Speaker 1: I've been tearing things down for twenty six years. That's
what I do, all I do, and I wouldn't have
it any other way. My demolition outfits it's just outside
of Hammond, Indiana. It's a one man operation. On paper,
I quote hire the guise an invoice. I source my
men through a guy named Aldo who runs a crew
call out of a parking lot south of Bormann Expressway.
They're hard workers, cash in hand folk who show up
at six in the morning and don't ask questions since
then on Union. There's no insurance or safety certifications, which
is fine with me since certifications cost money and the
kind of men Aldo supplies don't have Social Security numbers Anyway.
With al those men, I underbid legitimate contractors by forty percent.
That's the margin, and business is good. The Murphy's meatpacking
plant sat on a four acre lot on the south
side of Garry, about a mile east of the rail yards,
with the freight trains stack up overnight. It stood two
stories tall, made of brick and concrete, flat roofed built
in the late forties when Garry was still Gary Steel
mills running population growing the whole machine humming the plant
processed cattle for thirty something years, closed in two thousand
and three when the parent company folded and had been
sitting empty ever since, twenty years of nothing. The city
wanted the site cleared. Redevelopment was the word they used.
The funding was probably federal. I could only imagine. The
timeline was imaginary, but the demolition contract was real, the
money was real, and my bed was the lowest. The
survey photos made the plant look manageable. The site report
mentioned asbestos in the roof tiles, which my bid conveniently
didn't address. The inspector would check for abatement compliance and
the final walk through. By then the tiles would be
in a skip under six tons of rubble that nobody
was going to sift through. I hired four men. Frank
was mid forties. Stocky had worked with me three times before.
He knew the corners I cut, and he showed up anyway.
Because Frank had a wife and three kids, and demolition
work in the spring was steady, he showed up, did
the job, took the cash, and went home. Derek and
Edgar were younger, early twenties, referred through Aldo's call. I
didn't know which one was which for the first hour.
They were both slight, quiet, and were in the same
brand of work boots. They were already falling apart at
the soul. Edgar, the one on the left, I decided,
asked me about hard hats when they arrived. I told
them they're in the truck. I didn't get them. Thomas
was polish, barely spoke English, built like a shipping container.
He showed up. I pointed at things, and he'd demolished them.
I didn't know how to pronounce his surname, and I
didn't try. I knew Frank's name because Frank was useful.
The others were you or Hey. I didn't need more
than that. Day one. We arrived at seven. The plant
was bigger in person than the photos suggested. The perimeter
fence was down in sections. The chain link peeled back
and curled, as if something had pushed through from inside.
The parking lot was cracked through with weeds, the aggressive
kind ones that split concrete. The building itself was intact.
That was the first thing I noticed. Twenty years derelict,
and the walls were still straight, the roof still flat,
the brickwork uncrumbled. In Gary, That's unusual empty buildings here
get stripped by scrapers within months, copper piping, wiring, anything metal,
but the plant looked untouched. The windows were boarded from
the inside. The loading dock doors were rusted shut. The
main entrance had a padlock on it that took Frank
three minutes with bolt cutters. The smell hit us when
the door opened, A seep, low and constant, one that
gets in your sinuses and stays somewhere between chemical and
organic ammonia, maybe old blood, twenty years of whatever it
soaked into the floors of a place that killed and
cut and process cattle for three decades. Still breathing through
the brickwork, the concrete remembered what it had absorbed. Edgar
pulled his shirt over his mouth. Thomas walked straight in
without reacting. I stayed outside, directed from the parking lot.
It was a standard first day. We stripped the corrugated
cladding from the upper story and the exterior panels, each
the size of a garage door. Frank and Derek worked
the boats with impact drivers, while Edgar and Thomas stacked
the panels on the lot. I ran the rented excavator
for the sections that wouldn't come free. A Cat three
twenty had picked up half price because the hydraulic arm
had a slow leak and the rental company wanted it
off their books. It worked fine if he didn't push it.
I pushed it anyway. I watched from the cab. The
crew worked below me. Four men on a brick ledge
two stories up, no harnesses of safety line. Derek was
leaning out over the edge to reach a bolt. His
boots caught on a ledge that was eighteen inches wide
and crumbling. I didn't say anything. If something looks dangerous,
I tell the crew to handle it. That's the phrase
I use, handle it. It means the risk is yours,
the assessment is yours, the consequence is yours. I'm at
the perimeter with a coffee. My job is the contract.
