organism is my guess. These bastards must be protein starved. The south pole is a frozen desert.”
Doc nudged her again, indicating with a nod all the gleaming blades lined up on the table. They had their hands free, edged weapons were within easy reach, but they still didn’t know what they were up against. The fact that the knives were so available bothered her. Why would their captors trust them? Unless they were so outnumbered and outgunned it didn’t matter.
“Not yet,” she said, taking in the dozens of carcasses in the process of disassembly and the laborers doing the work. “We haven’t seen enough to make our move.”
Skinning pengies turned out to be much harder than it looked because of the weight of the wet cape as it was peeled back. She and Doc worked together to tear it down the length of the carcass. Once that was done, Oscar began the next lesson, separating the still feathered wings from the torso. He cut the heavy shoulder joints at just the right angle and the wings dropped off, falling into the bucket.
“You can’t split the backbone with a knife,” Oscar said. “Too damn thick.” He picked up a handsaw with prominent teeth and stepped onto an overturned bucket. “Start here,” he told them, “get the blade bit into the center of the spinal column. Be careful to stay in the middle of the spine and go slow so you make a clean cut all the way down.”
It took five or six minutes of concerted effort for him to reach the tailbone. As the cut deepened, the unmeathooked half of pengie began to separate, leaning outward. Oscar directed Mildred and Doc to catch the weight on their shoulders to keep the saw from catching. Bonemeal mixed with blood dripped steadily into the bucket.
When the carcass was cut clean through, the half pengie, well over 150 pounds, came down on their backs. Oscar waved for them to flop it onto the metal table, which they did. He then picked up cleaver and butcher knife and set about cutting it into chops and roasts. The dense meat was almost black and very slippery because of the fat, which remained soft and wet even in the cold room.
Mildred and Doc were transferring the final product to a rolling cart when the annoying Muzak was replaced by the sound of buzzer.
All around, workers put down their tools and headed for the exit.
“What’s going on?” Mildred asked.
“It’s lunch break,” Oscar said. “You don’t want to miss it. Come on, the cafeteria is this way.”
They left their bibfronts and gloves on the hooks in the hall and followed their instructor and the others. As they moved deeper into the center of the complex, Mildred scanned the walls, hoping to see the multilevel, full-scale maps they’d found in other redoubts. That would give them an idea of its size and layout and their position relative to escape routes. But there were no maps. The walls were unbroken expanses of blank gray concrete.
The throng filed into a sprawling, low-ceilinged room with row upon row of occupied tables, and headed for the serving area at the back. The aromas from the kitchen were complex, semi-industrial and thoroughly off-putting: the bouquet of burning tires mingled with scorched oatmeal and smoking fish grease.
Roughly two hundred people were already eating. There were men and women, a mixed bag of racial types, but none that Mildred could see were fat or old. There were no children, either. The diners were, if anything, uniformly scrawny. A few wore whitecoats, while the others were dressed in overalls of different colors—navy, green, black, red, orange, khaki. She and Doc were the only yellows in the room, and that drew stares from all sides. Over the piped-in Muzak there was hubbub and clatter, loud conversation and laughter. The setting made her think back to the year 2000, when she had been a guest for lunch at the Microsoft campus outside Seattle. Except the residents here were hunched over their plates, all business, shoveling in grub as fast as they could. She wondered what they all did to earn their keep.
“Get in line over here,” Oscar told them. “Grab a tray.”
Mildred and Doc did as they were told, sliding empty trays along belt-high rails toward the serving stations. Behind glass sneeze guards, workers in white were ladling food from a hot table setup—rows of stainless-steel trays—onto plates. As Mildred got closer, she could see what was on offer. There was a purple-black porridge dish. When served it was decorated with a spiky crown of what looked like black potato chips. Next to it in a serving tray was a gellike material—it looked like a mass of clear silicon caulk. Accompanying this were round slices of a compact bread smeared with gray paste.
As the server, a stick-figure female in a hairnet, spooned a big gob of the black porridge for her, Mildred said, “Uh, what is that?”
The cafeteria worker looked up from the plate she held and took notice of the yellow overalls. “Sure thing, newbie,” she said, slapping the porridge down dead center. “This is quinoa steamed with pengie blood.” She grabbed a handful of the blackened chips from an adjoining tray and deftly made a little crown of them. “With pengie skin crispies for garnish and a side of anchovy-herring pâté on quinoa bread.” Using a different serving spoon, she scooped up some of the clear stuff and let it ooze onto the plate. “And this is pengie egg soufflé.”
“Looks like uncooked egg white to me,” Mildred said.
“It’s pengie egg,” the server said, as if that information explained everything.
“So?”
The woman shot Mildred an exasperated look. “Pengie egg,” she repeated slowly as if to a small child. “The white never sets. It always looks like that, no matter how long you cook it or at how high a temperature. It’s protected by some kind of natural antifreeze. Don’t worry it’s fresh...”
Her words were lost in a sudden, grinding roar. Then everything began to shake. A Klaxon blasted a series of hair-raising pulses, obliterating the symphonic version of a Barry Manilow classic.
“Hang on!” the server shouted at them.
Mildred and Doc grabbed for the serving rails to keep from being thrown to the floor, which undulated in waves, as if it had turned to liquid. Gray dust rained down from the ceiling. The glass counter windows rattled violently in their steel frames. No one screamed, no one abandoned their food. As quickly as it had begun, it was over.
“Just a little icequake,” Oscar said. “Nothing to worry about. You’ll get used to them.”
Then he turned to the server and said, “Give them each a full portion. They’ve got a lot of work to do today.”
Mildred protested the show of generosity, but to no avail. A full portion is what she was handed.
When Doc received his plate, he stared in horror at the pâté of glistening, smashed, predigested fish.
The man in line behind them had to have read Doc’s expression because he leaned in and said, “Hey, if you’re not going to eat that...”
Doubled over from the sucker kick to the groin and gasping for air, Ryan didn’t hear the door shut behind Lima and his entourage. The pain would have dropped him to his knees but for the fact that his wrists were tethered behind his back to the wall.
“You okay, lover?”
“Yeah, yeah, just give me a minute.”
