Sardine Packing
by Robb White
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
The leader intervened, spoke to the men. “Guys, all the men up front. Turn your backs to the women. Let them undress first.”
The men agreed. Curses and threats were flung indiscriminately at the armed men, who didn’t respond and whose visors hid any expressions of emotion.
When it was the men’s turn to undress, some exposed their genitals to the woman up front. Like the men who obeyed her, she remained expressionless despite some crude language and gestures directed at her.
When everyone in the room was dressed in a gray robe, she surveyed the room. A couple times, she ordered someone to tighten the robe’s belt: “There are girls and young children out there,” she said.
The armed men removed the tables without a word from her. The tables were dismantled and stacked against one wall. The chairs were folded up and leaned against one another in three rows against another wall. No one interfered with the men while they worked.
He almost bolted for the door, but his mind rebelled. What if it’s locked? The thought of having a police baton slammed against his head made him grit his teeth. His knees shook with indecision. Then it was too late.
The woman ordered them into three rows and told everyone except those in the front to place his or her right hand on the shoulder of the person in front of them. They complied faster than they had for any previous order.
“Now, then,” she said. “The front of the line will follow the two escorts in front.”
An old man he hadn’t noticed before, scoffed: “Escorts, my hairy ass.”
You,” she barked to the group’s leader, “go up to the front of the line.”
He did without demur. He seemed cowed, no longer a leader of a mutiny but a sheep like the rest of them. His face burned with shame that he hadn’t made even an attempt to assert himself in the face of this lunacy, this outrage against the dignity of everyone in the room.
“All of you,” she said to the rest, “know that two escorts will be walking beside you every step of the way. If you attempt to remove your hand from the person in front of you, the consequences will be worse than what you saw a moment ago.”
The man in the painter’s coveralls lay on the floor on his back, still unconscious. He hadn’t moved or made a sound since he collapsed under that buffeting rain of batons. The two plainclothes men assumed positions on either side of her where the men in tactical gear had been.
They were moved at a pace faster than normal walking; it was hard to keep up. He wondered how the old people behind him would be able to, but he concentrated on keeping his hand on the shoulder of the man in front.
Instead of turning right at the bottom of the steps toward the lobby and the entrance doors, they went down the stairs to the main exercise room where the Nautilus machines, free weights, treadmills, exercise bikes, and weights on A-frame racks were displayed in various sections.
Some people were exercising as they passed. A girl in yoga pants holding a towel stopped after taking a step out of the rest room. She stared at them. A man with large biceps working with a curling bar at the preacher curl station glanced up once at the lines of people in robes going by and then returned his gaze to some inner distance. A sign taped to the wall of the bench press station said, “Lunk Alert! Excessive Noise Will Get Your Membership Voided!”
He thought they might be heading toward the swimming pool. The air turned humid and the tang of chlorine wafted about the line as they kept moving beside their grimly silent escorts.
The two escorts at the head of the line halted the procession in front of the fire doors.
People began talking again. The mood had lightened. Word was passed around that this was an elaborate prank that was about to end right there. People stepped a few feet out of the line’s center like customers at a ticket kiosk.
“I’ll bet my wife knew about this,” a man said behind him.
He wanted to believe it, but he wasn’t so sure. Nothing about the terror he’d experienced in his gut back in that room suggested this was a prank. This part of the room was in semidarkness. Every other unit of the overhead bank of fluorescent lights was unlit.
He heard the air brakes of a tractor-trailer outside in the parking lot.
“Everyone!” The woman shouted. “Pay attention now! Walk up the ramp you will see as I open these doors. Go to the front of the truck and take a seat on the benches placed against the sides of the truck. Do not stop moving once I open these doors. Is that understood?”
No one replied. Those who had expected this ghastly joke to end were speechless.
“Now!” the woman shouted, resuming her command voice. “Go! Go! Go!”
He was about midway in the line, and as before, his instincts told him to make a break for it once he reached the outside asphalt of the parking lot. He promised himself not to hesitate. Before he placed one foot on that ramp, he’d bolt right for the exit toward Five Points and the busy intersection. He hoped that the line would dissolve and people would scatter in all directions before he arrived at the open doors. The line kept moving steadily toward the rectangle of light obfuscated by the ramp leading into the truck parked up to the doors.
When he reached the place where he planned to run, his stomach sank. The ramp’s anchor cleats butted against the door frame. Armed with automatic long guns aimed at the line, men stood, blocking both paths. The moment came and went.
He was inside the truck, walking down to the front. The smell of diesel fuel was pungent in the dim interior. One overhead light gave off a milky translucence that blinked on and off with the juddering noise of the big semitrailer’s motor.
His failure to act weighed him down like an anvil jammed in his lap. People kept coming to fill up the benches on both sides of the truck. The mood was solemn, gloomy, heads lowered, hands clutched into tight fists held close. His depression was aggravated when he noticed that their self-appointed leader was nowhere on either of the two benches.
When the doors were slammed shut and the light went out, someone near the back screamed.
They jostled and bumped into each other as the semi drove away. He thought of his wife back home. She’d be doing her Sudoku crossword, but he wasn’t sure what time it was. Time warped and stretched like taffy.