Your job is everything between signing and finishing. Three years
ago a man died at one of my jobs, sit
and Portage. It was a commercial building, concrete block construction.
The wall needed temporary shoring before we could take down
the adjacent section. Shoring costs time, and time costs money.
I told the crew to handle it. They didn't sure it.
The wall came down. A man named a Man was
under it. He was undocumented, no next of kin and file,
no insurance to process. I found his family through Aldough.
I paid them eight thousand in cash. I didn't negotiate it.
I picked a number and I paid it, and the
family took it because what else were they going to do.
I tell myself it was a one off. The guy
should have been more careful. The risks are understood. Nearing
the end of day one, the upper cladding was stripped,
the panel was stacked, the skip half full. Good progress.
The crew was packing tools into the back of my
truck when Frank came over. He had his gloves off.
He was flexing his hands, something you do after eight
hours of impact dry, when the vibration has settled into
your joints and won't let go. The plans say one
basement level, He said, yeah. I was working by the
loading dock this afternoon. The floor was vibrating. It's gary, Frank.
The whole city's built on swamp. Everything vibrates, not like this,
he shook his head, like machinery running. The plant's been
dead for twenty years. There's no machinery. I know. He
looked at the building. The late afternoon light caught the brickwork,
turning it the color of dried blood. The boarded windows
stared back at us. If you stood still long enough,
if the wind dropped, you could almost hear something, something low,
like the building was breathing water table. I said, that's all.
Frank looked at me, then at the building. He didn't argue.
He never argued. That's why I kept hiring him. I
stood in the parking lot and looked at the plant.
The smell was still there, faint, a chemical organic seep.
I locked the gate, drove home, ate dinner, went to bed.
Day one was fine. Everything was fine. On the second
day we set up for another hard day of labor.
The ground floor of the Murphy's plant was a single
open space, about twelve thousand square feet, divided by partition
walls into processing zones. The equipment was still in place,
stainless steel tables bolted to the floor, drain channels cut
into the concrete. The overhead rail system running the full
length of the building on steel eye beams. The hooks
were still hanging, dozens of them, every eighteen inches, curved steel,
dulled by two decades of dead air, dangling at head height.
Some of them had material on them. A dark calcium
like deposit crusted and hard built up layers around the
curve of the hook, like something had dried there, slowly,
coat after coat, thickening over time. I didn't touch them.
I told the crew to leave the rail system for
now and focus on the partition. Walls. Get into the
cold storage rooms, stripped the insulation panels, pulled the refrigeration units.
The scrap valley on the steel were covered the excavator rental.
Frank and Derek took the far wall sledge hammers. The
partition was standard plaster board over brick. The plaster came
away in sheets. One swing went through the sledge on
my head, punched through the brick and kept going. Derek's
arm followed it up to the elbows before he caught
himself stumbling forward, the handle wrenching in his grip, he
pulled it back. The hole was about a foot across.
The air that came through was warm. It moved through
the hole in a steady current like exhalation. It carried
a smell different from the plant's usual chemical seep, something organic,
rarer than rot, the smell of a living interior meat
before its meat. The inside of something. Frank stepped back
from the hole. Derek was still holding the sledgehammer, staring
at the gap. With the warm air pushed through in slow,
even pulses, they widened, it took out the surrounding bricks
into the hole was big enough to see through, then
big enough to step through. Behind the partition wall where
the cold storage room should have been, there was a
concrete staircase. It led down. The stairs weren't on any plans.
I'd studied the plans, not thoroughly, but enough to court
the job. The basement level was to the north under
the main processing floor. This was south under the loading dock,
and he went deeper than a single basement level should.
The stairs descended maybe fifteen feet, turning once and opened
into what looked like a corridor, concrete walls and floor
wider than it needed to be. The warm air rose
from it in a steady updraft, carrying that raw interior smell.
I showed my torch down. The beam reached the bottom
of the stairs and into the corridor. I could see
the walls, no paint or fixtures. The floor was clean,
as if it had been maintained. The torch beam didn't
reach the end, Frank, Dereck go down and check it out.
