The Point of the Pit: Part One

The Point of the Pit
by Zeroin

Part One: Armand

The Pit was huge, a thousand feet long at the least, more than twice as high, and just about half as wide. Its shape was that of a sloping rhombus, one vertically parallel side leading down to another. It was open at both ends, each the mouth of a long and winding hallway that was as equally tall and wide as its entrance. Dark metal rails lined the roof of both the hallways and the Pit itself, leading from maw to maw across the stainless steel ceiling. The wall to the left of the tracks was covered from bottom to top in rust-red circles, perpetually-winking lights flashing in their centers. The opposite wall was blank and shining and void save for a rectangle of clear glass set at the very middle.

Behind this glass laid a room lined with button-laden panels and glowing computer screens. It was dominated by a long, plain table surrounded by even plainer chairs. A sleek, neon-accented vending machine stood next to the room's one and only door like a silent thug plotting ambush. Fluorescent bars washed the room in stark white light, painting the few living occupants in dismal monotone.

These occupants were dressed in loose gray coveralls; an insignia consisting of twin red spheres inside a red circle rested upon the breast of each garment. There were three coveralls and four men; three employees and one guest. Two of the coveralled men were stationed side-by-side at a pair of monitors; the third sat opposite the guest at the long table. A white paper sack lay between this latter pair; next to it were a couple hamburgers, each lying in the center of the crumpled petals of their white wrappers. The two at the table were talking animatedly to one another about sports; the two at the screens remained silent and watchful, eyes locked to the readings.

Their silence was broken by yellow, shining along the rim of both their screens.

"We've got yellow," they muttered in unison, the words caught by their headset mics and sent to places unknown. "Repeat, yellow in the Pit."

"Yellow?" asked the guest, eyes wide, brows up and arching on his forehead.

"Means we've got a delivery in the Pit," said his table-sharing companion. "Nothing to worry about."

"Ohhh." The guest stood. "Does that mean they're coming down?"

"Yes it does," his companion replied, grinning. "Come have a look?"

The grin was returned. "Of course."

Both of them joined the coveralls at their stations. All of them peered through the glass into the brightly-lit Pit, with its shiny steel walls and its multitude of blinking circles. The yellow was still there on the rims of the screens, now accompanied by the muffled sound of some loud and grating horn, echoing against the walls of the Pit and into the ears of the only witnesses to what happened next.

The horn was suddenly silent, as if struck down dead. Another sound quickly took its place: a thick and heavy rumbling, like the growling of some giant's famished stomach, punctuated by high shrieks and faint squeaking. Accompanying this gastric growl was a noise altogether unnamable, a husky, shifty sound, as of the grating of two curtains together, amplified to enormous scale. As the four men watched and waited, the sound grew louder, the rumbling more palpable, the grating-curtains sound rising into a buzzing drone. The room vibrated; the vending machine trembled next to the door, its plastic-wrapped contents at first shaking, then quaking violently as the sounds built further and further up. The coming rumble closed in on the Pit, swelling into a grand, god-like quake, seeming to shake even the Pit itself as it drew ever closer.

"Here it comes," said the standing employee, grinning at the guest, who returned the expression--but not without a certain trepidation. "Just watch."

They all watched--the seated employees, with their blank, uninterested faces; the standing worker, eyes flashing from the Pit to his companion; and the guest, whose nervous eyes were locked on the mouth of the left-hand hallway.

The quaking, shaking rumble, the metallic shrieks and squeaking, and the anonymous, shifting drone reached their peak just as their source sped into view.

A series of massive racks slid down the length of black tracks and into the Pit, greased wheels squeaking tremulously under the weight of their massive cargo. There were at least eight hundred of the racks (each the same rusty red of the circles on the left-hand wall) speeding down the rails, swinging and lurching, metal whining, moaning, groaning, and shrieking in inanimate anguish. Like snakes they writhed in motion, stretching from sloped ceiling to sloped floor, swinging and clanging and hissing, red-brown like long-dried blood.

