The Point of the Pit: Part Three

The Point of the Pit
by Zeroin

Part Three: Paul

"Bull."

Vince scowled around the stub of his candy bar. "Is not."

"Of course it is." Paul was fully turned away from his panel now. He was leaning back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest, wearing a look of amused derision on his face. "Total bull. That's all that was."

Vince rolled his eyes and popped the last inch of chocolate, caramel, and peanut butter into his mouth. Chewing purposefully, he shook his head. "What do you know, anyway? I could be right or I could be wrong, no one knows. That's the freaking point." He swallowed, and smirked. "Which you seem to have missed."

"Oh, you're part right, and you're part wrong," Paul said, grinning at Vince (and at the guest, and at Armand, but mostly at Vince, who looked at those gleaming, smirking teeth and wanted to crush every last one of them into powder). "You'd be all right if it weren't for a couple small details, I'll admit that. So maybe not total bull. We'll go with incomplete bull, for now. How's that sound?"

Vince's face was hard and waxy, caught in its expression by the force of his irritation. "Fine," he snapped, tugging at his coverall with agitated hands. "We'll go with that. But you gotta explain yourself." He leaned back in his own chair, mimicking Paul's position, right down to the crossed arms (the main difference was that Paul's hands were open and limp, while Vince's were taut and formed into brick-like fists). "'Cause you sure know more than you let on." He allowed himself a snide, serpentile smirk. "Or so you pretend."

"Unlike you, pretending isn't something I resort to," Paul snapped. Vince managed to convert his flinch into a petulant scowl before anyone could catch it. "If I have something to say, I say it, and not a word of it ends up false. You know that. You've been around me for years, Vincent, and I know you know. So don't you play games about all this; let's get it all straight instead: I don't lie. You don't lie, either, you just prance about in make-believe. You're a storyteller, I'm a reporter. People like you more because what you say sounds more exciting, more fantastic, more euphoric. You generate the fantastic, weaving as much excitement and intrigue and surprise in it as possible so that whoever hears your wondrous tale of flair and finery will be dragged into it like a hooked fish. You don't tell lies, you just ignore the truth and give people what you come up with on the fly."

Paul smiled, pink-red lips parting to expose ivory-cube teeth, shining like bright, baroque pearls. Vince tried his hardest to find even the smallest smidgen of spite, malice, sarcasm, poison, bile, or disgust behind those snow-white bicuspids--but even his hardest peering and his wildest mental machinations could not create what was clearly not there. Thus, Vince was faced with a starkly honest and friendly smile--something that neither Paul nor many of Vince's other acquaintances had ever graced upon the man. He was struck mute by that bold enamel crescent, shining at him from the face of a man who'd never liked him and never spared him so much as a single note of praise in all their years of parallel employment. He was completely flabbergasted by it.

"On the other hand, you've got me." Paul gestured at himself. "I'm a reporter. I see, I remember, I recall. Like a voice recorder. Hear, record, repeat. Maybe I whip it up a bit, add the emotions that I felt, or perceived, but for the most part I just tell it like it was. I lay down the facts, the truth, of what happened, why, where, and when. A lot of the time people don't like me, because what I say scares them, or angers them, or insults them, or depresses them. It makes them feel that way simply because they know that the stories of woe and sadness, of tragedy and defeat, of evil and tyranny, all of them are true. If there's anything that irritates a human being most, it's knowing that the world isn't as nice as it should be, and that people aren't as nice as they should be, either." His expression had gone serious and sour, and he was looking at Vince like a mother would look at an insolent child. Vince had to fight not to turn away from that look.

"We get it, we get it," Vince said, waving his hands. "You tell the truth, I make stuff up. We got it." He looked exasperated, his hands gripping his knees and his mouth twisted into a grimace. "Now c'mon, tell us your truth, Mister Reporter Man. You've left us hanging for too long, and some of us have breaks coming up right quick--breaks that we'd rather spend out in a restaurant instead of sittin' here and listenin' to you."

Armand glanced at his station. A display in the corner of the screen showed the time in well-defined blue LCDs. As he looked, the seconds ticked by, and they entered a new minute in the ever-flowing stream of time.

