"Gardner Dozois - A Kingdom by the Sea" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

A Kingdom by the Sea




A Kingdom by the Sea

by Gardner Dozois

Every day, Mason would stand with his hammer and kill cows. The place was bigтАФa long, high-
ceilinged room, one end open to daylight, the other end stretching back into the depths of the plant. It
had white, featureless wallsтАФpainted concreteтАФthat were swabbed down twice a day, once before lunch
and once after work. The floor could be swabbed tooтАФit was stone, and there was a faucet you could
use to flood the floor with water. Then you used a stiff-bristled broom to swish the water around and get
up the stains. That was known as GIing a floor in the Army. Mason had been in the Army. He called it
GIing. So did the three or four other veterans who worked that shift, and they always got a laugh out of
explaining to the college boys the plant hired as temporary help why the work they'd signed up to do
was called that. The college boys never knew what GIing was until they'd been shown, and they never
understood the joke either, or why it was called that. They were usually pretty dumb.

There was a drain in the floor to let all the water out after the place had been GIed. In spite of
everything, though, the room would never scrub up quite clean; there'd always be some amount of blood
left staining the walls and floor at the end of the day. About the best you could hope to do was grind it
into the stone so it became unrecognizable. After a little of this, the white began to get dingy, dulling
finally to a dirty, dishwater gray. Then they'd paint the room white again and start all over.

The cycle took a little longer than a year, and they were about halfway through it this time. The men
who worked the shift didn't really give a shit whether the walls were white or not, but it was a company
regulation. The regs insisted that the place be kept as clean as possible for health reasons, and also
because that was supposed to make it a psychologically more attractive environment to function in. The
workmen wouldn't have given a shit about their psychological environment either, even if they'd known
what one was. It was inevitable that the place would get a little messy during a working day.

It was a slaughterhouse, although the company literature always referred to it as a meat-packing plant.

The man who did the actual killing was Mason: the focal point of the company, of all the meat lockers
and trucks and canning sections and secretaries and stockholders; their lowest common denominator. It
all started with him.

He would stand with his hammer at the open end of the room, right at the very beginning of the plant,
and wait for the cows to come in from the train yard. He had a ten-pound sledgehammer, long and
heavy, with serrated rubber around the handle to give him a better grip. He used it to hit the cows over
the head. They would herd the cows in one at a time, into the chute, straight up to Mason, and Mason


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 A Kingdom by the Sea

would swing his hammer down and hit the cow between the eyes with tremendous force, driving the
hammer completely through the bone and into the brain, killing the cow instantly in its tracks. There