The Abbattoir

3. Waiting for death

The trip seemed endless. Invisible fingers kept finding their way between her legs. Since she couldn't stop them, she decided to yield to the tingling they invoked. What the hell! To her husband she was already dead. She'd never been a prude. Why not enjoy a few final orgasms?

The truck stopped twice so that even more chained prisoners could be crammed into the trailer. Hours went by. Her legs were beginning to tremble with exhaustion. Her stomach howled with hunger and her bladder demanded immediate relief. The closed box of the trailer increasingly reeked with the stench of urine as more and more prisoners were unable to restrain their bladders. Finally Kayla could bear it no longer herself. She was whimpering from the strain of holding it in when the trailer jolted sharply. A warm, wet tide began flowing down her leg. She burst into tears as she released the flood from her painfully distended bladder.

Next to her, Jan, feeling the warm liquid flowing past her feet, comforted Kayla softly. “Don't worry about it, hon. It's all part of the humiliation they've planned for us. No one gets a chance to piss privately. It's part of our punishment. They want us to die thinking of ourselves as animals, fit only for slaughter. Don't give ‘em the satisfaction.”

When the truck finally ground to a stop and backed up, stopping with a gentle bump, Kayla somehow knew that this was it. They had reached the Abattoir. With a clank of the locked bolt being thrust aside, the doors swung open. Bright light slammed into her eyes. Through the press of bodies around her she saw the prisoners that had been crammed in behind her begin filing out of the trailer. Soon she, too, was being pulled along by the chain connecting her collar to the man ahead of her. She felt the reverse pull of Jan's connection behind her as the line lurched through another blast of frigid outdoor air into a concrete building and down an institutional green corridor. Walking was strangely difficult, not only because of the grit cutting into her soft feet but because her legs felt extraordinarily tired.

The line passed through a tiled area where guards trained hot water at them from fire-hoses, blasting away the dried urine on their legs and feet. From there the dripping line filed into a large room devoid of furniture of any kind. Dozens of chains about a foot long with spring clips at the end dangled from eye bolts along most of the four battleship gray walls. There were three doors: the one they had come in by and two others on the opposite wall. A heavyset woman in the same brown uniform as the guards was standing on a dias between the two doors. She was flanked by four beefy male guards holding cattle prods. The door through which they had entered slammed behind the last prisoner. The woman spoke in a grating voice.

“Attention! From this point on prisoners will not be permitted to speak, either to the staff or among yourselves. Anyone who violates this order will be gagged and will remain gagged to the end. I recommend that you do not add that misery to the suffering you are about to endure. Guards will now begin circulating among you with urns and leg irons. You will be given a chance to empty your bladders into the urn. I advise you to take the opportunity, because if you pee yourself during the events which will follow, you will be forced to get down on your belly and lick up every drop that makes it to the floor. Again, that is not an experience you will want to add to those which await you during the final stage of your processing. After you have used the urn, the leg irons will be locked on your ankles and your neck chains will be removed. You will then be led to a position on the wall where you will be tethered until it is your turn to be processed. I strongly advise you to obey all orders from the guards from here on out. The touch of those cattle prods, as you may already have discovered, is extremely painful. I have seen the toughest of men screaming for mercy. Don't think you will fare any better.”

A half dozen guards began working their way through the prisoners from the side nearest the dias and the two doors. The woman's harsh voice continued without pause.

“Each and every one of you has been found to be a threat to society, guilty of an offense so reprehensible that decent people have decided you are either too dangerous or your crime too grievous for you to be allowed to live. It is our duty at this facility to see to it that you are put to death in a way that will provide justice for your victims while at the same time salvaging some usefulness out of your bodies. Usable organs will be harvested and made available to those in need of them. The remainder of your body will be rendered into meat products and sold for a variety of useful purposes. Even your bones will be crushed into meal and sent to municipal parks departments to fertilize public gardens. Thus your death will help other, more deserving citizens, to go on enjoying life. As a further act of justice, any profits from the sale of your body parts help offset the cost to the taxpayers for providing you with a fair trial and ridding you from their midst.”

The sound of pee filling the urns and the clanking of the leg irons being attached to the prisoners in front of her made it hard for Kayla to concentrate on the woman's diatribe. A girl was sobbing as she spread her feet and squatted over the mouth of the urn, whether from embarrassment or mounting fear Kayla couldn't tell.

“As part of your punishment,” the speaker continued, “we will see to it that most of you have the opportunity to witness the execution process before you undergo it yourself. This gives you plenty of opportunity to contemplate and regret the choices you made in your sorry lives that led you to this place.”

