The Abbattoir

2. Processing for Shipment

There were two heavy steel chairs with muscular men in brown uniforms standing beside them. Weight lifting was obviously a significant part of their training. A woman in an identical uniform was fussing with something electrical on a cart between the chairs.

The handcuffs were removed from Kayla and the male prisoner and both were shoved rudely into the chairs. Their arms were quickly strapped to the cold steel chair arms with thick belts. Another belt was cinched around their torsos and legs so they couldn't move. Even their heads were immobilized with clamps. Kayla's heart was thudding so hard she could see the fabric of her jumper bumping.

One of the men approached her with a device that looked like a large, battery powered crimping tool in which he had inserted a metal tag. He grabbed her right ear roughly, put it between the jaws of the device and squeezed the handle. In the next moment she was yelling with pain as he riveted the tag to her ear. The man in the other chair also yelped.

Then the women came to her right side with a syringe and a rubber tourniquet. She tied the tourniquet around Kayla's arm and waited for the vein to bulge.

Kayla's mouth was dry, but she managed to ask, “Is this how they're doing it? With a lethal injection?”

The woman snorted. “You should be so lucky.” She inserted the needle into Kayla's vein, removed the tourniquet and began pushing the plunger, emptying the syringe with its rusty red contents into her vein. “This is what you might call a meat tenderizer. It gets absorbed into your muscles and makes them nice and soft and juicy. As a side effect, it also makes your nerves more sensitive. Minor discomforts turn into major centers of pain. But it won't affect your organs at all, which is good because you're type O negative. That means you're a universal donor, compatible with everyone, That makes your innards particularly valuable. So in addition to providing some rich guys with some nice tasty meat, you'll be making a nice profit for The Company. You're a pretty bitch, too. The boys will have some fun with you before you're harvested.”

“Harvested?”

The woman chuckled. “Yeah. They're gonna love you, especially with your boobs all swelled up like that.” As she withdrew the empty syringe, she spotted white fluid oozing from Kayla's left breast. She flicked at the nipple with a sharp fingernail, sending a plume of milky spray into the air. “You were nursing a baby, weren't you?”

The words tore at Kayla's heart and her eyes glazed with tears.

“Oh turn off the waterworks,” the woman snapped. “Bitches like you make me sick. You've left a little baby with no mother and now you're feeling sorry for yourself. You should have thought of that before you did whatever you did that put you here.”

“But I didn't do . . .”

“Shut up! You had a fair trial and you were found guilty. All I know is, we're all a lot safer now that we're finally getting rid of trash like you. They shoulda cracked down on your type years ago.”

“But really, I . . .”

“I don't wanna hear it!” the woman yelled. “You may have fooled your friends, but you didn't fool the Tribunal and you don't fool me. If it was up to me, I'd have you garrotted right here in this chair so I'd have the pleasure of watching you die. But I'll tell you this: if you give me one more word of that ‘I didn't do it' crap, I'll stuff a sock in your mouth and tie it in tight. Is that what you want?”

“No,” Kayla whimpered.

“Then keep your lying trap shut!”

The woman produced a red hot electric branding device and aimed it at her face. Kayla panicked but couldn't move a millimeter to avoid it! The brand burned into her forehead for a good five seconds while she screamed and struggled uselessly against her restraints. Just as the branding iron was pulled away there was a lesser pain on the back of each hand as a machine needled a tattooed number into her skin.

Still weeping from the receding agony of the brand, she was released from the chair and pulled into an adjoining room, her male counterpart right behind her. Four more burly guards awaited them here.

“Strip!” one of them growled.

The two prisoners glanced at each other. Kayla saw an angry red combination of letters and numbers on the man's forehead and knew she must look like that, too. He shrugged and began to take off his clothes. She looked back at the guards incredulously. Did they actually expect her to disrobe in front of them? Her question was answered in the hardness of their eyes, and by the way they fingered the cattle prods in their hands. She took a deep breath and pulled the jumper over her head.

Kayla had never been naked in front of a group of strange men before and she felt an overwhelming embarrassment as cold air swept across her bare flesh. But she reminded herself again that this was probably her last day alive, so what did she care? She lifted her chin and glared back at the guards.

