DMV, page 31
The pickup had apparently driven all the way around the track and now maneuvered its way about the crash site, pulling into its original driveway. The lightly bearded young man who got out of the truck was wearing western attire and a cowboy hat. Calmly, their instructor walked over, waving to the man and hailing him in a friendly manner.
Was this all planned out and scripted? Danny wondered. Because it seemed completely real.
“Can I help you?” the driver of the pickup asked.
The instructor suddenly held a long knife in his hand. Danny had no idea where it had come from—one moment it wasn’t there, and the next it was—but the instructor’s pace increased, and before the other man could move away or try to defend himself, the knife was plunging into his stomach. With smooth, even strokes, the instructor pulled the knife out and thrust it in. Again and again and again.
Danny had never seen so much blood. In movies, it didn’t usually spurt this way, but as the pickup driver dropped hard to the cement, thick red liquid seemed to be jetting out in every direction, splattering on the concrete, spraying the side of the truck. Only their instructor seemed to miraculously avoid the crimson onslaught.
This had to be fake. Danny looked around at the others in his group, all of them simultaneously shocked and skeptical. From down the track, he saw an ambulance speeding toward them. To help his sister no doubt.
And maybe this guy.
Because Jill’s injuries were definitely real. And if her injuries weren’t fake…
Smiling, throwing his knife in the bed of the pickup, the instructor approached the group. Once again, he took out his driver’s license, pointed to it. “That’s what you can do if your license is designated with a ‘P.’”
The ambulance had arrived, and two paramedics carefully pulled the unconscious Jill from her car, placing her on a gurney and strapping her in before rolling her into the back of the ambulance.
“Got another one here, boys!” the instructor called out, pointing to the man on the ground. He chuckled. “Don’t think you’ll be able to help much, though.” He turned back toward the group, his gaze resting on Danny. “He shit and pissed himself. Like I said, always go to the bathroom before getting into your vehicle.”
The paramedics were climbing into the ambulance, obviously with no intention of assisting the pickup driver. “Where are they taking my sister?” Danny demanded.
The instructor waved him away. “She’ll be fine.” He clapped his hands. “Now! Let’s head over to Building Four, Room One Ten. We have some simulators there, and I want you to have a go, see how much you learned from this. Warning: the simulator seats have the capability to provide very strong electrical shocks should you respond incorrectly to the scenarios provided. So, once again, make sure you go to the bathroom before you strap yourselves in!”
****
A new man joined their group after they finished on the simulators (where Danny had been shocked only once, and mildly, after failing to come to a complete stop before making a right turn). They were seating themselves in a lecture hall, where they were to be assigned identities for a role-playing game, when a security guard escorted the man into the building, bringing him directly to the instructor, who then asked the newbie to take a seat.
Danny didn’t know who the man was, but he looked like he was somebody. It was the way he carried himself. He might or might not be famous, but whoever he was, the man seemed different than the rest of them, more important. And he was treated differently, Danny noticed. At lunch—or what passed for lunch—he overheard one of the busboys ask the man if he would be willing to read over something and give his opinion on it, a request that was met with a cold simple, “No.”
Danny finagled a way to get close to the man after they finished eating, while everyone was milling about and waiting to see what the afternoon would bring. He wasn’t good at introducing himself to others, especially adults, but if this situation didn’t spur him into taking the plunge, nothing would. “Hey,” he said, trying to sound casual, “what’s your name? I’m Danny. Danny Wilding.”
“Todd Klein,” the man said.
He decided to take a chance. “The Todd Klein?”
The man looked surprised. “You’ve read my books?”
So he was a writer. That made sense. “No,” he lied, “but my mom does.”
Todd laughed. “I thought they’d be a little boring for you.”
Danny looked around to make sure they weren’t being observed. “Why are you here? What happened?”
“Why are you here? What are you? Fifteen?”
Danny felt obscurely offended. “Sixteen,” he said, trying to keep the petulance out of his voice.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just weird to find someone so young in this…prison camp.”
“Is that what this is?”
“From what I can figure.” Todd shrugged. “Who knows?”
“They told us it was a re-education camp.”
The phrase seemed to alarm Todd, but he said simply, “Six of one, half a dozen of the other.”
“Well, do you have any idea how long we’re supposed to be here?” Danny asked. “Is this like jail, where we’re in for a long period of time? Or do we just learn these little lessons, get a certificate and go home, like traffic school?.”
“I have no idea,” Todd admitted.
Danny glanced around, lowered his voice. “They hurt my sister. They used her as a crash test dummy, and she was in an accident, and I’m pretty sure she broke her legs, and now she’s in the hospital.”
“They have a hospital here?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’m just guessing that’s where she is because some paramedic guys took her away.”
“Maybe she’s in a nearby hospital. Maybe we’re close to a town or a city.”
“You don’t know where we are either?”
Todd shook his head.
