Protect All Monsters (10 page)

Everybody was quiet. Richard joined the man at the podium. He introduced the stranger, “This is the director of operations, Carl Brenner. He has a few things to touch upon before we get to work.”

Brenner’s words were a raspy drill sergeant’s. “Welcome to the PAM Complex. Your world has been turned upside down. Your time to bitch and complain is over. I don’t want to hear it. You can cry into your pillows and talk it out among each other, but only during your free time. Work is work. You can die doing your job. Many have, people, so don’t be shocked. You can even die being careful. The guns strapped to your hips mean nothing. Running is your best option when attacked. If you die, there will be no funeral. You are already dead to your families and on paper. Your life is serving the government. Your life is serving me.

“We have a schedule to keep, so this will be short. Each of our special guests resides in sectioned-off quarters. We let them out during specific times of the day and only on specific floors of the facility. Each of you will be assigned—picked at random—to each floor. You will be rotated so you’re trained to work each job. Cross-training comes with benefits. Days off. Cash bonuses. We never close, people. Our hours are 24/7 indefinitely. You will be assigned a pager. Keep it on you at all times. Once you’re summoned, you show up to work, no questions asked. If you’re late, you receive a cut in pay. If you continue to be late, you will be assigned the less desired of jobs. Stay cautious. Be strong. No bitching. We’re here to protect the world from this threat. You’re doing your country a great service. Thank you.”

She eagerly awaited her assignment. Brenner left the stage, and Richard took the helm. He opened a folder. “I will read the names in order of their station. I will point out your station manager, and you will stand and form a line in front of them. These names are for the third floor: Jenny Davis, Annie Hampton, Anton Martinez…”

Her name wasn’t called.

“Second floor, east wing…Herman Richards, Becky Sullivan, Gerry Halloway…”

“That’s my cue,” Herman said, patting Addey on the back. “Hang in there. We’ll talk later. We’ll share stories.”

He filed through the crowd and into the line. She missed him already. A familiar face was like a best friend in this horrible place.

Richard read off the list for the second floor west wing, the first floor, and then he called out a list for the sublevel.

Her name was on that list.

She walked to the line. The manager reminded her of a Barbados panhandler with long dreadlocks and dark skin, and he wore a yellow hazmat suit. The other lines, the leaders were well clad, and she easily deduced that she’d been assigned the lowest of the low of duties.

“My name is Douglas. Follow me to the pit.”

She was on high alert. The adrenaline kept her sharp.

Moving on, Douglas used a key card to unlock a large freight elevator located south of the conference room. There were fifty of them in the group. The clustered confinement quickly smelled of sweating flesh and frayed nerves. Douglas whistled under his breath. This was just another day at the job for him.

“I feel so important.” The man laughed to himself. “There’s an awe of silence in my honor.”

The man exuded that dickhead persona. He was in charge, and the power was manipulating him. She didn’t feel the least bit safe.

The elevator ticked down to the sublevel. There were two sublevels. Each level, it grew colder—near freezing. The elevator stopped, but it didn’t open. Douglas turned around to face them. “You will be given a pager, and you will pick out a hazmat suit. This is hard labor. You will be sore after today. I suggest changing out of your clothes and only wearing your undergarments. It gets hot very fast. You’ll have fifteen minutes to change. Tomorrow, you will report at the freight elevator at exactly eight o’clock. You will receive a wake-up call at six thirty sharp. If you sleep in, that’s your problem—your punishment.”

Douglas was about to open the elevator when somebody asked, “What exactly are we doing?”

He smiled. “Let me put it this way…you’re about to meet the living dead.”

Chapter Thirteen

The freight elevator opened with an audible struggle of power cables. She expected a wide expanse of a room, but this was a smaller chamber outside of a greater entity. A locker room formed one side; on the other side, hazmat suits hung according to a person’s size and weight. The room was sterile smelling, an air freshener working overtime at the ceiling.

Douglas commanded, “Pick a locker, change, put on the hazmat suit and stand at the door marked
Entry
. You have fifteen minutes. Move it, people. The last thing you want to be is fired from the worst job this place has to offer. You won’t like the consequences.”

She lifted a yellow hazmat suit from the hook and picked out a locker and began to strip. She had her pants off when Douglas spoke under his breath. “Nice, very nice. You’re going to be fine, Addey.”

Fucking asshole, go blow it out your ass.

She didn’t turn around. She worked faster to change into the suit. Her world was enclosed within a gas mask. Thirty seconds, and her air intake was already stagnant and warm. Her breath kept fogging up the plastic shield over her eyes.
This is going to get claustrophobic in no time.

She shoved her clothes into the locker. They had no locks, so she memorized the number 22 and hoped for the best. Perhaps people didn’t survive long enough to merit personal security, she supposed.

Douglas was roaming about the lockers, eyeing the women lasciviously.

Don’t be afraid to defend yourself…nobody will hold it against you.

She waited in line before the steel double doors with the word in dripping, spray-painted lettering over the top:
Entry
.

Douglas kept his mask off until the last minute before entering the next section. “Your job is to shovel what comes from the ceiling chute into the gutters. That’s it. I’ll play the radio to keep you motivated. We work for two hours, take a thirty-minute break and repeat the process. On the way in, you’ll see a chamber that looks like a shower stall. This will spray you with a cleaning solution at high pressure. There’s a break room nearby right before you reach the showers. There’s food, drinks—alcohol included—and a place to sit down and watch TV or read or sleep.”

He disengaged the lock belonging to the final door between them and their job. “Follow me.”

The first area was the break room. Another group of workers hung out in their underclothes, exhaustion printed on their faces. They smoked and ate, or slept on furniture. The place reeked of desperation and broken hope.

