Dire Means (42 page)

“Welcome to the fodder sty,” Pop said. “Come.” He walked midway down the walkway and stopped beside the cap at which the straps aimed. Mark followed, and Morana brought up the rear, keeping her phone to her ear.

Mark looked down at the large shiny cap beside his feet. Morana stepped to it and swung it back on its large hinge like a submarine hatch. The aroma of delicious food flooded out, and Pop inhaled through his nose with his eyes closed.

Mark tapped the edge of the cap’s opening with his foot. Pop saw him and said, “They’re oubliettes.”

“What’s an oubliette?” Mark asked.

Pop flashed a proud grin. “An oubliette is a walled-in container, usually underground, with a single opening in the top. In our case they are converted pulp containers from our paper process. You can think of them like a teardrop-shaped room, buried to the neck underground. We used these oubliettes as holding bins to store shredded pulp before it is converted to mulch in preparation for baling and shipping to paper product manufacturers. When we expanded to include our own production facility, these nifty little containers became—available.”

Satisfied at Mark’s level of amazement, he continued. “Oubliette comes from the French word,
oublier
, or ‘to forget.’ We use the oubliette for the gentle immurement of fodder.”

“Immurement?”

“Yes. Immurement is the gentlest form of execution you’ll ever see. Immurement uses a doorless, walled-in space, such as an oubliette, combined with neglect, to cause death by starvation or dehydration. Our fodder have complete freedom of movement within their respective oubliettes. Their hands and feet are not restrained. The floor and walls are padded so they cannot hurt themselves.”

Pop’s calm explanation made the process seem more horrible than Mark had imagined.

“So this is where you starve them?”

“We aren’t starving them. They do that all by themselves,” Pop chuckled.

“But homeless people who walk the streets aren’t confined to oubliettes,” Mark said.

“Arguable,” Pop replied. He pointed up. “Back to our tour... Those rods and cables, and the lights and doors and temperature, and all mechanical things in this sty are controlled by Bracks in another part of the Nest. The only way out is via the console just inside the door.”

The door to the side room opened, and out rolled the chef in a red jumpsuit, gagged and bound once again to the hand truck. Raphael wheeled him down the center aisle between the oubliettes. When he reached Pop, Mark, and Morana, they stepped off the walkway onto dirt that surrounded the oubliette covers so he could pass by.

The chef’s eyes remained wide, but he didn’t struggle. Raphael stood the chef upright and connected the hanging leather straps to the top of the hand truck. He then raised his hand. The cables went taut and lifted the hand truck and chef into the air above the oubliette cover.

Morana stepped back from the opening while Raphael guided the hand truck and chef down into the yawning mouth of the oubliette. As the chef sank, Raphael patted him gently on the head, as if he were saying farewell to a good friend. After the chef was out of sight, the tethered straps continued to feed into the oubliette until they buckled from slack.

A series of pops echoed from within the oubliette. “Bracks just electronically released all the straps on the hand truck,” Pop said. They suddenly heard the chef’s voice screaming, cussing, and then begging them. His voice reverberated inside the oubliette as if he was in a plastic bottle. The cable went taut again, then slid up and out of the oubliette’s mouth carrying the empty hand truck, its straps and the chef’s gag dangling from its top.

Morana took hold of the oubliette’s cap and swung it shut with a rubbery thud. She pressed the handle down until it locked into place, muting the chef’s pleas.

Pop continued his description of the sty. “Our oubliettes are twenty feet in height, ten feet wide, cylindrical, with a smooth inner lining impossible for human ascent by hand or foot. Fine paper confetti, a material we have in abundance, lines the floor. We once padded the floors with whole newspapers, but replaced them with confetti when the first fodder began to fold and press it into wedges and other tools that left scars after failed suicide attempts. This self-mutilation went against our desire to keep the fodder physically pristine. Again, we need to ensure that starvation is the only possible conclusion as cause of death when fodder are discovered. Three feet of compacted earth separate the buried walls of each oubliette. This makes communication between fodder impossible via voice or vibration. The caps, too, are soundproof. Mo, give Mark a look inside,” Pop said.