What choices did Karen's teenage daughters make to deserve being here, Kayla wondered bitterly. But she kept silent. A woman somewhere to her right, however, cried out a similar protest. Kayla couldn't quite catch the words. Two guards were instantly upon the woman. One stuffed a thick wad of material into her mouth and the other belted it in hard with a thick leather strap. Kayla clamped her teeth together. She didn't want to die like that, no matter how outrageous the distortions and lies coming from the dias.

The uniformed woman continued. “When every one of you disgusting wretches has been chained to the wall, we will begin processing. Since we receive new batches of condemned criminals nearly every day from all over the world, we have made our system as efficient as possible. You will notice that there are more than twice as many males among you as females. This is normal. To accommodate this disparity we have two execution theaters for the males and one for the females. Once we begin, the males will be taken through that door on my right two at a time, the females through the door on my left one at a time. At any given moment in the male theater two prisoners will be in the process of termination while two others observe. In the female theater, one will be in process while a second observes. The observers in both theaters will be the next to be processed as new observers are put in their place.”

Suddenly a guard was in front of Kayla detaching the chains from her collar. Another guard thrust the urn, already reeking of urine, against her thighs. He glared at her.

“Piss in the pot now or lick it up later,” he growled.

Kayla spread her legs and squatted over the urn which the guard was pressing into her crotch. Fear had already loosened her urethral sphincter and she felt the pee pouring out of her, splashing into the partially filled urn. Her legs were trembling. The instant the guard pulled the urn away, the other guard clamped cold steel shackles on her ankles, grabbed her left arm and pulled her between two rows of prisoners to the wall at the back of the room. She had to do a quick shuffle step because of the short ankle chain. When they reached the wall, he took one of the dangling chains and clipped it to her collar. He left her there without a word, her hands still cuffed behind her, now with chains added to her ankles and another holding her to the wall.

The girl beside her was very young. She looked vaguely familiar. With a sinking feeling Kayla realized she was standing next to a younger version of Karen, her boss. This must be one of Karen's daughters. She looked terribly frightened, her cheeks shiny from crying. Kayla couldn't bear to look at her.

“As I'm sure you know by now,” the dias woman was saying, “the good citizens of this and other participating countries have decreed that pain is an appropriate part of your punishment. Do not, therefore, imagine that you will be spared the full measure of suffering you deserve, regardless of your age, sex, race or physical condition. It is also important that we keep a high level of job satisfaction among our staff, so they are permitted free rein to add to your punishment in any way that amuses them, provided they do not damage those parts of you that are scheduled to be marketed. They have complete dossiers on each of you from the marketing department, so they know just how far they can go to make the end of your lives as miserable as possible without affecting profits.” The walls were filling up quickly as the three pairs of guards worked through the rows. A tall, balding man was brought to her left side and chained up. He immediately began groping her crotch. She ignored him, letting him push his fingers into her cunt. She saw his penis begin stiffening as he rubbed its sensitive knob against her leg. She was past caring. She was quite confident she'd be forced to endure much worse than this very shortly. She closed her eyes and pretended it was her husband. She visualized them sneaking a quicky in a closet at the newspaper office and felt pleasurable tingles spread upward from her clit to her breasts and shoulders. She shivered. A minute later she felt warm spurts against her leg. Well, at least she'd given the poor man one last orgasm. What's wrong with that? She had already been pronounced dead and corpses don't have to behave themselves. The thought infused her with a strange kind of release that made it a little easier to face her terror. She smiled at the man, turned her back on him, found his still hard staff with her hands and gave it an affectionate squeeze.

“One last reminder,” the interminable woman on the dias was saying. “Talking is prohibited, both here and in the execution theaters. With one exception. If it pleases a member of the staff to hear you begging for mercy, you may do so. No other talking or whispering will be tolerated. If you wonder what it would be like to spend your last hours with a sock stuffed in your mouth, take a good look at that woman there. There will be times, of course, when you'll be tempted to scream because of the pain. It's at the discretion of the staff as to whether to permit it. I'll leave you with this admonition: you earned your place in this facility by your stupidity and bad behavior. You have one last chance to prove you are not entirely worthless. Accept your punishment, suffer in silence and die with a modicum of dignity.”

That was apparently her standard close because the door to her right, slid open in response to the touch of an unseen control. She turned on her heel and marched through it leaving a room soaked with the silence of unspoken anxiety, disturbed only by the clinking of metal as the guards continued to shackle and move prisoners from the dwindling ranks of the chain gangs to crowded positions along the walls. When the last of them had been secured there, the guards formed a ring in the center of the room, facing outward so they could keep an eye on the prisoners. The last vestiges of whispering disappeared under the hard eyes of the guards watching for someone to zap.

