A Happy Bureaucracy, page 9
part #1 of Happy Bureaucracy Series
“I’ve heard of you, seen your file passed around, I’m sorry about that promotion, Mr. McDowell,” Dewitt said, moving closer. “We had great hopes for you; it was a shame to see you go off in the first wave. How is it that I have gotten here before you? You left a full 12 hours before me.”
“Radioactive sandstorm sir, forced us to dig down and sit it out for most of the second day,” Arthur said. There were a million questions swimming like caffeinated sharks in his head, but the most selfish one came out first: “You knew of my promotion?”
“Of course,” Dewitt answered. “I personally thought there was no one better for it. After you were chosen in Boyd’s surprise ‘lottery' for the conscription, the position still had to be filled. Went to a man by the name of Ralph Siemens. It was very unfortunate.” Dewitt clutched at the chain-link fence holding him in. “Not that it matters now.”
It did. He understood Dewitt’s sentiment; there was no future for them now, but it mattered because it was a promise. It mattered because it was the only shred of hope Arthur had held on to going into this mission. If he got back, he was promoted. Period. But to hear that it was immediately awarded to Ralph, no less than 12 hours later (and given the efficiency of the IRS, likely immediately after) was like grinding salt covered glass into an already festering wound.
The two guards that had brought him here, the man with the poorly drawn snake tattoos, and Dumb Dick Rick, were now at the trough. Each stuck their head in and drank voraciously. When they had had their fill, the man in the tattoos pulled out a knife and started to sharpen it with his belt. They clearly intended to stay for a bit, let the slaves know who was in charge.
Dewitt lowered his voice. “I’m sorry you got caught up in this. Boyd wanted me out of the way, always has. There wasn’t anything he was unwilling to do to get my position, but it was mine to have.” His tired eyes met Arthur’s once more. “The Revised National Emergency Operations Guide clearly states that anyone, no matter their pay grade or position, can be reassigned to carry out essential operations. The Guide also states census taking as ‘essential’.”
The rest did not need to be said aloud. Henry S. Boyd had initiated this census to get what he wanted and damn the consequences. The man that Arthur had looked up to, his hero, had purposefully sent an unknown amount of men to their deaths so that he could take advantage of a loophole that would allow him to move up in the agency. The bureaucrat in Arthur respected the calculus, but the man in him wept at the coldness.
“The two of us are finished,” Dewitt said, then collapsed to a sitting position in despondent misery and physical pain. “Thank you for your service.”
“Keep quiet over there! Don't talk durin’ our break!” Dumb Dick Rick yelled. But there was no need. The Commissioner had lost interest in Arthur, now confined to his fate. As for Arthur, well, his existential terror was too deep to move him to words.
The last civil place on the planet, well, it just let psychopaths climb the ladder of authority with a cold distance. The system that he grew up in, that he believed in, truly and without compromise - what difference was there between it and the terrible hierarchy here? Both Henry S. Boyd and The Colonel had killed men to get to where they are, but at least The Colonel had the decency to throttle those men with his own sausage-like fingers. Boyd had just filed a form. He lied to Arthur’s face. This was supposed to be easy, there was supposed to be no one here, a tribe at most. Instead there was a death trap, and Arthur had stepped into it, willingly!
“Where’d you git those tats?” Dumb Dick Rick asked the other guard, pointing at the striped garden hoses with poorly drawn circles for eyes. “Those snakes are sick.”
“Forced a man at gunpoint to do ‘em,” the tattooed man replied. “Said it’d take him hours, I told him to do them before I was done eating my breakfast!”
“Alpha male,” Dumb Dick Rick approved without emotion, fist bumping the other.
“Alpha male for sure,” the tattooed man agreed. “Only took ‘bout twenty minutes, but I had been done with my can of beans by then, so I blew his fucking head off once he was done. Probably the best work of his life.” He looked at his permanent doodles and smiled with admiration.
More men came to the trough, each with a weapon holstered or slung over their shoulder. A couple of them had slabs of cooked, greasy meat in their hands. There were 11 of them total, gathered around the trough as if it were an office water cooler, and each one took a long drink before leaning against it. The group was testosterone mixed with an ignorance that almost had integrity. Arthur looked on. These men were proud, brutal, stupid and arrogant. Was this what man had reverted to as a result of society collapsing, or had he always been this way, only now he no longer had to hide it?
