Streets as Clean as These - Page 9

The truck drove for hours. There were no windows, no seats, no light. Everyone was huddled together, maybe two dozen people. The odor was unbearable, like spoiled milk and unwashed flesh. Frank fought the urge to vomit.

Some people wept quietly. Others cursed under their breath. Most didn’t do anything at all. 

Eventually the truck came to a stop, and the engine turned off. A few moments later, the rear latch thunked open, and harsh sunlight washed away the darkness in an instant. The passengers covered their eyes with their hands. 

The bullhorn barked again. “Get out of the vehicle. Exit to your right.”

One by one the passengers stumbled into the sunlight, where they were manhandled by masked men, pulled away and shoved through a nearby door on the side of a large structure. When Frank’s turn came, his eyes barely had time to adjust, but he saw they were in the middle of a vast desert. It was desolate, flat, sunbaked. 

Men shoved him through the door and into the building. Inside, new men appeared, shouting and gesturing. One gripped his neck and forced his head between his knees as he was made to walk. Eventually, he came to a turnstile, where a masked man with a latex glove jabbed him in the arm with a hypodermic needle.

Within a minute, Frank lost consciousness.

 

He came to in dim light, unsure where he was. The air smelled faintly of hot oil and static electricity. Waves of sharp, white-hot pain radiated from his mouth. It was unlike anything he’d ever experienced. Excruciating.

Frank pushed himself upright and touched his lips. He could feel dried blood on his chin. He probed the inside of his mouth with his tongue, checking his teeth.

But there was no tongue. And there were no teeth.

He clawed at his face in disbelief, and soon noticed something else. His hand crept to the top of his head, shaking.

His hair was gone. He’d been shaved to the skin.

And as his trembling fingers walked across his scalp, Frank noticed they were throbbing, too. He held out his hands, and immediately saw the problem: 

His fingertips were burned off, blistered and hideous.

He tried to scream, but all that came out was a strained, obtuse wail without consonants. He sounded like an animal.

Suddenly the world was bright. An oppressive light was all around, forcing his eyes closed. And when he finally reopened them, he saw that he was not alone.

He was in some kind of factory, kneeling in front of a work station with a table. And next to him on all sides, extending out to a breathtakingly endless expanse, were other people.

Their heads were shaved like his, and he could see by the puckered forms of their mouths that their teeth were gone, too. Frank tried to stand up. The urge to escape this place was surging within him. But something tugged at his ankle.

He was chained to the floor. And as the people around him began to wake up to their own situations, a wave of terrified, tongueless screams rose in a crescendo. Frank had never heard such a disturbing cacophony before; it sounded like the chorus of hell.

Their lamentations were soon drowned out by a deep, mechanical drone, as vast arrays of complex machinery came to life around them, setting in motion levers and gears and servo motors.

A conveyor belt began moving through Frank’s workstation. In front of it was a small screen and a microwave-sized metallic box with a slot cut in the side, its purpose mysterious.

Frank traced the conveyor belt with his gaze for what seemed like miles into the distance, all under the same roof. This building was massive—in any given direction, he could not see a single wall or window. It just kept going, a labyrinth filled with strange machines and captive people, chained and helpless. There had to be thousands of them. Tens of thousands, even. 

Some type of object was coming down the conveyor belt now, making its way through other stations like an assembly line. Frank couldn’t see it clearly, but watched it roll down the line, being assembled piece by piece. 

And when it finally arrived, Frank saw that it was some kind of microchip. There was no telling what it was supposed to belong to—a computer? A TV remote? As he pondered this, the screen on his station lit up. It displayed two words:

“INSERT CHIP.”

This was followed by a simple animation of a hand placing a chip into a metal box.

Frank looked at the chip on the conveyor belt, then at the box on his table with the hole in it. He picked up the chip and put it in the box. A faint whirring noise was his only reward. A moment later, a new chip was in front of him on the belt. It looked identical to the first one.

“INSERT CHIP.”

Frank looked across the sea of broken humanity, working obediently as their machine prison hummed around them.

And a man in the distance—if he could still be called that—caught Frank’s eye. His face was hollow, exhausted, streaked with grime and blood. His clothes hung in tattered folds on a skeletal frame, his mutilated mouth drew breath in pained heaves—the death rattle of a long-suffering beast.

And in that moment, Frank understood that he would never leave this place.