we get it," Vince said, waving his hands. "You tell the
truth, I make stuff up. We got it." He looked exasperated, his hands
gripping his knees and his mouth twisted into a grimace. "Now c'mon, tell
us your truth, Mister Reporter Man.
You've left us hanging for too long, and some of us have breaks coming up right
quick--breaks that we'd rather spend out in a restaurant instead of sittin' here and listenin' to
you."
Armand
glanced at his station. A display in the corner of the screen showed the time
in well-defined blue LCDs. As he looked, the seconds
ticked by, and they entered a new minute in the ever-flowing stream of time.
"He's
right, we have limited time," Armand said, begrudging the first two words even
as he said them.
Paul
nodded, and looked at the guest, who had taken a seat across from him, next to
Vince. Armand stood between them all, hands in the pockets of his coverall,
fingers fidgeting with the lint. He felt like a man standing on the border
between the camps of two armies, standing there as they charged one another
with sword and shield, standing there about to get slain in their wanton
combat. Shaking a little, he took a chair, put it down next to Paul's, and sat,
hands still in his pockets. Paul gave a slight nod: acknowledgement of
allegiance. It made Armand quiver.
The
guest and Vince looked at Paul. Armand merely looked at them, gazing into their
faces with his own stolid, blank gaze.
Paul
flexed his shoulders a bit, loosening up, drew his sleeves up his arms like a
magician preparing for his tricks, and smiled. Behind him, thousands of
shiftless faces gazed blankly at the back of his head.
"Well..."
***
Bodies
fell like hailstones from the great rift, their matter cold and heavy and
numerous. They dropped quickly, slipping out of the faint light of the Pit
above and into the velvet shadows below. Blondes, brunettes, redheads; the
young, the elderly, the middle-aged; the babies, the toddlers, the teens, the tweens; healthy, sickly, dying, dead. All shapes. All
sizes.
All
fell.
The
plummet was silent and sightless for a time. It was as if the bodies had passed
out of atmosphere and into empty space, where there was no light and no air and
no sound, where there was nothing but dust and death--where neither heat nor
cold dared venture. The drop in the dark was so long that an observer might
have been pressed to ponder if the bodies hadn't reached a pocket of
anti-gravity and gone static mid-fall.
Blue-white
light stretched into the darkness with soft, curving tendrils, gently caressing
the bodies, wrapping and enfolding them in satin glow. Their forms half-cast in
darkness, the bodies of these damned and destroyed eased into the light,
descending down into the ungodly effervescence, their skin turning periwinkle
as they grew closer to the cold luminescence, beaming from below.
There
was a faint hum to the air, as if electricity lunged through it in
steadily-streaking bolts. Indeed, there seemed to be some strange energy in the
air, for as the bodies neared the terminus of their voyage, they slowed, their
velocities easing into neutral, giving the impression that even the eternal orb
of time had begun to slow, its axial rotation grinding and groaning as it
shuddered to a halt.
And the bodies with it.
They
hung like unattended marionettes, limbs askew in the air, hair caught in
whirling curves, the strands glittering an ungodly
blue in the light. Eyes stared dully into space. Mouths hung open like those of
dead fish. Wounds glistened with cold blood, their pits and channels
transformed into dark splotches and streaks by the swelling glow, which was
swiftly transforming into a shining, sheering blaze. The source, unseen but not
unfelt, seemed to be swelling, as if consuming glutinous volumes of energy and
expelling it as unholy radiance, which built upon itself in thick, viscous
layers. It was this light--and its inherent energy--that held the bodies aloft
like detritus in still water, like marbles in gelatin. The pocket of anti-gravity
had made an appearance after all.
They
hovered for several minutes, stragglers dropping into place all around, the
ever-present monotone hum strumming 'round them, blue bolts of electricity
licking across their skin like sparking earthworms. Electron-thin lines of
eldritch-blue power leapt from body to body, some chaining through as many as a
thousand masses before expiring in soundless, invisible explosions.
A
winding, curving length of silver cable slipped through the air, snapping its
tapered tip around the waist of the nearest body, wrapping itself tight before
dragging it down, out of the field of blue light, into the white. A thousand
duplicates rose in its stead, mimicking their predecessor even as another
thousand lifted high.
