The Redemption Factory (3 page)

Two enormous steel doors were pushed aside by Shank who, like a ringmaster, indicated for Paul to enter. “Feast your eyes on the beauty of death and you will know that this place has no equal.”

Hesitating, Paul stopped, as if to take a breath of air.

Shank grinned before pushing Paul ahead. “Doubt is the gate through which slips the most deadly of enemies, Mister Goodman. Hesitate, and you die. Surely, we don’t want that on your first day, do we?”

Reluctantly, Paul entered, and immediately felt as if an invisible hand had slammed against his stomach. The place was massive and held no boundaries. It was breathtakingly horrible, like the Sistine Chapel blooded by barbarians, seething with rage in a hideous frenzy of activity. Its dank coldness reeked with tension and void of all things human. The massive floor was littered with sawdust chips speckled red with imperfections while above him thousands of withered electric wires hung dangerously like spindly skeleton bones on a giant spider. There was a sense of danger about the place; a sense that someone was going to be killed before the day was complete.

Ruddy violins of sheep carcasses captured on unforgiving ‘S’ hooks dangled grotesquely from above, mingling with dead, cello-shaped cows, like a bizarre scene from Hieronymus Bosch marrying the surrealism of Salvador Dali.

More of the same type of biblical paintings, such as those in Shank’s office, lined the walls. There seemed to be
hundreds if not thousands of them, and like those intense displays, the eyes in the surrounding pictures seemed to stare at him – at everyone – like sentinels on duty, illuminated by garish fluorescent lights.

Workers were saturated in blood and moving in perfect harmony, as if part of some farcical play performed for an invisible audience. They all seemed to be talking at once.

“Ladies and gentlemen! Your attention, please!” screamed Shank, his voice rising above the skull-rattling noise of machinery.

But if the workers heard his voice, they showed nothing, continuing with their hacking and sawing of meat, some of which was dead, some of which was clearly not.

“A contestant has entered our domain, our magical kingdom of life and death. He believes he is our equal. What say you?”

The workers were as bloody as the mangled wreckages of meat they hacked at, and distinguishable only by the tiny whiteness of their eyes, teeth and fingernails. They continued working their endless preparation of death as if they were immune to the question uttering from Shank’s mouth.

Paul’s nostrils began to flood with a stomach-churning smell. The same stinking stench from outside the building came at him with force, but more powerful in its taste of rotten flesh, and of fear and hate oozing from the ruins of carcasses and their tormentors.

One group of workers, their faces obscured by the steam rising from giant mugs of tea cradled in their massive hands, sat comfortably in a corner, seemingly immune to the chaos all about them, talking, reading newspapers roughly handled
by reddened hands. Other workers devoured meals of fried eggs and freshly slaughtered meat, wiping their stained mouths with bloody, ragged handkerchiefs and soiled aprons.

Paul felt his stomach move at the thought of eating a creature he had seen alive minutes ago. How could their stomachs hold down the food? He felt his head go light and wondering if he was going to vomit, if his resolve would evaporate?

Swiftly, he remembered Shank’s warning about fainting and vomiting and he willed himself to win, not to succumb. He needed this job, badly. He would not leave this terrible place without it.

“Are you feeling okay?” asked Shank, grinning. “You look pale. Perhaps we can arrange a visit for some other time? It’s nothing to be ashamed about, Mister Goodman. Many are called, but few are chosen …”

Paul barely collected himself sufficiently to frame a thought. “Thank you for your concern, Mister Shank,” he replied. “But I’m fine. More than fine …”

“Good!” replied Shank, slapping Paul’s back. “That’s what we want to hear. Isn’t it, ladies and gentlemen?”

No one heard. If they did, they did not answer.

Shank walked ahead, talking loudly, his voice filled with pride. “My abattoir is the biggest single killing unit in the country. The major activities involved in the operation of the abattoir are slaughter and chilling of carcass product, boning and packaging, as well the drying of skins for leather. Nothing goes to waste here, Mister Goodman.
Nothing
.”

Moving swiftly, Shank walked towards a cluster of open doors, followed closely by Paul.

