Somewhere Else

The man grunted and sighed as he sat on the cold steel of the floor. His head swam and the air seemed to be thick with something that made a piercing pain in his temples with each shallow breath. His tongue seemed to be caked with some kind of sharp metallic grit. Moments ago he had been asleep.


Something was wrong.

He remembered going to sleep in a bed with Kirkland cotton sheets in an air conditioned room. He could see the painted drywall and the grimy synthetic carpet around him but it faded away like a daydream under closer scrutiny. His skin prickles with sweat and his dry mouth aches as he stumbles to his feet.

John was awake and his thoughts set racing through the fog of restful sleep with increased urgency at the sight of every new detail. The worn iron grates, the bustling pipes and cables. The pockmarked steel door emblazoned with an unfamiliar phrase. For a moment his mind went to the thought that he was now in some kind of event or convention. However the sharp smell of iron and the chalky reek of atomized flux increased his awareness that he was somewhere entirely new. Then he briefly remembered the steel doors and catwalks that he had seen in places like hospitals and images of factories that he had seen in documentaries. These were different. The iron was thicker. Older and scratched by some unknowable progress of time that had rounded and thinned it.

At last his eyes rested on the door reading the words there with trepidation. They were as simple as they were strange simply reading.

To the glory of mankind

He had only finished reading the words as the door began to open. It didn’t swing open loosely or slide on a track. Instead the huge bulkhead split neatly into three sections that retracted into the walls with a a slow grinding. Brilliant blinding light and smothering putrid heat poured into the small chamber followed by a cacaphony of deafening industrial noise. The myriad sounds of hissing air tools, flaming torches and the ceaseless whining of metal being worn to shape by sanders. The squealing of files and clang of heavy hammers. There were other noises too. Amidst the clamour there were the sounds of machines that he knew nothing of. Staccato buzzes and whines.