“Is this even legal, what they’re doing? Me and my sister were kidnapped! They tattooed us with our driver’s license numbers! And they…” He was getting perilously close to crying, and he took a deep breath. “Like I said, they hurt my sister.”
“No, I don’t think this is legal.” Todd’s voice was quiet but firm. “I’m going to talk to some of these other men and women when I get a chance and see if we can’t find a way out of here. Until then—” He broke off as a DMV employee approached them.
“Three Four One Five Seven Nine,” the employee said. “Eight Six Five Zero Zero One. What are you two discussing?”
“Your mama,” Todd replied.
Danny was admiring of such defiance, but he couldn’t help noticing the strange look that had crossed Todd’s face when the man addressed him by his license number rather than his name.
“There are very few comedians in the camp,” the employee said. The words were presented as an observation but obviously meant as a threat. He nodded at them and continued walking. “As you were.”
Todd looked over at Danny once the man was out of earshot. “What say we canvas the yard, talk to some of our fellow inmates, see who’s interested in joining us?”
Danny nodded.
“Then let’s go meet our companions.”
****
A new instructor had arrived for the afternoon, a blond crew-cut guy who looked more like a football player than a DMV clerk—and who had one eye that opened far wider than the other. “You may address me as ‘Sir,’” he said.
Apparently, the plan was for them—the prisoners, as Danny now thought of himself and the others—to spend the rest of the day performing some type of unspecified manual labor. “It is hard work but very rewarding,” the instructor said.
“And what is it exactly that we’ll be doing?” Todd asked. In the space of a few hours, he seemed to have become their spokesman.
The instructor smiled at Todd then turned away, not answering the question. “On the way, we are going to take a small detour and look at The Pit,” he said. “The Pit is where particularly recalcitrant campers are taken so that they might reflect on their actions and perhaps derive some benefit from introspection. Onward!”
He led them, single file, around the side of the low building where Danny and Jill had been branded, to the woodland beyond. Towering above the trees in front of them was the wall, and that was the direction in which they headed. The dirt path they were on was narrow, and it eventually ran through a short meadow where there was, indeed, a pit. It was as wide as two car lengths, and the instructor gathered them at the edge, telling them to look down.
Standing next to Todd, Danny peered into the hole. As large as its diameter was, the pit was surprisingly shallow, its top edge only a few feet above the heads of the men and women who stood at the bottom. Dirty and unkempt, dressed in raggedy scraps of clothing, the dozen or so people huddled together against the opposite side were hemmed in by what appeared at first to be a swirling pool of black water. But it wasn’t water. The shifting darkness on the dirt in front of them was actually ants, thousands of them. The insects and the humans seemed to be observing a kind of truce and staying on their own sides of the pit, but lines of marching ants spread outward from the central assemblage and up the dirt walls to form a fluid ring at the top, encircling the entire crown of the hole’s wide opening.
“Let us out!” a woman cried, her pleading eyes looking up at them. “For God’s sake, let us out!”
“You know,” the instructor mused, “the ant is the only species other than humans that wages war. All animals and insects fight, of course, but the mobilization of an entire society for the purpose of conquering a rival in battle happens only with human beings and ants.” He glanced around at Danny, Todd and the rest of the group. “We’re much more alike than most of you probably realize.”
“Please!” another woman sobbed.
“Time’s a-wasting!” the instructor said cheerfully. “And there’s a lot of work that needs to be done. We’d better move out. Onward!”
They stopped moments later in front of a gigantic mound of debris several yards away from the high wall, which this close they could see was topped by barbed wire. Painted on the side of the concrete barrier were detailed murals of demolished cars and freeway accidents.
“Halt!” the instructor announced. “We’re here!”
The afternoon was exhausting. They were put to work assembling a series of five-foot high piles of alternating red bricks and white cinder blocks. An entire building seemed to have been demolished here, and it was their job to separate the bricks and blocks from the rubble and boards, and stack them at the foot of the wall. “Slave labor,” one woman muttered as she toiled, and that was how Danny felt as well. He had plenty of time to think while he ferried materials, and while he didn’t know much about the legal system, he was pretty sure he couldn’t be put in a prison camp if he hadn’t actually been convicted of a crime. Which meant that either this wasn’t a prison camp, or the laws governing the DMV were different than those that applied to the rest of society.
He suspected the latter.
They worked until it was nearly dark. Tired and dirty, they were returned to the mess hall for dinner. The morning’s instructor was standing just inside the doorway, welcoming them, and Danny strode angrily up to him, demanding an answer to the question that had consumed him all afternoon: “Where’s my sister?”
The man favored Danny with a slight smile. “If you wish me to respond, you will address me as ‘Sir.’”
“Where is my sister, Sir?”
“Why, she’s being fitted for her prosthetics.”
Danny wasn’t sure he’d heard right. “What?”
