Polestar Omega. James Axler
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then he closed ranks and growled out of the corner of his mouth, “I suggest we dispatch the minders now. Easy pickings.”
Mildred glanced over her shoulder at their clipboard-bearing, whitecoat escort. They had removed their respirators. The woman was a stick figure, her lab coat looked two sizes too big and flapped as she walked. Slicked with oil, her mousy brown hair was drawn back and coiled in a tight bun at the back of her head, which made her cheeks look all the more gaunt. She wore heavy soled, lace-up shoes. The male whitecoat was likewise undernourished looking, pale and prematurely bald, with narrow wrists and spidery fingers. Doc was right. Even with hands cuffed behind their backs, they could dispose of these adversaries with a few well-aimed front kicks. The trouble was, they didn’t know if the whitecoats had the keys to the cuffs. To really improve their situation, to help themselves and the others escape, they needed their hands free and that outcome wasn’t guaranteed by turning on the escort.
“No, not yet,” Mildred whispered back. “Keep your cool. We need to recce this place. For the time being, better to look docile and compliant.”
Doc grunted his assent, but he immediately resumed mumbling to himself like a deranged person.
He didn’t like the restraints. Neither did Mildred.
“In-for-ma-tion,” Mildred repeated with venom. “Focus, you doddering old fool.”
That shut him up.
The redoubt appeared to be fully functional, which was somewhat unusual of late. Everything worked. Power. Lights. Heat. Air. There was no sign of trash in the corridors, no mindless vandalism of the furnishings, which made Mildred think the place had not only never been looted, but that perhaps the same people and their children and their children’s children had occupied and maintained it since nukeday.
The hallway ended in a T and a pair of elevator doors, which opened at the push of a button in the wall. The whitecoats shoved them into what looked like a freight elevator and made them stand side by side at the back of the car. When the doors shut, the woman pressed a button in the console and with a jerk they began to descend. The concrete shaft passed by in a blur.
An unpleasant fishy odor filled the car; it seemed to be coming from their escort. Doc noticed it, too, because he wrinkled his nose and made a sour face at her. It was a long way to their destination, and they didn’t stop in between. When the doors finally opened, they faced a corridor lit by bare bulbs in metal cages set at intervals down the middle of the ceiling. Along the right-hand wall were a row of metal hooks, from which hung plastic bibfronts and rubber gauntlets.
The whitecoat female pointed at the heavy protective gear and said, “Put them on. Hurry up.”
“Just so you know,” Mildred said as she stepped into the bibfronts, “we don’t do toilets.”
“I think you’ll do whatever you’re told,” the woman said. She waved at the pair of swing doors on the left with her clipboard. “Through there...”
As they approached, Mildred could hear music coming from the other side. She used her shoulder to push the door open and nearly choked on her next breath. The reek of animal blood and rotting fish was that thick. Wall speakers pumped out the saxophone stylings of Kenny G, which mingled with the clatter of cutlery and rhythmic rasp of handsaws. The gray concrete room was lined with rows of stainless-steel tables and rolling steel carts. The latter were piled high with what looked like heaps of raw liver except for the red knobs of bone sticking out. About two dozen people in bibfront slickers labored with saws and knives and cleavers, either at the tables or on the gigantic carcasses hanging from meat hooks set in heavy rails on the ceiling.
At first glance Mildred thought they were sides of beef. Or enormous hogs. Then she looked closer and saw the stubby wings, taloned web feet and feather coats.
“By the Three Kennedys,” Doc said, his eyes wide with amazement, “those immense creatures are avian.”
Two men in black overalls strode up to them. From the truncheons they carried, Mildred assumed their job was to keep the butcher shop running smoothly. They were joined by a third man in bibfronts and dark blue coveralls.
“Some newbies for you to train, Oscar,” the female whitecoat said to the latecomer. His ruddy face, and his chest and arms were splattered with an impasto of blood, pinfeathers and fish scales. “When you’re done, turn them over to the fertilizer crew.”
The whitecoats unlocked and removed the handcuffs, then turned and left the room.
“Over here,” their instructor said, waving for them to follow him.
They stepped up to one of the hanging carcasses.
“What kind of bird is that?” Mildred asked, practically shouting to be heard over the Muzak and the clatter.
“Clonie pengie.”
At least she now had a clue where they had jumped to. “‘Pengie’? You mean penguin?”
Oscar scowled and looked at her as if she was crazy. “No more questions,” he said. “I’m going to show you the ropes, then you’re on your own, so watch carefully. You screw something up or work too slowly, and those men in black will pound the living hell out of you.”
Oscar selected a nine-inch boning knife from the array of razor-sharp blades on the tabletop. Raising his hand above his head, he plunged the point into the middle of the penguin’s torso, then slashed downward, smoothly unzipping the wet, gray feather coat from breastbone to pelvis, revealing an inches-thick layer of grainy brown fat beneath.
A horrible stench gusted from the incision, making Mildred take a step back. Doc coughed and covered his nose with his hand.
“You want to cut just deep enough to open the cavity,” Oscar said. “Be careful not to puncture the stomach.” He aimed the knifepoint at a bulging reddish sack the size of a basketball. “You don’t want to release the sour bile from the glands, these ones here, here and here.” He indicated compact, twisted, cordlike globs of gray tissue. “Prick them by accident and the meat is ruined.”
“Yeah, we’re walking a fine line there,” Mildred said.
Doc grinned at her joke; Oscar didn’t catch the sarcasm.
The butcher widened the cut by gripping the skin with gloved hands and pulling the edges apart. Coils of greasy guts slid out the bottom and into a strategically placed ten-gallon bucket on the floor. There was such a volume of intestine that the bucket was instantly filled to the brim. Oscar slopped the overflow into a second white plastic bucket.
“Cut here at the gullet and airway,” he said as he made the incisions with his knifepoint, “then pull out the heart, stomach and lungs. The rest will follow—like this.”
The remaining organs flopped into the backup bucket.
“Make your last cut just above the poop chute, right here. And that’s that. Gutting is the easy part.”
A female worker in navy blue hurried over to hoist the heavy buckets onto the metal table. Taking up a knife, she quickly excised the bulging stomach from the rest of the innards, then sliced it open over an empty bucket. Using both hands, she squeezed forth a slimy mess of half-digested herring, anchovy and other unidentifiable small fish and crustaceans. What skin remained on the little fish had a dull, yellowish cast from the animal’s stomach acid. The stench was like being downwind of a gray whale’s blowhole.
“Are you saving that to make fertilizer?” Mildred asked through the fingers clamped over her nose.
The worker laughed. She grabbed a gloved handful of the putrid slurry, then squeezed it in her fist, making it squirt into her open mouth. As she chewed, she gave them a thumbs-up.
A man in black swooped in from behind and whacked her sharply on the back of the skull. “You know better than that,” he said, raising the truncheon again. “Now get back to work.”
A second reminder wasn’t necessary.
“Go