The
first tentacle sped down, down, down--into
white light, over a floor made of a hundred pale-blue depressions, like a
multitude of bowls set rim-to-rim. Sensors along the inner length of the
motorized appendage determined the body's specifics (male, one-hundred-thirty
pounds, forty-eight, bald, seditionist, living), gleaned from a chip embedded
in the flesh of the earlobe. This information allowed the tentacle to determine
which of the many bowls to unceremoniously dump the body like a discarded toy,
leaving it lying face-down against the cold metal. Six more bodies--all of
similar ages, body types, and states of disrepair--piled atop him. All around
and above, bodies were flung into the hemispherical depressions, the tentacles
tossing them at just the right amount of force to be quick and efficient and
yet keep the bodies from becoming further damaged in the process. It was swift,
effective, economical. Cold.
A
half-hour later, the final few bodies dropped into place in their respective
bowls, some lying shallowly in their cool containers, others piled in bleeding
mountains made of crooked limbs and twisted torsos. The tentacles, waving and
weaving like the tendrils of an anemone, slid soundlessly into the hatches
interspersed between the bowl-depressions, their shiny surfaces gleaming as
they slipped out of view, the hatch doors sliding shut behind them with
clanging finality.
The
blue light faded away, the hum dying with it, the occasional bursting POP of electricity springing out from
the growing silence. The anti-gravity emitters--glowing hemispheres extended on
hydraulic arms, fingers of blue energy stretching from their sparking
surfaces--slid into their own hatches along the side of the high, sloped walls
of the brightly-lit Underchamber.
Blue
faded, leaving only the white--and soon, even that began to fade, slowly,
gently giving way to black. Even as it did, there was a creak, a groan, a
rumble, and a half-mad shriek--as the bowl-like depressions moved forward, led
along by a massive conveyer, journeying into shadow.
Journeying to the Separators.
One
of the depressions lifted up off the track, propelled by sparking blue emitters
all along its rim. Within its coldly-curved confines sat eight bodies, all fat
and bald and old--and alive, some of them twitching even as the bowl rose into
the air, silent as the grave. These particular bodies jerked like fish,
flopping about, bodies smacking noisily together. Their flapping, numbed mouths
managed only to utter half-grunts and frightened noises. They wriggled and
writhed, unable to completely overcome the shackles of paralysis, while their
strange wounds ached of agony and oozed precious blood. Eyes spun in their
sockets like wheeling marbles, glancing all around with frantic anxiety. Those
that laid on their backs in the bowl stared, stunned and frightened, up at the
high ceiling, from which unrelenting light shone down, bright and cruel.
The
bowl made its way through the air, its fellows following suit all around it. It
floated to the nearest wall, which was separated into a mosaic of square-shaped
tunnels, lining it from bottom to top. Each one was marked by numbers,
highlighted in glowing green; they denoted every cubicle, from one to one
hundred. A deeper, plainer version of the depressions took up the width of the
mouth of each of the cubicles; red lights blinked on and off along its rim as
the floating bowl docked with it, settling in with a clank and the sound of the emitters powering down, their blue light
flickering out.
There
was a thick buzz, like the amplified drone of a single bee. Then, with a spark
and a flash, the rest of the tunnel filled with blue-white light. Tentacles
slid from ports in the wall, curved and poised like living vines ready to
attack. They lined the length of the corridor-like tunnel, gleaming and
sparking, waiting.
Tentacles
drew bodies into the tunnel, one by one, their lengths wrapped around arms,
legs, necks, torsos, foreheads. As soon as their burdens were enveloped in the
snapping, popping, snarling light, the tentacles released it, letting it float
down the corridor, gently propelled by its own acceleration. The tentacles dove
upon it, extending strange implements.
The
bowl was quickly emptied, the very last body sliding into the anti-gravity even
as the corridor was voided at the other end. It hung in the center of the
tunnel, twitching with returning nervous control, neck jerking as it fought to
turn its head to look around. Its eyelids fluttered, sometimes squinching closed as impulses got confused. A hand groped
out towards the wall.
From
that same wall came a tentacle, tipped with a long ,
thin needle. It deftly dodged the flailing hand and planted itself into the
meat of the body's flabby thigh. It
remained there for mere seconds before withdrawing, slipping into its port like
an eel diving out of sight. Several other needle-nosed tentacles jabbed into
arms, the other leg, the neck, the torso, injecting jaundice-yellow liquid into
the body's sluggishly-pumping veins.
