The Abbattoir

The Abattoir

1. The Condemned

She sat nervously on the edge of the hard plastic surface of her bunk. All sixteen women in this holding cell had to be equally nervous, but Kayla could only think of her own fear and the ironic turn of events that had brought her to the Condemned Dispatch Center. They would be coming for her any minute now to prep her for death. She didn't know how they would do it, how these sentences were carried out, because it was illegal for citizens on the outside to discuss the topic. In this holding cell there were plenty of rumors and theories, many of them gruesome, but the only certainty was that it would happen soon.

She pined for her strong, fair-haired husband and her beautiful eight month old daughter with her bright blond hair and vivid blue eyes, neither of whom she had been able to kiss or even touch during the forty-four hellish days between her arrest and final sentencing. Six weeks. And it had all been a long, cruel, preordained joke. Two weeks to prepare a defense to save her life; two more to plead before a tribunal that had already made up its mind she was guilty; then two more for an appeal before a judge whose function was to rubber stamp the conviction. All in secret. All behind closed doors. And through the whole miserable travesty they kept her locked up in steel rooms, behind plexiglass walls and shackled like a mad dog. Even now she and the fifteen other women in this room were chained to their bunks by one ankle. Her farewell to her family had been through a bulletproof partition, five minutes of tearful final words into microphones before she was led off, shuffling in her leg restraints, to this place of dread filled waiting.

It was hard to tell how long she had been languishing here. There were no windows or clocks, the lights were always on and the meals — if you can dignify cold oatmeal and water with that name — came at regular intervals. As did trips to the open toilet at one end of the room.

Kayla thought of all the bad decisions she had made in her twenty-three years of life, the worst of which was accepting a job as assistant to the editor of a newspaper known for its liberal bias. What a stupid move to make in a political climate that had so enthusiastically embraced “get tough on crime” and “zero tolerance” that it had turned hundreds of offenses, even many misdemeanors, into capital crimes with a mandatory death sentence! Then, when that clogged up the prisons and courts, replaced the ponderous system of trial by jury with the new sleeker, fast-paced trial by tribunal. Three judges who started every trial on the twentieth day after the arrest, gave the prosecution and defense five days each to state their cases and rendered a verdict on the thirtieth day. Fancy lawyer's tactics were a thing of the past. The accused got a court-appointed attorney from a rotating pool. No exceptions. And only that one appeal. It was an extremely rare appeal that actually brought about a reversal of the verdict, but defendants almost always filed for it, if only to get an extra two weeks of life.

Nor was there any expensive dilly-dallying in carrying out the death penalty. Five quick minutes to blow kisses to whoever cared enough to be there, then the condemned was hustled off to a Dispatch Center like this one, to await transport to the execution site, their death certificate already presented to family and friends.

In another cost-cutting move, the execution process had been privatized. For a reasonable fee, a company called Justice for All (JFA) took the condemned prisoners off the government's hands for liquidation and disposal, saving the grateful taxpayers a bundle. How and where JFA carried out the executions was highly classified under the National Security Act and any attempt to ferret out or reveal that information was defined as an act of treason, punishable by death. That effectively gagged the soft-on-crime types.

As for the rumors that rich prisoners were secretly buying their freedom, the Justice Department pointed out that no such escapee had ever come to light, and attributed their perfect record to the strict proof-of-death requirements demanded of JFA. Just what that proof consisted of was another classified secret, although most people assumed it had to do with DNA.

Then there were the persistent rumors that JFA was making millions by selling the body parts of executed prisoners. On that subject the Justice Department was stubbornly silent and no one cared enough to risk treason charges by looking into it. What was important to the average citizen was that the streets were being cleared of thieves, pimps and killers, the schools of drugs and dealers and the courts of bleeding heart, wrist-slapping judges who worried about the “rights” of criminals. If organs were salvaged to help sick people, so much the better.

Kayla had known all this, of course, but it didn't seem relevant. She had no criminal plans in mind. She had been focused on the great salary she was receiving from the Sun Times and the bright future it promised for her fledgling family. She and Paul could finally afford a new home and escape the obnoxious neighbors and unreasonable landlord of their low-income apartment complex. She barely took notice of the field reports she was collecting from the fax machine every day, including those filed by reporter Jan Stone. She proofed the flood of reports quickly, looking for typos, paying little or no attention to content, and passed them on to the executive publisher, Karen Lacross. In hindsight she wished she had been less starry eyed and more observant. Jan Stone had a reputation for being a firebrand investigative reporter who specialized in uncovering governmental corruption. Why hadn't she noticed that the stories Stone was filing were an exposé of the JFA facilities? Jan's reports always referred to it as “the Abattoir” — the Slaughterhouse — and, stupidly, she hadn't made the connection. If Karen Lacross and Jan Stone wanted to flirt with arrest for treason that was their business, but Kayla should have known better than to let herself be sucked in. She should have told her boss she wanted nothing to do with those stories. Of course, that would have meant having the guts to jeopardize her new, highly paid job, and with it her new house. Part of her realized that even if she'd realized the peril, she may still have taken the risk to preserve her dream. Yet she couldn't help but resent both women for the sudden destruction of her life. As far as the Tribunal was concerned, she was just as involved as the other two in a conspiracy to violate the National Security Act. So here she sat, five bunks away from her pretty boss, and seven from the ambitious young woman who had wasted all their lives in a vain attempt to unveil the horrors they were all now condemned to experience.

