Everything Inc.: The Precious and the Broken
Page 8
Dan’s heavy arm fell over my shoulder.
“Let’s go drink some beers,” he said.
EPILOGUE
DAVE WAS SHAKEN AWAKE by another caravan coursing down the channel. Most nights he’d sleep through it, but lately, sleep was uneasy. The drugs didn’t help; they seemed to bite back in the middle if the night these days. He’d wake with those ephemeral thoughts still drifting through his mind; the ones he tried washing away with booze and drugs in the first place. What was the end-game? What was he doing here? And what was really going on at the end of the tunnel?
Sleep wouldn’t come again. With an inspired anger, he started walking, following the slow-moving carts at a distance. What was he afraid of anyway? Dan had gone; he’d seen the two men walking back out of the channel the other day. Maybe Dan was right. Maybe Dave was wrong. Maybe he was crazy, seeing things. So he walked.
He sneaked close to the last cart as it went through the open gate and around the right side of the caravan as the man went back to secure the lock after they’d passed. An uneasiness settled in his stomach as he heard the click of the lock. But no one had noticed him.
The procession continued. Further down the tube, he returned to the rear of the cars and followed. There were ladders leading up to manholes above, but he hadn’t come this far to break off yet. He wanted to see where these cars were going. He was through speculating.
Awhile later, the cars were slowing down. The dim, red lights had brightened a bit, and the whirring of machinery had gotten louder as they went. When the cars finally stopped, he went around the right side of the caravan and into the dark by the far walls of the channel, behind a row of intermittent support columns. He crept from column to column, careful to stay ducked below the dim marker lights from the ceiling.
More of the square cars up ahead. Many, many more of them. He tiptoed away from the columns and out to a railing looking out over a long, low depression, the cars dipping down one by one, rolling out to a deep, intubated pit. One of the trailers tilting backwards on hydraulic pistons like the bed of an enormous dump truck. Out rolled bodies. Limply tumbling into the pit. The faint smell reached him now; the sour waft of death escaping from the powerful vacuum system.
“Hey! You there!”
Dave turned to see two gasmasked men closing in on him. He wouldn’t have had much longer anyway, he figured, not with all the drugs he was doing. And what would he have done anyway? Tell everybody? He’d been telling them for years. They all thought he was crazy.
As the gun barrel raised toward his face, he noticed dimly a poster of President Len Carter hanging benevolently on the far wall of the tunnel. He remembered the paper he’d signed, certifying that he pledged to be an asset to Enterprise, above all else. The Contract of Usefulness, was that it? Close enough...
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