The
body--that of a man reaching the boundaries of old age (evidenced by his
declining hairline and increasing forehead)--jerked, twitched, flexed, and
twisted in midair, fighting to scream, fighting to flail, fighting to push
away, away from all that surrounded him. His mind, trapped inside something
that felt more like a giant, flopping prison instead of the body he'd hauled
around for decades, could only scream without a sound. Its cries grew epic as
its vessel was dragged back into paralysis, limbs falling limp, eyes going
still, breathing slowing, slowing...mind shrieking, shrieking…
FREE ME! FREE ME! FREE ME! I AM A HUMAN
BEING, FREE ME! I AM A MAN! I AM A PERSON! I AM ALIVE! I AM ALIVE! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD LET ME GO! it
wailed, its unheard howls doing nothing but echoing back.
There
was no way out of his mind
There
was no way out.
There
was no one there.
There
was no one but the machines.
The
tentacles moved his limbs into the proper position: arms spread straight out
from the chest, legs spread straight down, shaping the body into a T. His head
was straightened and lifted, his fingers splayed. A strangely-shaped tentacle
rose up to his head and pressed itself against it, then drew itself across the
flesh, humming as it sheared the hairs from their roots, an attached vacuum
sucking up the strands and particles. It progressed all over his body,
eliminating the hair and consuming it with an unseen mouth, until he was fully
smooth. The tentacle sucked up the few missed bits of detritus, then whipped
away.
There
was a short pause, the body floating down the corridor, nearing the end.
Ports
opened on all sides, their mouths spiraling irises that gaped with sharp edges.
Strange, fat discs ejected from them, their rims encrusted with anti-gravity
emitters. They circled the body, examining it like vultures. Each had a glowing
eye, set like a jewel in the center of their circular bodies. This eye shone,
blinking away peridot light as it scanned the body
before it.
There
was a BEEP, and every eye turned
bright, sulfur yellow. They froze for a second, then spun into sudden, frenzied
action. The discs positioned themselves all around the body, arranging
themselves in formation. Their eyes pulsed gently, the color building up
brighter and brighter, a near-silent throb growing with it.
Their was
a flash, and a buzz, and yellow. Saffron beams of piercing light sprung from
the eyes of the discs and pierced the flesh of the man. The discs zipped down,
making long, straight incisions down the body, splitting the skin into fourths.
They repositioned themselves and cut again--and again--and again--and
again--until the body was covered in cauterized wounds. The skin was now
separated into oddly-shaped patches.
The
discs pulled back, gathering in a cluster behind the body. Their eyes flickered
back to peridots.
Stage
one was complete.
Stage
two initiated as tentacles once again extended from the walls, click-clacking
claws spread wide. They pounced upon the body, gripping the patches of skin at
their edges--and ripping them away simultaneously, stripping the body of flesh
in mere seconds. Blood hung in the air in trails; a floating, flying vacuum
drew them in, collecting them in its clear plastic belly. The flesh itself was
dropped in an equally-airborne crate extending from the wall. It drew back into
its hiding place without a single sound.
The
eyes of the discs became sulfur crystals once more and spun into action.
Tentacle-claws gripped muscles while disc-lasers cut them free from the bones;
the bleeding, red masses of meat were quickly dumped into crates. Organs--the
heart, the lungs, the liver, the kidneys, the testes--were cut from where they
lay and placed into cold-storage boxes. The intestines were clipped loose and
dragged out, looking like some fleshly, unpleasant rope, drenched red. They were
evenly cut and loaded into another, bigger, cold-storage box. The eyes were cut
by nanites sprayed from a tentacle; the invisible
robots evenly shredded the optic nerve on a microscopic level. The optic globes
themselves were plucked from the head like eggs. The mouth was pried open and
the teeth wrenched from the gums, one by one. The tongue was lifted up until
the tip pressed against the roof of the mouth; a thin laser sheared it from its
root and a claw pulled it out of the mouth, the bottom dragging across the
bleeding gums. The flying vacuum, now accompanied by a pair of clone brothers,
siphoned liquids of all sorts from the air, from wounds, from emptied gums.
Each type of liquid was drained into a different pocket of its artificial
stomach. Tendons and ligaments were snipped and clipped and dropped in cold,
smoky boxes. Bones were gently lifted away when their supports were released,
and were placed into marked boxes ("Femurs," "Tibias,
"Fibulas," "Patellas,"
"phalanges (fingers)," "phalanges (toes),"
"Pelvis"), which quickly and noiselessly slid back into the walls
they'd come from.
