3 Carting through a slaughterhouse

I used to watch teen movies in the 90s. The movies always had a scene where the parents would walk in to their son reading through a rather graphic magazine. I've never lived through a situation like that, but I assume getting caught with your boss' chopped up corpse is fair comparison.

With little time left to spare, I grab the trash bag and start dredging it towards the cart. The task is much easier now that I've drank a substantial amount of blood, but by no means would Clemen register as light. The sound of shoes making their way closer also adds an extra dose of adrenaline, I quickly make my way right next to the cart.

The cart is a little bit more than waist high as I stand next to it, this is going to be one hell of a deadlift. Using my newly refreshed muscle mass, I spread my legs trying to get them as stable as possible on the blood-slick ground. Its a good thing the company provides anti-slip rubber boots for this job, but that is most likely so that employees can't complain they injured themselves at work.

Gripping the sides of the black garbage bag, I will it to not break on me. I would pray, but that would result in a rather drastic inner conflict. The steps are about 15 metres away and closing in fast, it's now or never.

I put my entire body into it, starting with locking my arms and pushing up with my legs. It starts to lift slowly, gradually gaining momentum as I get to my chest level and I can feel the blood filled sack sloshing on my thighs. I'm not tall enough to just drop it in, I'm going to have to swing it into place. I only have one shot at this, I hold my breath as I feel the undead flesh in my face start to redden with exertion.

I start to swing the sack from right to left, hopefully generating enough momentum for it to clear the plastic bar and land in the bin portion of the cart. I feel my arms start to give out as the weight increases with the pull of gravity when I swing it backwards. The glove elastic I used to tie up the end of the bag where I took a sample is not fairing well with this much motion, it starts to unravel. Soon, a spring of red liquid starts to shoot out of one end, the force of the liquid starting to rip the hole bigger. This is going to have to be it, I swing with all my might and send the bag flying straight towards the bin compartment as the hole widens enough for me to see part of Clemen's chopped up thigh.

The entire bag disappears into the slot it was meant for, the head caused a thickening thud as the momentum whips it's neck and slams the head into part of the top of the bin, leaving a red gore spot. The cranium then settles down and hangs out of the top of the bag, It is almost comical to see a head staring out of the cart. Wait. The head is still clearly visible!

The steps are almost at the door now, maybe 3 meters at most. I Look around to see how I can camouflage the whack-a-mole that is coming out of my cart. My eyes settle on the garbage bag I removed from my cart to make room, lying in the pool of blood. The feet have now stopped moving in front of my cell door. They are most likely wondering why the door is closed and the light still on.

The door starts to open, I run over to the discarded bag.

I snatch the bag, skid over to the cart and attempt to shove it upside down on the head, making Clemen look like he is part of a pile of garbage bags present in my bin.

"Dohowski? Your shift ended over thirty minutes ago! What are you doing in here?" Shift quartermaster Darrion Sheffield is a very tall and lanky creature, needing to bend his back as he looks into the room.

"Radford told me I had to finish cleaning the sector before I got off from overtime, this cell had a clogged drain so its been hell to clean." I answer in my best formal yet tired tone, being skittish would get me caught when I've put too much effort to back out at this point.

"I see, well this is a bit excessive, this room certainly has a large mess. I'll send one of my workers to clean it up. Get your equipment to your storage area, no point in keeping you here if you are working in a few hours again." He looked around at the giant puddle of blood that occupied most of the floor and the blood spurts that plastered the walls. With a shrug he leaned his head back out into the hallway. I gripped behind my cart, breathing out a sigh of relief as I followed him out of the room and was about to turn the opposite way.

"Have you seen Radford recently? He hasn't filled out his end of shift checklist." Darrion asked as I started rolling away, looking at my back, his bony hands seemed to be holding onto some clipboard. I froze.

