Читать книгу Polestar Omega - James Axler - Страница 10

Chapter Two

Mildred walked down the gritty, gray hallway two steps ahead of Doc, still bristling over what she had been subjected to during the forcible change of clothes. The orange bastards had taken full advantage of the situation—the hood over her head, their gloved hands holding her wrists trapped at her sides—to feel her up as if she were a prize pig at a county fair. As they squeezed, pinched and prodded her naked flesh, though muffled by the respirators their laughter was still audible and sorely grating.

The time would come for payback-plus she hoped, but there were much more pressing concerns than that—in particular, the level of organization and technical sophistication their adversaries seemed to present. “Seemed” was the operative word, because up to this point as far as she was concerned it was all just talk. Even so, it was clear their captors weren’t the run-of-the-mill, incestuous ville barons and lackey louts, nor a roving band of jolt-crazed coldheart murderers or a swarm of flesh-eating cannies.

Mildred could hear Doc mumbling to himself as he shuffled along behind her. The mumbling got louder and louder, then he closed ranks and growled out of the corner of his mouth, “I suggest we dispatch the minders now. Easy pickings.”

Mildred glanced over her shoulder at their clipboard-bearing, whitecoat escort. They had removed their respirators. The woman was a stick figure, her lab coat looked two sizes too big and flapped as she walked. Slicked with oil, her mousy brown hair was drawn back and coiled in a tight bun at the back of her head, which made her cheeks look all the more gaunt. She wore heavy soled, lace-up shoes. The male whitecoat was likewise undernourished looking, pale and prematurely bald, with narrow wrists and spidery fingers. Doc was right. Even with hands cuffed behind their backs, they could dispose of these adversaries with a few well-aimed front kicks. The trouble was, they didn’t know if the whitecoats had the keys to the cuffs. To really improve their situation, to help themselves and the others escape, they needed their hands free and that outcome wasn’t guaranteed by turning on the escort.

“No, not yet,” Mildred whispered back. “Keep your cool. We need to recce this place. For the time being, better to look docile and compliant.”

Doc grunted his assent, but he immediately resumed mumbling to himself like a deranged person.

He didn’t like the restraints. Neither did Mildred.

“In-for-ma-tion,” Mildred repeated with venom. “Focus, you doddering old fool.”

That shut him up.

The redoubt appeared to be fully functional, which was somewhat unusual of late. Everything worked. Power. Lights. Heat. Air. There was no sign of trash in the corridors, no mindless vandalism of the furnishings, which made Mildred think the place had not only never been looted, but that perhaps the same people and their children and their children’s children had occupied and maintained it since nukeday.

The hallway ended in a T and a pair of elevator doors, which opened at the push of a button in the wall. The whitecoats shoved them into what looked like a freight elevator and made them stand side by side at the back of the car. When the doors shut, the woman pressed a button in the console and with a jerk they began to descend. The concrete shaft passed by in a blur.

An unpleasant fishy odor filled the car; it seemed to be coming from their escort. Doc noticed it, too, because he wrinkled his nose and made a sour face at her. It was a long way to their destination, and they didn’t stop in between. When the doors finally opened, they faced a corridor lit by bare bulbs in metal cages set at intervals down the middle of the ceiling. Along the right-hand wall were a row of metal hooks, from which hung plastic bibfronts and rubber gauntlets.

The whitecoat female pointed at the heavy protective gear and said, “Put them on. Hurry up.”

“Just so you know,” Mildred said as she stepped into the bibfronts, “we don’t do toilets.”

“I think you’ll do whatever you’re told,” the woman said. She waved at the pair of swing doors on the left with her clipboard. “Through there...”