“Over there, to your left, are the by-product rooms housing dripping, fertiliser, oil, sinews, hoofs, hair, glue, bones and horns.” A sound kept interrupting the flow of Shank’s words, a sound so soft it was barely perceptible, of muffled voices emanating somewhere from inside. Only the terror in the sound sharpened its appeal to be heard. The voices weren’t loud, but their clarity grew.

Paul traced the sound from some place near the upper entrance, an independent floor governed by a cluster of
red-hats
who stood menacingly about like a hierarchy of Spanish Inquisition cardinals about to pronounce death on a heretic. There was an absence of movement, a core of quiet and stillness complete, as if they were waiting on a photographer. He had the edgy feeling that all the activity must mean something, even if he couldn’t make any sense of it.

As if in trance, Paul followed the sound, followed its Pied Piper magnetic power even though he didn’t want to and for a brief moment he thought he saw the flash of a gold hat and felt his resolve being undermined a little by Shank’s words not to look at the gold hats, as if they were Medusa, capable of turning flesh to stone.

Turning his head slightly, Paul watched as bewildered creatures entered one end of the large room, only to emerge naked, humiliated and dismembered at the other atop a large conveyer-belt slithering its way ominously in his direction. The workers moved quickly on the creatures, in a frenzy of activity, infected by the fervour, their hands gesticulating like traffic cops on too much caffeine.

The gold hat was screaming instruction at the workers. “Keep it tight, Raymond, you stupid fuck! The cows are trying
to leap over the barrier. Stun the bastards, will you!”

Galvanized by the smell of blood, some of the cows, in a futile attempt to escape, were attempting to leap the barrier. Raymond, a tall skinny young man looked confused by the rush of cows heading dangerously in his direction.

“Careless, Geordie!” shouted Shank angrily at the gold hat. “Bloody careless. They’ve squeezed out of the stunning tongs and head bars.
You’re
in charge, but you’re losing control of the situation. The animals have taken over the farm. Fix it!”

Without hesitation, Geordie grabbed the stun gun from Raymond’s hand, pushing him backwards towards the crushing beasts, regardless of his safety. There was a unity of purpose in Geordie’s movements.

Seconds later, the
spa spa spa
sound of the stun gun began, isolating the brain of each creature as the tiny metal pellets hit home at the back of the skull, devastating all feelings in the body.

As each beast buckled to the ground, it was quickly set upon by the angry butchers, raging that the creatures had humiliated them in front of Shank. Most of the cows had their throats quickly slit, but a few not so fortunate suffered a slow and agonising death of stabs wounds to the body. A bloody highway of intricate veins and vestigial nerves were strewn everywhere, some ticking with shock.

“Look at them move, Mister Goodman. It’s almost like poetry in motion,” said Shank, admiringly. “You know, sometimes I think they see the faces of their wives in those cows …”

Paul said nothing. He was numb. He had never witnessed anything on this scale before, never imagined this was how his
Saturday fry originated. He felt shame, disgust and hatred for the grinning faces. He had no other option than to look away.

“It’s a great form of anger-management, is slaughtering,” continued Shank. “I could make a fortune selling this therapy – and it would work. Not like the nonsense of sitting on a couch and telling some shrink your problems. How can sitting on a couch and making a fool of yourself be beneficial? It’s all baloney. Voodoo magic and hogwash. No, this is the real thing. None of my butchers go home with anger in their hearts. It’s all released here, in the Bloody Garden of Eden. Isn’t that right, Geordie?”

Geordie turned to face Shank.

“Who’s this idiot? Another tourist come to visit Grisly World?” asked Geordie, ignoring Shank’s question. “And why is he staring at me? Think I’m a freak, Idiot? Never see someone wearing scaffolding?”

To Paul’s horror and disbelief, Geordie was a young woman. Steel leg-braces looped the outside of her legs, and as she walked menacingly towards him like darkness on the move, her limps becoming more pronounced in their vertical stiffness. Her eyes were mirrored bullets, lethal in their intensity and savagely focused, bleaching the depth of his bones. Shadows jiggled on the wall behind her, seemingly human, following her every move. She seemed to have deliberately set her face into an expression that no worker could misinterpret: don’t fuck with me, it screamed. Now it said to Paul: fuck off; your kind isn’t welcome here …

“Easy, Geordie,” said Shank, grinning at the look on Paul’s face. “Calm your arse down. I don’t want you killing a
would-be
recruit on his first day. This is Mister Paul Goodman. He’s
passed all the tests. Almost. Hasn’t fainted once. Hasn’t even shit his pants. He’s defeated the lot of you.” Shank laughed. It was full of scorn and disdain for Geordie, for the workers.

