The Reductionists

by JT Pearson

  *

  My name was called and I left the waiting room in the enormous Government building that was shaped more like a castle than an institution. The agent that was going to interview me met me just inside his office with a big grin and his hand out. I took it and shook it firmly. He continued to hold it as he made pleasantries.

  “James Morrison.”

  “Yes, sir.” He continued holding my hand even though I attempted gently to retract it. “And your name, sir?”

  “No. that’s not necessary. You don’t need to know my name.” He studied the piece of paper in his free hand. “Do you prefer James or Jim?’

  “Jimmy, actually.” Still pumping my hand. “You’ve got a real firm grip there, Jimmy.”

  “Okay, let’s see here. My file says that you haven’t got another job. We really prefer our men to have this job along with a more regular job.” He looked down more closely at the piece of paper while we continued our awkward introduction near the entrance. “Says here that you haven’t had a job in over three months.” He smiled even wider. “So, what have you been up to with all of that free time on your hands?”

  “Mostly masturbating. It fills the days,” I said looking down at my hand. The smile drained from his face and he jerked his hand away and wiped it on his pant leg.

  “Take a seat, Mr. Morrison.” He managed to erase the look of disgust that had taken over his face and transformed it into something somewhat neutral and professional.

  “So,” he looked down at his notes, “you have been recommended by another of our reductionists. He feels that you would be a good fit in this job. I like your friend Frank and I respect his opinion but I do have some questions for you.”

  “Of course.”

  He tapped on his desk and a form appeared on the glass, clear for his view but blurred from my angle.

  “Have you ever hunted animals?”

  “No.”

  “Never?”

  “No.”

  “Why is that, Mr. Morrison? Do you have an aversion to the idea? Does it make you uncomfortable?”

  “No. I just never had the opportunity. I eat fried chicken nearly every day. I’m fully aware that someone kills those chickens. Animals die.”

  “And would you say that you take pleasure in the thought of animals dying?”

  “Listen, I know that Frank told you that we used to spend our afternoons shooting hundreds of rats. That’s because the Pollution Control Unit snuck a few beers out of the coolers on the back of their machine and gave them to us for helping them out. We were only fifteen. We couldn’t buy beer. It’s not that I loved killing rats so much as I loved beer. I’m not some sadist if that’s what you’re looking for.”

  “By no means. We’re looking for a detachment. A neutrality.”

  “Then I’m your man because I don’t really give a shit about much of anything.”

  A few questions followed but they were rather insignificant and then the interview concluded. I figured that I probably didn’t get the job but I wasn’t disappointed.

  It wasn’t even two weeks later that I was called in to the office of the Citizen’s Force Population Reduction Division and given a small training manual and some work tools. I waited a couple more weeks to work into the rotation and then one day my little contact bracelet started blinking green and chirping like a cricket. I arrived at the Super Transport with time to spare. Frank had been posted to fly on a separate transport so I wasn’t going to be seeing him until the unit that he was with met up with our crew.

  I boarded the transport to the most putrid smell that I’ve ever encountered. Looking around the ship at the reductionists was an eye opening experience to be certain. I’d expected to see mostly young people, young males like me, but it wasn’t the case. There were a few males around my age but the rest of what made up my unit were elderly people. Both men and women in their sixties, several in their seventies. I thought about the fourteenth straight euthanasia proposition that had been shot down the month before, just too many of these old people to outvote. Apparently recruiting citizens to fill in for the fleeing regular military wasn’t going as well as it once had. Government reports came back consistently indicating that public opinion was highly in favor of population reduction but when it came to the actual practice of the law, by the looks of the recruits there didn’t seem to be so many that were willing to act on it. When I thought I was being screened carefully so that Pop Reduc could find their perfect soldier, the two weeks that I waited had been nothing more than bureaucratic red tape, processing time. They were taking anybody they could get.

  In the two months that preceded my arrival things had gotten so bad that recruiting agents had been raiding retirement homes for able-bodied elderly, promising them warm meals, comfortable footwear, and someone to talk to. Each of the Citizen’s Force platoons was run by a regular army sergeant and his second in command, who was generally a regular army private. The sergeant, gaunt with high cheekbones, spiky white hair, and deep-set washed blue eyes, looked disgusted as he studied his ‘I guess you’d call them soldiers.’ The private was struggling with an old woman’s foot, trying to get a boot on it.

