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.

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.

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.”

4. Sampling the meat

She felt paralyzed. She heard the click of her neck chain released by the guard. She felt his vice-like grip on her arm. She felt herself moving. It didn't seem real. Her mind felt numb. Her heart was pounding, adrenalin making her lightheaded. She wanted to crawl out of her skin. She heard the clink of her leg irons on the floor and felt them bite into her sensitized skin as she shuffled toward the steel door. It opened magically to let her through and snickered shut behind her. She was in a short corridor lined on all sides — walls, ceiling and floor — by sound-proofing materials. As her mind began to function again, the reason for the strange silence in the room she had just left behind became obvious. This corridor was a sound barrier, keeping the screams of the tortured from overly stressing the nerves of the waiting damned.

She was led through another electrically controlled door and on to a platform that overlooked a high-ceilinged chamber. This was the “theater” for processing, only it was backwards. She, the audience, was on the stage and the scene to be enacted for her was spread out on the floor of the auditorium. Jan was being spreadeagled on an odd looking table made of narrow beams in the shape of a horizontal X. Her arms and legs were being strapped down to the crossbeams and a gag had been stuffed in her mouth and strapped in so tightly that it distorted her face. Her breasts were smeared with blood. The men working over her wore smocks drenched in blood and blood was splattered all over the several stainless steel cabinets that formed a partial arc on the far side of the X-shaped table. The floor glistened where it had been recently hosed down and little pink-tinged riverlets snaked toward a floor drain.

While Kayla was taking this in, the guard led her up to a 4x4 wooden beam that functioned as a railing at the edge of the platform. It was bolted to two vertical steel posts. A second guard materialized with another 4x4 about four feet long and placed it on the floor of the platform just in front of the railing. They made her step up on it. She could barely lift her legs. Her handcuffs were removed and the guards, one on each side, took her hands and placed them palm down on top of the wooden railing. They looped chains around her wrists and around the railing beam to hold them in place. Her leg irons were also removed, her feet spread apart and chains wrapped around her ankles and the railing posts to hold them there. She was so absorbed by what was happening to Jan that she barely noticed as they taped down her fingers, wrapping the tape around the beam. What finally drew her attention from Jan was the slippery feel of the beam on her palms. She looked down and saw that the railing beam was covered with blood. Instinctively she tried to pull her hands away, but the chains and tape held her fast. Then the guard on her right produced a large nail and a hammer. He grinned at her, carefully placed the point of the nail on the back of her hand where it wouldn't contact a vein or mar her tattooed ID. He lifted the hammer and drove the nail through her hand into the beam. Kayla screamed as he continued to hammer until only three inches of nail protruded from the back of her hand. Blood flowed from both sides of her hand and her whole body trembled from the shock of it. The pain was fiery and she tried not to let her hand move to aggravate it, even as the guard ripped away the tape from her fingers and removed the wrist chain. Then he handed the hammer and another nail to the guard on her left who repeated the process, nailing her left hand to the railing as well.

Still they weren't finished. One guard held her lower leg while the other guard hammered a nail through her foot into the beam she was standing on, first the left, then the right. They removed the ankle chains and left her there to watch the show about to take place below. She wept with agony, but willed herself to stop shaking so the pain would become bearable. It occurred to her that if she could screw up the courage to yank her hands and feet upward hard enough, she might tear them off these nails. But what would be the point? Even if she'd had the strength to do it, the guards were still behind her, watching, no doubt hoping she would try so they could hammer more nails through her. She grit her teeth and held as still as possible.

A voice cut through her concentration.

“Well, look what we have here,” it said. “The bitch spy who acted as go-between in the conspiracy. And a lovely little traitor she is, too. Even prettier than the cunt laid out for butchering.”

Kayla, swaying, held her tongue. The man leering up at her from the main floor was wearing a green smock drenched in blood. He had a big square face with dark eyes, bad complexion, an acne pocked nose and thick, curly light brown hair. His face and hair were speckled with blood. Even his freshly washed hands had blood under the fingernails. How did he know who she was? Well, that was no secret and all these people seemed to have clipboards.

