End of Women: Part Five

A Short Drop

Symon had been given a rough morning. At six AM, he had all the other operators in the bunkhouses had been woken by a blaring alarm call. For a fraction of a second his sleep-deprived brain had panicked, thinking he had overslept; then he noticed all the other operatives jumping down from their bunks, shoving on pants and boots, rapidly scrubbing themselves down with soap and a brush in lieu of a shower before the Commander walked in and gave them the shortest briefing he could remember.

"We're back to work boys. Apparently there was some clusterfuck at the elimination centre, and we need all hands available."

That was it. That was all they got. Just get your ass down to the centre now. By the time he and the rest of the men had trudged their weary exhausted selves over to the tarp-covered fortress, detail had set up a long series of wooden gallows in the courtyard beside one of the watercages, which seemed to have been decommissioned. 

"What happened here?" Symon said aloud. The guys either side of him shrugged, bewildered; all the other watercages were already in operation, packed to the brim with women and sinking into the pools below with the usual white noise of wails and screams Symon barely registered at that point.

"Guess they need us to pick up the slack." One of the men said as the caged-over walkways started to fill up with masses of naked girls. Once all of the men were assembled ready for work, the Commander approached the final gate and unlocked it, took the first girl out from the line and walked her up to the nearest noose. He slipped it around her neck and kicked the block out from under her feet, leaving her to dangle and twitch until she stopped moving. Once she had, he lifted the slipknot and dropped the body into a dugout trench that ran between the lines of gallows.

"Simple enough." The Commander held up his hands to them all, then pointed to the final gate. "Get to work lads, we need ten thousand processed before midday."

Symon sighed and shook himself, trying to keep himself awake. As he approached the final gate he scanned the small crowd of operators for any sign of Robin, but the kid wasn't around. Maybe he'd slept through the wake up drill? Thinking nothing more of it Symon reached into the walkway and grabbed at random, pulling out a short and buxome brunette. Holding her in front of himself and facing away, he walked her up to a free gallows with one hand on her arm and the other clamped around her bound-up wrists.

"Just another mechanical failure, I guess." Symon said to the younger man beside him who was pulling a soft asian behind himself like a cart.

"I don't know man, but from what I heard some idiot got into the processors underground and they had to shut the whole thing down. Pretty sure the guy is on probation, might get kicked out of the service."

As his woman stumbled and shook nervously on the steps up the gallows, Symon looked around again for Robin, a little more concerned now than he was. Every member of their operating team was there, except Robin. He remembered what Robin had said the night before: I'm starting to think we got sold. Had the dumbass gotten himself into trouble?

Symon pushed the coarse rope ring around his girl's neck and tightened it up snugly, then pulled the cantilever to hoist her onto her tiptoes before knocking the block out below. She dropped and rasped, choked, her lips tuning blue and her legs kicking on the air. Symon turned to the man next to him who was still working his girl into the noose.

"What did they do with the guy? Do you know?"

"Think they - fuck's sake, stop moving you stupid bitch! - they threw him in the brig, most likely. He went into some restricted area regular operators aren't supposed to access."

Symon froze. Something Robin had heard at the party had made him mistrust Bluenorth, and it had driven him to do some kind of investigating. It made sense; every Compound shutdown they had worked, Robin had grown more and more reclusive, quiet, like he'd lost his faith in the Company.

Symon looked between the legs of his girl and a trickle of urine dripped out between her legs. He lowered the cantilever and took the noose off her, kicking her down into the trench.

"This way seems kind of gross." The man beside him said with a turned-up nose and a grimace as his own girl pissed to signal she was dead.

"This is how they used to do it, before the Eastway Watercage got bought by Bluenorth." Symon informed him. "Incinerators get backed up and the engines fail if you overwork them." 

Just as Symon jumped back down from the gallows to grab another woman, the Commander sauntered past, hands behind his back in quiet contemplation. Symon saw his chance.

"Sir?" He asked, giving the former Trooper a flat-hand salute. "Do you mind my asking where Robin is?"

The Commander looked Symon right in the eyes, the sadness in his own giving away the truth.

"I'm afraid that's classified, son."

Symon looked to the ground, and nodded. He took another woman from the caged-over walkway and moved much more slowly with this one, his mind racing. What would they do to Robin? How heinous had his crime been? It was only the shout from the man working near him that jolted Symon out of his reverie.

"Hey, you gonna kill that thing or what?"

Symon looked up and realised he had been standing on the spot with the girl in his grasp for a weirdly long time. He pulled himself together, seeing the red grip-marks on her arms from where he had held her so hard in his anxiousness. He promptly pushed her forward and up the gallows steps, helping her to step up onto the block. 

"Its Robin." He told the man working beside him. "Robin got into the processor."

The man paused while his girl jerked and choked to death in his noose.

"You sure?"

"Yeah. Commander won't say what happened to him, and he's the only one not here."

They gazed at each other in deep thought for a moment, before Symon's woman spoke.

"You mean the man who came into the waiting cell last night?"

Symon did a double-take. The red headed skinny thing blushed and lowered her head when they looked at her.

"You saw him?" Symon pressed her.

"Yeah." She gulped and stammered, looking at her bare feet on the block. "He opened up the door and walked right through us, like... among us. He went up the steps while we were waiting. Then men came in with guns... they shot a lot of girls, and we saw them carrying him out just after."

She came to an awkward stop. Symon turned his head left and right; both of the nearby men had been listening to her. Symon paused, then slipped the noose around the woman's neck and dropped her.

"They wouldn't kill him, right?" He asked both the guys nearby. They shook their heads, but their eyes were on the trench. Symon watched the face of the woman who has seen it all turn pale blue.

Oh jesus, Robin, what have you done now?