Frank looked at me. Standard assessment, check the extent, check
the walls for structural issues. See if there's asbestos. Report back.
Frank looked at the stairs. The warm air moved past him,
ruffling the collar of his jacket. Derek was standing behind him,
still holding the sledgehammer, waiting for Frank to move first.
I don't like the air, Frank said. Here's a basement.
Basements are warm, not like this. Frank. I took a
sip of my coffee. I'm not paying you to stand around.
He looked at me for a long moment, the same
look he'd given me at the end of day one,
the look that said he knew exactly what I was
and showed up anyway because money was money. He turned
and went down the stairs. Derek followed. I stood by
the hall and waited twenty minutes. I checked my phone,
scrolled through emails. The City Inspector's office had sent a
request for the abatement schedule, which I hadn't arranged for
Espesso's compliance. I forwarded to myself and marked it on red.
I'd deal with the next week, deal with it. Never
Edgar and Thomas were still working the ground floor, pulling
stainless steel tables from the floor bolts. The sound of
their hammering echoed through the building, the natural rhythmia of
two men working at their own pace. The warm air
from the hole pulsed in and out slow. I could
feel it on my face when I stood close enough.
A damp heat like standing over a subway grate in summer,
had shifted occasionally, the rhythm changing, speeding up for a
few seconds and then settling back, like something adjusting. I
finished my coffee. Then Frank came up. He stepped through
the hole, calmly, tools in hand, face neutral. Derek was
behind him, same pace and posture, same blank expression. They
didn't look shaken nor relieved. They looked like two men
stepping out of a room they'd been in a thousand
times before. They went back to work without a word. Frank,
he stopped, turned, what's down there? Nothing? Empty rooms goes
back maybe fifty feet. He sounded off because he sounded okay.
After sending him to do something he didn't want to do,
I'd be met with a sharp turn. The rest of
the day, the words came out even no emphasis, like
someone reading a line from a manual. Anything structural, no asbestos,
no good, We'll factor it into the schedule. He turned
and walked back to the partition wall, picked up his
sledgehammer and started swinging. Derek was already working. He gone
straight to the wall without being told, picked up his
hammer and started hitting the brickwork. Every impact landed at
the same interval, same force metronomic. I filed it the
way I file everything. Edgar's question about hard hats, Frank's
comment about vibration, the asbestos, and the roof tiles. I
filed things. I note them and put them in a
place where they don't interfere with the contract. That's management.
I went back to the truck. From the cab, I
could see through the plant's missing wall into the ground floor.
All four of them were working. The sound reached me
through the wind screen. They were working harder than I'd
ever seen them, no brakes or conversations, just the hammers
rising and falling. But they weren't working where I told
them to work. The city contract specified exterior inn start
with the street facing elevation, clear the access route, open
the site for the heavy machinery there would come in
week two. That was what I quoted. The crew wasn't
demolishing outward. They were demolishing inward. Every swing was aimed
towards the sub basement. The hole in the partition wall,
the one Frank and Derek had come back through twenty
minutes ago, was twice as big as it had been.
The surrounding brick work was coming down in sections, each
impact removing a specific portion, widening the opening with an
efficiency that looked almost architectural. They were opening it up.
I sat in the cab and watched four men I
was paying twelve dollars an hour reshape a Daregt meat
packing plant around a hole in the ground that wasn't
on any plan. I should have gone in, should have
pulled them off the wall, redirected the work, reasserted the schedule.
I didn't. They were working hard and fast, and they
weren't complaining, And for twelve dollars an hour, that's all
I'd ever ask of anyone. I took another sip of
coffee and watched. The crew was working hard. That was
the thing I kept coming back to. And they were
working fast, working without breaks. In twenty six years of demolition,
I never seen a crew maintain that pace for more
than an hour. These four hadn't stopped since Frank and
Derek came up from the sub basement. They were quiet,
but some days were like that. Some crews never talk.
You but four men together who don't share a language,
and the job gets done in silence. But the direction
of the demolition was still wrong. They were still working
inward towards the sub basement. But I could correct that. Tomorrow.