Dewitt gave Arthur a sidelong look, still sitting in defeat. He recognized the look of disapproval in Arthur’s face. “You weren’t alive before the bombs fell,” Dewitt said in a hushed tone. “We were always like that, only interested in covering our own insecurities with a false sense of superiority. If someone thought you were weak, then you picked on or blamed someone that was different than you: women, different races, different sexualities, hell, anyone and everyone that wasn’t close to you. The only difference between them now and then is that then we didn’t have an excuse for it, but we did it anyways.”
Dewitt raised a hand over his shoulder and clutched the fence. “I saw that in Boyd. The only thing that gives that man pleasure is being above someone else. I kept my position for as long as I did so he wouldn't get that satisfaction.”
A few of the guards had spread from the trough, but not far from it. A few of them leaned against the cages, knowing that the slave within would not dare to grab them. It was like dogs pissing to mark their territory, and now that Arthur thought about it, it wasn’t a stretch to see one of them do exactly that. The guard that was head to toe in sheet metal had returned. He leaned casually on Arthur’s cage. Dewitt stopped speaking at once, not wanting to push his luck.
Arthur wanted his promotion because it meant safety, and in all honesty he would have been happy to stay there. Or so he thought. He had never been in charge of someone else. Would that power have gone to his head? If he somehow did get home and got the promotion that he deserved, how long would it take before power had poisoned his soul? He had always run fantasies in his mind’s eye of sending Ralph’s smug face off to his death. Wasn’t this what Boyd had done to Dewitt?
Was civility a luxury to mask the rancid monkeys that they truly were?
The sun had almost completely set and a cool breeze washed over the caged people. It was the closest thing they would get to refreshment.
“Anyone else hot?” Dumb Dick Rick boomed at no one in particular. “Why’s it still hot out?”
A shiver crept up Arthur’s creaky spine.
No one answered Dumb Dick Rick. As one guard leant down to drink some water, another punched him in the groin with precision and speed. The man fell down in agony, immediately in a fetal position, clutching his assaulted balls. Laughter burst out of the other guards, the random act of cruelty on the same level as the finest stand-up comedian. Dumb Dick Rick, with a smile that revealed his rotten teeth, chest-bumped the attacker and shouted “Alpha male, dog! Alpha male!” Then he patted him on the back in affection.
The guard leaning on Arthur’s cage spat out a giggle, and smoke poured out from underneath his mask.
Arthur looked on at his captors in disgust, at once not surprised by his own gender, but lacking any understanding in it. If Dewitt was right, if his experience in both worlds had proved a valid theory of man, was there any escaping this? Arthur knew that there was a life of casual violence and indifference to suffering ahead of him. If terrible things were going to happen to him, why not be defiant to it?
The man with the tattoos brought his arm up to show off the snakes to a different guard, but then he froze, looking bewildered. “Di-did my snake just move?” he said with an awe that sat neatly with fear and pleasure.
Arthur looked at the guard near him, the sheet metal armor reflecting what little light was left from the sun. Fuck the consequences he thought and moved toward Dewitt. He had questions, questions that his existential crisis demanded answers to, and tomorrow there was no guarantee he would be able to ask them. “Is there no future, sir? If we have always been like this, what can we do to break this cycle?”
Dewitt shuffled, then faced Arthur, his eyes tired and grey, looking as desperate as Arthur felt. “Who knows? Maybe nothing. Maybe we wait out this era of fallout and hatred and try again. Or maybe we just hand the reins to the women, and hope they don’t castrate the lot of us.”
“Good answer,” said the guard in the sheet metal armor, more smoke pouring out of the helmet.
Rabia!
“Probably only castrate the worst of you demented swine and sell the festering genitalia off as power symbols to the other women in charge. So you two will be fine,” Rabia whispered. “Also,” she continued, “shut the fuck up, we’re on break.”