"He's right, we have limited time," Armand said, begrudging the first two words even as he said them.

Paul nodded, and looked at the guest, who had taken a seat across from him, next to Vince. Armand stood between them all, hands in the pockets of his coverall, fingers fidgeting with the lint. He felt like a man standing on the border between the camps of two armies, standing there as they charged one another with sword and shield, standing there about to get slain in their wanton combat. Shaking a little, he took a chair, put it down next to Paul's, and sat, hands still in his pockets. Paul gave a slight nod: acknowledgement of allegiance. It made Armand quiver.

The guest and Vince looked at Paul. Armand merely looked at them, gazing into their faces with his own stolid, blank gaze.

Paul flexed his shoulders a bit, loosening up, drew his sleeves up his arms like a magician preparing for his tricks, and smiled. Behind him, thousands of shiftless faces gazed blankly at the back of his head.

"Well..."

***

Bodies fell like hailstones from the great rift, their matter cold and heavy and numerous. They dropped quickly, slipping out of the faint light of the Pit above and into the velvet shadows below. Blondes, brunettes, redheads; the young, the elderly, the middle-aged; the babies, the toddlers, the teens, the tweens; healthy, sickly, dying, dead. All shapes. All sizes.

All fell.

The plummet was silent and sightless for a time. It was as if the bodies had passed out of atmosphere and into empty space, where there was no light and no air and no sound, where there was nothing but dust and death--where neither heat nor cold dared venture. The drop in the dark was so long that an observer might have been pressed to ponder if the bodies hadn't reached a pocket of anti-gravity and gone static mid-fall.

Blue-white light stretched into the darkness with soft, curving tendrils, gently caressing the bodies, wrapping and enfolding them in satin glow. Their forms half-cast in darkness, the bodies of these damned and destroyed eased into the light, descending down into the ungodly effervescence, their skin turning periwinkle as they grew closer to the cold luminescence, beaming from below.

There was a faint hum to the air, as if electricity lunged through it in steadily-streaking bolts. Indeed, there seemed to be some strange energy in the air, for as the bodies neared the terminus of their voyage, they slowed, their velocities easing into neutral, giving the impression that even the eternal orb of time had begun to slow, its axial rotation grinding and groaning as it shuddered to a halt.

And the bodies with it.

They hung like unattended marionettes, limbs askew in the air, hair caught in whirling curves, the strands glittering an ungodly blue in the light. Eyes stared dully into space. Mouths hung open like those of dead fish. Wounds glistened with cold blood, their pits and channels transformed into dark splotches and streaks by the swelling glow, which was swiftly transforming into a shining, sheering blaze. The source, unseen but not unfelt, seemed to be swelling, as if consuming glutinous volumes of energy and expelling it as unholy radiance, which built upon itself in thick, viscous layers. It was this light--and its inherent energy--that held the bodies aloft like detritus in still water, like marbles in gelatin. The pocket of anti-gravity had made an appearance after all.

They hovered for several minutes, stragglers dropping into place all around, the ever-present monotone hum strumming 'round them, blue bolts of electricity licking across their skin like sparking earthworms. Electron-thin lines of eldritch-blue power leapt from body to body, some chaining through as many as a thousand masses before expiring in soundless, invisible explosions.

A winding, curving length of silver cable slipped through the air, snapping its tapered tip around the waist of the nearest body, wrapping itself tight before dragging it down, out of the field of blue light, into the white. A thousand duplicates rose in its stead, mimicking their predecessor even as another thousand lifted high.

The first tentacle sped down, down, down--into white light, over a floor made of a hundred pale-blue depressions, like a multitude of bowls set rim-to-rim. Sensors along the inner length of the motorized appendage determined the body's specifics (male, one-hundred-thirty pounds, forty-eight, bald, seditionist, living), gleaned from a chip embedded in the flesh of the earlobe. This information allowed the tentacle to determine which of the many bowls to unceremoniously dump the body like a discarded toy, leaving it lying face-down against the cold metal. Six more bodies--all of similar ages, body types, and states of disrepair--piled atop him. All around and above, bodies were flung into the hemispherical depressions, the tentacles tossing them at just the right amount of force to be quick and efficient and yet keep the bodies from becoming further damaged in the process. It was swift, effective, economical. Cold.