The nearest guard noticed a drop forming at the point of her right nipple. “Hey Ramsey,” he said to the guard next to him, “looka this!” He reached out and squeezed the nipple painfully. An arc of pale white liquid jetted out. “Milk!” he said. “We got us a mommie here, and her tits are bustin' with milk. It'd be a terrible shame to waste it, don'tcha think? After all, her brat ain't gonna get no more of it.” The other guard smiled and nodded. “Come on. There's plenty to go around.”

He grabbed Kayla's arm and a vice-like grip to hold her still while he bent to her right breast and took the nipple in his mouth. The other guard, Ramsey, moved in on her left and was soon sucking there as well. Too shocked and frightened to speak, Kayla glanced over at the male prisoner and was dismayed to see that he was smirking along with the other guards. In fact, his penis was beginning to rise! Jesus! Is there no situation where a man can't get horny? She closed her eyes and endured the molestation. It doesn't matter. I'll soon be dead. As that thought established itself, she realized that the partial draining of her over-filled breasts and the feel of lips and tongues suckling at her teats actually felt good. She concentrated on that.

After a few minutes, the guards — aware that another pair would be arriving soon — broke off their feast of mother's milk and shoved Kayla against a photo backdrop on the wall. She found herself faced by a camera set on a tripod.

“Hold your hands beside your face with the tattoos facing the camera,” the first guard said as he wiped her milk from the corner of his mouth. She did so and the flash went off.

Both prisoners were pushed to the center of the room.

“Take a good look at the number on the back of your hands,” the guard said. “That's your name from now on until you're dead, which won't be long. Whatever you were called before, forget it. That person is officially dead and gone, never to be heard from again. You're just walking carcasses now, pieces of meat that belong to The Company and you'll answer to . . .” he read the brand on Kayla's forehead, “. . .7K9B3 and . . .” he squinted at the other prisoner, “. . .7K9B4. Once you've been harvested, your head and hands will be sent to the Dispatch Central at the Department of Justice for verification of death. So take good care of them. You want them to arrive nice and pretty.”

So much for the rumor of DNA identification. Kayla glanced at the back of her hand. What was actually tattooed there was 7K9B3 (O –).

The prisoners were ordered through another door into a room where more guards awaited them. This room had the unmistakable foul odor of human waste in spite of exhaust fans overhead. Four toilets were arrayed on one wall, two of them occupied by the male and female prisoners who had preceded Kayla. They looked miserable, especially the female, a thin black girl who could not have been older than sixteen. Duct tape was wound over her mouth and around her head, and there was something odd attached to her leg. Kayla automatically averted her eyes from their embarrassment. A series of four adjustable bars at hip level occupied the center of the room and both Kayla

and her companion were led to one of them and ordered to bend over it. A guard pulled her hands up behind her almost to her shoulder blades and attached a chain to hold it there. Another chain linked her collar to an eyebolt in the floor so she couldn't stand up. A dolly was rolled up next to her with an enema bag slung from it and one of the guards pushed the greased nozzle into her rectum. Warm water began to flow into her belly. Almost at once she had a terrible need to go to the bathroom.

“You have a long trip ahead of you,” someone was saying. “This is to clean you out so you don't shit on the floor like the disgusting pigs you are.”

Within a minute Kayla was squirming as the endless flow of water flooded her, swelling her belly. She knew she couldn't hold it much longer and dreaded the embarrassment of spouting watery shit all over the floor.

“Hold it in!” the same voice intoned. “If you soil our floor, you'll be whipped until you lick it all up!”

A few minutes later (though it felt like an hour!) she burst into tears as she strained to hold it all in. And still the torrent filled her bowels! “Please stop! Please, please, please!” she heard herself pleading. “I can't hold it any longer! I can't!”

Finally she felt the nozzle pulled out and a wetness running down her leg as she strained to keep her sphincter closed. The instant the floor chain was unclipped from her collar she trotted to the nearest open toilet and moaned in relief as a noxious soup of intestinal waste and warm water gushed out of her. The original pair of prisoners had departed, but her own male counterpart arrived at an adjacent toilet a second behind her, his face a mask of relief as his bowels let go. She looked down at her legs and noticed a brown track where she had dribbled prematurely. A day ago she would have been mortally embarrassed at having to shit in public, now she simply hoped the guards would remove her handcuffs so she could wipe herself. But there was no toilet paper.

The guards ambled over, removed the chains that cinched the prisoners' arms up painfully high, then pulled them off the toilets. They led them into a tiled corner area, hosed them off, and shoved them through a door that opened into a long narrow corridor.

