The Crooked God Machine

by Autumn Christian

  A door slammed shut and locked behind me, and I was left alone.

  When I pulled the bag off my head I found myself in an underground abattoir. Dirt pushed its way through the wooden slat walls and dead animals were piled up underneath a chute. Suckling pigs, spine wrenched cattle, broken-necked swans. Two concrete killing slabs were set in the center of the room, and blood ran in trenches through the floors.

  I pressed my hand over my mouth and noise to keep from gagging and leaned against the wall.

  The room trembled and dirt rained down on my head. More dead animals tumbled through the chute. The bottom of the pile squirmed, and a man emerged from the dead, wearing a stained apron and clutching a pig by its hind quarters.

  He threw the pig down on one of the killing slabs. It landed against the concrete with a crack of bone, a thud of wet and congealed flesh. The pig lay supine on its back, head peeled back. The man picked up his butcher tools and sliced the pig in two so that its body ruptured, its skin deflated, and its blood and fluid poured down the corners of the slab.

  My lungs grew tight and I breathed inside my hands, but I could still smell the pig's blood and shit.

  "You'll get used to it," the man said to me without looking up, "everyone gets used to it. Come over here and help me with this, will you?"

  With my hand still pressed over my nose and mouth, I stepped over the trenches of blood and walked over toward the killing slabs

  "What do they call you?" the man asked me.

  "Bubba," I said, the word muffled by my hand.

  He laughed and said, "Bubba? Strange name."

  "No," I said, peeling my hand away from my mouth so I could speak more clearly, "that's not what I meant. My name's Charles."

  "But they call you Bubba?"

  "Not anymore," I said, "just Charles."

  He told me to call him Number Seventeen.

  "Why Number Seventeen?"

  "It's how I keep track of time in this place. I count the number of people who come in here and die, or get taken away, or what have you. So I'm Number Seventeen, and when you're gone, I'll be Number Eighteen.

  I said nothing.

  "You're trembling all over, Charles, what's shaken you up?"

  "The smell," I said, "I'm just not used to the smell."

  "You'll get used to it," Number Seventeen said once more, "The guy who was here when I came in, back when I was still Number One, he said the human body has an enormous capacity to adapt to its surroundings. He was a crazy bastard. I'll always remember what he said."

  Number Seventeen handed me a knife.

  "You ever butchered a pig before?" he asked me.

  I said no, so he taught me. When he was finished, the pig lay on the killing slab in several bloody, quivering chunks. Its heated blood and gore dripped down my arms, and its scent clung to my tongue. I could hardly recognize what it used to be.

  "This is your job now," he said, "until you disappear. We butcher the animals. Then we push them through the flap over there, to be collected. You don't get to know what happens after that."

  I glanced over at the flap. It was a small, blood-stained metal sheet cut out of the wall opposite of the chute. It hung slightly open like a deflated mouth, dripping from its edges.

  "What happens when you run out of animals?"

  "You don't," he said, "there are so many dead things. You never run out."

  “But in Edgewater, we hardly ever ate meat,” I said, “they told us there was a shortage.”

  Number Seventeen went back to the pile of dead animals and retrieved a black swan with a bolt running through its brain. He laid it out on the killing slab just like he'd laid out the pig, with a crack of bones, a slap of skin and feathers. The black swan lay on its back with its tongue unrolled out of its mouth and its feathers soldered into the congealing blood.

  “The meat goes to the priests and the favored of God,” Number Seventeen, “and that ain’t either one of us.”

  "How do I get out of here?" I asked.

  "You don't," he said, "you've always been here."

  "Where did the others go?"

  "There's no one else."

  He chopped the swan's head off, and it rolled silently off the killing slab. I expected the swan's severed neck to spurt blood, like a great fountain, but its blood only dribbled out onto the concrete.

  "You don't understand," I said, "I need to get to the capital. I was with a girl. Do you know if she's somewhere in here?"