A half-hour later, the final few bodies dropped into place in their respective bowls, some lying shallowly in their cool containers, others piled in bleeding mountains made of crooked limbs and twisted torsos. The tentacles, waving and weaving like the tendrils of an anemone, slid soundlessly into the hatches interspersed between the bowl-depressions, their shiny surfaces gleaming as they slipped out of view, the hatch doors sliding shut behind them with clanging finality.

The blue light faded away, the hum dying with it, the occasional bursting POP of electricity springing out from the growing silence. The anti-gravity emitters--glowing hemispheres extended on hydraulic arms, fingers of blue energy stretching from their sparking surfaces--slid into their own hatches along the side of the high, sloped walls of the brightly-lit Underchamber.

Blue faded, leaving only the white--and soon, even that began to fade, slowly, gently giving way to black. Even as it did, there was a creak, a groan, a rumble, and a half-mad shriek--as the bowl-like depressions moved forward, led along by a massive conveyer, journeying into shadow.



Journeying to the Separators.

One of the depressions lifted up off the track, propelled by sparking blue emitters all along its rim. Within its coldly-curved confines sat eight bodies, all fat and bald and old--and alive, some of them twitching even as the bowl rose into the air, silent as the grave. These particular bodies jerked like fish, flopping about, bodies smacking noisily together. Their flapping, numbed mouths managed only to utter half-grunts and frightened noises. They wriggled and writhed, unable to completely overcome the shackles of paralysis, while their strange wounds ached of agony and oozed precious blood. Eyes spun in their sockets like wheeling marbles, glancing all around with frantic anxiety. Those that laid on their backs in the bowl stared, stunned and frightened, up at the high ceiling, from which unrelenting light shone down, bright and cruel.

The bowl made its way through the air, its fellows following suit all around it. It floated to the nearest wall, which was separated into a mosaic of square-shaped tunnels, lining it from bottom to top. Each one was marked by numbers, highlighted in glowing green; they denoted every cubicle, from one to one hundred. A deeper, plainer version of the depressions took up the width of the mouth of each of the cubicles; red lights blinked on and off along its rim as the floating bowl docked with it, settling in with a clank and the sound of the emitters powering down, their blue light flickering out.

There was a thick buzz, like the amplified drone of a single bee. Then, with a spark and a flash, the rest of the tunnel filled with blue-white light. Tentacles slid from ports in the wall, curved and poised like living vines ready to attack. They lined the length of the corridor-like tunnel, gleaming and sparking, waiting.

Tentacles drew bodies into the tunnel, one by one, their lengths wrapped around arms, legs, necks, torsos, foreheads. As soon as their burdens were enveloped in the snapping, popping, snarling light, the tentacles released it, letting it float down the corridor, gently propelled by its own acceleration. The tentacles dove upon it, extending strange implements.

The bowl was quickly emptied, the very last body sliding into the anti-gravity even as the corridor was voided at the other end. It hung in the center of the tunnel, twitching with returning nervous control, neck jerking as it fought to turn its head to look around. Its eyelids fluttered, sometimes squinching closed as impulses got confused. A hand groped out towards the wall.

From that same wall came a tentacle, tipped with a long , thin needle. It deftly dodged the flailing hand and planted itself into the meat of the body's flabby thigh. It remained there for mere seconds before withdrawing, slipping into its port like an eel diving out of sight. Several other needle-nosed tentacles jabbed into arms, the other leg, the neck, the torso, injecting jaundice-yellow liquid into the body's sluggishly-pumping veins.

The body--that of a man reaching the boundaries of old age (evidenced by his declining hairline and increasing forehead)--jerked, twitched, flexed, and twisted in midair, fighting to scream, fighting to flail, fighting to push away, away from all that surrounded him. His mind, trapped inside something that felt more like a giant, flopping prison instead of the body he'd hauled around for decades, could only scream without a sound. Its cries grew epic as its vessel was dragged back into paralysis, limbs falling limp, eyes going still, breathing slowing, slowing...mind shrieking, shrieking…

FREE ME! FREE ME! FREE ME! I AM A HUMAN BEING, FREE ME! I AM A MAN! I AM A PERSON! I AM ALIVE! I AM ALIVE! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD LET ME GO! it wailed, its unheard howls doing nothing but echoing back.