As though reading her mind he said, “My name's Bert. Me and the cunt on the table go way back. I have to apologize. I wanted to have those gorgeous tits of yours nailed to that plank while you watch the fun, just like we did with her. But it seems some rich Asian guys have coughed up a pile of money for the privilege of eating your tits, and the chef feels they should be presented unblemished. But I trust you'll be content with being nailed in place by your hands and feet. It's not as aesthetically pleasing, but I know you wouldn't want to deprive The Company of the nice profit it stands to make on your boobs. Your hands and feet have no market value and since you won't be needing them any more, might as well make them useful for something , right?”

Kayla couldn't bear to look at him, so she looked over to where Jan was tightly bound to the X, her legs and arms cinched down with four straps each. Another strap pinned her hips and still another passed over her shoulders and under her outstretched arms. She could only wiggle her hands and feet. For the first time Kayla noticed two naked young women standing quietly near the cabinets next to a pile of what looked like picnic coolers. One was very young, a petite, blue-eyed blonde with spectacular breasts and a caesarean scar on her abdomen. The other was vaguely exotic with a very slim, elegant body, long black hair and shy, soft eyes. The IDs branded on their foreheads had healed into purple scar tissue. They stood perfectly motionless, apparently waiting for orders of some sort.

Bert, seeing where Kayla's attention had wandered, said, “You like our little slave girls over there? Very pretty little things. And quiet, too. We cut out their tongues as part of our agreement to let them work here for a while. They're very helpful.” He smiled mirthlessly at them and added, “They'd better be.”

He snapped his fingers at them and pointed to Jan on the table. The dark haired girl immediately trotted over to Jan and washed the blood off her breasts with a wet cloth, wiping them dry with another. Then she returned to her place by the coolers. Blood continued to ooze from the entrance and exit wounds of the nails.

Bert ambled over to a cabinet near his captive on the table and selected a huge syringe filled with white fluid. He plunged the thick needle into Jan's right breast and pushed the plunger. Jan's face contorted in pain and she balled her hands into tight fists. When the syringe was empty, he took another full one and emptied it into her left breast.

He turned to Kayla and held up the empty syringes. “Milk,” he said. “Makes the tits nice and juicy. Improves flavor. ‘Course they won't be anywhere near as tasty as yours. Nothin' like natural mother's milk to bring out the true succulence of young tits. That's why they let you keep pumpin' ‘em in jail, so you'd provide them with some nice milk-soaked mother's tits. Big profit in those babies.”

Turning back to the cabinet, he picked up some kind of instrument which he tapped lazily on the palm of his hand, then on Jan's right breast, swollen now to half again its normal size.

“Well, 7K9B5,” he said to her, “you'll be pleased to learn you've been invited to the snuff banquet tonight. In fact, you're the featured entree.” He smiled and brandished what Kayla could now see was a boning knife. “Course, they're getting you at a discount. Know why? ‘Cause you're damaged goods. Oh you're not damaged yet, but you will be.”

He giggled and put the point of the knife on the nascent rise of Jan's breast. Blood seeped up and surrounded the blade. Jan tried to keep the fear out of her eyes by thinking angry thoughts, but her terror was transparent. The muscles of her jaw bulged as she bit into the massive, soggy gag filling her mouth, and its leather strap.

“Actually, as a reward for my contribution to the arrest and conviction of you and your fellow conspirators, The Company has agreed — very generously, I must say — to let me sample your meat. They gave me my choice of cuts. I selected this.”

