Dire Means

by Geoffrey Neil

  Pop seemed satisfied with her explanation and pressed the remote. The video continued. It showed Morana and the other Trail Bladers wheeling Keith onto the freight elevator. Nanette stroked his head and dabbed his mouth with the cloth she still held, but did not answer his muffled grunts. Raphael unfolded a black tarp and snapped it open. They draped it over Keith’s body to conceal him.

  The short loading dock spanned less than twenty feet from the freight elevator door. A shiny red and black Trail Blader truck was backed to it, and its large rear doors swung out from the center, blocking any view of the bound and gagged Keith Mendalsen from the street. The lights on the loading dock blinked off. In less than five seconds, they wheeled Keith from the freight elevator into the back of the dimly lit armored truck, labeled “Trail Bladers Subterranean Data Destruction.”

  Inside the truck, they pulled the tarp off and slid Keith and his gurney into the chute. Keith heaved and struggled under his restraints. They closed the lid of the chute and wheeled in several large metal containers on top of Keith’s temporary tomb before closing the truck’s heavy rear doors. The diesel engine coughed and then rumbled to a deep growl that drowned out the faint thumping of Keith’s body inside the hatch.

  Pop stopped the video and turned up the lights. His PDA beeped from inside his pocket. He pulled it out and made his usual strained look at it from about twelve inches. He touched the screen and returned it to his pocket.

  “That was our first obtainment, Mark,” he said. “And it took a mere two-hundred-forty seconds from the fodder’s entry into our vestibule until the truck pulled away from the loading dock. Our obtainments have since become more polished. In fact, we’ve improved so much that we can obtain fodder from any of our buildings quicker than the elevator buttons cool from the fodder’s touch.”

  The screen retracted into the ceiling and then Morana stood to take a phone call. She turned toward the wall and said, “Great, I’ll let him know.” She turned back to Pop and said, “I have to go or the fodder may damage itself.”

  “Fine. Mark, your timing is good. Come, we are going to show you the very next phase of fodder processing.” Pop led them out.

  Mark’s nervousness grew as they walked toward the now-familiar garage foyer. He was possibly going to see fodder—dying fodder. As they entered the foyer, Pop stopped a few feet from the mural of Mark and gazed at it with hand on his chin, smiling. “What a night. I want to thank you for autographing our image of you.”

  “I wish I could say it was my pleasure,” Mark said.

  Pop laughed.

  Again, Mark noticed the red door on the opposite wall of the foyer. It had no knob, handle, or console. He was about to ask what it was for when Pop said, “At the conclusion of the video we watched in my office, you saw the fodder transported by truck. They arrive here as our guests.”

  Just then, the garage door swung opened. Raphael entered, wheeling a chubby man—bound, gagged, and tilted back on a red and black hand truck. The man wore a chef’s uniform and his mouth was stuffed with a ball gag. His terrified eyes shot from Pop to Mark and then attempted to look back over his own shoulder.

  Pop said, “What’s cooking, fodder? Welcome. We’ve been waiting for you.”

  Morana went to the handle-less red door and waited.

  The bound man yelled something, but the gag wrestled his tongue, mutating his words into drivel.

  “Who are we? We’re Trail Bladers. And you’ve cooked yourself up a vacation at our resort.” As with Ty, Pop answered, having understood every word the chef squeezed out from under the gag. “By the way, you’ll be happy to know you won’t need to tolerate the homeless while you’re on vacation. We’ve arranged for a suite with no unpleasant sights and no needy people nor their smells.”

  The man hummed six syllables.

  “What do we want from you?” Pop said.

  The chef nodded.

  Pop stepped closer to the chef and lowered his voice. “We want to know if you could find it in your heart to help us execute our mission.”

  The chef nodded hard and said, “Um hmm, um hmm, um hmm.” Even Mark could understand that. The man’s eyes lit up with hope.

