Penultimate day of Hell
We heard the announcement an hour ago. It came over the loudspeakers, the usual voice. The one that told us when to clock on and off, when to move the wrecked carcasses of sinners from the cess pool into the fiery pits, or from the rack into that huge ball full of broken glass that you spin them around in. The same voice that announced the arrival figures for each month, so we knew how hard we’d have to work while they got some more staff. The same voice that congratulated you at the end of the shift, saying you were doing the work of Right.
It was like that at the interview, ‘a job for life, a job doing what is right’ was how they’d told me it would be. And I suppose what they said is true, I mean God isn’t too powerful without the threat of eternal damnation so we keep him sorted and he looks after us. Not like the other one, I met him once or twice, and he was a right bag of moods, always muttering about figures and statistics and pain/weight ratios behind those thick black eyebrows. And it is a job for life, there’s always some punishing to be getting on with, even if people stopped sinning and we got no new arrivals then we’d still be working all the time to cope with the ones we’ve got. Until now, it seemed.
The mood in the camp wasn’t great. Everyone knew they’d be laid off tomorrow and would have to find new jobs. We’d been promised an adequate severance but you never know how long that will last for and it is hardly like jobs grow on trees. No-one was really talking to one another, it made sense not to say anything because chances are most of us wouldn’t see each other again when we went our separate ways. No point making friends. I wondered where I’d go next, what my next job would be. I had a few years left in me, but I’d only ever known this job, this work, this life. I am not really qualified to do anything else.
I prodded at a few of the bodies in the vat, where they’d been stewing and screaming for a while. They seemed ready for something else so I pulled the lever and the vat slowly tipped the bodies onto a conveyor belt where they moved down to the mesh box where they get electrocuted continually. I pushed the lever, the vat steadily righted itself and some more bodies arrived from tube overhead. Most of my friends don’t understand why I do this job, they say it must be really unpleasant, hurting people all day. Like working in a concentration camp. I tell them that it isn’t like a concentration camp because there you are hurting people for no good reason, whereas here it is because they are unrepentant sinners who’ve had their chance and blown it. All these people made a choice and made the wrong one. As for the violence and the smell and the blood and all that, they give you tranquilisers to take if you start to feel a bit uncomfortable, but hardly anyone uses them, you just get used to it.
I had a break so I went to see my supervisor to ask him what had happened. He gave me a story that we’d all heard before, but never thought it would actually happen. There was some sort of crisis upstairs, big problems, big decisions being made, big cuts. Whole departments being axed, this was only part of it. Nothing personal. The big problem was that it had gotten to the stage where there were too many arrivals, too many sinners who needed processing. It was starting to look like they were going to have to take some of the sinners who’d been around for a while to ‘step on the other side of the desk’ and becomes processors. Those who make the decisions thought this was a bad idea, placing them in a position of such responsibility. Instead the new Big Idea was reincarnation, give the sinners another chance to see the light, then hopefully most of them would go to heaven.
“What are they going to do with all the new sinners though?†The new plan was to maximise efficiency, give them a short sharp shock of maybe ten years then give them the option of repenting again. It was predicted that this would yield much better results in terms of numbers saved and sent to heaven. “So there is some chance I’ll be able to keep my job?†Only if I retrained, this place was going to be torn down, a new centre built with better and faster machines. The new training would have to be voluntary as it was unpaid and would require a lot of hard work. Also there’d be no guarantee of a permanent job at the end of it because they didn’t know how big the new place would be and how many sinners they’d be getting and a lot of details were still to be worked out.
I went back to work, the news was spreading so we didn’t work too hard. There’s no point working really hard and doing a good job of torturing some people when they’re only going to be reincarnated tomorrow. I wondered what I was going to do, whether I’d go in for the training or not, whether I had much choice seeing as how I wasn’t likely to get a job anywhere else. I suppose I am qualified to operate machinery, I am reliable and punctual, but a lot of people frown on this sort of work, a necessary evil. They know it has got to be done but they don’t want to think about it. Some people have quit this job but then always come back a month later saying they couldn’t find any other work. Plain and simply people think you are a bit odd if you have done this sort of thing, especially if you have done it for a long time, like I have. Like being a pest-control guy, people know you are just doing a job and it isn’t the real you but they just think if you spend that much of your life doing something it must affect you.
The training was a big concern, I was pretty sure that with my experience I could do the training and get a job in the new place, but I didn’t really know what I was letting myself in for. The changes they talking about, reincarnation, second chances, short periods of torture, these were big changes, I don’t know what kind of machines will be involved in only torturing people for a few years. Will they be bigger and faster than these machines? Or a new kind of machine altogether? I don’t know if I’ll be able to do the training unless I know what sort of thing I’ll be doing at the end of it. But they didn’t know that yet, or more likely they weren’t about to tell us until they were good and ready.
A few guys had beaten a path to the supervisor’s door, demanding higher severance pay or a guarantee of a job at the new place. Talk of wives and children, threats being made. The supervisor said there was nothing that he could do and they could take it up with the Union if they wanted to but then it would have to go all the way to the top, and they knew what that meant. Speaking of which, I wonder what they are going to do with him, the one with the eyebrows and the foul temper. He has been here for ages, far longer than any of us, and he is going to be as affected by all of this as we are. I can hardly imagine that he will take charge of the new place, because it would be such a step down after being in charge of such a grand operation as this. I imagine it is going to be one hell of a golden handshake that he gets after all these years of loyal service.
My shift finishes, I put the present load on a low heat and go to the locker room to clock out. The next shift workers come in and take over. They will have been notified already. I only have one more shift, tomorrow, and then I will have one of the biggest decisions of my life to make. I get changed, and go up in the lift. I come out on the ground floor, I smile at the secretaries who are manning the front desk. They smile back, an idiot’s smile because they don’t know me and now the chances are they never will. Their jobs will also end tomorrow, but they’ll find something else similar, every secretarial job is more or less the same. They won’t be too bothered, chances are they’d rather work somewhere else than here. People always look at you a bit funny when you walk out of this building, it is black, mirrored, not very large since most of the complex is underground. But everyone knows what goes on here. Everyone knows what we do.
Still a cool story, though- just sort of hard to read.
Although I can now see it’s got that slick movie image look. I’ve never seen the Sopranos, I don’t have Showtime.