“No, I don’t need to see—”

“It is important. You need to see,” Pop insisted.

Morana pulled the handle up and swung the cap of the chef’s oubliette open.

Raphael stepped aside to make room for Mark, who approached it, knelt down grabbing the rim of the cap, and leaned forward to peer in.

He saw the chef standing in the center of the oubliette, looking up. A dim light high on the wall gave the oubliette’s interior a soft glow. The chef’s feet sunk into a bed of confetti. The only object in the oubliette was a small white plastic bedpan off to the side.

When the chef saw Mark’s face peer down at him he shouted, “What do you want? Let’s make a bargain, here, yes? I can be a spokesperson for your cause. I have friends who own many restaurants—we can work together for your cause!”

Mark pulled his head from the opening and the chef screamed, “Noooo! Come back—please!”

Morana grabbed the handle of the lid and swung it closed again. The rubber seal was more effective than a volume knob in silencing the chef’s pleading. Morana put her weight on the handle locking it into place.

“How often do you change the bedpan?” Mark asked—trying to keep conversation going as he studied the sty and committed the information he was hearing to memory.

“We’ve found that it doesn’t see much use after the first two days,” Morana said.

Pop added, “We’ll change his pot tomorrow—which is service far beyond what our brothers and sisters on the street could dream of getting.”

“How long do you expect him to live?” Mark asked.

Morana and Pop looked at one another. The corners of Pop’s mouth turned down as he looked up, estimating.

“Ten days, max,” Morana said.

“This one’s a chunky monkey—I give him thirteen,” Pop said. “The record so far is fifteen days. What stubborn fodder she was.”

“How do you know when fodder die? Do you look inside every day?” Mark asked.

Morana answered, “When fodder expire, infrared and temperature sensors detect heat loss in the oubliette, which then signals Bracks. He calls Pop for approval to prepare the body for delivery. We draw the fodder’s body up from the floor of the oubliette with hooks that attach to loopholes on the back of their jumpsuits. If the jumpsuit is marked ‘bird feeder’ under the collar, the middle fingers are amputated and sent to our hoppers for inclusion in the day’s mulch. That mulch eventually becomes plates, napkins and other paper products we supply free of charge to local shelters. The ‘bird-feeder’ label means that on more than one piece of footage, the fodder was recorded flipping the bird to a Trail Bladers actor. Pop’s theory is that anyone who will extend a middle finger to a suffering impoverished person will never contribute voluntarily to Pop’s cause.”

Pop nodded, liking Morana’s answer. He added, “You see, Mark, this is the only way to convince some fodder to feed our brothers and sisters without complaining.”

The cables and hooks pulled away from over the chef’s oubliette and flowed over the other oubliette caps, stopping at the end.

Mark’s attention came back to the kaleidoscope of aromas—grilling meats, sauces, and baking that filled the sty. The food smelled better in the sty than in the rest of the Nest. The hunger it triggered reminded Mark of his day stranded and penniless on the Third Street Promenade. He looked to Pop and said, “You were going to explain the food I smell. Why would that smell be in the sty?”

“Ah, yes. The aroma. The ventilation system circulates air from the café through each oubliette before discharge up and out of the bunker outside. Our friend Bracks added this Draconian touch into his architectural plans to make sure that the fodder experience mimics that of our brothers and sisters as they struggle to survive amidst the busy eateries of the city streets.”

Mark counted the oubliettes. Twenty. If it took ten to thirteen days to dehydrate a person to death and one new fodder checked in per day, then there would always be an oubliette available—with several new vacancies to spare.

They left the fodder sty using the only console placed inside a room in the Nest. Raphael went into the garage while Pop and Morana led Mark to the next stop on his tour.

They made their way through a few hallways until they reached the door of a room seemingly detached from the rest of the bunker. It had a console, but neither Pop nor Morana tried to use it. Pop knocked three times beside a peep hole.

“Can’t you scan yourself in?” Mark said, pointing to the console.

“Yes, but Bracks performs best when we respect his privacy. We don’t pressure him for access, and he’s yet to fail us.”