  "You aren't getting out of here until they come for you," Number Seventeen said, "and they might not. Nobody ever came for me."

  I heard a pounding against the wall. A tight, rattling pounding as if someone in another room was trying to get our attention.

  "What was that?" I asked

  Number Seventeen ignored my question and went back to work butchering the swan. The pounding continued. I stepped over a trench of blood and moved toward the wall. I pressed my hand against the pounding wall. It reverberated through my skin.

  "You better work," he said, "if you don't work they won't give you anything to eat."

  "I need to talk to someone," I said, "I need to get out of here. I have somewhere I need to be."

  "No you don’t. Didn't I tell you that you've always been here?"

  "You don't understand. I need to get out. I can't stay here working with you."

  Number Seventeen tapped me on the shoulder and held out a butcher's knife for me to take.

  "Only when you realize you're trapped do you want to be freed, but you've been trapped all along. They took you into the dark room, they took you out of the dark room, and there's no going back. Now work, or they'll hurt you. I want you to work because if you don't I'll be alone again."

  I hesitated for a moment, watching the spattered surface of the butcher's knife quiver in his grip. Number Seventeen stared straight through me like a ghost would.

  I took the butcher's knife from Number Seventeen's grasp, and helped him cut up the black swan.

  ***

  I spent weeks, maybe months, in that underground abattoir, butchering the dead animals that kept piling up underneath the chute. We pushed the butchered parts through the chute, and food was pushed back through the chute. At first I wouldn't eat, because I couldn't eat without thinking about the bloody mouth of the chute, the grip of those sick and broken dead creatures. But I got too hungry soon enough.

  Number Seventeen taught me how to use the knives, how to turn my face away when I sliced the heart so the blood wouldn't spurt into my eyes. He taught me how to forget that I ever existed anywhere else but this black iron prison, this lonely underground abattoir.

  Every time we went to sleep against the wall, Number Seventeen told me another year would soon pass us by. We no longer knew day from night. Every time we woke up and went back to work, Number Seventeen would say that the world above us had been destroyed and rebuilt during the time we dreamed.

  The pounding against the wall continued. Number Seventeen told me it was the pounding inside his head. He told me that pounding was his heart sliding down into the grease trap of his bowels.

  "I used to wait for the day when they would come and get me," he told me, "like they came for everyone else. But that day never came."

  I cracked the breastplate of a newborn foal, a hoofed mass with a blue tongue. Its fluid spilled out onto my fingers hot as gasoline. The pounding in the wall cracked against the back of my head. Despite what Number Seventeen said, I'd never gotten used to the smell.

  Number Seventeen continued speaking.

  "I started looking for myself in the guts of these dead animals. One day an animal will come down that chute, and I'll slit it open, and I'll find who I used to be inside of it, curled up and small. Bloody and red, like an unborn fetus. The last part of me that ever hoped to escape this prison."

  "What then?" I asked him.

  "I'll know there's nothing left to hope for."

  The pounding in the wall continued when I slept and when
I woke. Even in this underground abattoir, buried deep within a labyrinth, the noise never stopped.

  "I saw the person you used to be," Number Seventeen told me once when I awoke. He stood at an empty killing slab, smiling.

  "What?" I asked.

  "I found the unborn fetus of you. It was cradled inside the stomach of a black swan."

  "What did you do with it?"

  "I ate it," he said.

  The pounding grew in intensity. I pressed my hands against my head to keep my brain from being ground into pulp.

  "I'm tired of this," I said, "We shouldn't have to live in a world where we have to drive ourselves crazy just to survive."

  Number Seventeen buried his hands into the pile of dead animals. Blood crept down his fingers. It filled the gaps between his teeth, pooled in the space between his lips.

  When I wasn’t butchering animals or talking to Number Seventeen I drew on the walls in charcoal and blood. Drawing of Edgewater, of the animals we butchered, of Jeanine dancing like rigor mortis underneath the grip of the hot wire spider.