As they approached, Mildred could hear music coming from the other side. She used her shoulder to push the door open and nearly choked on her next breath. The reek of animal blood and rotting fish was that thick. Wall speakers pumped out the saxophone stylings of Kenny G, which mingled with the clatter of cutlery and rhythmic rasp of handsaws. The gray concrete room was lined with rows of stainless-steel tables and rolling steel carts. The latter were piled high with what looked like heaps of raw liver except for the red knobs of bone sticking out. About two dozen people in bibfront slickers labored with saws and knives and cleavers, either at the tables or on the gigantic carcasses hanging from meat hooks set in heavy rails on the ceiling.

At first glance Mildred thought they were sides of beef. Or enormous hogs. Then she looked closer and saw the stubby wings, taloned web feet and feather coats.

“By the Three Kennedys,” Doc said, his eyes wide with amazement, “those immense creatures are avian.”

Two men in black overalls strode up to them. From the truncheons they carried, Mildred assumed their job was to keep the butcher shop running smoothly. They were joined by a third man in bibfronts and dark blue coveralls.

“Some newbies for you to train, Oscar,” the female whitecoat said to the latecomer. His ruddy face, and his chest and arms were splattered with an impasto of blood, pinfeathers and fish scales. “When you’re done, turn them over to the fertilizer crew.”

The whitecoats unlocked and removed the handcuffs, then turned and left the room.

“Over here,” their instructor said, waving for them to follow him.

They stepped up to one of the hanging carcasses.

“What kind of bird is that?” Mildred asked, practically shouting to be heard over the Muzak and the clatter.

“Clonie pengie.”

At least she now had a clue where they had jumped to. “‘Pengie’? You mean penguin?”

Oscar scowled and looked at her as if she was crazy. “No more questions,” he said. “I’m going to show you the ropes, then you’re on your own, so watch carefully. You screw something up or work too slowly, and those men in black will pound the living hell out of you.”

Oscar selected a nine-inch boning knife from the array of razor-sharp blades on the tabletop. Raising his hand above his head, he plunged the point into the middle of the penguin’s torso, then slashed downward, smoothly unzipping the wet, gray feather coat from breastbone to pelvis, revealing an inches-thick layer of grainy brown fat beneath.

A horrible stench gusted from the incision, making Mildred take a step back. Doc coughed and covered his nose with his hand.

“You want to cut just deep enough to open the cavity,” Oscar said. “Be careful not to puncture the stomach.” He aimed the knifepoint at a bulging reddish sack the size of a basketball. “You don’t want to release the sour bile from the glands, these ones here, here and here.” He indicated compact, twisted, cordlike globs of gray tissue. “Prick them by accident and the meat is ruined.”

“Yeah, we’re walking a fine line there,” Mildred said.

Doc grinned at her joke; Oscar didn’t catch the sarcasm.

The butcher widened the cut by gripping the skin with gloved hands and pulling the edges apart. Coils of greasy guts slid out the bottom and into a strategically placed ten-gallon bucket on the floor. There was such a volume of intestine that the bucket was instantly filled to the brim. Oscar slopped the overflow into a second white plastic bucket.

“Cut here at the gullet and airway,” he said as he made the incisions with his knifepoint, “then pull out the heart, stomach and lungs. The rest will follow—like this.”

The remaining organs flopped into the backup bucket.

“Make your last cut just above the poop chute, right here. And that’s that. Gutting is the easy part.”

A female worker in navy blue hurried over to hoist the heavy buckets onto the metal table. Taking up a knife, she quickly excised the bulging stomach from the rest of the innards, then sliced it open over an empty bucket. Using both hands, she squeezed forth a slimy mess of half-digested herring, anchovy and other unidentifiable small fish and crustaceans. What skin remained on the little fish had a dull, yellowish cast from the animal’s stomach acid. The stench was like being downwind of a gray whale’s blowhole.

“Are you saving that to make fertilizer?” Mildred asked through the fingers clamped over her nose.

The worker laughed. She grabbed a gloved handful of the putrid slurry, then squeezed it in her fist, making it squirt into her open mouth. As she chewed, she gave them a thumbs-up.