People swing where the wall gives. The crew finds a
section of brick work that comes apart easily, and they
keep going. Because momentum is momentum. It's physics, I rationalized.
I went through the routine check the skip levels running
ahead of schedule, which meant I'd need a second skip
by Thursday. Logged the tonage in the notebook I kept
in the glove box. Called the City Inspector's office. Yeah,
we're going to need to push the site visit back
a week. We found a sub basement that wasn't on
the plans. Need to assess it before we can give
you an accurate completion date. The inspector asked about the
abatement schedule, the asbestos in progress. I said, specialist teams
coming next week. There was no specialist team. The asbestos
tiles were already in the skip under a quarter ton
of plaster and brick. By the time anyone checked, they'd
been on Landfill and Porter County. The inspector said fine,
pushed the visit to the following Friday. I thanked him,
hung up. I needed the extra week, not for the
sub basement, for the safety equipment. If an inspector walked
under the site right now, he'd see four men doing
heavy demolition with no hard hats, no high vis, no harnesses,
and no dust masks waited for the particular they were breathing,
he'd shut us down in ten minutes. The extra week
brought me time to stage the equipment scattered around the site,
make it look used. The hard hats would be removed
from the plastic wrap. The day before the visit, I
went back to check on Frank. He was working the
south wall, the same metronomic swing I'd noticed in Derek,
same impact at the same interval. I stood behind him
and waited for him to notice me, but he didn't.
Just kept swinging. He stopped, turned the sledgehammer, hung it aside.
His face was neutral, not focused, just the surface, the
sub basement. How far does it actually go? Approximately fifty feet,
single corridor, four rooms, branching east. Structural condition intact, poor concrete,
no visible degradation, asbestos non visible. Every answer was the same,
delivered at the same pitch, the same flat register, no thinking,
like reading of a spec sheet. I'd worked with Frank before,
a man who gave you more than you asked for
because he paid attention and had opinions. He'd tell you
the load bearing wall was in the wrong place, tell
you the architect was an idiot. He'd tell you when
something wasn't safe, and you could choose to listen to
him or not. But he'd tell you. This wasn't Frank talking.
This was something that wore Frank's voice out. You're feeling
all right? Yes, His face didn't change. His eyes were
on me, fixed, impossible to miss, no micro movements, no shifting,
just two points aimed at my face and nothing behind them. Good,
I said, keep at it. I walked away. The gas
station was two blocks east on Madison Street. The walk
was ordinary, crack sidewalks, dead lots, the particular emptiness of
South Gary, with the buildings outnumbered the people three to one.
The gas station was a BP with a food counter.
I bought a sandwich and a large coffee. The woman
behind the counter was in a sixties heavy set, reading
a magazine. She didn't look up from until I put
the money down. You're working the odd plant. Yeah, Murphy's,
She said it the way you said the name of
someone you knew and didn't like. My uncle worked there,
processing floor twenty two years till they closed it. Long time.
People didn't like that place, even when it was running.
She gave me my change. There was a part they
didn't use, a lower section. My uncle said they sealed
it off in the seventies before he started something about
the original building, whatever was there before the plant went up,
so the company poured concrete over it and pretended it
wasn't there. I took my coffee, probably just the original foundation,
probably back to a magazine. I walked out. I filed
it the way I foul everything somewhere behind the asbestos
and the inspector in the growing archive of things I
decided were not my problem. I came back to the site,
unwrapped my sandwich, and leaned against the truck. The crew
hadn't stopped six straight hours of heavy demolition, without food,
without water, or sitting down. I'd never seen it. The
human body doesn't work like that. You hit a wall
at hour three, grip weakening, the hammer gets heavier with
every swing you take five. They hadn't taken five once.
The sub basement entrance was three times the size it
had been in the morning. The opening gaped in the
south wall, the warm air pouring through in a steady current,
and the four of them were still widening it, still
working inward, swinging in that perfect rhythm. I was chewing
my sandwich when I saw Edgar's arm. He was swinging
left handed. His right forearm was open, a gash running
from elbow to wrist. The blood had run down to
his hand, over his fingers onto the sledgehammer handle. The
grip was slick with it. Every time he swung, the
hammer twisted slightly in his wet grip, and he corrected
without flinching. I stood there with my sandwich and my coffee,
and I watched the men bleed and work, and I
did the calculation. Stopping Edgar meant pulling him off the wall.