Soon,
only the spine and the skull remained, floating slowly along the tunnel,
strange, sparking energy flickering across the bloodstained bone. Most of the
tentacles had retracted, and only one of the discs remained, orbiting the skull
like a moon. It aimed its single cycloptic eye down
at the cranium--and fired, its bright-yellow beam cleanly cutting through the
white matter, making a lid out of the top of the skull. Its purpose fulfilled,
it slung itself into its port without further adieu.
A
tentacle clamped its claws onto the top of the skull. With a sickly sucking
sound it drew off the "lid," exposing the meat within. Long, thick
strings of slime stretched from the "lid" and the revealed brain;
they floated dreamily in the gravity-free air until the flying vacuum idly
consumed them. Another tentacle--this one with a long, chrome nozzle--leveled
its snout-like nose and let out a huff of air--and miniscule machines, which
skittered invisibly across the surface of the brain.
They
dove down the sides, scrambling their way down, down, down to the stem. They
gathered around it, pushing frantically against the sides, little spider-legs wriggling
in thick liquid. Once all were present, they began to nibble and gnaw, chewing
at the stem with clashing mandibles, swarming to the core as they ripped at the
sleek rope, the sole connection from the spinal column to the brain itself.
This connection, like all the others, was quickly cut. The nanites,
overzealous, dived down, biting their way down the inside of the spine,
ruthlessly eating every stringy nerve; they ignored the brain, which was drawn
from the skull by a series of tiny, tugging tentacles, each of them pulling at
the shiny, shiftless mass until it came out, sickly-wet sucking sounds
accompanying the extraction.
The
tentacle hovered over the skull, holding the brain aloft, tendrils writhing
tight around it, running over the wrinkles.
This
precious organ--the organ of all organs, the chamber of the human soul, the cradle of being--was disposed of like an old and rotting
cabbage. It was tossed, with a whirl of its tentacular
captor, into the nearest hovering crate. It struck the side with a violent,
viscous SPLAT. The tentacle nudged it
down to the bottom, then drew the lid closed.
A
pair of tentacles gripped the skull and the spine each, and pulled them apart
with a single, vicious tug. The two were placed in their separate containers
and whisked away. The vacuums made their final trip through the charged air,
whirring quietly. Tentacles plucked shards of bone and bits of meat and
collected them in vials.
Their
work done, they all--tentacles, vacuums, crates--drew back into the walls,
sliding into hatches and ports that were mere inches from the tunnel's
inevitable terminus:
A dead end.
***
Armand
reflected, as everyone stood there staring at Paul's expressionless face, that
even though silence usually seemed empty, there were times when it was so full
of flying, streaking, boiling, bubbling, noiseless energy that you just knew,
just knew, that not only was the
silence not empty, it was ready to explode in a flash of fireworks and frenzy.
He wanted to duck behind the table, or out the door, before everything went kaboom and emotions splashed across the room like fiery-hot
shrapnel.
Then
Vince let out a shaky, hoarse laugh, and some--but not enough to put Armand at
peace--of the tension ebbed away, like air being let out of a balloon.
"Right,"
he said, hands clenching tight on his knees. "Right, that's exactly what
they do with them. Right, that's what they're all for. Right, and my mother is the Queen of Eng--"
"I
saw it."
Vince's
mouth shut so hard his teeth clicked together loudly. The guest winced visibly.
Paul
gazed at them both, still expressionless. "I was there. I saw it
all."
Vince
swallowed several times, then choked out, "You
can't prove it. You can't. There's no way...there's no way..."
"I
don't have to." You believe it
anyway.
Vince
tried to say something, and found nothing in his mind to speak about. So
instead he latched onto a drifting curiosity.
"If
this is all true--and I doubt it is," he said, rolling his eyes,
"then can you tell me, Mr. Reporter, Sir, what the Company does with all these ripped-out pieces of
people? Can you tell me, Paul? Can you?!"
He was nearly screaming now.
Silence.
Again, Armand shivered, feeling surrounded by a sea of dark emotions.
"Tell
me," Paul continued, seemingly unperturbed by his spiteful coworker,
"when was the last time you saw a cow, Vince? When? The building we're in
is surrounded by countryside and farmland, Vince, when was the last time you saw a cow?"
Vince
could only stare, eyes agape. The guest stared, as well, perplexed.
"You
think your shoes are made of cowskin, Vince? You
think your hamburger was made of bull meat? You think you drink cow's milk?
Countries have to eat. People have to
eat. And there are no cows anymore, Vince. The Bleeding Plague saw to that.
There are no cows, but there sure are a lot of people, aren't there? Billions.
