Дэймон Найт - Orbit 10

The crowd raised the bleeding body and chanted, Dogcatcher’s dying, dying, dying. The tank was a melted gray clot of metal. It bubbled and rivulets of silver lava flowed across the street, filling the gaping craters, snuffing out the glowing embers inside.

A family skittered past Mantle, half human, half dressed - a blond Belgian with two children, dirty, swollen, fair-skinned. Man­tle turned from the phantasm and ran. He ran from himself, he ran from a crowd that was all around him, he ran from his children who begged him. The crowd, pushing toward the tank, thinned out as Mantle ran the other way. Behind him the explosions be­gan again, melting foundations, cracking skyscrapers, rupturing the ground.

Mantle did not slow down until he became lightheaded from exhaustion. Then he walked aimlessly, keeping to the main thoroughfares; there was no place to go. The settling evening was calm: the wind softly whistled between the buildings, the heat rose from the cement, a blue-white star winked above him, and the full moon shimmered as a trail of cirrus passed across its face.

The wheeze of the wind unnerved him; shadows seemed to spring from every corner, from every doorway, yet he could not see anyone in the streets. Block after block, building after building, it was the same cardboard desolation. Unconsciously, he yearned to hear something besides the clatter of his heels and the wheezing of the wind, to fear something alive.

He heard something stir ahead. He stopped, listened, strained his eyes.

He heard a soft whisper. You killed them, you killed them. We saw you. We watched you. You left them, you left them and ran, ran.Another small voice joined the first. Run away ‘cause they’re dead, dead, dying, dying.

Mantle ran from the voices. I came back, he said to himself, then out loud, “I came back.” The whisper followed him. It screamed, it railed, it rose through the dead buildings.

You left them, you ran, runner. We were watching, we were waiting. Watching, waiting, watching, waiting. Runrun, now runrun that way, run this way runrun into the subway run; we’re in the tunnels, in the elevators, in the bank vaults, in the candy stores, in the cracks in the cement. So runrun; we’re waiting: running-waiting, running-waiting.

As Mantle ran he raised his head toward the infected moon, his eyes focused on the bleeding image shrouded in captured clouds. Three gnarled figures ran beside him, pale in the moon­light, yellow teeth snapping at the air.

They had begun to move into the streets, crashing into the stillness, pouring, merging with themselves, splitting, sucking flesh-soft debris into their vortex. Pressing, bloated figures flooded around Mantle, running with him, trapping him in a cage of movement.

You-them, you-them, you-them, you left, you left them. Floorsucker. We are waiting, we are waiting. Waiting for the floorsucker, waiting for, waiting for.

Mantle stumbled. The crowd poured over him, scratching at his eyes, snapping his bones, stripping his skin. Mantle huddled into a ball, his arms over his gaping eyes, legs against his chin. He opened his mouth, forcing the decayed, putrescent shout out of his bleeding throat. And he screamed, exhaling thick streamers of sound until he became only an instrument for his scream.

The diggers, the scratchers, the gougers shrank away from him, clots of his flesh warm in their hands. They shouted, mag­nifying Mantle’s lone strident scream. Unable to contain them­selves, mouths open like hungry birdlings, the spectators joined the deafening chorus.

The scream Mantle created was continuous, only the instru­ments, the individuals ran out of breath, to inhale, and slowly exhale, filling the spaces left by their breathless companions. Ooooommmm was the latent singsong-the Ooooo rising on the sound curve until it reached the mmmm which fell away into a grumble.

The pieces, the groups, the instruments converging, pushing into each other, raised Mantle above them. Mantle, his palms pressed against his drained orbits, convulsed and gagged on his distended tongue. He was the missing fragment forced into place: the newly coronated directing force. With sudden purpose he out­stretched his arm, watching it fossilize before him, willing his weakened joints into stiffness.

From his vantage point atop the crowd, Mantle could see the vastness of his legions milling past the pincushions of dark-windowed spires reaching into the night sky. Mantle, the petrified god, the hollow king, drew their energy, swam in their ecstasy, and drowned as he took his position in the natural order. Before him, out of sight, the sun readied itself to eclipse the evening.

For the Democratic National Convention

Every day, Mason would stand with his hammer and kill cows. The place was big—a long, high-ceilinged room, one end open to daylight, the other end stretching back into the depths of the plant. It had white, featureless walls—painted concrete—that were swabbed down twice a day, once before lunch and once after work. The floor could be swabbed too—it was stone, and there was a faucet you could use to flood the floor with water. Then you used a stiff-bristled broom to swish the water around and get up the stains. That was known as GIing a floor in the Army. Mason had been in the Army. He called it GIing. So did the three or four other veterans who worked that shift, and they always got a laugh out of explaining to the college boys the plant hired as temporary help why the work they'd signed up to do was called that. The college boys never knew what GIing was until they'd been shown, and they never understood the joke either, or why it was called that. They were usually pretty dumb.

There was a drain in the floor to let all the water out after the place had been GIed. In spite of everything, though, the room would never scrub up quite clean; there'd always be some amount of blood left staining the walls and floor at the end of the day. About the best you could hope to do was grind it into the stone so it became unrecognizable. After a little of this, the white began to get dingy, dulling finally to a dirty, dishwater gray. Then they'd paint the room white again and start all over.

The cycle took a little longer than a year, and they were about halfway through it this time. The men who worked the shift didn't really give a shit whether the walls were white or not, but it was a company regulation. The regs insisted that the place be kept as clean as possible for health reasons, and also because that was supposed to make it a psychologically more attractive environment to function in. The workmen wouldn't have given a shit about their psychological environment either, even if they'd known what one was. It was inevitable that the place would get a little messy during a working day.

It was a slaughterhouse, although the company literature always referred to it as a meat-packing plant.

The man who did the actual killing was Mason: the focal point of the company, of all the meat lockers and trucks and canning sections and secretaries and stockholders; their lowest common denominator. It all started with him.

He would stand with his hammer at the open end of the room, right at the very beginning of the plant, and wait for the cows to come in from the train yard. He had a ten-pound sledgehammer, long and heavy, with serrated rubber around the handle to give him a better grip. He used it to hit the cows over the head. They would herd the cows in one at a time, into the chute, straight up to Mason, and Mason would swing his hammer down and hit the cow between the eyes with tremendous force, driving the hammer completely through the bone and into the brain, killing the cow instantly in its tracks. There would be a gush of warm, sticky blood, and a spatter of purplish brain matter; the cow would go to its front knees, as if it were curtsying, then its hindquarters would collapse and drag the whole body over onto one side with a thunderous crash—all in an eyeblink. One moment the cow would be being prodded in terror into the chute that led to Mason, its flanks lathered, its muzzle flecked with foam, and then—almost too fast to watch, the lightning would strike, and it would be a twitching ruin on the stone floor, blood oozing sluggishly from the smashed head.