Nicola Lombardi - The Tank

“Keeper?”

Scar’s mellow, yet mocking voice called him to his duty. This time he wouldn’t just shut up, so he stared right in the man’s mirror lenses: “Don’t worry, Guard. I know my duty.”

After such an answer, not wanting to give the Guard time to retort, he brought his thumb to the Closing button and vigorously pressed it, tightening his lips. Again the hidden mechanism’s quiet rustle. The dark glass door closed.

From the outside Goran’s hair and red jersey were barely visible as he was the nearest, while the other two were no more that opaque silhouettes. It seemed to him that they were dangling on their feet, lost, trapped like rats in a glass cage.

The next button was the Disposal one (and there too trivial jokes about toilets and excrements had sprawled). Giovanni waited for a second, implicitly stating that he was aware of what he had to do and how he should do it.

From the Ring’s side a muffled clang could be heard, followed by a buzz similar to the one of a dentist’s drill. Not the sharp, piercing one, rather the slow, chunky one that rotated with a low-pitched noise making the whole skull vibrate while extracting a rotten tooth. It was the sound of the platform moving.

What was happening inside the Shutter was inexorable in its simplicity. The Suffering had opened and the gum platform had started rotating forward. A small treadmill.

Giovanni counted in his head to thirteen, as he had been taught, then once again pressed the Disposal button. The buzz stopped immediately and another clang informed them that the Suffering had closed. Operation complete.

Scar didn’t comment. He wrote something on the form – probably the time at which the procedure had concluded – then said to Giovanni: “All being well, we will be back for two other deliveries today.”

Giovanni lifted the clipboard with the fax and showed it as if it was a giant banknote. “As per communication. And be on time.”

The two EGs looked at each other and, even if their expression remained unchanged, one could very well read the silent question that remained hung up in the air: Which of us is going to shoot him?

No, pals, you can’t do that was Giovanni’s answer, who simply started at their glasses. When the Guards turned on their heels and moved towards the elevator one could hear the noise of the ice breaking off their bodies to leave invisible puddles on the linoleum floor.

Giovanni waited, listening to the clattering noise of the elevator cabin’s descent down the concrete shaft.

Bravo, he told himself.

He immediately realized that his childish self-complementing was a two-bladed weapon. Yes, he had behaved well, both with the Disposal procedure and with the EGs, but he sure didn’t help strengthening the esprit de corps that the NMO’s higher ups valued so much. It was the barely noticeable movement of the clipboard insistently tapping against his thigh that made him realize his hands were shaking.

Once back in his flat he rapidly went to drink a glass of cold water. While he tried to focus on each second of pleasure given to him by the liquid caressing his dry throat he felt his mind detaching from all those all-in-all inane reflections on his behaviour and adhering, as if attracted by a giant magnet, to the true core of the matter: he had just carried his first execution . It was no simulation. He was finally truly part of the garbage disposal , as he had heard calling the Disposal. Three examples of the garbage corroding the Country day after day had been detached from the social context (expression taken from the manual word by word) and he was on the frontline for a whole year. Cleaning. That was the word. Everything else could easily slide to the background.

He went to the Control Room (already re-named Control for short) and sat before the console.

There they were, on the screen. Greenish, bent, crawling: his first three disposals. The gaping mouths, the legs shaken by convulsions, the feet that convulsively hit heads, stomachs, backs… he shivered, feeling a euphoric tingling on his skin. There had to be an awful smell in there. And the dark was almost absolute, apart from the dim neon light coming from the Ring and through the opaque walls of the Shutter, up on the top. A true hellhole.

He raised the hand that still held the empty glass in a toast to whoever invented the Tank system. It was that rigor, that inflexibility, that he had so enthusiastically greeted with the rise of the NMO.

No more in-between measures, no more accepting everything, no more cultural and religious invasions, no more impunity, with the suffocating rhetoric of idiotic do-godders. And also no more overcrowded jails, indulgences, nepotism, the soft line , which was no more than intellectual weakness, unequivocal symptom of decadence of any social order.

Since the NMO had seized the power crime had decreased by 60% in ten years. Giovanni remembered how things were before. He was young when the military coup that ended that unbearable farce known as the Fourth Republic. He had read a lot about it and the comparison wasn’t hard at all. The ancient pillars of corruption, clientelism, immorality and false politics had been destroyed with wrecking balls. If strong-arm tactics were necessary, well, bless them!

The movement in the screen didn’t seem to stop anytime soon. Giovanni observed it driven by curiosity while his body started relaxing after all the physical tension. At that moment he realized he hadn’t been able to watch the three convicts fall, filling him with dissatisfaction. Could he do something about that?

Sure.

He knew the console’s commands, like he knew that every single moment of the closed-circuit recordings was stored in the enormous hard drive in the central database. He didn’t hesitate and, willing to put his knowledge into practice, switched from REC mode to PLAY, then rewinded the timeline until he found what he was looking for… there it was!

The Shutter was always visible in the lower section of the screen. It was practically a darker rectangle on the circular edge. Giovanni sat back on the armchair and when the Suffering’s shutters opened he couldn’t help but whistle with satisfaction.

The first silhouette hesitated, standing on the edge like a shy diver. Then, undoubtedly pushed by the other two convicts, who were being dragged by the moving platform, he turned on his heels trying to get back in and fell on his back. Down under many shining dots disappeared and heads bent like mushroom that suddenly rot; the prisoners had recognised the Shutter’s sound, shut their eyes and moved trying to avoid the crash. Which happened, of course; found and painful in its greenish silence. The second convict jumped and “landed” on his feet, immediately bending over in a whirlwind of bodies twisting and screaming. There was a way to listen to the sounds coming from the Tank but Giovanni was so fascinated that didn’t think about turning the audio channel on. The third convict landed on his head, violently becoming a part of the big family (another unofficial term. Maybe he had managed to break his neck.

Giovanni had heard tales about convicts preferring trying to die in the fall rather than agonizing for an undefined amount of time. This was possible, of course, only if there was a long distance between the Shutter and the superficial layer of guests. If that was not the case, a voluntary self-harming fall could only lead to painful wounds and broken bones. There were even cases where those who were already lying in that mass of bodies tried to exploit the newcomers’ arrival to try and get their neck broken.

They were plausible stories. But there were also some that, on the contrary, were more fit for old drunk seawolves trying to tell the most absurd story, like in Moby Dick. For example, Giovanni was shocked hearing a third or fourth hand account about the convicts of a Tank managing to stand against the wall, climbing on each other’s shoulder like the members of a circus until they reached the Shutter. Balance wasn’t an issue since their hands were free (helping each other with their teeth, breaking the plastic cuffs wasn’t so difficult). Once on the top, one of the convicts supposedly managed to open the Suffering – or whatever its nickname in that particular Tank was – and entered the Shutter. Only the Keeper’s presence of mind (he was by chance walking by the screen) avoided a disaster. The ingredients for an urban legend were all there.