  “I don’t understand why they’re not going on. I guess it could be my bunions causing all of this trouble. I’ve been a size seven since the day I was married. It was one of my late husband’s favorite things about me. My delicate feet that is. Don’t get me wrong. He wasn’t one of those perverted toe sniffers or anything. He was a perfectly decent man. He just admired pretty feet. He was in advertising, my Harold. Cat food mostly. He even worked with Morgan in one campaign. You remember Morgan, the famous cat. My Harold said that he was a pain in the caboose to work with, so spoiled. He always hissed at Harold. That reminds me. I wanted to ask again about Mr. Pickles. He’s my cat. Why is it again that Mr. Pickles can’t accompany us into…” She droned on as he struggled with her foot.

  The private was well tanned and prematurely gray He dripped with perspiration as he wrestled with her foot. He had a kind face and a patient demeanor but it was starting to wear thin. Finally he interrupted her.

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t try an eight or even a nine?”

  “A nine? Now you’re just being rude.”

  I saw the sergeant look around nervously before sneaking the end of a small plastic tube from his pocket and plugging it into his nostril. My worst fear was confirmed as I saw him work a valve in his pocket and bright red gas travel the tube and disappear up his nose. The worst drug a person could get mixed up with. Clauster gas. It created a sadistic high. A vicious high that gave you inhuman strength and robbed you of your compassion. Recent controversial studies had linked the drug to the onset of schizophrenia. Abusers heard voices directing them toward violent acts earning the drug the street name Demon Speak. And as I’ve mentioned, enough of a dose can turn your brains into oatmeal. The medical profession insisted that the drug was invaluable when not abused, citing its uses for controlling depression and diabetes. The bitter smelling clauster gas was also what I had been smelling since I’d arrived. I saw many of the old timers also carefully, discreetly slipping tubes up their noses. The sergeant’s tube snaked back into his pocket and disappeared. His eyes flickered and rolled up before settling back to normal, just a little red glow to them. By the time we reached our destination he’d be a raging lunatic sporting the ‘clauster death grin’, just like all the other clauster abusers on the transport. That’s how they transformed this crew that looked more like the regular bingo crowd at a retirement home into a squadron of deadly soldiers. Apparently we really were above the law and I could see that the government couldn’t afford to lose any of us, especially not these clauster addicts.

  An old timer, around seventy five, walked the aisle of the train greeting people. He was spilling from his undersized uniform, as his stomach hung well over the front of his pants, but he didn’t seem to mind, shaking hands and grinning. I knew him from somewhere. I figured it out. He also worked as a gre
eter at my local Wal-Mart. “New recruit Private Lee Mackey, pleased to make your acquaintance.” He gripped hands firmly one after the other and shook heartily.

  From the back of the train I heard an old woman yell out, “roll out the barrel!”

  Everybody joined in singing the old drinking polka classic except for the sergeant who took cover under his jacket and took a nap. Occasionally, his head poked out and surveyed his crew before returning to his makeshift foxhole.

  I examined the heat gun that they’d issued me. It was heavier than it looked. I rolled it from hand to hand and tickled the safety with my thumb, getting a feel for it. These heat guns made it much easier for the biohazard crew that came behind us jamming to music and tossing the cubed, dried bodies into the disposal bins.

  When we arrived at our destination it was raining. I immediately understood my platoon’s penchant for polka as it belted from the transport’s external sound system. It felt like a party. Studies had suggested that music kept people’s spirits high and on the task at hand and polka was the best of all those tested to do that from jazz to Gregorian chant. And it also created the great ‘what’s happening panic’ among our target when we landed. The people of the city became a stampede as they figured out what was going on and tried to flee, slipping and falling and getting up again. The doors of the transport opened and we exited fully armed and ready to reduce population. I don’t want her-you can have her-she’s too fat for me, bellowed merrily from the speakers as elderly terminators rubbed their hips and bad backs, hobbling after the people of Houston, firing heat slugs into their backs that sunk in and sizzled.