An evil smile started to spread on my face as I looked at the lump of plastic that hid the missing quartermaster. It's almost poetic that I got to cut him up, put his arms and legs in a wastewater bin and now am carting his quadruple amputee core through the halls where he used to look down on me and just be generally awful.

"Haven't seen him in the past 8 hours." I call back without turning and continue down the length of the hallway. Guess the answer was sufficient for Darrion as I hear his steps start to move away. It was very lucky that I didn't get one of those coked-out skeptical quartermasters that this place has, they would not have let me go so easy.

Now all I had to do was stash Clemen somewhere and reap the rewards. Getting him outside of the slaughterhouse was going to prove quite difficult as the gates were heavily guarded and monitored, to ensure no one left the building with some extra blood or meat in their pockets. Security on the inside was much more relaxed.

The layout of the entire building covered almost 4 square kilometres. It had a waste treatment facility, an administration area, a shipping area, the slaughter cells where I worked and a storage area that could fit enough frozen meat and blood to feed half the city. It was a massive project that had taken years of construction to build but ensured the flow of nutrients into the city was highly efficient and gave many poor saps jobs.

The turnover rate for workers was quite high, workers often found the conditions too brutal, underpaid or were bullied into quitting. It was pretty often that the "bullying" ended up with a few dead individuals, the slaughter teams were well equipped and flaunted their strength. On most occasions I would avoid their wrath, but I had been roughened up a few times. The supervisors and quartermasters tend to look the other way as long as no one gets killed. Threatening to tell the police of the murders that happened in cold blood was a good way to get picked as the next target.

I thought about all of the things that were wrong in this type of business as I carted my dead boss through the halls towards a special spot. All the killings, all the disappearances, all the vampires who were stuck here with no way out. It almost brought a tear to my eye when I thought about how I wasn't going to be one of them anymore.

I turn a corner onto a main hallway that leads toward the waste management area. My cart sloshes as the movement of the cart makes the plastic wrapped limbs bang into the sides of the plastic bin. Up ahead is a security checkpoint with a rather lazy looking guard. I'm not immensely worried as they barely pay us any attention most of the time, but they are a class above even the slaughter teams when it comes to overall senses and physique. If something were to tip him off that something wasn't right, I could most likely not even react before I was pinned down.

The guard raises an eyebrow as I wheel my cart closer, casually getting up from his chair between the workflow dividers. Most people are clocking in at this hour, I am the only who is leaving towards the equipment storage & waste management area.

"Why are you leaving so late? No one has notified me there were still workers from last shift." His voice is gruff and his body looks like it was made out of a redwood tree trunk. This guy looks like he bench presses railroad cars.

"Ask Radford why he is such a dick and maybe he'd give you an answer, he certainly doesn't tell me." I give my best tired smile and hope the perforated brain in my bin can understand what I just said. As for the guard, I get a slight grin but see his eyes narrow as he looks me up and down and then looks at my cart quickly.

"You smell like blood, the freshly cut kind." I feel the hairs on my neck start to raise. The hole in the bottom of the bag holding Clemen must have kept spewing out blood. Vampires have an extremely good sense of smell when it comes to different types of blood, one that increases with the amount of power and experience they have obtained. He definitely seems to know his aromas.

"My job is to clean up fresh blood, haven't you heard there was a massive slaughter the night prior? I scrubbed those cells in that specific sector." I try my best to keep calm, but the guard has attracted attention to me and the traffic on the other side has stopped to look at the situation.

The guard seems to spot the gore near the top of the garbage bin, the one that Clemen's fat head left when I chucked him in there. Swiping a finger, he brings it up to his nose and takes a good whiff.

"This is brain matter, why is it on your cart." He points the gory finger at me, a piece of red flesh still sticking to the end of it.

"I don't know, it must have rubbed off from one of the sponges..." I scramble. Brain matter is one of the priciest pieces of meat an animal can provide, it is usually on par with the entirety of the animal in terms of price. A worker should not have specks of it on his cart without good reason.