Two more guards awaited them carrying cattle prods. Chains attached to an overhead rail were clipped to their collars and they were ordered to move forward and catch up with the others. 7K9B4 (which was the only name she knew him by) was in front of Kayla and, for some reason, stopped about ten feet short of the couple who had preceded them on the toilets. Kayla felt a sharp object jabbed into her back.

“Move it!”

She pressed against the back of 7K9B4. “Please, the guard is hurting me. Let's go!”

But he didn't move. Instead his hands, still cuffed behind him, found their way to her crotch. With her hands secured behind her she couldn't push his away, and she knew better than back up into the guard, so she ignored his groping and pushed her body harder against him. “Please! He's going to hurt me!”

“If I move, will you let me suck on your tits, too?” he said.

“Move, goddammit!” the guard barked, and suddenly Kayla was jolted with a terrible pain. She screamed and hurled herself against 7K9B4, knocking him forward. He tripped, but the steel collar caught him by the jaw and kept him from falling.

“Shit!” he spat.

“Well MOVE, you jerk!” Kayla shouted. “He's using a cattle prod on me!”

They stumbled forward until they were pressed up against the prisoner ahead of them. It was the black girl with the tape over her mouth. She was still weeping softly and kept fidgeting and turning. Kayla could read the brand on her forehead. 7K9B1 (X). She could also see that the odd thing on her thigh was a plastic bag filled with a pinkish fluid. It was taped to her leg and a plastic tube ran from her crotch to the top of the bag.

A commotion behind her made Kayla turn in time to see two more prisoners emerge through the door and be connected to the overhead rail. Ironically, the first of them was none other than Jan Stone, the reporter whose illegal digging had set off this disaster. Jan was being forced to push right up against her. Kayla felt a terrible anger welling up against this woman whose selfish nonsense had triggered Kayla's loss of her family, her future and her life. The brand on Jan's forehead, still fresh and sore, read “7K9B5 (A+).”

“So,” Kayla spat, “did they do this on purpose to rub it in?”

Jan looked up at her, puzzled. “What?”

“Did they put you next to me as a taunt?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You're Jan Stone, the one who got me arrested for treason. You're the reason I'm about to die!”

“O my God! How did that happen? What'd I do?”

“You filed those damn stories about the Abattoir and I touched them, that's what you did!”

“O my God! You worked for the Sun Times?”

“I was Karen's assistant. All I did was carry your damn faxes to her office, and now I'm going to die for it. God damn you!”

“Oh, I'm so sorry! I really am! I'm so, so sorry. I didn't mean for anybody to get hurt. Karen and I knew what we were risking, but it never occurred to me that anyone else would get dragged in. I'm really, really, really, sorry.”

Kayla seethed at her for a while, softened a little by the anguished look on her face.

“What's your name?” Jan asked in a whisper.

“Seven K nine B fucking five!” Kayla shot back.

“Please, please,” Jan said, “I understand that you hate me, and you have every right. I deserve it. But we're going to be dying together and may be next to each other for a long time during shipment. Please tell me your name.”

“Kayla.” She spat out the word as though it were sand thrown in this wretched reporter's face.

“I'm so sorry, Kayla. I thought I was doing the world a favor if I could wake people up to the brutal practices at the Abattoir. Now I realize all I did was get us all killed. I know I'm beyond forgiving, but I am truly sorry you got sucked into my hopeless battle for justice.

“What do you mean ‘brutal practices'?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Yes. I mean, not really, but I want to prepare myself. Do you know for sure what goes on there? It's all highly classified. How would you find out? Have you been there?”

“No one who's been there ever comes back to tell about it, unless he works for The Company. I happened to stumble across a guy who works there and was so fond of certain sexual tricks of mine that he was willing to make some trades, spill some beans.”

“Special sexual tricks?”

“Oh yeah. He loved my rim jobs.”

“Rim jobs?”

“Sorry. Not many of my friends are as innocent as you. I'd run the tip of my tongue around the rim of his asshole, even poke it in there a little. He'd moan and groan and get hard as a rock, then flip around and do me like a berserk fucking machine. I was the only one who'd do that for him, except for the occasional woman at the Abattoir if he'd promise to pull her out of the line for a while. Some people will do anything for an extra few weeks of life.”