  Our kind-faced private strolled along, adding a little dance to his step almost keeping time with the music while accurately keeping count of the bodies with a similar device to what is used when taking a store’s inventory. He tapped the keypad steadily as he hummed along with the polka. The sergeant brandished an antique firearm, possibly an old magnum. Every so often he would draw it and fire at someone, not really discerning whether it was one of us or the scrambling Texans. It really made no difference, as he was too high to hit anyone anyway. Like Frank had said, I found it far easier than I thought it would be to join my fellow reductionists firing into the crowd. I cooked a young redhead who was running away with her cocker spaniel in her arms. Next, I shot a young, nicely-groomed and utterly stunned black man who’d been strolling along listening to his music too loud to register us, his head protected from the rain under his hoodie. Just a fraction of a second before he noticed what was coming he looked up, his face frozen in what would be eternal bewilderment, catching the heat slug in his chest. Then I took down a beautiful old Korean woman wrapped in traditional garb. Her robe melted to her skin causing her to resemble a uniquely-patterned package. I felt giddy and even fired a couple of slugs back toward our sergeant, but I really wasn’t making much of an effort to hit him as the first was a behind the back maneuver and the other between the legs. The sergeant appreciated the sentiment. After a couple of hours we were called back to the transport and informed that we had to get out of the way and allow the cleanup crew to come in and do their job. What just happened? I thought to myself. Was it second hand smoke from all of the clauster that made me so detached, so cavalier about human life? I had no idea that I would behave the way that I had. As I sobered up on the trip home I became sick and I threw up on the old Wal-Mart greeter’s boots. He clapped me on the back when I was through and smiled.

  I found out that Frank had been high on clauster all the time. I resisted for a while but I was already getting a contact high every time we went out so eventually I just gave in and started sucking down clauster gas too. One job, after we were finished, our quota filled, and we were filing on to the transport, Frank turned and flamed a bus full of school children that had survived the reduction. Our quota had been filled! He just smoked them all for no reason without even a change of expression and turned and boarded the transport to go home. I was so high that I could barely register what he had just done but I knew that it was messed up. When I came down from the gas I hated him for it. Why had all of these perishing lives not had any effect on me until I watched children die? It wasn’t against regulation to kill them. It was just a sort of unwritten rule among all of the reductionists. All of them except Frank. After that, I found myself more and more fearing the thought that I might become like Frank.

  Phoenix, San Antonio, Columbus, Detroit, they all went by like a blur, killing women in cowboy hats, street thugs in do rags, women in pant suits, men is dresses – I even shot a dog. I wasn’t supposed to do it but it jumped at me when it should’ve run. I avoided killing children. I just couldn’t shoot them. The fact that Frank would never left my mind. I decided that I was going to kill Frank when the opportunity presented itself.

  Months passed and that opportunity never came because Frank quit Pop Reduc, citing severe emotional fatigue, and for me, all of the screaming voices and panicking crowd bled into one numb clauster-saturated sleepy bloodbath movie with a polka fueled soundtrack. It seemed that I was always on the way to kill people, killing people, or on the way back from killing people. I became a full fledged clauster addict just like Frank had been, just like the sergeant and three quarters of the Citizen’s Force, getting jacked through the top of my skull before every reduction, rarely bothering to come down anymore. The people seemed so beautiful when you killed them that way. The government knew we had all become addicts and they didn’t care. It put a little pep in our step and kept us from asking annoying questions like, “are you really sure it’s okay to kill these people?” While traveling on the transport I would hear the old people talking amongst each other, saying things like, “we would’ve never dreamed of doing things like this when we were young.”

  It was about fifteen and a half months after I joined Pop Reduc that Minneapolis came up for reduction. The nation had three cities to choose from. Minneapolis, which really didn’t belong in the vote, New York city, and Orlando, which would’ve certainly lost if it hadn’t been for a last second grass roots campaign by the Association of the Elderly to band their votes together and protect the retired community in Florida.

  Minneapolis, after following every rule, from mandatory sterilization after one child to refusing to fund their grandparents when it pertained to serious medical issues, was up for reduction. It made no sense.

  The transport lowered through flurries under a gray overcast, typical Minnesota afternoon, and landed in downtown Minneapolis near Nicollette, blaring In Heaven There Is No Beer from the exterior sound system. I was good and high as I stumbled out of the train, eyes nearly glowing. I wondered if my parents were out shopping. Amazingly, I immediately spotted an old classmate, Frederick Glum. He was always picked last in gym class because he was so slow, and unfortunately for him, that hadn’t changed as I easily chased him down and planted a heat slug right between his heaving, sweat-drenched shoulders. Freddy’s body provided a lot more sizzle than most.

  I couldn’t believe my luck. I spotted Frank, the son of a bitch. He was jumping back and forth trying to figure out where to go. He headed into a small boutique to hide and I followed him. I kept my gas mask down over my face so that he wouldn’t recognize me. I found him hunkered behind a rack of ladies underwear.

  “Come out from back there, you pervert,” I said in my deepest, most authoritative voice.