There was an itch behind her eyes; she wanted to cry. It would be easy to fold to her emotions, but the looming shape of the showers and the strange fence barrier looming in the distance snapped her from that option. The showers had high-pressure hoses from top to bottom. She watched a group stand in place as they were doused. Next, they walked past wet tiles up to a scary perimeter fence. A security guard stood, bored and indifferent to them. He was older, maybe in his sixties. He chewed on a wet cigar and wore a headphone set. His job was to survey the row of ten TV monitors around him for anything suspicious.

Douglas asked the man, bending down to his level, “Everything safe, Andy?”

“They’re still dead,” Andy griped, pointing at the screens. “And I’m still alive.”

Andy looked at them, his face unchanging. “Newbies, huh? This is a helluva place to start working.”

“I started here.”

Andy yukked it up at Douglas’s expense. “You stupid shit, and you’re still here!”

He unlocked the gate. A machine conveyor pulled it open. Douglas walked in, ushering them to follow. “Come on, people.
Move
.”

The area was now a concrete square surrounded by twelve-foot-high fences. They stood on a raised platform. She couldn’t see to the bottom, they were so high up. The walls in the far distance beyond the gates were concrete and painted black, the walls themselves at least twelve feet from their standing position.

The stench was awful, the air thick enough to leave condensation on their faceplates. Her father had worked at a meat-packing plant for five years before quitting. The only part of his work uniform he’d brought home were his boots. They stank of concentrated beef, a sickly sweet smell, and this stench was far advanced. Flies buzzed below by the thousands, a constant background din. There were movements from below, a constant shuffle, like hundreds of feet tramping in mud puddles.

Gutters were carved out of the concrete floor, each slit five feet from the other. A metal slide extended from each slit. The opening was large enough for a person to slip through. Blood caked the gutter slits in a thick gruel paste. Flies and worms and maggots writhed in the mess. She turned her head away when she caught the human head wedged in the corner. Male or female, it was impossible to distinguish. The pulped skin was mostly peeled from the skeleton.

Jesus Christ.

Douglas’s mask was on, his words were muffled. “Okay people, there’s the rack of shovels. Take one. Stay clear of the dumping zone.”

The dumping zone was blocked off by a hip-high fence with caution tape, orange cones and blinking lights. It was fifteen by twenty feet. Over the dumping zone, on the ceiling, a square tube that resembled a giant air duct was aimed at the concrete. A digital clock on the wall counted off from ten seconds.

“Don’t move, people.”

Nine, eight, seven, six…

The air duct grumbled like a beast dislodging phlegm from its throat.

Five, four, three, two, one…

Blood dripped down by the gallon. Addey’s body was doused from head to foot from the splashes, as was everybody else. And then the load arrived: WHOMP! It was spit out in a compressed pink, red and purple square. The concussion rattled their feet. The landing loosened the compressed material. It slithered against the walls of the fence, a slippery, wet noodle sound. Human organs, muscle tissue, flesh, arms, legs and heads in various stages of decay unfolded. Worms and maggots stewed in the mess in heavy masses. There was an audible group sigh of repugnance. Disbelief locked Addey in place. There had to be dozens mixed into that square. How many of them were shot from the ceiling a day?

Douglas explained to the dismayed crowd when the mess settled, “They’re corpses from murder scenes, leftovers of horrible car accidents, state executions, Jane and John Does and your loved ones out of caskets. Yes, get over it. It’s fucking happening, and it’s not your call. It’s not mine either. If you’re disgusted by it, shovel it down into those gutters that much faster. How else do you keep dead people happy? They eat flesh. It’s a primordial instinct. Resurrected with decaying brain matter, that’s all they can compute:
eat human flesh
. We’re all cavemen when it comes down to it, and they’re demented Cro-Magnons. Now get to work. The next batch is coming in,” he studied the digital clock, “twenty-five minutes. Shovel it up fast. Hurry, or else we’ll have a really big mess on our hands. You’ll be swimming in the shit if you don’t step up the work speed. Make it a game, a competition—I don’t give a fuck. Get it done!”

The group scrambled for the shovels, including Addey. She shoveled up a wad of mixed organs and dumped them down one of the four slides that channeled below them. She kept having to clear the condensation from her mask, though blood smears obscured her view.

Five minutes later, she was coated in sweat that clung to her skin in a cold gel.

I can’t keep doing this.

Eight hours a day? For how many days?

Animosity crept into her mind with the thoughts to match.
Damn you, Deke. If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be here. High school dropout. Heroin junky. Fucking idiot.

She shoveled harder, fiercely dumping each load. She collected a mandible and a collection of tongues in one scoop, half a female torso the next time that crawled with insects and a slithering snake. The shovels penetrated wet meat in staggering unison. She breathed in the noxious odor, hoping eventually for a clean breath.

Break time was two hours away. Twenty-three minutes until the next square of compressed remains shot down.

“I can’t…do this,” she mumbled.

She was growing dizzy. She couldn’t breathe. She gasped and choked, about to hyperventilate, when a pair of hands grabbed her. “We’ve got a fainter.”

Her burning-hot breath blocked the faceplate. She couldn’t see who carried her out of the work zone and through the showers. She was pressure-hosed, pink water covering the floor and running down the drain.

“You’re going to be okay,” a man’s voice assured Addey, clutching her tight. “I have just the thing for you. This happens to all of ’em at some point. It’s no fault of your own. Death isn’t something we’re used to seeing.”

“No, it’s not,” she replied. “It’s…too much.”

“There are special ways of coping,” was his final comment.

She was carted into a room in the corner of the showers. The room was dark until an overhead lightbulb flicked on. The person removed her mask; he was Douglas. He’d already stripped from his suit. He wore only a sopping wet undershirt and a pair of boxer shorts. The room contained four lockers, one of them Douglas’s. He opened it and retrieved a vial of white powder.