There was no way out of his mind

There was no way out.

There was no one there.

There was no one but the machines.

The tentacles moved his limbs into the proper position: arms spread straight out from the chest, legs spread straight down, shaping the body into a T. His head was straightened and lifted, his fingers splayed. A strangely-shaped tentacle rose up to his head and pressed itself against it, then drew itself across the flesh, humming as it sheared the hairs from their roots, an attached vacuum sucking up the strands and particles. It progressed all over his body, eliminating the hair and consuming it with an unseen mouth, until he was fully smooth. The tentacle sucked up the few missed bits of detritus, then whipped away.

There was a short pause, the body floating down the corridor, nearing the end.

Ports opened on all sides, their mouths spiraling irises that gaped with sharp edges. Strange, fat discs ejected from them, their rims encrusted with anti-gravity emitters. They circled the body, examining it like vultures. Each had a glowing eye, set like a jewel in the center of their circular bodies. This eye shone, blinking away peridot light as it scanned the body before it.

There was a BEEP, and every eye turned bright, sulfur yellow. They froze for a second, then spun into sudden, frenzied action. The discs positioned themselves all around the body, arranging themselves in formation. Their eyes pulsed gently, the color building up brighter and brighter, a near-silent throb growing with it.

There was a flash, and a buzz, and yellow. Saffron beams of piercing light sprung from the eyes of the discs and pierced the flesh of the man. The discs zipped down, making long, straight incisions down the body, splitting the skin into fourths. They repositioned themselves and cut again--and again--and again--and again--until the body was covered in cauterized wounds. The skin was now separated into oddly-shaped patches.

The discs pulled back, gathering in a cluster behind the body. Their eyes flickered back to peridots.

Stage one was complete.

Stage two initiated as tentacles once again extended from the walls, click-clacking claws spread wide. They pounced upon the body, gripping the patches of skin at their edges--and ripping them away simultaneously, stripping the body of flesh in mere seconds. Blood hung in the air in trails; a floating, flying vacuum drew them in, collecting them in its clear plastic belly. The flesh itself was dropped in an equally-airborne crate extending from the wall. It drew back into its hiding place without a single sound.

The eyes of the discs became sulfur crystals once more, and spun into action. Tentacle-claws gripped muscles while disc-lasers cut them free from the bones; the bleeding, red masses of meat were quickly dumped into crates. Organs--the heart, the lungs, the liver, the kidneys, the testes--were cut from where they lay and placed into cold-storage boxes. The intestines were clipped loose and dragged out, looking like some fleshly, unpleasant rope, drenched red. They were evenly cut and loaded into another, bigger, cold-storage box. The eyes were cut by nanites sprayed from a tentacle; the invisible robots evenly shredded the optic nerve on a microscopic level. The optic globes themselves were plucked from the head like eggs. The mouth was pried open and the teeth wrenched from the gums, one by one. The tongue was lifted up until the tip pressed against the roof of the mouth; a thin laser sheared it from its root and a claw pulled it out of the mouth, the bottom dragging across the bleeding gums. The flying vacuum, now accompanied by a pair of clone brothers, siphoned liquids of all sorts from the air, from wounds, from emptied gums. Each type of liquid was drained into a different pocket of its artificial stomach. Tendons and ligaments were snipped and clipped and dropped in cold, smoky boxes. Bones were gently lifted away when their supports were released, and were placed into marked boxes ("Femurs," "Tibias, "Fibulas," "Patellas," "phalanges (fingers)," "phalanges (toes)," "Pelvis"), which quickly and noiselessly slid back into the walls they'd come from.

Soon, only the spine and the skull remained, floating slowly along the tunnel, strange, sparking energy flickering across the bloodstained bone. Most of the tentacles had retracted, and only one of the discs remained, orbiting the skull like a moon. It aimed its single cycloptic eye down at the cranium--and fired, its bright-yellow beam cleanly cutting through the white matter, making a lid out of the top of the skull. Its purpose fulfilled, it slung itself into its port without further adieu.