The cargo of these long, wailing racks shifted noisily. A hundred thousand naked bodies, undeniably human and questionably dead, hung from hooks and clamps and from within blood-caked wire cages latched to the linked shafts of the racks. The heady, shifting drone came from these hanging, bleeding bodies and their near-constant friction. Blood, ripe-red and fresh, dripped down the legs of the hanging, swinging bodies in thin, trickling trails. It was under this grisly cargo that the racks squeaked and squealed like petulant children under the weight of obligation.

"This is a yellow delivery," said the first of the seated coverall employees (whose badge identified him as "Paul"). "Great big racks of dead bodies on meathooks." He casually pressed a button on his panel, bringing the morbid line of racks to a bellowing halt. He turned to the guest, who was opening his mouth to say something, and interrupted him with, "Before you ask: no, I've got no clue why we get daily shipments of corpses down here in the Pit. Normally all they send us are big crates full of fruit or computer equipment or skin mags. But every noon, right on the hour, they send us these great ruddy racks of dead people." He leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette, and took a couple sips off it. "No one knows why they do it, no one knows where they get the bodies from, and no one knows what they do with 'em, so don't ask."

The guest shut his mouth, and stared silently out the window, at the macabre curtain of metal and mutilated flesh hanging before him. After a couple minutes, he looked back down at Paul. "What do you do with them while they're in here?" he said, voice hushed in the wild fear that the ripped and torn cadavers on the racks would hear him.

Paul didn't bother looking up from his panel, where he was deftly adjusting settings. "Count 'em," he said brusquely. "That's what those sensors on the wall are for. They analyze each object and count 'em up. I just keep track of the system, make sure it's not screwing up, and I tend to the rail system, and make sure that that's not screwin' up." He took another cigarette sip. "Frankly, I'm just a watchdog for a trouble that hasn't come in the five years I've been working here. It's easy work. I tend to a delivery every half an hour, press a few buttons, monitor a few systems, and get paid about fifty bucks an hour to do it." He smiled at the guest. "Not bad, eh?"

The guest returned the smile. "Not bad at all..." He rubbed his chin, eyes once again locked on the contents of the racks. "...you sure they're dead?"

At this, the other three men shared a troubled look.

"We don't know," Paul finally said.

The guest stared. "You don't know."

Paul glanced at his coworkers. "Well, some of us aren't so sure about it." He picked at his cigarette. "Me, I'm pretty sure they're as dead as George W, God piss on his wretched old soul." He jerked his thumbs at the other men, who gave the guest nervous grins. "These two jackanapes have a difference in opinion."

The guest turned his attention to them. "And you guys think they're alive?'

The other man sitting at a control panel (his name was Armand) gave a quick, curt nod of his dark head. The third man, the one standing, grinning lips smacking around a wad of obnoxiously pink bubble gum, presented the guest with a jesterly tilt of the head usually reserved for pernicious carnies playing their tricksy games among the tents of the arcade.

"We sure do," the gum-chewer confirmed ("sure" transformed into "shore" through the filter of his masticating mouth). "Old Paul here just thinks the way he does to keep his conscience good and clean." He gave the guest a sleazy wink. "Me 'n Armie have filthier souls than old boy Paul."
Armand "Armie" Dallinson scowled. "Don't put my soul in the same slop as yours, Vince." The guest caught the look of intense irritation on the dark man's face. "I just think they're still alive, that's all."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," drawled Vince, gum popping and clapping in his open mouth. "Then why do you still work here, Armie? How come you still ship 'em down the Line every day? Why do you keep it up when you know perfectly well those people on hooks and spikes are still in the land of the living?" He smirked down at the man, who looked back with rising anger. "Well? Whatcha got to say for yourself, Armie?"

"I have a family to feed, you know that," Armand said, face flushed with scarlet, embarrassed anger. His dark eyes flickered from the guest and to Vince and back, and then, in a low, almost equally-embarrassed half-mutter, he said, "and besides, they probably deserve to be hanging there in the first place."