A man in black swooped in from behind and whacked her sharply on the back of the skull. “You know better than that,” he said, raising the truncheon again. “Now get back to work.”

A second reminder wasn’t necessary.

“Go on, you open up one,” Oscar told Mildred. He handed her the knife and pointed at the next carcass in line. Unlike the others, its head was intact. It had a long black beak, large vacantly staring eyes. Only in overall body shape did it resemble the emperor penguins she’d seen in zoos and in National Geographic. There was a cluster of tightly spaced bullet holes high in the middle of its chest.

She had to stand on her tiptoes and reach as far as she could to correctly position the knifepoint. Making the first cut was difficult because the breastbone was deceptively massive, evolved to support the powerful wings. Once she got under the bone, the tip slid easily through the skin. She sliced downward as she’d seen Oscar do. Halfway through the cut, dark blood began to pour from the incision, splattering into the waiting bucket. It was the internal bleed from the chest wounds. Mildred held her breath as she yarded out double handfuls of guts.

Once both carcasses were cleaned of entrails and organs, and the cavities hosed down, Oscar showed them the next step.

“Can’t pluck off the feathers,” he said. “Too densely packed. Takes forever to do the job with pliers. So we just skin them out. Make sure your blade is hair-splitting sharp. If it isn’t, touch it up on the stone on the table. The idea is to leave the fat on the meat instead of removing it with the cape.”

He then proceeded to demonstrate the process, starting at the angry stub of neck. The feathered cape peeled away quite easily from the shoulders, riding as it did on a thick layer of brown blubber. He cut around the base of the wings, then throwing his full body weight into the task, ripped the skin of the torso down until it draped in gory folds on the floor. He used a pair of long-handled shears to snip off the webbed, taloned feet at the ankles and dropped them into a bucket of similar clippings. He finished by pulling the skin down over the stumps of wrinkly skinned legs.

As Oscar rolled up the cape, Mildred felt a nudge from Doc.

“What pray tell is a ‘clonie’?” he said.

“Cloned organism is my guess. These bastards must be protein starved. The south pole is a frozen desert.”

Doc nudged her again, indicating with a nod all the gleaming blades lined up on the table. They had their hands free, edged weapons were within easy reach, but they still didn’t know what they were up against. The fact that the knives were so available bothered her. Why would their captors trust them? Unless they were so outnumbered and outgunned it didn’t matter.

“Not yet,” she said, taking in the dozens of carcasses in the process of disassembly and the laborers doing the work. “We haven’t seen enough to make our move.”

Skinning pengies turned out to be much harder than it looked because of the weight of the wet cape as it was peeled back. She and Doc worked together to tear it down the length of the carcass. Once that was done, Oscar began the next lesson, separating the still feathered wings from the torso. He cut the heavy shoulder joints at just the right angle and the wings dropped off, falling into the bucket.

“You can’t split the backbone with a knife,” Oscar said. “Too damn thick.” He picked up a handsaw with prominent teeth and stepped onto an overturned bucket. “Start here,” he told them, “get the blade bit into the center of the spinal column. Be careful to stay in the middle of the spine and go slow so you make a clean cut all the way down.”

It took five or six minutes of concerted effort for him to reach the tailbone. As the cut deepened, the unmeathooked half of pengie began to separate, leaning outward. Oscar directed Mildred and Doc to catch the weight on their shoulders to keep the saw from catching. Bonemeal mixed with blood dripped steadily into the bucket.

When the carcass was cut clean through, the half pengie, well over 150 pounds, came down on their backs. Oscar waved for them to flop it onto the metal table, which they did. He then picked up cleaver and butcher knife and set about cutting it into chops and roasts. The dense meat was almost black and very slippery because of the fat, which remained soft and wet even in the cold room.

Mildred and Doc were transferring the final product to a rolling cart when the annoying Muzak was replaced by the sound of buzzer.

All around, workers put down their tools and headed for the exit.

“What’s going on?” Mildred asked.