  “Please! Please! Just leave me here and reduce someone else. I’m young. I have my whole life to live. Please, I’m begging you.”

  “Come out. Don’t die like a coward.”

  “You’re going to shoot me! You’re going to shoot me!” he mumbled as he cried. He stumbled out from his hiding spot camouflaged with a pair of pink panties on his head, and a pile of bras hanging over his shoulders. He was peering through the leg hole. The clauster gas made him look a lot like a space traveler. I kind of expected him to fly away, but he didn’t. Frank didn’t recognize me through the mask.

  “You some kind of si
cko that likes to wear women’s panties on your head?”

  “No. I promise. I promise. If I were, I’d certainly expect you to shoot me. But I’m not. I’m not. I’m just like you.” He stood, tears streaming down his cheeks, and his hands above his pantied head. “Just like you, I promise. I actually used to be a reductionist.”

  “I guess that’s the problem, isn’t it?” I lifted my mask and aimed for his chest.

  “Jimmy? Wait, Jimmy! Wait!”

  I blazed him and he shriveled into a neat package after a bit of sizzling.

  During our next reduction I cornered a man in Portland that swore he didn’t live there, a misunderstanding, he was from DC, worked in the president’s administration. He insisted that he snuck out of DC to visit his sister that he hadn’t seen in a decade because she had cancer. He said his assistant covered for him back in Washington, and that he actually worked for Pop Reduc too, just like me, collecting data and putting the offending states up for vote. He had been caught off guard when we arrived. He was stunned. Before leaving for Portland he left the codes and procedural duty up to his assistant, and once the codes had been dialed in there was no stopping what had been put into motion. He knew that Portland was a safe destination because the losing city had been predetermined. There was no actual voting. It was a facade. The cities were chosen by the government. That day it was supposed to have been Akron. His assistant must’ve made some kind of mistake, the man insisted. “You were supposed to have been in Ohio.” Every vote counts, I thought to myself, sarcastically, the phrase that continually ran across the screen on Pop Reduc nights. I believed the man when he claimed that he was from DC but I also believed that his assistant back in DC had been looking for a promotion when the job that had belonged to the man in front of me on his knees became vacant. I dragged the man out of sight and allowed him to trade his log in ID and the codes that would allow me to adjust the tally of ballots that provided the selection for population reduction. Then I reduced him and headed for the transport. I ran into Ernie. He lowered his camera and he looked at me strangely but I didn’t think he’d seen what had transpired.

  Tuesdays and Saturdays were the nights of the Pop Reduc vote. It was Saturday and William Shatner was hosting. First he told a bunch of jokes about how old he was and then he did this strange musical collaboration with Courtney Love where he spoke bad poetry and she sang along. A model walked on stage and handed an envelope to Shatner. He took the envelope, smiled, and opened it, pausing before pulling out the little card with the name of the city that had registered the most votes.

  “This is so exciting. The votes are in and you’ve made your decision, America. Right now, as we speak, the Population Reduction team is landing in the city that you decided needed a reduction the most.” His grin was ear to ear. “I’ve got goose bumps.” He pulled the card from the envelope. “Wait. Is this right? Should I actually read this?” Off camera the nation heard the voice of the director, “Shut off the remote camera to the Transport System! Turn it off!”

  I found the man that I told you would be home at the beginning of this story. I ran into the Oval Office and President Howard stood up at his desk with that fake smile of his and held out his hand like he expected me to shake it. I raised my gun and pointed it at his forehead. Just before I squeezed the trigger I heard a couple of pops and I dropped to the floor. Secret service men walked out from where they had been waiting for me. Ernie stood over the top of me and filmed my eyes as I lay dying. Across the country on all the screens that were viewing this live, the words, TERRORISTS ATTEMPT BRAVELY THWARTED BY PRESIDENT HOWARD appeared. My limbs grew cold and I felt like I was slowly shrinking into myself. The room got darker. I tried to bring my arm up and detach the box that was recording my vital signs but I could no longer move that arm. Ernie moved in for a better angle. President Howard, the monster that had put this law into action hovered above me.

  I could hear President Howard talking to the head of the Secret Service as they bent over me, the President never losing his smile. He spoke quietly but Ernie’s microphone picked up what he was saying and fed it to the people back home.

  “Ron, what the hell is wrong with people these days? You give them a good job with benefits and they still want to put a hole in your forehead.”

  “You’re right, Mr. President. No one knows what’s good for them anymore.”

  I watched the blinking light on Ernie’s camera until I drifted away, while America watched too.