“Where is he now?”

“I don't know, but I have a bad feeling in my stomach that he'll be waiting for me with his butcher knife.”

Kayla swallowed her anger. This girl looked frightened, and genuinely contrite. And she was so young, probably in her early twenties, like Kayla herself. It was easy to believe that in her zeal to save the world from the brutality posed by “The Company” she failed to take into consideration the danger she was creating for others in the information chain. Her mind flashed to the black teenager in the line ahead whose soft weeping could still be heard.

“That black girl up ahead,” she whispered to Jan, “why have they taped up her mouth and what's that thing on her leg? Do you know?”

“That girl is HIV positive,” Jan whispered back. “See the X at the end of her brand? That means she's marked for immediate extermination when we arrive at the Abattoir. As far as The Company is concerned, she's garbage. She has no value beyond their fee for getting rid of her. They'll just incinerate her. They've gagged her so she can't spit on anyone or bite. The catheter is draining her urine into a bag because they don't want her pissing on the floor during shipment and contaminating any other assets. The urine is pink because that bitch in the branding room is not particularly gentle when she rams it up there. Her urethra is torn and bleeding and it's probably infected. She acts like she's in pain. By the time we reach the Abattoir she'll probably be happy to be shoved in the oven.”

“The oven? You mean cremated?”

“I mean they'll chain her to a tray and shove her into their crematory oven alive and kicking where she'll be reduced to bone and ash. Which they'll grind up for bone meal. Salvage a few cents profit out of her.”

“They'll burn her alive?” Kayla asked, horrified.

“You better believe it. These are not nice people. Why do you think I was trying to expose their practices? If the public knew what's going on, people would rethink their attitude about zero tolerance and using the death penalty for every damn piddling offense. They'd begin to question whether the government should be allowed the power to keep its activities secret, enabling a few hard-assed judges to send thousands of people to horrible deaths.

Kayla couldn't get her mind off the image of being burned to death in an oven. Her heart was pounding. “Will they do that to us? Burn us up?”

“Hell no,” Jan said, squinting at Kayla's brand. “You're an O negative. You're a universal donor. Shit, you're worth a small fortune in body parts. They can be used by anyone.” She looked Kayla up and down. “You don't have a lot of meat, but you're young and soft. You'll probably be sweet and succulent, especially your breasts. Looks like they're full of milk, right? They'll love that. You have no idea what the underground market will pay for roasted milk-filled breasts.”

“Meat?” Kayla was feeling light headed.

“That's what we are, sweetie. Spare parts and meat on the hoof.”

“You mean they're actually going to eat us?”

“That's what ‘Abattoir' means, Kayla. It's a slaughterhouse. They'll scoop out our saleable organs and butcher what's left for meat products. Except for our heads and hands. Those they cut off and send back to the Justice Department as proof of our deaths.”

“O my God! Well, I suppose it doesn't matter what they do with our bodies once we're dead. But how will they actually kill us?”

Jan stared at the pale young woman as she tried to find a way to avoid a direct answer. “Depends,” she said.

“On what?” In spite of her effort to calm herself, Kayla's voice was quivering.

“Well, we know you have no communicable diseases because they gave us blood tests when we were arrested. Are you a smoker?”

“No.”

“Good. Do you have a heart problem?”

“No.”

“Excellent. Then they'll be harvesting your lungs and heart. That means you'll probably be dead before they filet your edible parts. But you never know. They do like to see pretty women suffer. They separate the women from the men, you know. There's a special team for each. The men on the women's butchering line will undoubtedly find creative ways to make use of your tits and vagina while you can still give them a reaction. But then I only know what Bert, my horny source, told me. We'll find out personally in a few hours.”

“We have a few hours, still?”

“Oh yeah. They have to ship us to the Abattoir. Fortunately it will be a fairly short trip for us. According to Bert we're fairly near it. Condemned prisoners come from all over the country and a dozen other participating nations, and they're all shipped to that one secret facility, so most of them have a long, miserable trip. In that sense, we're lucky.”

Another pair of prisoners emerged from the door behind them and the guards, using their cattle prods, moved the entire line forward. Kayla could hear clanking somewhere ahead around a bend in the corridor. Talking to Jan helped settle her nerves a little.

“What about Karen?” Kayla whispered. “She must have known the danger she was putting herself in.”