The door opened and a man of about 5’ 2” stood in front of them. Mark saw a Trail Blader’s uniform hanging inside from a closet doorknob. Bracks wore jeans and a wrinkled lime-green dress shirt. He sported the messy hair of a mad genius and wore thick black-rimmed glasses.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Bracks Hemlanson,” Pop said. “Good of you to greet us.” Pop’s sarcasm missed Bracks. “I want you to meet Mark Denny. He’ll be a new director.”

Morana stepped aside to give Bracks a better view of Mark.

“Hi,” Bracks said. His eyes stayed on Morana. “Hug?” He opened his arms to Morana and she brushed him off as she walked by.

“Knock it off,” she said.

Bracks’s office was a suite the same style as Mark’s, but much smaller and rectangular. It was split lengthwise into a living side and what was obviously a work side. On the living side were some folding chairs, a sofa, a kitchen with a stack of dirty dishes on the counter, a small coffee table, and a door to a restroom.

“Bracks refuses to allow housekeeping to enter his suite,” Morana said, pointing to a stack of dirty dishes on the kitchen counter. She went to it and began to rinse the dishes and load them into a dishwasher.

Pop sat down on the sofa and crossed his legs as if he planned to stay a while. “Sit. Relax,” he said to Mark, pointing to a chair opposite him.

Mark studied Bracks’s work area. This is what he had been waiting for—the control center.

Monitors lined one wall over a desk with a laptop, a notepad, and two keyboards. Beside the long desk was a cabinet with a locked Plexiglas front. Computer and networking equipment was stacked neatly inside. Mark recognized a row of humming external drives, battery backups, and at least a couple of servers.

Bracks sat and rolled in his chair to the desk and began to type on the laptop. “We’ve got three potential droppers,” he said to no one in particular.

Pop got up and joined Bracks to look over his shoulder at the monitors. Bracks clicked his mouse a few times and then brought up camera shots on each of his monitors showing the interior of oubliettes. Each contained one person. Out of twelve that were on camera, half sat still, their backs against the wall of their container. The others lay sprawled out on the six-inch bed of confetti that covered the floor.

The chef, on the far right monitor, walked in a circle around the perimeter of the oubliette’s interior dragging his hand against the wall. He stopped from time to time, scraping the wall with his fingernails as if trying to find a weak spot.

“I give numbers three and eight less than twenty-four hours,” Bracks said. “They haven’t moved for six hours.”

“That timing is excellent,” Pops said. He grinned and they shook hands.

Mark walked to Bracks’s sink, and took a few deep breaths to put a wave of nausea in check.

Morana said, “Let’s go, I can see Mark is reaching his threshold for today. Are you hungry, Mark?”

He turned to her with a look of disbelief. “No.”

When they exited Bracks’s suite, Mark tried to remain calm, but he was visibly shaken. He and Morana walked ahead of Pop and Bracks, who remained in conversation a short distance behind.

“How are you feeling?” Morana said.

“There’s so much to learn,” he answered, averting the question.

“Overwhelmed?”

“I’ll be okay.”

“Go to your suite and rest.” She pointed ahead. “I’ll be there in a few minutes to talk to you.”

Mark continued to his door. When he placed his hand on the console, he looked back and saw Morana speaking closely to Pop, who rested his chin between his thumb and forefinger, listening carefully.

Mark entered his suite and sat in the living room to wait for Morana. His task was daunting. The Trail Bladers were technologically advanced and their methods were polished, organized and monitored by Bracks, an apparent mad genius to whom no one had access.

A few moments later, Morana let herself in through the console without knocking. She sat beside Mark on the sofa. “I know that what you’ve seen is overwhelming. We owe you an apology,” she said. Mark’s face didn’t brighten. “I apologize because we have rushed you. Papa was disappointed with your reactions in Bracks’s office. Your demeanor concerns him. He hoped your enthusiasm for our mission would have progressed more by now. I convinced him that you simply need a short break and that you’ll come around. I hope you understand the importance of my having intervened.”