  “I didn’t know you were an artist,” Number Seventeen said.

  “I’m not,” I said, “I mean, I stopped doing it.”

  “I was an artist once,” Number Seventeen said as he watched me, “but I started to forget what was real and what wasn’t.”

  “That’s not what matters,” I said.

  “Then what the hell does?” Number Seventeen said.

  "I'm tired of travelling from one meat freezer to one slaughterhouse after another," I said to him, "I'm tired of all the dead things. I'm tired of waiting to die from the beginning of life."

  Number Seventeen laughed.

  "Sounds like something you'll have to take up with God," he said.

  He dragged another carcass to the killing slab and I turned away. When I lowered my hands from my head, the pounding stopped. There was now a small hole in the wall.

  "Was this here before?" I asked Number Seventeen.

  "It doesn't mean anything," he said, "don't pay any attention to it."

  I pressed my eye to the wall.

  A woman stood in the center of a room on top of a metal plate. Her skin and hair were illuminated in bright colors. Orbs of light and electricity bounced off of her limbs and sparked in her hair. She wore a dress of transparent gauze, and when she turned I could see her spine bend down like a bird's mouth.

  "Jeanine?" I whispered.

  She came over to the hole in the wall.

  "Who's there?" she asked.

  "It's Charles."

  "Charles?" she said quietly, "you're not Charles."

  "Yes I am. What are you doing?"

  "I'm a ghost. They're taking ghost pictures of me."

  "Ghost pictures?"

  "They sell them to parents with dead children."

  "Get away from that wall," Number Seventeen called out to me, "stop talking to the wall. There's nothing beyond that wall."

  I ignored him.

  "Jeanine, is there any way to leave this place?" I asked her.

  "No," she said.

  The light swelled in her hair, grew to an intense violent-green, and then diffused into red. It sparked off her mouth like dandelion wisps that disappeared when they touched her clothing.

  "Did you put this hole in the wall?" I asked her.

  "Yes," she said.

  "Why?"

  "I was lonely," she said, "I have to go. They need more pictures."

  She returned to the center of the room and turned around slowly so the light could gnaw her, spark her, hit her with a burst of color and then fade.

  "Get over here," Number Seventeen said, "There's so many animals coming through the chute, we're going to drown in them if you don't start helping me."

  I didn't get another chance to talk to Jeanine until Number Seventeen fell asleep. As he and I sat propped up against the wall, Jeanine whispered to me through the hole.

  "Can I call you Charles?" she asked me.

  "I am Charles," I said.

  "I was traveling to the capital with a man named Charles, before I was imprisoned here. I told them my brother was a prophet, but they didn't believe me. They said everyone had a brother who was a prophet down here, and then they put me in this room. I thought I was dying until they put me in this room. But I'm already dead."

  "You're not dead, Jeanine," I said.

  "Be quiet please," she whispered, "I have to tell you this before I forget how to speak. I need to tell someone this because if I don't then it means I'll be lost forever. Seven years ago, when I was still a girl, I got a slip implant put into my head."

  "I know," I said, "I know all of this. I'm Charles. I know you."

  "Be quiet please," she said once more, her voice soft and insistent, "I was going to be an archaeologist. I lived in this little town called Edgewater, this town on the edge of nowhere. My brother was a prophet, he lived in the capital. I thought I didn't exist until I got to the capital. So as soon as I could I left Edgewater and headed out for the capital. I enrolled in the university there. I joined the archeology department. I thought I could uncover the things we thought were lost. All the things we lost from the very beginning.

  "But I found out there was nothing there. I was one of the few students still interested in archeology. In the courses we were taught what was beneath the ground, and how we would teach others what was beneath the ground. We saw pictures of what was beneath the ground - these glossy, fake photographs. When I asked one of our instructors when we would get to excavate the earth, he reproached me. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, ‘you must learn to stop asking questions like that.