  “They all want to help,” Pop said to Mark. The chef’s face regained some of its worry.

  “You are going to help us in a way that the whole world will see. But for you, it might take a while longer,” Pop said as he thumped the back of two fingers on the chef’s belly and pointed to the red door.

  The chef screamed through the gag as Raphael leaned him back and then rolled him toward the door. Morana had her phone to her ear. When the chef came near she said, “Now—open it now.”

  Mark heard a series of five metallic sounds like that of electronic deadbolts unlocking in sequence followed by a hiss, then the door slid open. Pop motioned for them to enter a small hallway, painted red, with a small sign on the inner wall that read, “The Sty.”

  The first thing Mark noticed was the smell. It rushed out the door and filled the foyer before they could enter—grilled meats and BBQ. He thought perhaps they had entered a kitchen of some sort, but he knew the diner was in a distant area of the Nest. “What is that smell coming from?” he asked.

  “We employ some of the best chefs in the west,” Pop said.

  “We’ll explain the delicious aroma shortly,” Morana added.

  The heavy red door slid shut behind them and dead bolts locked into place. Mark noticed a security console inside the door, but not outside.

  Raphael wheeled the chef into a small room off the side and closed the door behind him.

  “I’m so sorry you had to observe that fodder,” Pop said to Mark. “In the future we’ll try to keep them out of sight—they are such an eyesore.”

  “He didn’t bother me,” Mark said.

  “Well, their begging is embarrassing and sometimes fodder can be downright intimidating in their demands of us. I didn’t put them in their situations. They made choices that brought their lives to this,” Pop pointed back at the red door through which they had entered, “and suddenly we’re supposed to help them out so they can do it again? Ha! It’s ridiculous!”

  “I get your point,” Mark said.

  “Good. We simply prefer not to see them or smell them or, God forbid, touch them. Just as the public relocates our brothers and sisters on the streets, we occasionally move our fodder to cleanse our environment. It makes our living space so much more aesthetically pleasing.”

  “Is there no way that fodder can convince you to spare their lives?”

  “Obviously you are new to dealing with fodder,” Pop said. “You see, Mark, if you give them anything, they linger—on and on and on.” Pop made a rolling gesture with this hand. “Our goal is to end their need for help. And so far we have succeeded with every fodder—eventually.”

  Raphael laughed and Pop continued, “Who knows why they get themselves into such a predicament? They’ve had the same opportunity as I’ve had to be responsible and to avoid the trouble they are in. I’ve maintained my freedom my whole life. I don’t know why they can’t just do what I did.”

  Mark couldn’t tell if Pop’s comparison of fodder and homeless people was sarcastic or simply the warped logic of insanity. “What is happening to the fodder right now?” Mark said, pointing to the door where the chef had disappeared.

  “He’s being dressed—put into something a bit more comfortable,” Pop said. “He’s almost ready. Meanwhile, I’ll show you the heart of our fodder sty.”

  Pop led them around the corner from the small red outer room into a bigger room a hundred feet long. The low lighting made the room feel like an unlit warehouse interior at dusk. A narrow walkway split two rows of chrome manhole covers the size of automobile tires. The covers faced up on the dirt floor and each had a two-foot arm handle protruding up at an angle. Small LCD monitors stood waist high beside each cover, their screens faced, and illuminated, the narrow walkway.

  Darkness shrouded the high edges of the roo
m. Morana spoke into her phone. “Light please,” she said. Floor lights came on and revealed the faint shapes of rods, wheels, and pulleys tucked in the high ceiling.

  Two long leather straps hung from the ceiling a few feet away. The bottom of each strap had a silver hook. Morana said, “A-17,” into her phone and a motor in the ceiling whined. Long straps glided beside the walkway, their bottoms lagging behind at an angle like ghostly drapes. They moved with robotic precision to a place over a distant shiny cover. The straps and hooks swayed back and forth before stopping directly over the cover.

  “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 Moran
a’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.