A tentacle clamped its claws onto the top of the skull. With a sickly sucking sound it drew off the "lid," exposing the meat within. Long, thick strings of slime stretched from the "lid" and the revealed brain; they floated dreamily in the gravity-free air until the flying vacuum idly consumed them. Another tentacle--this one with a long, chrome nozzle--leveled its snout-like nose and let out a huff of air--and miniscule machines, which skittered invisibly across the surface of the brain.

They dove down the sides, scrambling their way down, down, down to the stem. They gathered around it, pushing frantically against the sides, little spider-legs wriggling in thick liquid. Once all were present, they began to nibble and gnaw, chewing at the stem with clashing mandibles, swarming to the core as they ripped at the sleek rope, the sole connection from the spinal column to the brain itself. This connection, like all the others, was quickly cut. The nanites, overzealous, dived down, biting their way down the inside of the spine, ruthlessly eating every stringy nerve; they ignored the brain, which was drawn from the skull by a series of tiny, tugging tentacles, each of them pulling at the shiny, shiftless mass until it came out, sickly-wet sucking sounds accompanying the extraction.

The tentacle hovered over the skull, holding the brain aloft, tendrils writhing tight around it, running over the wrinkles.

This precious organ--the organ of all organs, the chamber of the human soul, the cradle of being--was disposed of like an old and rotting cabbage. It was tossed, with a whirl of its tentacular captor, into the nearest hovering crate. It struck the side with a violent, viscous SPLAT. The tentacle nudged it down to the bottom, then drew the lid closed.

A pair of tentacles gripped the skull and the spine each, and pulled them apart with a single, vicious tug. The two were placed in their separate containers and whisked away. The vacuums made their final trip through the charged air, whirring quietly. Tentacles plucked shards of bone and bits of meat and collected them in vials.

Their work done, they all--tentacles, vacuums, crates--drew back into the walls, sliding into hatches and ports that were mere inches from the tunnel's inevitable terminus:

A dead end.

***

Armand reflected, as everyone stood there staring at Paul's expressionless face, that even though silence usually seemed empty, there were times when it was so full of flying, streaking, boiling, bubbling, noiseless energy that you just knew, just knew, that not only was the silence not empty, it was ready to explode in a flash of fireworks and frenzy. He wanted to duck behind the table, or out the door, before everything went kaboom and emotions splashed across the room like fiery-hot shrapnel.

Then Vince let out a shaky, hoarse laugh, and some--but not enough to put Armand at peace--of the tension ebbed away, like air being let out of a balloon.

"Right," he said, hands clenching tight on his knees. "Right, that's exactly what they do with them. Right, that's what they're all for. Right, and my mother is the Queen of Eng--"

"I saw it."

Vince's mouth shut so hard his teeth clicked together loudly. The guest winced visibly.

Paul gazed at them both, still expressionless. "I was there. I saw it all."

Vince swallowed several times, then choked out, "You can't prove it. You can't. There's no way...there's no way..."

"I don't have to." You believe it anyway.

Vince tried to say something, and found nothing in his mind to speak about. So instead he latched onto a drifting curiosity.

"If this is all true--and I doubt it is," he said, rolling his eyes, "then can you tell me, Mr. Reporter, Sir, what the Company does with all these ripped-out pieces of people? Can you tell me, Paul? Can you?!" He was nearly screaming now.

Silence. Again, Armand shivered, feeling surrounded by a sea of dark emotions.

"Tell me," Paul continued, seemingly unperturbed by his spiteful coworker, "when was the last time you saw a cow, Vince? When? The building we're in is surrounded by countryside and farmland, Vince, when was the last time you saw a cow?"

Vince could only stare, eyes agape. The guest stared, as well, perplexed.

"You think your shoes are made of cowskin, Vince? You think your hamburger was made of bull meat? You think you drink cow's milk? Countries have to eat. People have to eat. And there are no cows anymore, Vince. The Bleeding Plague saw to that. There are no cows, but there sure are a lot of people, aren't there? Billions. And billions. And billions. And every couple of months, a hundred thousand pass right through here, right down the tunnels, out of a Pit and into the Seperators.