“Oh yes. Karen has her share of regrets, too. She was foolish enough to share her thoughts about my investigation with her husband and two teenage daughters. Now they're sharing this last trip with us.”

“Her husband and kids were convicted?”

“And sentenced to death.”

“But Karen told me they're only sixteen and seventeen!”

“Bert told me he's butchered children as young as twelve years old.”

“He actually BUTCHERED them?”

“The kids don't get any better treatment than we will.”

“How can anyone do that kind of work?”

“Bert loves it. Often threatened that if I didn't please him, he'd tell the cops about my investigation and have the fun of carving me and Karen's daughters up for what they call a snuff banquet.”

“What's that?”

“There are groups that pay big money to eat spit-roasted human females.”

“That's horrible! But they wouldn't do that to children!”

“Why not? They've already killed them to harvest their organs; why not double the profits with snuff banquets featuring tender young girl meat?”

Kayla was finding it hard to breathe. “They cut out their organs, too?”

“Of course they do. Kid's organs are worth a whole lot of money, sweetie. If you needed a new heart, wouldn't you rather pay handsomely for a barely used sixteen year old model than settle for a cheap fifty-six year old clunker?”

“My God! Why is there no public outcry?”

“Because it's a fucking state secret and no one knows about it except the bastards who profit by it, and they're willing to kill whole families to keep it that way, as you're now seeing.”

Kayla felt sick. “And that's what you were trying to do? Expose it?”

“Disastrously, yes.”

“Now I understand why the courts don't allow you to have your own lawyer, just a court-appointed loser who doesn't do shit.”

“And I'll bet your lawyer told you they had an open and shut case against you and your only hope was for him to bribe the appeals judge.”

“How'd you guess?”

“. . . and he'd only do that if you put out for him during the attorney consultations.”

“Twice a week on the consultation room table.”

“That's the system. You got fucked by your lawyer, then you got fucked by the judge at the appeal. Now you're about to get fucked by Justice for All, Inc.”

The line was jarred forward again to the accompaniment of screams from further back as the cattle prods made painful electrical contact with naked flesh. Kayla rounded the bend in the corridor and could now see that the first person in line was jammed up against a metal door. The waiting was becoming torture in itself. Kayla studied the small woman behind her and the misery that clouded her dark brown eyes. The last of her earlier animosity evaporated.

“Forgive me for thinking badly of you, Jan — for hating you. If I have to die, I'm proud to be dying with you. How'd you get caught, anyway?”

“Bert. Speaking of getting fucked. Seems he got cold feet and decided to rat on me. Told his bosses that he'd heard I was nosing around where I shouldn't and decided to entrap me. Our last date in the motel was recorded in living color, including me giving him his rim job and him doing me in all my holes. But best of all, it caught with wonderful clarity the questions I asked him about the Abattoir as we lay in bed with his fingers in my cunt.”

“What I don't understand is why they think I'm part of the conspiracy. All I did was collect the faxes you sent in and pass them on to Karen.”

“You proof-read them, hon,” Jan said softly. “That put you in the loop. You know too much, as they say.”

“Thank God I didn't pass it along to my family. They were all polygraphed.”

“Thank God,” Jan agreed. “I've already destroyed one beautiful family. I couldn't stand it knowing I'd wiped out yours, too.”

At the rear of the line a pair of guards began disconnecting the prisoner's neck chains from the overhead rail and connecting them to the prisoner ahead. Soon the entire line was linked neck to neck. The metal door at the front of the line swung open letting a cold draft rush into the corridor. A guard appeared from the other side and began hustling the prisoners along out of the building into the cold outside air, using his cattle prod where necessary. As Kayla emerged from the building, she saw that they were being herded toward the open end of a tractor-trailer. Shivering in the frigid January air, she saw that barriers had been erected on both sides so that no one could see the line of nude prisoners trotting toward the truck and up the ramp into the cavernous interior, already crowded with naked convicts. The pungent odor of stale urine assailed Kayla's nose as she jostled for a position among the sweating, doomed human beings being crushed into the semi. Suddenly the world went dark as the heavy doors were slammed shut. She became conscious of moaning and weeping from somewhere in the darkness, but she was more aware of the fact that, except for Jan, she was now pressed on all sides by naked male bodies. At least two of them had already begun exploring what they could reach of her with their hands cuffed behind them. The truck began to move.