The many hours of standing from the time she'd been taken from the holding cell, through the long truck ride, and now in this frightful metal room just outside the death chambers, had taken a physical and mental toll on Kayla. Her legs were trembling with the effort of keeping her upright. Her stomach was in turmoil.

After several minutes of this unbearable silence, a loudspeaker near the ceiling between the two death chamber doors crackled to life. The voice was chillingly matter of fact, the speaker putting all his effort into clarity of diction.

“Females 5G2P3 and 2J7Q4 will now report for final processing.”

Two of the guards consulted clipboards and moved to opposite walls. They began walking counter-clockwise, reading the I.D.s branded on the prisoners' foreheads as they went. That was merely for show because it was immediately obvious who had been called. A freckled redhead directly opposite Kayla moaned and sagged against the wall. A plump young black woman several prisoners over on her left burst into tears and clapped her hands over her mouth. The guards double checked their clipboards against the number on the brands, then released the women from their wall chains, seized an arm and forced them forward toward the “female” door. One of them unclipped the communication device from his belt and spoke into it. There was a clunk and the heavy door slid ponderously open. The two guards and their captives disappeared as the door slid shut again behind them. Another clunk was the audible evidence that a lock had ensured there would be no turning back for 5G2P3 and 2J7Q4.

Didn't the woman guard say the women would go in one at a time? Kayla thought. One to die, one to watch. Then it came to her. They would need to start with two, one as the victim, one as the watcher, to set up that sequence. One of those first two was to be spared the added horror of witnessing her own imminent fate.

A few minutes later the two guards returned through the third door, the same one through which the prisoners had arrived. Almost immediately the loudspeaker came to life again.

“Males 5Y3P6, 5Y3P8, 4R1T2 and 7K9B4 will now report for final processing.”

Same thing. They had doubled the initial participants. Then the last of the four numbers sank in and Kayla caught her breath. 7K9B4 was the man who had gone through the initial processing with her at the Dispatch Center. Her own number was only one digit away. She watched as the guards detached him from the wall. He was staring at the floor. Then suddenly he looked up at her and winked. Kayla was in a panic of indecision. She didn't like this dreadful man, yet, like her, he was about to die. She loathed him. She empathized with him. What did he mean by winking at her? Was he trying to bolster her courage, or merely indulging his sick sexual compulsions, alive and well even in the face of death?

Then he was gone. With the others. And she would never know.

All was silent. It was eerie. No screams from behind the doors. No indication of the pain that damned woman had promised. There was also no clock to keep track of time. But why did it matter? What difference does it make when death is only minutes away and the number of those minutes is unknown? It seemed like hours, yet only moments, before the calm, clear doomsday voice announced the next victims.

“Males 4Y6B2 and 8P3D4 will report for final processing.”

Not her. Not yet. Relief swept through her as two men were extracted from the walls. Kayla's thoughts were blurred by dread, but enough reasoning remained for her to realize that the men were being called more quickly than the women. Why? Her smarter self told her not to think about it. But the part of her running amok with fear shouted the answer. It was because the bastards in charge of the female “theater” got more fun out of creating extended tortures and lingering deaths!

She felt herself swaying and realized that she was feeling weak. She could barely hold herself up. The restraints on her neck, wrists and ankles were really beginning to hurt, too. Then she remembered the “tenderizer” shot. She'd been warned it would make her muscles weaker and her nerves more sensitized.

“Female 3K9D7 will report for final processing.”

Kayla's heart jumped into her throat. The number was so close to hers! It was someone in her own holding unit. With a chill she realized that the girl on her right was keening and rocking on the balls of her feet. It was Karen's daughter. Kayla looked in horror at the brand on her forehead. 3K9D7. In the next instant a guard was unclipping the girl's neck chain and propelling her toward the opening maw of the death chamber. A cry went out from somewhere at the far end of the wall to which Kayla was attached. A woman was screaching “No! No! She's innocent!” Kayla recognized Karen's voice. The girl's mother. Her screams were cut off by the thick rag that was stuffed into her mouth and strapped in place. Tears rolled down Karen's face as she watched the portal slide shut behind her daughter and lock with a final thunk.

These horrors were too much for Kayla. She wanted it all to be over quickly. Yet she wanted to live. Why couldn't she be brave?

Three more pairs of men were called to their destiny, some of them trembling, others spewing defiance, their words cut off by the bite of the cattle prod. Then another woman, crying in terror. Two more male pairs.

Inevitably the voice called for another familiar number. “Female 7K9B5 will report for final processing.”

It wasn't Kayla. At first she was relieved. Then she remembered who it was. She watched as Jan Stone was led across the center of the room and through the sliding door through which female prisoners passed but never returned.

Her mind was numb as two more pairs of men were called to their fate.

Then it came.

“Female 7K9B3 will report for final processing.”