The guest blinked at Armand. "Why do you say that?"

"Yeah, Armie, whatcha thinkin' in there?" Vince cackled. Paul gave the braying, abrasive man a dark, annoyed look, but said nothing. "What keeps Armie Dallinson on the job?"

Armand's scowl had reached canyonesque levels. His chin rocked at the end of his face, squirming uncomfortably as he struggled to find the right thing to say.

A quick glance at the guest, whose own visage was brimming with honest curiosity, decided him. His jaws ceased their seasick motions, and the thunderheads gathered in his face slowly broke apart. He opened his mouth.

"Well..."

***

The room was tiny, the size of three coat closets and configured in the shape of an L. It was really a crawlspace, hidden beneath a short flight of stairs in the middle of a creaky suburban house. The only light in the whole building came from this half-pint hideaway. A sole light bulb cast dusty brown-orange light across an even dustier old desk. The clutter on this particular piece of furniture was such that one would be hard-pressed to look over it without craning one's neck--not that one would be inclined to do so, seeing how there was nothing beyond the steep piles of papers, magazines, books, pencils, pens, markers, the occasional action figure, music discs, movies, and general trash but a blank wood wall.

The owner of the desk, and the room, and the stairs, and the house, was a man with bone-pale skin and small, watery eyes. He sat at the desk, amid the rambunctious clutter, scribbling with a black marker on a sheet of white Bristol board. Each stroke of the dark, stinking stylus brought the growing picture a step closer to completion. Had anyone been watching, they would've noted that the artist was merely inking a picture he'd finished drawing sometime earlier. The picture, messy and frenetic as it was, was nonetheless clear in its message: a man in futuristic fighting gear (complete with flight boots and space helmet) held a bruised and battered man over his head; he was preparing to toss his prisoner over the edge of some jagged precipice and into dark oblivion. The man in the power suit, clearly the hero, looked noble and determined; the beaten man wore a look of terror, his gaunt and ugly face slick with sweat, nose as ripe and red as the circular insignia emblazoned upon his dark jumpsuit.

The style was poor, the drawing shaky and out of proportion in several areas, but the passion and effort put into it was evident by the care the man took in doing well with what he had. He slid the marker across the paper slowly, gingerly, making sure every stroke made was the stroke that worked best for the picture. After every line, he examined and re-examined the picture, analyzing, strategizing, planning his next move. His care was extreme (as it always was when he was working on a cover), and it filled the musty old crawlspace with the heat and tension of exertion.

That heat died upon the arrival of three sharp sounds.

Knock knock knock.


The man at the desk froze, and the air with him. While heat had fled, tension not only remained, but increased exponentially. Sitting stock-still in his creaky wooden chair at his creaky wooden desk in a creaky wooden room, he waited, making no sound himself, for further noise of knocking. His hand hung over the page, marker poised above the paper; his eye slowly slid across it, making sure his hand had not faltered in panic at the noise. It had not, and the artist inside him relaxed.

Knock knock knock.

He slowly, quietly, laid the marker down on the desk. He made no further motion: his neck did not shift, his legs did not so much as quiver in their joints. Even his eyes remained unblinking, and his chest hardly heaved for breath. He dared not move, dared not make more sound than his minute breathing and hammer-on-anvil heartbeat.

For they were here.

Maybe, he thought, mind aclutter with quiet fear and noisome panic, maybe they will go away if I do not move, and do not squeak. Maybe maybe oh maybe oh GOD.

His arm ached, tortured with the urge to reach over to his desk lamp and turn it off, to kill the heat and light it emitted, creating an unwitting beacon for the eyes and thermal vision of those that were knocking, knocking on his chamber door. His arm remained still, but war waged within his old and anguished nerves, indecision creating quarrel in a mind already under siege by aching anxiety. He wanted to reach up and slap the switch on the lamp, to bathe in comforting darkness, hidden away from his unwelcome guests in a cape of black.