“It’s lunch break,” Oscar said. “You don’t want to miss it. Come on, the cafeteria is this way.”

They left their bibfronts and gloves on the hooks in the hall and followed their instructor and the others. As they moved deeper into the center of the complex, Mildred scanned the walls, hoping to see the multilevel, full-scale maps they’d found in other redoubts. That would give them an idea of its size and layout and their position relative to escape routes. But there were no maps. The walls were unbroken expanses of blank gray concrete.

The throng filed into a sprawling, low-ceilinged room with row upon row of occupied tables, and headed for the serving area at the back. The aromas from the kitchen were complex, semi-industrial and thoroughly off-putting: the bouquet of burning tires mingled with scorched oatmeal and smoking fish grease.

Roughly two hundred people were already eating. There were men and women, a mixed bag of racial types, but none that Mildred could see were fat or old. There were no children, either. The diners were, if anything, uniformly scrawny. A few wore whitecoats, while the others were dressed in overalls of different colors—navy, green, black, red, orange, khaki. She and Doc were the only yellows in the room, and that drew stares from all sides. Over the piped-in Muzak there was hubbub and clatter, loud conversation and laughter. The setting made her think back to the year 2000, when she had been a guest for lunch at the Microsoft campus outside Seattle. Except the residents here were hunched over their plates, all business, shoveling in grub as fast as they could. She wondered what they all did to earn their keep.

“Get in line over here,” Oscar told them. “Grab a tray.”

Mildred and Doc did as they were told, sliding empty trays along belt-high rails toward the serving stations. Behind glass sneeze guards, workers in white were ladling food from a hot table setup—rows of stainless-steel trays—onto plates. As Mildred got closer, she could see what was on offer. There was a purple-black porridge dish. When served it was decorated with a spiky crown of what looked like black potato chips. Next to it in a serving tray was a gellike material—it looked like a mass of clear silicon caulk. Accompanying this were round slices of a compact bread smeared with gray paste.

As the server, a stick-figure female in a hairnet, spooned a big gob of the black porridge for her, Mildred said, “Uh, what is that?”

The cafeteria worker looked up from the plate she held and took notice of the yellow overalls. “Sure thing, newbie,” she said, slapping the porridge down dead center. “This is quinoa steamed with pengie blood.” She grabbed a handful of the blackened chips from an adjoining tray and deftly made a little crown of them. “With pengie skin crispies for garnish and a side of anchovy-herring pâté on quinoa bread.” Using a different serving spoon, she scooped up some of the clear stuff and let it ooze onto the plate. “And this is pengie egg soufflé.”

“Looks like uncooked egg white to me,” Mildred said.

“It’s pengie egg,” the server said, as if that information explained everything.

“So?”

The woman shot Mildred an exasperated look. “Pengie egg,” she repeated slowly as if to a small child. “The white never sets. It always looks like that, no matter how long you cook it or at how high a temperature. It’s protected by some kind of natural antifreeze. Don’t worry it’s fresh...”

Her words were lost in a sudden, grinding roar. Then everything began to shake. A Klaxon blasted a series of hair-raising pulses, obliterating the symphonic version of a Barry Manilow classic.

“Hang on!” the server shouted at them.

Mildred and Doc grabbed for the serving rails to keep from being thrown to the floor, which undulated in waves, as if it had turned to liquid. Gray dust rained down from the ceiling. The glass counter windows rattled violently in their steel frames. No one screamed, no one abandoned their food. As quickly as it had begun, it was over.

“Just a little icequake,” Oscar said. “Nothing to worry about. You’ll get used to them.”

Then he turned to the server and said, “Give them each a full portion. They’ve got a lot of work to do today.”

Mildred protested the show of generosity, but to no avail. A full portion is what she was handed.

When Doc received his plate, he stared in horror at the pâté of glistening, smashed, predigested fish.

The man in line behind them had to have read Doc’s expression because he leaned in and said, “Hey, if you’re not going to eat that...”