For a long while, the truck drove at a high speed. They were uniformly thumped on the bench. When they came to stops, other sounds could be heard like the traffic at intersections. Once, the truck hit the brakes hard and three or four people were knocked off the benches. One old woman wept on the dirty floorboards, unable to rise. Her husband apparently lacked the strength to pick her up. Finally, two men helped her back onto her seat. Her husband clutched her hand as though a lifeline had been torn away from him.
When the ride smoothed out again, he stood up and said to them, “We have to rush the door as soon as it’s opened. We have no choice, people. This isn’t going to end well.”
That inspired a tumultuous debate within the semi’s narrow confines. Some wanted to charge the doors, as he suggested; others wanted to wait.
“Wait? Wait for what?” he demanded.
No one knew what to say.
They were still discussing their options when the truck braked again, slowed, and stopped. The ramp squealed when it was pulled out on its castors and then thudded as when it dropped.
The doors were flung open. This time, the woman wasn’t there. A man in a dark business suit stood on the ramp. “Greetings, everyone!” His voice was cheery. He sounded like a game show host.
People exhaled with relief. So it was a huge, awkward prank.
“When you come down the ramp,” the man in the suit said, “watch your step. Please remember to keep your hand on the shoulder of the one in front of you just as before. You will follow our escort as far as he takes you and then stop.”
People stood up and began peppering the man with questions. Two armed men in the same tactical gear entered on either side of him and trotted to the front of the truck. They turned around, stopped, and waited for the man in the suit.
“Let’s begin now,” he said, nodding and clucking happily. “You’ll appreciate our surprise for you and you’ll understand everything. All will be made clear. Come on now, everyone! Chop-chop! Let’s move it!”
He stepped down from the ramp while more armed men entered. People were grabbed by the lapels of their robes and made to stand up in the center of the truck. Their hands were placed on the shoulders of people in front of them. Some went mute, some obeyed in a trance-like state. Many whimpered or begged to be let go. They promised not to tell, they said.
The sobs and cries erupting all around him reminded him of a childhood religious book about the Gates of Pandemonium opening wide to let out the demons. Some people had to be punched or slapped hard into obedience. No one fought back. His elbow was wrenched painfully when he was jerked to his feet.
The re-formed, ragged line of men and women began moving again, then trotted, stumbling their way out of the truck, down the ramp, into the blinding sunlight. They were in open country. He had no idea where. A stand of birch trees lay ahead. A rusted, barbed-wire fence stretched behind them. Where the afternoon sun shone, rows of trees that might have once been an apple orchard showed a silvery tinge to their leaves as the wind lifted them. Distant birds called to one another. He recognized the repetitive Tea-cher, Tea-cher of the oven bird and the harsh trill of the bluejay.
Rows of armed men, several dozen, stood around with automatic rifles. Some held AR-15s like his own, back in his upstairs closet. Most of them were clean-cut, close-shaved like the pink-faced little man in the white shirt, but others were long-haired and bearded and had menacing looks as they passed them. A few laughed or called them names he couldn’t hear or understand.
He couldn’t see clearly ahead of them where the armed guards were herding them, but it looked as though a backhoe had dug a path into the soft, loamy earth of what might have been a farm’s land, long gone farrow.
The path grew wider and deeper. They ran forward, still stumbling. The old ones gasping for breath. No one dared fall out of line with all the guns around.
The pit they ran into ended in a wall of tan dirt scraped by a dozer’s shovel. Broken roots poked through or tangled among themselves. The floor of the pit wasn’t scraped but packed with fill dirt and lumpy in places. It seemed to lift and fall of its own accord like small waves that reacted to invisible stones dropped from above. He had to blink the salt sting out of his eyes from his sweat. The stink of dirt and something else was atrocious.
His foot tripped on a root, and he fell to his knees. But it wasn’t a root; it was a human hand that seemed to reach up to grab at whatever was passing by. He was too numb to scream. Most of his mind had vacated the citadel.
When he glanced above at the din of voices above their heads, he saw them all: the short man in the white shirt, still beaming at them, the woman with the command voice, their Judas goat beside her, the one who had led them out of the meeting room and into the kill chute. The game-show host appeared on the other side of the pit. No longer smiling, he had removed his suitcoat in the sweltering heat and was loosening his tie.
“Is that everyone?” he asked someone standing behind him out of sight.
He didn’t hear the reply. It didn’t matter.
The pungent smell of fear was laced with the overpowering stench of the dead bodies they were standing on.
Looking up, he saw the armed men taking positions on opposite sides of the pit.
It wouldn’t be long now. He tried to focus his mind. The myth of a drowning man reliving his life in the seconds before his lungs exploded was a happy sailors’ myth. Drowning must hurt like hell. This was nothing to it, he supposed, but it didn’t stop him from shivering despite the intense humidity and stink. He couldn’t remember a single thing except for an image of his wife holding that letter in her hand, scrunching up her eyebrows as she tried to make sense of it.
He had always loved the perfect, symmetrical shape of her hands, such lovely woman’s hands. Did that happen the same day as this? It seemed unbelievable that half a day had passed; it all seemed to have occurred in the long-ago past, like the day he failed his swimming test at the YMCA.
Copyright © 2023 by Robb White