And billions. And billions. And every couple of months, a hundred thousand pass
right through here, right down the tunnels, out of a Pit and into the Seperators.
"And
every day, manmeat rests under plastic in grocery
freezers. Leather jackets made of human skin hang on clothesracks.
Human hair is made into wigs, fur coats, blankets, rugs, stuffed animals,
dolls. Teeth are made into ivory beads, cufflinks, necklaces, pendants,
earrings, charms--along with bones, which are also good for those skeletons you
see only in schools and doctors offices--you know, the ones that hang,
fully-assembled, on metal racks. Organs are preserved for transplants--or, more
profitably, for consumer consumption. Hearts, livers, tongues--they're all on
sale at the supermarket. Just look for the section with Bessie the Overweight
Cow, universal logo of all things beefy."
He
said it with the indifference of a man discussing the weekly weather, but
Armand, caught in an ocean of feelings, could feel a stream of roiling warmth
pouring from Paul. As he stood and listened, it grew hotter and hotter: the man
was a fountain of fury. Armand was forced to take a couple steps away from
Paul, to keep the streaming, steaming air from scalding him.
"I've
seen it all, Vince. I've seen every age cut up and stored away--the elderly,
the middle-aged, the new adults, the young adults, the teens, the tweens, the kids, the toddlers, the infants, the newborns." He spat out the word
like a mouthful of raw poison. "I've seen fetuses carefully cut from the
womb and dumped in growing vats. I've seen semen and eggs extracted from gonads
and force-fused together so that the puling greedy leeching monsters that run this wonderful Company can keep feeding us. I've seen a hundred thousand
clones dragged down the racks, drugged and mindless, never able to walk awake
in a single second of their lives! A hundred thousand souls, Vince! A hundred
thousand of them, stolen innocents who never did anything to anyone! Nothing!"
He
stood over Vincent, casting his shadow across him. His fists were clenched
tight, flesh white and shaking. He breathed heavy through his nose, his lips
pressed together in a taut scowl. His eyes blazed like beacons, flaming with
indignation, disgust, rage--and
sadness. Unshaking, cold sadness. Vincent looked into
those bright eyes and saw a man who'd been mourning for millions for every day
in a decade. He saw mourning--ringed with guilt.
"You--you--" he stammered, edging
backwards, trying to escape Paul's enveloping shadow, which loomed over Vince
and the guest with room to spare.
Paul
looked at him with his eyes daring.
Vince
said nothing more.
There
was a beeping sound, and Vince let out a small screech. He looked around,
unembarrassed at his squeamishness, for the source.
Paul
hadn't so much as twitched. "It's lunchtime, fellas."
Armand
managed to tear his staring eyes away from Paul to look at the beeping
monitors. Each one flashed orange numerals at him. Lunchtime, indeed.
"He's
right," he said quietly.
Vince
was already up and moving, his long legs stretching clumsily in front of him as
he lurched his way towards the door. When he got there, he stopped, and
swiveled around, nearly knocking over the guest, who winced and stood back.
Both of them stared at Paul; Vince with rising, petulant anger, and the guest
with trepidation--and nausea.
"You're
full of it," Vince snarled. "You're full of it and I'm having you
reported. You can't talk that way about the Company!" He was screeching
again. "You can't! You can't talk that way! You can't spread crap like
that around! That's not a good joke! That's not funny! What's wrong with
you?!" His spittle flew and landed in clinging strands on the shining
table. "What the hell is wrong with
you?!"
Paul
looked at him with those same eyes. "It's lunchtime." Rock hard tones.
Vince
flinched. His anger washed away like a cheap façade. The fear hung out from his
face like drooping, rotten eaves. His skin was sallow and slick. "I'm
reporting you," he finished lamely, and left, the guest following, holding
his stomach. For a second, Armand could see both men's eyes flashing to the
waxed paper petals that had once held big, juicy hamburgers...then dash away,
flesh going green just as the door shut with a click.
Armand
turned to Paul, expecting to see the man still standing, still glaring like a
statue of a god--Aries, or Zeus, or raging Poseidon.
Instead,
he found himself presented with an excellent view of the back of his head.
Blinking, the revelation that had been flung at him only moments before already
washing away (not really, of course, he knew that; it would come back to him in
time, and that's when he'd cling to the rim of the toilet bowl and pay his dues
to the porcelain goddess, throat aching, eyes weeping, soul cringing and
clenching), he neared the man.
"You
should go."