Arthur kept quiet. There was so much he wanted to say, and if there were no barriers between them (or madmen around them), he would have rushed in for a hug and squeezed like a bear. He would then apologize for being a headstrong zealot for a cause that did not share his affection. He would look into her burnt mahogany eyes, steal a glance at her beauty, and brace himself for the ugliest string of words he had ever heard.
The man holding his groin on the floor had rolled over, no longer doubled over in pain. He looked into the sky above, now dotted with a few stray stars and local planets. “It’s so big,” he said, “It’s so fucking big”. No one paid him any mind.
Dumb Dick Rick and the tattooed man were too busy gawking at the poorly drawn snakes, their jaws open in disbelief. “They are moving!” Dumb Dick Rick said.
The man in the tattoos screamed in terror. “GET THEM OFF! GET THEM OFF!”
Dumb Dick Rick grabbed the man’s knife from out of his hands and hacked furiously at the tattooed arm.
Panic. Sheer bloody panic spread through the crowd of guards like a blighted thunderbolt.
“I put something in the water,” Rabia said to Arthur, reaching into her pocket.
The sudden violence had stirred something in the guards that was not rational, and each dealt with it with flight or fight. There was laughter, tears, and raw animalistic screaming.
Rabia fished out a lock pick kit. She slid a long, L-shaped piece of metal into the padlock that was holding the door shut, then pulled out a crooked piece of metal and started to rake it towards her.
The guards around them paid them no attention. They were too busy either fighting each other or some invisible thing in the air that only they could see.
“What in god’s name did you put in there?” Arthur asked.
“Everything,” Rabia said as the padlock came undone. “I put all of my drugs in there.” The door swung open. “Well, except for the good feeling ones.”
Dumb Dick Rick was now beating the man with the tattoos with his own severed arm. “It’s not working!” he cried “The snakes are everywhere!”
Arthur crawled out his cage as Rabia moved on to Dewitt’s. She worked quickly on his padlock. “This deserves a raise,” she said as the old man stumbled out of the cage. “A raise and a room.”
“How did you…?” Dewitt tried.
“Easily,” Rabia answered, “I’m a god damn professional!”
The two men followed Rabia, who was walking with urgency, but not running, through a path of cages. The men and women (and even a child) within the cages looked out to them in fear and desperation. Arthur met the eyes of each one he passed. I will get you out, he thought, no matter what happens.
The terrible cacophony of drugged-induced hysteria had reached a crescendo. Guards from all around had gathered to quell, or at least watch, the bedlam that had befallen their peers. Rabia shoved Arthur down behind an empty cage. Dewitt followed suit. Four guards, including the one with the rifle who had greeted them into this cruel hell, ran past them, too busy with the vicious circus ahead of them to notice the wounded bureaucrats being herded by a short, metal guard.
Rabia led Arthur and Dewitt inside the cage. Two more guards ran towards them, a mixture of pleasurable anticipation and fear on their faces. “Over there!” Rabia pointed to the trough. “One of them wants to fuck The Colonel!” she yelled. The moment they were gone, she led Arthur and Dewitt out of the cage.
Save for the endless rows of miserable people incarcerated in rusting boxes, the town was empty. They were soon at the far side of it, nearing a jumble of vehicles, all of them mutated into something horrible, and each capable of carrying at least one cage. “This is where they ship the slaves in and out,” Rabia said, “We get in one of these junk demons while those Nazi cocksuckers are distracted and get the hell out of dodge!” She stopped suddenly and removed her helmet. Her kinky afro burst free from its constraints. Arthur’s heart skipped a beat when she looked at him.
Rabia’s heart did the same, but for an entirely different reason.
Before them was a rusted Chevrolet Impala convertible. Metal spikes were welded to the front of it and a large cage had taken root in the back seats. This Frankenstein of car and vicious junk had lost most of its red paint, but the large, manic smile of a shark had been painted on the hood of it. Rabia was immediately in love.
“We take this one,” she said with awe. “Oh yes.”
Chapter Eleven
At times it felt as though Rabia’s driving was like trying to buck a Saturn Five rocket. Knuckle white tension and high octane fuel was the new law for the journey. Consequence could only ever happen if it caught up with you and, with their new ride, this was unlikely.