  “’'But what about the buildings that have been burned to the ground?' I asked the instructor, 'what about the thousands of graves, the earth piled on top of the earth? There has to be something underneath us that nobody has yet to find.'

  “‘Only children ask questions like that,’ the instructor said, ‘do you want to be treated like a child?’

  “‘No,’ I said quietly, and I stopped.

  “The instructor said to me, ‘When you've finished your education here in the archeology department you will become an instructor. You will take these pictures and show the world that we have found everything that needs to be found.’

  "Then after he finished speaking to me, he pushed a glossy photograph across the desk toward me. It was a photograph of a dead butterfly, pinned inside a shadow box. I took the picture and left the archeology department and I never went back. I suppose that's when I realized that what I'd been trying to run away from my whole life would follow me wherever I went. Or maybe that whatever I was running toward didn't actually exist. I couldn't go back to Edgewater. The swans were dead. The meat freezer empty. I couldn't stay in the capital with the archeology department and the fake photographs, but I couldn’t go back to my old life. So I went into a slip implant clinic and asked them to make me into a deadhead."

  "I'm so sorry, Jeanine," I said.

  "I don't want you to be sorry. If you ever see Charles, you can tell him I'm sorry."

  "Why are you sorry?"

  "Because he loved me. Because he took me home from the hospital, after my body rejected the slip implant. And I never told him I saw he had become a ghost, that even when I thought I was the one slipping away he'd gone and died on me. Because it was my idea to go on this stupid journey to find his wife. Like it would mean I could stop running away if we found her.”

  I pressed my hands against the wall, as if I could reach straight through and touch the light sparking against her fingers.

  "Jeanine, we're going to get out of here. I promise."

  "Oh," Jeanine said, "you know you shouldn't promise things like that."

  The door banged open and several men and women spilled into the room. Number Seventeen awoke and grabbed my hand. A woman tore his hand away. I struggled and kicked to try to get away. Someone punched me in the throat, so I couldn't breathe. A bag went over my head. I called out for Je
anine as they dragged me out of the abattoir and back into the labyrinth.

  "Where are you taking me?" I asked, "where are you taking me?"

  Nobody answered me. Number Seventeen sobbed as they shut and locked the door. I tried to stop them from pulling me further down into the labyrinth. In response they smashed my ribs, suffocated me, ground my knees against their boots. I fell onto the floor and cracked my chin against the stone. As I fought to get away the bag came off my head.

  Someone grabbed my hair and tried to pull me up off the floor. It was the woman with the crab meat veins who’d interrogated me when I first came to the labyrinth. Instinctively, I reared back and head-butted her in the face.

  She cried out and let go of me. The other captors swarmed around me and struck my arms and face and chest, again and again. I cried and twisted my body away from the blows. They dragged me across the floor like a husk.

  Shouts echoed from down the hallway. My captors stopped and let go of me. The woman with the crab meat veins pulled out a gun and pushed me face first down into the concrete.

  A volley of gunshots rang out and my captors fell dead onto the floor around me.

  “Get up.”

  A lean man wearing God’s mask and holding a rifle towered over me.

  When I didn’t get off of the floor fast enough, he grabbed my arm and pulled me up. I raised my arms to ward him off and he released me. I backed up into the wall arms outstretched, head turned away, but he didn’t make a move to attack. He only stood there twitching like he was caught in an electric fence.

  "Get out of here," he said, "we're tearing this place down."

  "Who are you?" I asked, “you’re not a cultist?”

  Only then did I notice he wore an armband with a bold number six.

  “Not important. Go back the way we came and you'll find your way out."

  "There's someone I need to find."

  "You won't find them in here."

  Several other people ran past me carrying guns and wearing black masks. The lean man followed after them and left me alone in the corridor with my dead captors, slumped and bleeding like animals.

  I went up the passageway. In distant parts of the labyrinth I heard people shouting, gunfire going off. I kept walking until I saw the door marked 'exit,' pulled it open and found myself outside in the desert.