"And every day, manmeat rests under plastic in grocery freezers. Leather jackets made of human skin hang on clothesracks. Human hair is made into wigs, fur coats, blankets, rugs, stuffed animals, dolls. Teeth are made into ivory beads, cufflinks, necklaces, pendants, earrings, charms--along with bones, which are also good for those skeletons you see only in schools and doctors offices--you know, the ones that hang, fully-assembled, on metal racks. Organs are preserved for transplants--or, more profitably, for consumer consumption. Hearts, livers, tongues--they're all on sale at the supermarket. Just look for the section with Bessie the Overweight Cow, universal logo of all things beefy."

He said it with the indifference of a man discussing the weekly weather, but Armand, caught in an ocean of feelings, could feel a stream of roiling warmth pouring from Paul. As he stood and listened, it grew hotter and hotter: the man was a fountain of fury. Armand was forced to take a couple steps away from Paul, to keep the streaming, steaming air from scalding him.

"I've seen it all, Vince. I've seen every age cut up and stored away--the elderly, the middle-aged, the new adults, the young adults, the teens, the tweens, the kids, the toddlers, the infants, the newborns." He spat out the word like a mouthful of raw poison. "I've seen fetuses carefully cut from the womb and dumped in growing vats. I've seen semen and eggs extracted from gonads and force-fused together so that the puling greedy leeching monsters that run this wonderful Company can keep feeding us. I've seen a hundred thousand clones dragged down the racks, drugged and mindless, never able to walk awake in a single second of their lives! A hundred thousand souls, Vince! A hundred thousand of them, stolen innocents who never did anything to anyone! Nothing!"

He stood over Vincent, casting his shadow across him. His fists were clenched tight, flesh white and shaking. He breathed heavy through his nose, his lips pressed together in a taut scowl. His eyes blazed like beacons, flaming with indignation, disgust, rage--and sadness. Unshaking, cold sadness. Vincent looked into those bright eyes and saw a man who'd been mourning for millions for every day in a decade. He saw mourning--ringed with guilt.

"You--you--" he stammered, edging backwards, trying to escape Paul's enveloping shadow, which loomed over Vince and the guest with room to spare.

Paul looked at him with his eyes daring.

Vince said nothing more.

There was a beeping sound, and Vince let out a small screech. He looked around, unembarrassed at his squeamishness, for the source.

Paul hadn't so much as twitched. "It's lunchtime, fellas."

Armand managed to tear his staring eyes away from Paul to look at the beeping monitors. Each one flashed orange numerals at him. Lunchtime, indeed.

"He's right," he said quietly.

Vince was already up and moving, his long legs stretching clumsily in front of him as he lurched his way towards the door. When he got there, he stopped, and swivelled around, nearly knocking over the guest, who winced and stood back. Both of them stared at Paul; Vince with rising, petulant anger, and the guest with trepidation--and nausea.

"You're full of it," Vince snarled. "You're full of it and I'm having you reported. You can't talk that way about the Company!" He was screeching again. "You can't! You can't talk that way! You can't spread crap like that around! That's not a good joke! That's not funny! What's wrong with you?!" His spittle flew and landed in clinging strands on the shining table. "What the hell is wrong with you?!"

Paul looked at him with those same eyes. "It's lunchtime." Rock hard tones.

Vince flinched. His anger washed away like a cheap façade. The fear hung out from his face like drooping, rotten eaves. His skin was sallow and slick. "I'm reporting you," he finished lamely, and left, the guest following, holding his stomach. For a second, Armand could see both men's eyes flashing to the waxed paper petals that had once held big, juicy hamburgers...then dash away, flesh going green just as the door shut with a click.

Armand turned to Paul, expecting to see the man still standing, still glaring like a statue of a god--Aries, or Zeus, or raging Poseidon.

Instead, he found himself presented with an excellent view of the back of his head. Blinking, the revelation that had been flung at him only moments before already washing away (not really, of course, he knew that; it would come back to him in time, and that's when he'd cling to the rim of the toilet bowl and pay his dues to the porcelain goddess, throat aching, eyes weeping, soul cringing and clenching), he neared the man.