He pushed the blade into her flesh and began slowly carving her right breast from her chest. Kayla felt herself growing dizzy at the sight of it but knew if she fainted she would tear painful gashes in her hands and feet. She struggled to stay conscious while Jan vibrated in pinioned agony on the X, her muffled screams tearing at Kayla's heart. It took only a minute for Bert to slice the breast free of Jan's body. Blood ran off both sides of her chest, dripping on the floor. He placed the disembodied breast on her stomach while he laid a surgical dressing over the gaping wound in her chest to keep her from bleeding to death. Then he picked up the breast with a flourish and put it on a plate. Mocking the delivery of a TV chef, he described how he was preparing his “dish” with seasoned butter, which he smeared on with a rubber spatula. He sprinkled on some basil and tarragon. For a garnish, he pinned a sprig of mint leaves to the nipple with a toothpick. He slid the finished product into a microwave that stood atop one of the cabinets, set the timer and turned on the oven.

As if on cue, two older men entered the theater from a side door. They wore immaculate smocks with surgical gloves, caps and masks. Bert stood back smiling as they took over the processing. “Sorry, Bitch,” he said to Kayla. “This is the boring part. You'll just have to wait while the meat cooks.”

With expert swiftness the two older men drew three sides of a large square with scalpels, beginning where her right breast had been, slicing across under her left breast, then down that side to her hip and across her lower abdomen to the other side. As Jan continued to scream into the mass of cloth in her mouth, the men slashed at the underside the huge flap of skin, separating it from the flesh beneath, then folded it over her right side, exposing the abdominal muscles beneath. They made a deep vertical slice through those as well and folded them aside. Most of her internal organs were now exposed to the bright lights overhead. With speedy efficiency the two men — obviously trained surgeons — began cutting the organs free, cauterizing the severed vessels in her body with the surgical equivalents of a soldering iron and a blow torch, to keep her from bleeding to death. One of the slave girls kept smelling salts under her nose to prevent her from passing out from the pain and horror. As each organ was extracted, the other slave girl opened a cooler to receive it and hurried it off through the side door, returning a minute later to await the next delivery. In this way they took out her entire intestinal track, both kidneys, her womb, her liver, her spleen, pancreas and stomach.

Above Jan's muffled screams, the microwave oven dinged its cheerful announcement that Bert's snack was ready. He pulled out the plate with the steaming breast, now a rosy pink, and placed it on a cabinet which he rolled in front of Kayla where it lay sizzling in its juices. Removing a fork and carving knife from the cabinet drawer, he carved it into three thick slices. The outside two he offered to the guards who accepted them eagerly. The middle slice, with the garnished nipple, he kept for himself, taking large bites and chewing noisily in front of Kayla. When she wouldn't look, he sauntered over to Jan and leaned over her, taking another bite.

“Delicious!” he informed her. “I only regret that I can't put the rest of you in my freezer and enjoy you for several more months. But I mustn't be greedy. I'll take your gag out if you'd like to taste yourself. Of course your stomach is gone, but that doesn't matter. Your taste buds are still intact. No? Well, don't say you weren't given the chance. This is pretty expensive meat, you know. You'll be even more delicious when you're roasted properly on a spit over a fire. That'll be in about . . .” he checked his watch, “. . .twenty-five more minutes. Gives the kitchen crew time to clean you up, stuff you, run the spit through you from cunt to neck and rack you up on the rotisserie for roasting. You'll be done to juicy perfection by the time your party arrives for the feast.” He snickered at the look of horror in her eyes. “Be a nice touch if they could leave your head on with an apple in your mouth, but Dispatch Central insists on getting it back uncooked for identification.”

He would have continued the taunting, but Jan's breaths were coming in short pants and her eyes were beginning to glaze. Within a few minutes her eyes had drooped shut, her hands twitched and, with a final shudder, she died.

The surgeons quickly reached up under her rib cage and cut out her heart and lungs. One of the naked girls whisked them away in a cooler. The muscles and skin flap were repositioned on the body, sinking into the emptied abdominal cavity. Bert drew a pair of long-handled pruning shears out of a cabinet and, to Kayla's further horror, snipped off Jan's hands. He used a hand-held cross-cut saw to cut off her head. It flopped to one side as the saw finished chewing its way through the bones of her vertebrae and dropped to the floor as the final swatch of skin was sliced through. The girls picked the hands and head up off the floor and dropped them into a plastic bag which they carried out of the room. The men released the straps, placed Jan's body on a gurney and rolled it through the side door.