Knock knock KNOCK.

His hand remained where it was. Sweat slipped from his nostrils onto his lips, from out of the sparse forests of his hair and onto his forehead; from his cheeks to his neck, where it spilled beneath his shirt in rolling round droplets. His teeth grit against one another, beartrap mouth clamped shut around his twitching tongue. He allowed himself a single swallow and a single blink, but not the movement of his hand across six inches of detritus-drowned oak to turn off a light that was probably about to get him killed.

KNOCK KNOCK CRASH.

There goes the front door, he thought, as a stampede of rock-heavy footsteps pounded their way up the stairs above him and down the stairs to his left.

Calmly, unerringly, his hand reached out and soundlessly shut off the lamp.

Awash in the darkness, at the back of the room, he waited in his chair, listening to his house creak around him. The footsteps were slower, softer now, as their makers carefully made their way through the comic man's crumbling house. Blank eyes staring into blanker darkness, the hidden man, as still and silent as the living can be, could see his unwelcome guests in his mind's eye. They were clad in blue, from their thudding boots to their blank helmets. Their padded, battle-ready uniforms were bulletproof, shockproof, waterproof, flame-retardant, resistant to cuts and scratches, unstainable, and machine-washable (dry clean only)--but, most remarkably, they were hopelessly blue, the color of a clear summer sky as it transitions to night after sundown. The only break in the monotony was in the black, full-face visor, the black rubber soles of their boots, and the scarlet, circular insignia on the breasts of their uniforms.

Company Security, he thought, trembling in his chair. They found me.He was far from surprised. Despite his alias, despite his efforts to distance himself from his works, despite living like a recluse in the worst house in the worst neighborhood, despite it all, they'd found him--but that was what Company Security did best. How better to serve the Company--and the United States government--by rooting out those pesky dissenters, hidden deep in their urban burrows like scared, petulant rabbits? Hunting down the rebellion was Security's most infamous task--aside from brutal, private executions, which no living person had actually seen happen (but the bloodsplattered, gore-ridden aftermath was evidence enough for most).

Right now, he thought, sweat dripping down the sides of his skull, if they find me... He shut his eyes and silently shook his head. No, no no no no NO. He cut that thought away from his mind and disposed of it, like fat from the meat. He would not think it. If he stayed still and quiet, under the old and rotting stairs, behind the false wall that served as his hideaway's door, he'd make it through.

He just had to keep it up until they were gone.

Several firecracker bangs shot through the house. The comics man did not so much as shift in his chair; he kept soundly still, listening to the Security Officers as they made their thudding way through the house. He heard them open and slam cupboards, doors, drawers, shelf covers and even windows, each one opening and closing with a clamorous BANG! that made the moldering, termite-eaten building tremble in its foundation.
The man fervently gnawed on his lip, eyes half-squinched closed, salty saline droplets slipping from his pale, sunken eyes. He knew that the Officers would find nothing out there; everything he needed to survive was hidden in addendums to his cozy annex (the mouth of which was the workroom he presently sat in, weeping, terrified, on the verge of the end of his life, of his work, of all that he’d tried to do for the world). There wasn't a single sign of habitation in the rest of the ruined house; he'd made sure of it. His hope rose like hot air, filling him from paunched stomach to hairless skull.

The brutal noise of gunfire burst from somewhere upstairs and down into the ears of the comic-creating man. He nearly jumped; instead he clamped down with tooth and jaw. Blood spilled from his freshly-cut lip, drawing jerky, scarlet lines down his chin, across the valley of his neck, soaking into his filthy undershirt, clinging to his graying chesthairs. More gunfire, and the sound of breaking glass, shredding wood, flying porcelain.

Bathroom, he thought dully. They're in the bathroom upstairs.