Truly, this was Rabia Duke, freelance Enforcer, at her best.
Arthur did not vomit, but only because there was no food in his system to purge.
Whether it was out of necessity, or minor revenge against ‘the system’, Commissioner Dewitt was seated inside the cage that was welded to the back of ‘The Shark’ (a name Rabia immediately adopted for the car, and enforced almost violently).
No one followed.
By the time the IRS agents had made it back to the van and drove it and The Shark to the horseshoe rock enclosure that Rabia and Arthur had camped out in the night before, a yellow-orange haze had engulfed Slaver City. The darkness of earth’s own shadow had engulfed the valley and mountains, and the inhumane city they left behind had caught fire. Whatever calliope of drugged induced insanity they had left behind them, it had peaked with the wholesale destruction of at least three of the pre-war buildings.
Committing precious water to those buildings would be egregious. Instead, the denizens of Slaver City opted for the more abundant resource of sand, using every free and slave hand available to dig and snuff the fire out. As the fires faded, and much of the chaos had ceased, Rabia, Arthur and the Commissioner sat on top of a boulder, sharing provisions of food, water, and alcohol. They admired Rabia’s professional handiwork.
Arthur finally accepted Rabia’s offer of whiskey.
The three were in immensely good spirits. Watching the fire had done much for this, but freedom was surely the better opiate. Rabia lit a cigarette and slapped Arthur on the knee. “You are a real bastard,” she said, affectionately. Her hand lingered. “You are lucky I’m a god damn professional.”
Arthur took a swig of whiskey and then rebounded in horror as its hateful burn assaulted his throat, then numbed his senses. He wasn’t quite drunk enough to reply to her with something cheesy like “I’m lucky to have you”, but he did have enough courage to scoot closer to his knight in sheet metal, which, for Arthur, was about as suave as he was capable of. He passed the bottle to Dewitt, whose eyes had taken up a fire of their own after a couple of swigs, and no longer looked as tired as they had in his cage.
“How in the hell did you manage that?” Dewitt asked Rabia, passing back the bottle.
Rabia had her share of Wild Turkey, an amount that was alarming, and then turned to look at the old man. “Your employee of the year here had us caught in the ‘spider’s web’, so to speak,” she said, referring to Arthur as she slapped him on the back. “Once he was gone, I slit the throat of one of the guards as he came to drag me, and then shoved my ‘Fly Swatter’ to the other’s dick before he could say anything. I threatened to kill him if he didn’t give me his clothes…”
“And you used them as a disguise to sneak in?” Arthur asked intuitively.
“Christ no, he wouldn’t hand them over, so I unzipped him with my knife from crotch to belly button,” Rabia replied, removing her cigarette contemplatively. Both men stared at her in horror. Arthur moved away from her, just a little.
“I made my way back to the van, taking a different path than we came, had half the urge to drive back home too,” she continued. “Spending a couple of days with this do-gooder was enough to guilt me back.” She nodded at Arthur with a drunken smile. “So, I did what any God-fearing patriot would do, I packed my pockets with every high powered drug at my disposal and headed back with a cocktail of fear and loathing that would kill any lesser woman.”
“Then you donned his armor and snuck inside?” Arthur tried again.
“Hell no, had to kill a different man for that. Came around on the backside of town nearest the cages and saw one of them pissing in a corner,” Rabia answered, lightheartedly.
Dewitt raised his hand. “I don't need to know what you did to him,” he said, half chuckling in fear.
Rabia shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
“Tomorrow is going to be a big day,” Dewitt said.
If Arthur was conflicted about how he felt about Rabia before, he wasn’t now. Rabia was brave, or batshit insane, but however she wielded her traits, she did so admirably. Here was a woman who was truly in charge of herself. Oh, she was frightening, and her constant consumption of chemicals was worrying, but she was everything Arthur was not. She was commanding, decisive, and not bound to petty rules. She had somehow managed to do all of this in the United Wastes without losing her humanity or empathy. She had saved him, and he was man enough to admit that wasn’t emasculating at all. Arthur had never been in love, but this felt like the start of it.