“Well, she's off to the kitchen,” Bert said. “Nice fresh girl meat for our visiting Asian businessmen.” He turned to Kayla and smiled. “You're up next.”

5. The Execution

Kayla wept. She wept in grief for the brave young woman she had hated less than a day ago. She wept in gratitude that Jan's suffering was finished. She wept in terror of her own ordeal, now only minutes away. She was so immersed in her boiling emotions that she hardly noticed that one of the guards had entered her from behind and was pumping away. It was only the pain screaming from her hands that drew her attention to it. Her over-sensitized vagina felt scalded by the hot semen that gushed into her. That was followed swiftly by the insertion of a thick copper stim in her pussy, wet now with the guard's semen. The stim was locked in place with a chain around her hips. She didn't allow herself to scream as the nails were yanked out of her hands with a pry bar. She concentrated so hard on isolating her mind from the pain that she hardly noticed as they handcuffed her again, this time with her hands in front of her and clipped to her collar. The part of her mind still able to analyze her situation told her it was to keep her hands away from the stim between her legs.

Jan had shed a prodigious amount of blood and the two girls were hosing most of it down the floor drain as Kayla's guards began prying at the nails in her feet. The guard on her left “accidentally” set the heel of the pry bar on the outside edge of her foot and crushed the bones as he levered the bar back. There was an audible crunch of bone and Kayla screamed in agony in spite of herself.

“Oops,” the guard said. “Guess I should be more careful. Hope you don't think this little boo-boo is going to get you out of walking down those stairs and over to the table, though, ‘cause I sure don't plan to work up a sweat carrying you just because you got your foot in the way of my pry bar.”

Both guards chuckled at the sarcasm.

“If you're curious about that thing in your cunt,” he went on, “It's a remote controlled stim. Packs quite a wallop, too, just in case you decide to give us any trouble.” He showed her a small object in his hand. “This here's the trigger. Works like one a them keyless things for car doors. Let me demonstrate.”

He pushed a button and a terrible pain exploded between her legs and in her belly. She fell to her knees, doubled over. It lasted only a few seconds. Then the same guard pulled her to her feet by her hair. “Want another demo?” he asked mildly.

“No,” she whimpered. “Please, I'll do whatever you want.”

“Course you will,” he said. “In fact, we're so confident you're gonna be a good little bitch, we ain't even gonna put your leg irons back on. So wadda ya say to that?” He held the remote control in front of her face with his thumb hovering of the button in case she failed to get the hint. “Huh? Whadda ya say? Let's hear it!”

“Thank you, Sir,” she murmured.

While they waited for the slave girls to finish cleaning up, one of the guards said to the other, “Hey Roger, I been watchin' that little blond slave, the one with the hose. She's a cutie. Where's she been all this time?”

“Over on the men's side.”

“Doin' what, for chrissake? They're all a bunch of fags over there.”

“Fluffin'.”

“Fluffin'? You mean givin' the fags blow jobs?”

“Blow jobs, hand jobs, whatever makes ‘em stiff.”

“Fuck! Why're they wasting that on them fags?

“Oh, it ain't the staff they're fluffin.' It's the perps.”

“The perps? Well shit! Where's the punishment in that?”

“Oh that ain't the punishment part. I'm sure the ass-wipes don't mind some pretty young slut givin' ‘em a blow job. It's what comes next they don't like much.”

“Yeah? What?”

“When she's got ‘em all stiff and hard and ready to pop, she wraps a leather thong around the bottom of their dick and ties it off real tight so the blood can't run out. Then one of the faggots slices it off at the base. The damn thing stays hard as a rock. Gives the chef a nice stiff cock to cook up for the fag customers. He does these decorative platters with different colored cocks.”

“Think Bert'll let me have her for a whole night? I got a thing for blonde pussy. A real thick, long thing!” He laughed at his own joke.