Faint muttering of voices and the sound of footsteps, just overhead. Not a muscle moved. He didn't even blink, and refused his lungs oxygen. He gazed unseeingly, listening hard, viewing nothing but darkness and hearing nothing but thickly-muffled gibberish. Sweat covered him in a hard, cold layer, an icy shell. The voices continued to come from above, one louder than the others (Security Leader, he thought), the other two quieter, more submissive. Clearly a discussion between a superior and his subordinates.

Please leave, please, oh please, please leave me. His tears fell in salty torrents. Please go, please leave, please oh please oh please FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GO GO GO GO PLEASE OH PLEASE JUST GO FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GO.

More muttering. Someone shifted their weight from one foot to the other.

PLEASE.

A sharp bark, followed by more footsteps. They headed away, down the stairs, across the landing.

Out the door.

Silence, in the house. Pure silence. The man sat like a stone in his chair, heavy and still, shiftless. His ears reached out, groping for sound, for sign that the Officers were coming back, that there were some still in the house, that they were far away. They groped, and found nothing. No sign, not of absence nor presence. Simply nothingness.

Time passed, slipping away, dying.

He unfroze. His eyes blinked. His lungs filled, swelled, exhaled, shrunk. His shoulders untensed and lowered. His hand came up to his chin, wiped away blood.

The chair creaked beneath him.

He froze up in his chair again, eyes darting wildly in their sockets, one hand over his mouth and the other gripping the arm of the chair.

There was a thin, arid sound, like the crepitus of long-dry bones, a puff of sawdust, a spray of splinters, a flash of movement--suddenly the man let out a rasping, rattling wheeze. His hands clutched at his throat, gripping and squeezing. Blood gurgled up over his tongue and spilled between his teeth and out his mouth. His legs trembled and jerked, rattling against the floor, knees knocking up against the desk as he gurgled like a draining tub.

A steel spike, ten inches long and lined with a serrated frill, jutted from his chest, just under the pectoral muscle. Blood jetted around the baroque blade in thin, crimson streams, spraying the abysmal mess of the desk with shocking red. The drawing in front of the man soaked in an ever-growing pool of blood, white paper retreating before waves of sinful scarlet.

Thin rays of gloomy-gray sunlight wafted in through the hole made by the invading flechette, sending silver light dancing across the spike in curving, wavy streaks. The man's eyes were locked on the cold, lifeless weapon, gaping dumbly at it as his blood flooded the floor.

Thuds, heavy and hard, rocked the building, sending dust cascading from the ceiling. The man shook in his chair, writhing, mouth gnashing around silent shrieks shot from a thrashing tongue. Each thud was monstrous to his dying ears; each marked another enormous crack in the crust of the world as it was shredded by chaos; each was a thunderstroke of Vulcan's hammer upon his sparking anvil; each was a hoof of the Reaper's steed, pounding into the dirt, coming, coming.

Coming.

The thuds stopped just outside the false wall. There was a fearsome grating as a boot slid across the bare concrete floor. Breathing, faint and steady, was barely audible to the comics man, with his throat choked with blood and his ears full of death's sirens.

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.

There was a pause--and then the click-whir-hum of activating machinery--and then a razor-thin beam of bright-red light cut through the wall, right at the top, and worked its way down to the ground. It returned to the top, cut all the way to the right, then straight down to the ground again. A massive rectangle of wall fell to the floor, leaving a hole just the right size for the Officer to step through, rifle at the ready.

The Officer froze two steps into the room. With a flick of the thumb, the rifle's halogen lamp turned on with a quiet hum. The beam cut into the darkness, bright and blue-white. It danced across the inside of the room, then focused on the man inside it. The Officer moved closer, carefully, watching the target through the rifle's thermal scope, until the flechette was plainly visible. The Officer gave the steel spear a quick nod, as if acknowledging a job well done, and lowered the rifle.

The man gurgled and choked, wide, red eyes locked on his attacker. His gravel-on-sandpaper breathing filled the room with its gruesome white noise. Despite the spear, despite the blood oozing from him in thick streams, despite the way his lungs filled like guzzling stomachs, he managed to hold his head up high and look into that blank, black faceplate, pride painted all across his pale features--pride at what he was, what he was doing, why he was doing it. The look held for all of ten seconds before he succumbed to a violent coughing fit, vomiting gushes of blood into his lap.