The guard squints and starts to reach for the bin. If he grabs the head, I am as good as crucified in the Sahara Desert. I start to think about what I can do to make him believe me, but nothing is coming to mind. If I really had nothing to hide then there would be no issue with getting a quick inspection.

"Wait." As he is about to reach and pull on the top bag a voice calls out from the side line. Both the guard and myself turn our heads to see who spoke up. A woman with sunken in cheeks and a rather large pair of eyes is pointing at something on my cart. "He hasn't closed his waste bin, it probably sloshed out."

Sure enough, the wastewater bin that had the arms and legs in had not been closed with the screw on lid. There were a bunch of splashes of mucky water and blood covering the front end of my cart. It was typical to screw the lid on when moving between cells but I had simply forgotten in my last second camouflage antics.

The guard looked at the gore splat and the crimson splashes that were nearer the front. He sniffed the wastewater quickly before wrenching his face away, a look of disgust as he sniffed the oxidized animal blood and excrement that was frequently mixed in that cocktail.

"Go on through, remember to plug up that lid next time, it smells awful." He waved me through, seems the smell made him lose his interest almost immediately. Traffic resumed on the other side as the situation de-escalated. I shot the woman ghoul a thankful glance, but she had already moved on to other things.

I carted my way through the waste area, depositing cleaning products in certain sections, casually throwing out the limbs into an incinerator dump. The waste of meat was disappointing, but they were not worth the trouble of keeping fresh. Once a vampire's body part was separated from it's heart, it would decay rather rapidly. Only the chest was of interest to me.

Taking a barely used path, I crossed over into some kind of mechanical room. I came here for my breaks or when I wanted to get away from Radford. I had never seen anyone else use this area and I was pretty sure the equipment inside was defunct. In a corner of the room was a rather thin and deep storage closet, I used to store beers in here when they would go on sale, but with my meager salary I could hardly afford them anymore as the price of goods kept rising as the vampire population grew.

I pulled out my dear friend from the bin by taking out the entire bag, tossing the trash that covered him into a new bag that I pulled out of my cart. His head stared blankly at me, un-seeing and deformed. I next replaced the garbage bag he was in with a new one and then placed the entirety of it in a rather large plastic tub that was at the back of the closet. Now if he leaked he would at least have a place to collect the liquid, the less waste the better. The amount of blood that had flowed out of him would be enough to last me a few days. I needed to think of a way to cauterize the limb wounds.

Looking around I saw a dusty tool cabinet in the opposite end of the room. Crossing over, I started to look inside. There were many rusty screw boxes, some drywall equipment, some electrical switches and pliers. On the bottom shelf I found something that could be extremely useful, a butane torch with a flint spark igniter a bit further back. I gave the butane canister a shake, seemed like there was still a bit left, I wasn't sure how long it would last. I would need to work quickly and efficiently to cauterize the wounds.

I picked up a drywall trowel, thinking the metal would conduct the heat nicely and it had a large flat area away from where I could hold it. I brought the tools over to my good friend Clemen and readied myself to cauterize the limbs. I took a small sip of blood before starting, the vile tasting liquid only furthering my want to keep this money printing corpse.

I lit the torch, using the blue intersection of the flame to transfer as much heat onto the trowel as possible. Even a few inches away, my hand could feel the metal start to turn red hot. I pushed the garbage bag down enough to have access to his right arm and pressed the burning trowel directly onto the gushing wound.

The first drops of blood vaporized into a noxious black steam. It was soon followed with the disturbing sizzling sound of human meat and fat being roasted at a high temperature. I pressed it there for a good 15 seconds, the metal cooling and the sound slowly going from an aggressive bubble to a barely audible sputter.

The wound seemed to be almost completely burnt upon inspection. There were some tiny streams of blood that formed out, like a badly closed tap, but that was about it. Satisfied with this result, I prepared the trowel for its next limb.

I couldn't help but smile, it was time for a barbeque.