“Don't know why not. He let me have the brunette for a couple hours the other day.”

“She hot?”

“Hot? Christ, yes! She'll do anything you want. She let me shove it in her mouth and piss down her throat. Drank every drop, and pretended she liked it, too. Fuck, she'll let you shit in her mouth if she thinks it'll keep her outta the lineup for another few days.”

“Think Bert'll mind if I rough the blonde up a bit? You know, put some real good stripes on her, make her scream?”

“Shit no. He's been bangin' ‘em both pretty good since he pulled ‘em outta the line. Prolly gettin' bored with ‘em by now. I saw him eyein' a couple beauties in today's lineup. In fact, if you wanna hump the bitch, you better do it soon. Their two weeks is about up. The clowns over at Central will be wonderin' where the fuck their heads are. Old Bert'll wind up on one of the tables next door if he holds ‘em out much longer.”

“I'll bet the fags over there would love to fry up his balls.”

“Prolly wouldn't even take ‘em off first.”

They sniggered at the prospect.

By then most of Jan's blood had been flushed off the floor below and the slave girls were coiling the hoses. The two guards took Kayla's elbows and guided her down the stairs. Cringing from the pain, her legs now barely able to hold her up, she limped across the wet floor leaving bloody footprints behind. She closed her eyes to avoid the sight of the table and wondered if her beloved Paul was thinking of her. She wondered how long it would be before he found a new woman to share his bed. She wondered if his new love would be kind to her baby. The stim rubbed against her vaginal walls as she hobbled along, reminding her of the first time she and Paul had made love and the spectacular orgasm it produced. The first of many hundreds. The first had been at a picnic in a pine grove on her parent's property. The last one was just two days before her arrest. Afterwards licked each other clean and held each other and shared dreams of their new home. But there were so many other times. In her apartment. In his apartment. In their apartment. On a beach at midnight. In a motel pool at three in the morning. In the toilet of an airplane during a trans-Atlantic flight.

Suddenly the guards jerked her to a stop. They had arrived at the table. The place where she would die. Those painful steps were the last she would ever take, these blood spattered walls the last she would ever see. Her whole life was reduced to a series of “lasts.” She had read her last book, seen her last movie, nursed her daughter for the last time. Even the horrible ordeal she was about to undergo, her first confrontation with death, would be her last.

They were standing next to the intersection of the X. Two more guards waited alertly on the other side. Four burly male guards to subdue one wounded, frightened, fettered female. Did they expect she'd make a break for it? Her handcuffs and collar were being removed. The two guards on her side of the table seized her by the ankles and upper arms. In a moment they had picked her up, suspended her horizontally over the table and lowed her on to it, the small of her back landing on the center of the X. The other two guards quickly seized an arm and an ankle and within seconds all four of her limbs were being strapped down to the narrow beams. She herself was now an X. The length of the crossbars were adjusted so that her hands and feet extended over the ends. Each arm and leg was pinned down by four very tight straps. She felt another belt being tightened down over her hips and watched the two guards at her head securing a final strap just under her throat and over her armpits. It was the same configuration of restraints she had watched applied to Jan and they rendered her totally helpless, completely at the mercy of the same ruthless team that had just shown Jan no mercy whatsoever. A strange listlessness swept through her. Even the pain in her feet faded to a tolerable burning.

A noise at her left drew her attention. She turned her head to the side. A woman was being led on to the platform. Her observer. The next in line. With a shock she recognized the face. It was Karen, the gag still strapped in her mouth. She was being brought in to watch her assistant die. At least she would not have to watch her other daughter being taken off, although it was not beyond the cruelty of these people to bring the girl in to watch her mother die. Or maybe the nubile teenager was one of the girls the guards said Bert had his eye on to replace today's slaves. It was all sadly moot since she would not be around to find out.

Suddenly a hand was squeezing her breasts. “Okay, Bert! She's down tight and ready to test.” It was the guard who fancied the blond slave.

“Go ahead,” came Bert's laconic reply from somewhere out of sight.