She thought about the sad stories the girls in the neighboring bunks had told. The girl on her right, Jodi, was a poster child for the Justice Department's newly rejuvenated War on Drugs. Nineteen years old, she had been convicted of possessing three ounces of marijuana. When it came to illegal drugs, users and sellers alike now faced the death penalty with zero tolerance. The girl on Kayla's other side was twenty-one. Her name was Sarah. She had managed to violate the federal “three strikes and you're out” law. Her first conviction was for aggravated indecent exposure and criminal vandalism during her high school graduation party. On a dare, she and several female classmates had decided to strip nude, run through town and spray-paint the school motto on an empty police vehicle outside the police station. Unfortunately, the station was within 1000 feet of an elementary school which made the prank a first class sex offense. Her second was for criminal speeding (25 mph over the limit) while driving under the influence during her junior year in college. The third and fatal offense was for assault when she hit a date with a bottle as he tried to rape her. He brought a charge of criminal assault, claiming the sex was consensual and pointing out her record as a registered sex offender. The Tribunal agreed that her history of moral turpitude undercut her credibility and found her guilty. Third strike. Mandatory sentence. Death.

Kayla's breasts were aching. The one humanitarian gesture the court had made during her incarceration and trial was to allow her the use of a milking machine. Her husband had picked up the milk twice a day and assured her, through the guard who conveyed the bottles, that little Christina was being gradually weaned to cereal so that by the time Kayla was gone, she would be able to thrive without her mother's nourishment. All that had stopped with her arrival here, but Kayla's breasts kept reminding her it was time for another milking, a call that would never be answered.

The locks on the steel door to the holding cell snapped open with a chilling clatter. Three men walked in, a short middle-aged man with a clipboard and two burly young men carrying whips.

“Sit down, all of you!” the older man demanded.

All the women who were standing sank slowly to the edge of their beds. Kayla felt her bowels turn to mush.

“You will stand as I call out your names. If you do not stand promptly we will find you anyway, and believe me, you will regret it.”

As he called the first name and the woman stood, the two guards grabbed her, cuffed her wrists behind her, locked a heavy steel collar around her neck, released her ankle chain and led her to the front of the cell, near the door. Each woman called after that was similarly cuffed and collared, then attached to the woman ahead of her by a chain between their collars. Kayla was the fourth in line. Only one prisoner failed to stand when called. She had collapsed, crying, at the side of her bunk. One of the guards checked the name band on her wrist, then stood back and then cracked his whip on her back three times. She screamed with each blow and scrambled to her feet, blood spreading on the back of her orange jump suit where the whip had torn it open. No one else failed to respond. When all sixteen women had been locked together, they were led out of the holding cell and down a corridor into an unfurnished room already pretty well filled with a much longer line of men who were also handcuffed and chained together at the neck.

The door slammed behind them and the man with the clipboard took up a position in front of a door on the far side of the room.

“Listen up!” he demanded. “Every one of you is officially dead. Soon you will be physically dead as well, but until that time you will do exactly as you are ordered. We will accept no nonsense from anyone. You have NO rights. None at all. We do not owe you any courtesies, decencies or considerations of any kind. You are simply condemned flesh, animals marked for slaughter. The courts have assigned your bodies to this institution, Justice for All, Inc., for swift disposal and we will do so in a manner that serves our best interests. Part of that best interest is maintaining discipline. So whether we flay you to a bloody fucking pulp here and now as a lesson to the others, or slaughter you as scheduled, it's all the same to us. We will now take you two at a time into the processing room to be prepared for shipment. Until you are taken, you will remain standing here quietly.”

The first prisoner in each line was disconnected from the one behind and taken through the metal door behind the speaker. The rest waited. Kayla saw that stains had formed under her arms from nervous perspiration. Her stomach felt like jelly. She felt something on her thigh and realized that the man she was squeezed up against in the line next to her was pulling up the hem of her orange jumper with his fingers. It was an awkward maneuver because his hands, like hers, were still cuffed behind him. She shoved his hand away as best she could, but he persisted. Afraid of drawing the attention of the guards and the flailing they had threatened, she finally stopped resisting the man's fingers and let him find the bare skin of her bottom and slip a wiggling finger into her vagina. From inside the room came two muffled but horrifying screams, one male, one female. Someone behind her began weeping. Kayla felt sick to her stomach and no longer cared about the ongoing molestation of her privates.

When the guards came for the next pair of prisoners, the lines moved and the fingers slid out of her body. A new man was now pressed up against her and damned if he didn't do exactly the same thing. But Kayla still didn't care. The one thought burning in her mind was that she was now only once removed from being taken into that room. She didn't know why her predecessors had screamed but she was about to find out.

Much too soon, it was her turn. She hoped her legs would hold her up as the guard unlocked her collar chain. Shakily, she forced herself to walk into the room, a male prisoner right behind her.