"I
don't want to," Armand said simply.
Paul
nodded, not looking at his one remaining companion. His fingers busily flicked
buttons, turned knobs, adjusted controls. Armand's eyes widened when he
realized what his coworker was doing.
"Are
you sure you--"
"Very."
Paul hit a final button and sat back in his chair, reclining slightly, staring
at his screen. "I am very sure."
"Alright." He swallowed, tried to speak, and couldn't. He stood
instead.
"You'd
better leave."
"I
know." He swallowed again, throat dry as death. "You used to work in
the Separators, didn't you?"
Paul
inclined his head, looking over his shoulder at Armand. "Yep. For six
years. I got tired of it one day, and I asked for a way out. They gave me
this--" he gestured at the monitor before him (and, it seemed to Armand,
at the bodies still hanging outside), "--on a condition."
"What
condition?" Armand said, but his question was lost in the squeak of the
chair as Paul pulled it forward, closer to the panels. He opened his mouth to
ask it again--and closed it. He wasn't sure if he wanted to know.
"Go,
Armand. Go have lunch," Paul said lowly. "You've only got twenty
minutes left, and you and I both know how long it takes you to eat." He
turned back again and gave the dark-skinned man a shaky grin. "Go on, get outta here."
Armand
shifted and nodded, doing his best to return the expression. He turned
away--then turned back. "Thanks, Paul."
Paul,
already facing the panels again, raised a single hand in a jaunty pose.
"Not a problem, Armand. Take care."
Armand
watched that hand lower with sorrowful displeasure. "You too."
"I'll
try."
Armand
stepped out, closed the door behind him--and turned to see Vince standing
there, hovering over a curdling pile of vomit.
Vince
looked at Armand. Armand looked at Vince, his hand still on the cold steel knob
of the door. He had just enough time before the panting man spoke to notice
that their guest seemed to have gone on ahead.
"What're
you looking at?" Vince said through short gasps. Pink-brown slime drizzled
down his chin--the remains of his hamburger meal. His tone was angry but his
eyes were blank and distant: he was trapped in shock.
Armand
shrugged, and opened his mouth.
There
was a soft shifting sound that quickly built up into a screech--and ended in a SLAM as something big and heavy slid weightily
into place behind the door, which jostled and shook in its frame like a
frightened kitten. Shock waves rode up Armand's bones until they rattled in his
chest.
Both
men stared at the door. A faint, unmistakable whir droned from behind it.
"The
vending machine..." Armand muttered, eyes wide. He turned the knob.
"I
always wondered why that thing was so heavy..." Vince murmured, staring,
his forearm pressed against his mouth to keep himself from dry-heaving.
Armand
pushed the door open--or tried to, at least. "It's blocked." He tried
again, yanking the door back forth, managing only to slam it a millimeter one
way, a millimeter the other. "Completely blocked." He gave the knob a
tight, furious squeeze before letting go. He glared hatefully at the door.
"Come on, maybe if we work together we can--"
"I,"
Vince said, backing away from the door, "am on my break." He kept
backing away, walking down the hall, the spider-webs of vomit still stuck to
his chin. "And that means," he said with a nervous grin, "that I
don't have to do any work with anyone." He kept on, heading for
the lunch room. "So, if you don't mind, I think I'm going to walk...the
hell...away..."
And so he did, fumbling as he turned around, work
shoes clip-clopping on the cool metal
floor.
Armand
watched him leave, a bitter taste hanging off his tongue. He looked down the
hall one way (the way that Vince had just vanished down), then at the door,
cool and unmoving, and down the hall the other way--where the exit was.
He
tried the door again--to no avail, of course. That vending machine was a
monster; scrawny Armie Dallinson
wasn't about to topple it with his Muscles of Nonexistence. All the same, he
pushed, and shoved, and kicked and punched and slammed, beating the door with
curled brown fists.
Nothing.
Sighing,
shaking, trembling with anger and hate and sorrow and sadness, he stepped back
from the door, carefully avoiding Vince's puke puddle, and gave the door one
last look--and Paul one last "thank you," silent as thought but as
heartfelt as could be.
Then,
stone-faced, trying not to cry, Armand turned away, towards the exit.
He
wanted out.
THE END
© 2005 by Matthew Maldonado. Matthew Maldonado is an eighteen-year-old
student presently studying Graphic Arts. He has been writing for nearly seven
years now, in various genres, although fantasy, horror, and science fiction are
the ones closest to his heart.