The same terrible pain that had doubled her over on the platform seared through her belly again. They had activated the stim. Kayla screamed and every muscle in her body stiffened in an involuntary effort to escape the pain, but only her hands, feet and head moved. The agony went on for several eternal seconds, then suddenly stopped. She had just caught her breath when three more short jolts elicited three more screams. Still her body barely moved.

“She's secure!” the guard shouted.

“Okay,” Bert answered from somewhere out of her sight. “But gag her. She makes too damn much noise.”

The dark haired slave girl appeared beside the guard and handed him a thick, wadded ball of cloth and a leather strap.

“Open wide, bitch!” he ordered. “Unless you want us to test your restraints again.”

She opened her mouth and the wet, slimy glob of cloth was pushed into it. With a shudder she realized it was the same gag they had just removed from Jan's severed head. It was Jan's saliva she was tasting. They cinched the strap so tightly it hurt, but at this point that discomfort was the least of her concerns.

The bright overhead lights were cut off by Bert looming over her. “All comfy?” he grinned. “Don't worry, we'll start the festivities in a minute. First we have to get your observer settled so she don't miss anything.”

At that instant Kayla heard the bang of a hammer and a muffled scream from the platform. She looked over to see the guards hammering nails through Karen's breasts into the 4x4 railing. They had left her hands shackled behind her. The screams stopped when the hammering stopped, but Karen's face remained twisted in pain as she looked down on Kayla spreadeagled on the table.

Bert pretended to confide his thoughts to Kayla but spoke in a voice loud enough for Karen to hear. “That bitch up there thought she could bring down the most effective, most efficient and, frankly, most fun system of justice this country has ever known. In the end all she's done is bring down herself, her family and all her fellow traitors. So we've gone to the trouble of making sure she gets to see as much as possible of the suffering her meddling has caused. She watched her oldest daughter led off earlier. She was quite a treat, by the way; both of our docs got off in her. Spunky little bitch, stayed conscious long enough to see her own ribs sawed off and removed so they could get at her heart and lungs. Next this bitch watches her closest conspirator led off to her death. Now she gets to see you butchered. Later we'll bring in her sixteen year old to watch Mommie get carved up. She'll die knowing her daughter is gonna get the same treatment. Talk about justice!”

Karen was making desperate sounds through the muffling of the gag.

“See that?” Bert said. “The bitch is trying to protest that her darling daughters are innocents, had nothing to do with her treason. But she's wrong. It was their patriotic duty, them and her husband, to call the cops and turn her in as soon as she told them what she was up to. Instead, they kept quiet, tried to protect the bitch. That makes them part of the conspiracy. Guilty as hell. More meat for our customers.”

He laughed and straightened up, moving around to her side. The guards had pulled the stim out of her vagina and stripped away its chain. They were now tying very tight tourniquets around the tops of her arms and legs.

“Well, we better get started,” Bert said. “Gotta keep on schedule. Don't wanna be here all night. There's a basketball game I wanna see on TV.” He picked up the same boning knife he had used on Jan and gave Kayla's breasts some appreciative squeezes. “Nice fucking tits.” He bent down, sucked on each nipple for a few seconds and licked his lips. “And your milk is real sweet. Well, it better be. The customer's paid top dollar for ‘em. Want's ‘em nice and fresh, too, which is good. Be a crime to freeze luscious boobs like that, all chock full of mommie milk. Screws up the flavor.”

His preamble had the desired effect of ramping up Kayla's terror. Her whole body tensed as he laid the knife flat on her stomach, pushing the point into the underside of her right breast. With a practiced skill, he began slicing through the tissue. For Kayla the pain was searing and non-stop. She heard herself screaming into the gag, though little sound emerged. There was only a short reprieve as he handed the amputated breast to the blonde slave girl and began on the other.