From a gold container, Shank removed a cigar, sniffed its leaves then lit it. The tobacco crackled, and for a second, his face became invisible, lost in the mist of smoke.

“Has he, indeed? Not shit his pants? Well? What are we waiting for?” said Geordie, her eyes never leaving Paul’s. “He’s either with us or against us. Time for Paul the Baptist to find out if he’s a heathen or a butcher. Take him away!”

They came at him from every direction, like ants, their hands grabbing and pulling him to the ground. Within seconds his clothes were ripped from him and he was carried trophy-high, naked. He felt he was losing his mind, as if this was one of those nightmares you awake from only to find yourself paralysed with fear at what your mind has done to you, recognising it as valid and real, but that perhaps it never really existed to begin with.

“What? What are you doing?”

His mind wasn’t working right, as if it were wrapped in putty. Everything was soft and filtered, even the noise around him. He felt like he wanted to throw up but didn’t have the energy. He became light-headed. The sensation was one of floating away. Somehow, it was important that he stay on the ground. He blinked his eyes to try and clear his thinking. There were white spots behind his lids. They turned black when he opened his eye. He watched them, dancing across the ceiling. What was it about spots? There was something important but he couldn’t remember. Maybe it would come back to him, he thought and closed his eye, once more. He
screamed to be released, but the mob only screamed louder, laughing, encouraged by his fear and helplessness. Now he felt as humiliated and as naked as the beasts whose deaths he had witnessed a few minutes ago.

“Baptise. Bap-bap-tise. Baptise. Bap-bap-tise,” they chanted, almost in song. “Baptise. Bap-bap-tise …”

The more Paul struggled, the tighter their grip on him became. He fought off the twin impulses to scream and kick. Within seconds, he was drained and felt his body go limp, like paper damp with water.

“Now you’re learning,” whispered Geordie into his ear. “You can struggle, Idiot, but you can never win. Not here, not in this place. Never
ever
in this place …”

Unexpectedly, the crowd stopped and eased him to the floor, gently, as if he were something fragile, a tiny baby newly born.

“John and Alfred? Take his ankles. Raymond? His left hand; I’ve got his right. The rest of you stand back,” commanded Geordie.

“What are you going to –” But before Paul could complete his question, he found himself being hoisted into the air.

“Ready lads?” said Geordie. “One …”

“Hey!” shouted Paul, fear in his voice, as he felt his body swaying to and fro. “What are you –?”

“Two …”

“Look, okay. You win. Please …”

“Hope you can swim, Idiot.
Threeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

He remembered sailing through the air, naked, and the truly exhilarating experience of what birds must feel at the start of take-off. A swirl of colours passed over his perspective. He
remembered his penis wobbling from side to side, making horrible slapping sounds, as it winked at him like a one-eyed pirate.

Only when he realised that they had tossed him from the third floor and that he was falling quite rapidly towards his death, did he scream.

Some ray of hope, perhaps augmented by his closeness to death, seemed to fill him with adrenaline, dulling the fear inside. His life didn’t fly before him in a blink of an eye – as was rumoured in near-death experiences – but when his face and body crashed intp the red carpet beneath him, killing him instantly, he did piss himself.

Red. What would the world be without it? It is the most attractive of colours, primary in its superiority. Roses, apples, wines and Valentines. Red sunsets and hot love. Red is the component and attribute of power, vitality, passion, anger and excitement. All are governed by red. But without doubt, the most important of all reds is blood. Without it, we are nothing. It is a life-giver.

When you come upon an action at the precise moment of occurrence, movement is frozen, sound waves do not propagate, and what you see is not real. And so it happened, spreading through Paul’s whole being as he found himself swimming in blood – lakes and seas of the stuff – knowing if he didn’t do something very quickly, it would not be a life-giver but a life-taker.

His head came to the surface, only to find the rest of his body being pulled back down by the blood’s magnetic power. He was a good swimmer, loved to swim, but this thick liquid was unlike water. It had more in common with a swamp, and
the more he struggled the stronger it became.