“Your sister has graciously agreed to help us demonstrate tomorrow the strides that have been made for drivers with special needs. And for her cooperation, she will be receiving a brand new license!”
It seemed suddenly hard to breathe. “I…I don’t understand.”
“We have amputated her legs, which, let’s face it, after that accident would never have worked right anyway, and she’s getting two brand new state-of-the-art prosthetics! Tomorrow, she will show us how amputees can drive, race and do everything the limbed can do. Besides, the way she likes to behave in cars, having no legs will be a blessing.” He nudged Danny with an elbow. “Easier access, if you know what I mean.”
Even as Danny felt like throwing up, an incongruously logical thought cut through his shock and horror. “She can’t have her legs cut off today and then start driving tomorrow. It’s not possible. She’ll be in the hospital for a week.”
“We’re using wax,” the instructor said.
Danny had no idea what that meant. “Wax?”
“She’ll be over it in no time.” He clapped Danny on the shoulder. “See you tommorrow, bud. Oh, and start using your diapers at night. Taxpayer dollars pay for those. It’s a shame to waste them.”
Todd was waiting for him, along with three of the men who’d agreed to join them in looking for a means of escape. “What’d he tell you?”
“My sister,” Danny said, blinking away tears. “They’re going to kill her.”
“That can’t be true.”
“It is.”
“We won’t let that happen.”
“They sawed off her legs. So even if we found a way out of here, there’s no way she’d be able to come with us.”
Excusing themselves, the three men moved away toward a table, talking low amongst themselves.
Todd ignored them.“Don’t worry,” he promised. “We’ll get out of here. And we’ll bring your sister with us.”
Danny wanted more than anything to believe him.
But he didn’t.
“Dinner is served!” the cook anounced.
THIRTY THREE
The cheerful lights were starting to get to him. Along with the relentlesly sunny music.
It was the third time they’d been brought to the office for on-the-job training, and Jorge had been at his station for what had to be at least 24 hours. Doctors, he knew, were subjected to this sort of shit as interns. It was supposed to prepare them for the rigors of the actual job. But he doubted that the DMV had such lofty goals in mind. No, this was a war. They wanted the exhausted trainees to make mistakes or doze off so that punishment could be meted out. Jorge refused to give them the satisfaction, though, and through sheer force of will, he kept the tiredness at bay and pushed on.
At the moment, he was tasked with sorting newly printed forms that had not been collated, filing one copy of each in a long metal cabinet against the rear wall and distributing the remaining copies to the appropriate stations. It was boring work but easy to screw up, and Jorge was careful to make sure that the forms were in numerical order before filing them. Pulling open a new drawer, he peeled off the top form stacked on his cart—C134-2/V: Authorization For Duplicate Registration—and placed it in the appropriate manila folder.
The next sheet down, C146-3/G, was titled Request To Remove Spouse From Title Registration, and instead of immediately filing the form, he found himself staring at the word Spouse and thinking of Beverly. Over the past few days, the pain of her loss had settled into numbness. It was still there—it was always there—but it was no longer at the forefront of his thoughts 24-7. Overwork and perpetual tiredness had managed to push grief aside, and Jorge wondered if that was part of the plan.
Shaking off his reverie, he placed the form in its proper folder, picked up the sheet beneath it and continued filing.
He must have learned more than he thought in those “classes” he’d been forced to attend, absorbing department procedures and protocols by osmosis, since even though he’d made no attempt to pay attention or study, he seemed to be fairly adroit at performing whatever duties were assigned to him.
Unlike several of his fellow trainees.
A man he knew only as Mitchell went down first this time. During the final hour of their previous shift, he had almost sent an applicant to the wrong window after a cursory glance at her paperwork, and though he had caught himself and immediately corrected the error, he had been reprimanded for it. This time, Mitchell failed to notice that a man whose renewal application stated that he was required to wear glasses while driving had neglected to wear those glasses while reading off the eye chart. He passed the eye test with a perfect score, suggesting that he had memorized the chart.
Mitchell discovered his mistake at the same time the rest of them did—when the chimes sounded.
Once more, an announcement was made, everyone stopped what they were doing, and they all made their way through the maze, convening in the open space at the center of the office. There was no metal lattice this time but what appeared to be an old-fashioned electric chair waiting for the trainee.
Was Mitchell going to be electrocuted?
Flanked by two uniformed security guards, he was strapped into the seat as his supervisor from Window Seven announced what he had done wrong and how his slip had negatively affected the effectiveness of the Department of Motor Vehicles.
If, before, the recruits had been dopey, they were all now wide awake.
“All hail the DMV!” the supervisors chanted in unison.
“All hail the DMV!” the onlookers responded.
Jorge tensed up, expecting to hear an electric crackle and see blue sparks as voltage was discharged into Mitchell’s body, but to his surprise, the Window Seven supervisor called out, “Number Two pencil!”