At the same time a new pain flamed up in her right wrist. Through her tears she saw that one of the green-smocked doctors had begun sawing at her wrist with the cross-cut saw. The incredible pain, greater than anything she had thought possible, and the realization of what they were doing to her drove her to the edge of consciousness; but before she could dissolve into blessed oblivion, a pungent odor spiked into her head and she was immersed in hell again. The dark-haired slave was holding something under her nose, keeping her from passing out. She glanced over to her right in time to see her hand fall away from the end of her arm.

Now the man in green had moved up her arm and was placing the teeth of the saw on her upper arm just below the tourniquet. He began sawing and to a whole new symphony of agony slowly cut down through the flesh and bone, blood flying off both ends of the saw. Then he was moving around her head to the other arm while the blonde slave girl unstrapped the detached arm. More pain screamed from her left arm as the saw severed first her hand then the arm. The source of her agony then shifted to her left leg as the doctor sawed through her thigh, just below the tourniquet. Her mind was a chaos of horror and pain as the right leg was cut off in the same way.

She closed her eyes to shut out a reality too ghastly to witness. It couldn't be happening. It couldn't be that there was now just empty space where ten minutes ago she had arms and legs and breasts. She was struck by a terrible sense of waste. Her beautiful, healthy young body wasted, reduced to a bloody stump, irreparable forever. Deep sorrow and bitter anger raged alongside her pain, weakening her slippery hold on sanity. When she was able to open her eyes again, the slave girls were hanging the last of her severed limbs from a bar on meat hooks to drain. Bert had already skinned one of her legs and was carving off slabs of thigh meat. None of it seemed real. She could still feel her breasts and arms and legs as if they were still there, all of them immersed in molten pain.

The surgeons had moved in on both sides and she felt the sting of their scalpels as they cut a large oval on her body from her pubis to her neck. Working quickly to accomplish as much as possible before she bled to death, they peeled the huge flap of skin away from her body, slashing with skinning knives to free it from the tissue beneath. In a few excruciatingly painful moments the interior of her entire torso was exposed to the air. They swiftly sliced out the abdominal muscles and added them to the pile of meat growing on a stainless steel table behind Bert. In an increasingly muddled daze, Kayla watched them pull out yards of intestine, snip it free and dump it into a basket. Pain roared through her body as they moved on to the more valuable organs, cutting them loose and handing them one by one to the slave girls who put them carefully into coolers. Someone's fist rammed its way through the opening between her legs into the emptying cavity of her abdomen. It added to a torment so excruciating that she could no longer think about what was happening. What did it matter? What did anything matter anymore?

She heard a sobbing in the distance. Hysterical. Someone was afraid, sick with terror. She remembered the feeling. How long ago was that? Everything was vague now. Detached. The room blurred, dimming, sounds becoming dull, confused. Her massive agony was drifting away, becoming dull, not part of her. Images of her husband and her daughter sprang into her mind, and the memory of their sweet bodies warm against hers, Christina's little round mouth sucking contentedly at her nipple. She hugged the image closer. There was a faint buzzing sound, a saw somewhere in the far distance, a tingling far away where breasts once gave her the form of a woman. As her senses grew numb, her mind drew itself inward, a turtle withdrawing into its shell.

Hey babe, how you doing?

“Paul, I think they're cutting out my ribs, to get at my heart.”

You've got a great heart there, babe. Someone will be damn lucky to get it.

“I'm so scared, Paul!”

You're doing fine. It's almost over now, babe. They can't hurt you anymore. Can't you feel it? How the pain is getting farther away? And the noise. Hear how quiet it is, now.

“It's so dark. I can't see anything!”

There's nothing here you want to see. That thing on the table, that's not you anymore, babe. Come to me. It's peaceful over here. All bright and clean.

“Where's my baby, Paul? Where's Christina?”

She's right here. She's waiting for you. Come on.

She was floating. Into the softness. Her thoughts shrinking . . . shrinking . . . converging to the tiniest of pinpoints . . . balancing . . . reluctant . . .

It's time, babe. Take my hand. Let's go.

She felt the soothing warmth of his hand in hers and followed him away from the horror, into the light.

And she died.