The Officer tilted her head, activating a microphone inside the helmet. "Target uncovered and neutralized," she said, voice husky and cold. Chilly blue-green eyes the color of dead ice gazed remorselessly at the comics man as she reported in. "I repeat, target uncovered and neutralized by Security Leader Royles, on mission number twelve-twenty-eighty-six. Gathering infidel and heading back Home."

The man let out a horrid squawk at this last sentence, and tried to get up out of his chair. The blade shone in the halogen beam, weaving silver reflections across the walls and ceiling as the comics creator struggled to rise. Even mortally impaled, his rebellious will held strong. He fought to lift himself up out of his rickety
chair.

Officer Royle tilted her head again, soundlessly deactivating the microphone. She glanced at the struggling, jerking man, then proceeded to calmly cock her rifle, pressing a couple buttons on the side. The silver-gray gun clicked, whirred, hummed, and chambered a single glass dart. Royle aimed, peering over the top of her gun, and planted the dart into the man's neck with a swift swoosh and plunk. She watched him jerk as it hit, watched the foam flood from his mouth, eyes rolling in his trembling head, back arched unnaturally.

She watched as he writhed, flopped, twitched, twisted, trembled, shook, and shivered--and finally collapsed, as still and lifeless as his hope.

They had found him.

It was all over.



Light.

He tried to wince, to shy away from it with closed eyes and scrunched face, but neither the lids of his eyes nor the muscles of his face so much as twitched. He wanted to blink, at least, to spare himself from the glare for just a second, but even that pleasure evaded him; his eyes stayed open. He tried moving his arm to block the light, but that, too, failed him. His neck refused to operate, as well.

Helpless and immobile, he stared unwillingly into the light, watching it as it faded, melting from the center outwards. He could see shiny gray steel behind the glaring white wall; nothing more for now.

As the light slipped away, he tested his other limbs. None responded to his will. He began to fidget internally, uncomfortable with the paralysis and its meaning. He'd been shot and imprisoned for spreading seditious materials and threatening the welfare of the Company. He'd dared to think against the values of the Company, and to put his thoughts down on paper--and then, in the worst of all offenses, he'd dared to spreadhis thoughts to the common people.

He'd dared, and now what? Here he was, wherever he was, immobile, in the hands of the vile Company. He'd always known the time would come, one day, when the government Orwell had warned against would take him into their maw and gnash him to shreds, but he'd never thought it would come so quickly or be so frightening.

The light was gone. He stared straight ahead, looking right at a steel wall that spread out in all directions. Near the top of his vision there was a long rectangle of glass, and cutting up through the bottom his vision was a long, rust-red-and-orange spike. Red liquid of varying viscosity coated the shaft.

The spike nauseated the comics man, so he focused instead on the glass rectangle set in the wall above him. Blue-white light lit the room behind it, highlighting the four faces within in cold colors. They seemed to be talking about something, and took no notice of the paralyzed man fifty feet down. He tried his mouth again, to call out to them--to beg, to wail, to scream, to protest, to rave--but it didn't so much as twitch.

The spike taunted him on the lower edge of his vision. It jutted from somewhere below his sightline, and oozed with what had to be blood. It looked like it was made of age-old iron, rusted to the point where the whole surface was dark orange-red. The point at the end was blunt.

The man tried to imagine just where that spike was coming from--and with a stone-like sinking of his stomach, he realized it was coming from him. The rabid-looking red-orange spike was piercing him in the same place that the flechette had--it was probably even the same hole, kept fresh and open by the ungodly lance.

It was piercing him.

The thought surrounded him, building around his mind, flanking it, pressing in all around, clawing at his skull, dragging him down, down, down into screams, so silent and so alone.

So silent and so alone.

End Part One