"You should go."

"I don't want to," Armand said simply.

Paul nodded, not looking at his one remaining companion. His fingers busily flicked buttons, turned knobs, adjusted controls. Armand's eyes widened when he realized what his coworker was doing.

"Are you sure you--"

"Very." Paul hit a final button and sat back in his chair, reclining slightly, staring at his screen. "I am very sure."

"Alright." He swallowed, tried to speak, and couldn't. He stood instead.

"You'd better leave."

"I know." He swallowed again, throat dry as death. "You used to work in the Separators, didn't you?"

Paul inclined his head, looking over his shoulder at Armand. "Yep. For six years. I got tired of it one day, and I asked for a way out. They gave me this--" he gestured at the monitor before him (and, it seemed to Armand, at the bodies still hanging outside), "--on a condition."

"What condition?" Armand said, but his question was lost in the squeak of the chair as Paul pulled it forward, closer to the panels. He opened his mouth to ask it again--and closed it. He wasn't sure if he wanted to know.

"Go, Armand. Go have lunch," Paul said lowly. "You've only got twenty minutes left, and you and I both know how long it takes you to eat." He turned back again and gave the dark-skinned man a shaky grin. "Go on, get outta here."

Armand shifted and nodded, doing his best to return the expression. He turned away--then turned back. "Thanks, Paul."

Paul, already facing the panels again, raised a single hand in a jaunty pose. "Not a problem, Armand. Take care."

Armand watched that hand lower with sorrowful displeasure. "You too."

"I'll try."


Armand stepped out, closed the door behind him--and turned to see Vince standing there, hovering over a curdling pile of vomit.

Vince looked at Armand. Armand looked at Vince, his hand still on the cold steel knob of the door. He had just enough time before the panting man spoke to notice that their guest seemed to have gone on ahead.

"What're you looking at?" Vince said through short gasps. Pink-brown slime drizzled down his chin--the remains of his hamburger meal. His tone was angry but his eyes were blank and distant: he was trapped in shock.

Armand shrugged, and opened his mouth.

There was a soft shifting sound that quickly built up into a screech--and ended in a SLAM as something big and heavy slid weightily into place behind the door, which jostled and shook in its frame like a frightened kitten. Shock waves rode up Armand's bones until they rattled in his chest.

Both men stared at the door. A faint, unmistakable whir droned from behind it.

"The vending machine..." Armand muttered, eyes wide. He turned the knob.

"I always wondered why that thing was so heavy..." Vince murmured, staring, his forearm pressed against his mouth to keep himself from dry-heaving.

Armand pushed the door open--or tried to, at least. "It's blocked." He tried again, yanking the door back forth, managing only to slam it a millimeter one way, a millimeter the other. "Completely blocked." He gave the knob a tight, furious squeeze before letting go. He glared hatefully at the door. "Come on, maybe if we work together we can--"

"I," Vince said, backing away from the door, "am on my break." He kept backing away, walking down the hall, the spider-webs of vomit still stuck to his chin. "And that means," he said with a nervous grin, "that I don't have to do any work with anyone." He kept on, heading for the lunch room. "So, if you don't mind, I think I'm going to walk...the hell... away..."

And so he did, fumbling as he turned around, work shoes clip-clopping on the cool metal floor.

Armand watched him leave, a bitter taste hanging off his tongue. He looked down the hall one way (the way that Vince had just vanished down), then at the door, cool and unmoving, and down the hall the other way--where the exit was.

He tried the door again--to no avail, of course. That vending machine was a monster; scrawny Armie Dallinson wasn't about to topple it with his Muscles of Nonexistence. All the same, he pushed, and shoved, and kicked and punched and slammed, beating the door with curled brown fists.

Nothing.

Sighing, shaking, trembling with anger and hate and sorrow and sadness, he stepped back from the door, carefully avoiding Vince's puke puddle, and gave the door one last look--and Paul one last "thank you," silent as thought but as heartfelt as could be.

Then, stone-faced, trying not to cry, Armand turned away, towards the exit.

He wanted out.

The End