Pulling him off the wall meant driving him to urgent
care in Merrillville, which was forty minutes each way. There
was an hour and a half of lost time, plus
the rest of the afternoon. If he couldn't come back.
One man down meant the schedules lipped. The schedule slipping
meant the inspector visit couldn't be pushed again. The inspector's
visit meant the site had to be shut down. So
I didn't stop Edgar. I'd seen lesser men carry on
working with broken fingers. If it wasn't bothering him, it
wasn't an issue. I finished my sandwich. The sub basement
entrance kept growing, and somewhere underneath the calculation something stirred
that I didn't look at directly. The sub basement wanted
the building opened. The crew was the tool. Edgar's arm
was damaged to the tool, and the damage was acceptable
because the work was continuing and the work was all
that mattered. It was my logic, exactly my logic, the
same arithmetic I've been running for twenty six years. The
cost of a man weighed against the cost of delay
and the man losing every time something beneath this building
was running. The same equation I didn't think about that
for long. I went back to my coffee. The hammering stopped,
a hard stop, just four sledgehammers hitting the concrete floor
at the same instant, the sound ringing off the brickwork
and out through the stripped walls. Then nothing. I looked
up from my phone through the gap in the exterior wall,
I could see the ground floor. All four of them
were standing still, hammers at the side, arms loose. They
were facing the sub basement entrance, shoulder to shoulder, looking
like they were waiting for something to start. I put
my phone down in the truck door. Then they walked.
Frank first, he stepped forward without hesitation, just a man
walking doward a hole in the wall at a steady
and deliberate pace, matched by Derek behind him, Then Edgar,
then Thomas. Four men walking in step, and I don't
mean roughly precisely heel toe, heel toe. Every footfall landing
had the same fraction of a second. Aker's right arm
hung at his side. The gash was crusted black from
elbow to wrist. He hadn't cleaned it. The dried blood
cracked along the edges as his arms swung with each step.
They didn't go down empty handed. Frank grabbed the scaffolding
poles on his way past two of them. He carried
them one handed without breaking stride. Derek took the portable floodlights.
Edgar collected the extension cables, looping them over his shoulder
with his good arm. Thomas took the tools, sledgehammers, pride bars,
the impact drivers. All of it gathered into his arms
like firewood. They stripped the ground floor the way they
stripped the wall systematic. Everything that wasn't bolted to the
structure was picked up and carried toward the stairs. The
portable generator went last. Thomas came back for it last,
picked it up by both handles, eighty pounds of steel motor,
and carried it down the stairs without adjust in his grip.
Three minutes maybe four. Then the ground floor was empty.
The warm air from the sub basement entrance shifted thicker,
pulsing in long, wet exhalations that I could feel from
the truck. I got out, crossed the parking lot, walked
to the gap in the exterior wall where the cladding
used to be. The ground floor looked like something had
died in it. The inward demolition had gutted the load
barren structure along the south wall without the crew working
to maintain the controlled opening. A steel eyebeam had dropped
across the main entrance, dragging a cascade of brickwork with it.
The doorway was buried a ton and a half of
steel and brick piled in the frame like something had
coughed it up. I went to the loading dock. The
rolling doors were rusted shut. They'd been like that since
we'd arrived, but now a section of the upper floor
had collapsed across them. Concrete slab rebarb poking through like
broken bones, piled waist high against the corrugated steel. The
demolition had taken out whatever was holding that section up,
and gravity had done the rest. The exterior gap where
we'd strip the cladding on day one, the opening in
the upper wall that we'd been using for access was
twenty feet off the ground. The scaffolding was gone. The
crew had carried it below while I was away. I
was halfway across the ground floor when I heard something
I groan from above, structural steel under stress. I looked
up the upper wall on the east side, the section
directly above the cladding gap i'd walked through was moving
a slow, inevitable lean. The brickworks separating from the steel
frame in a cascade that started with a single crack
and became a roar. I ran away behind me. The
wall came down. The noise was enormous, brick, steel and
concrete slab hitting the ground floor in a single compressed
impact that shook the building under my feet. I turned around.
The opening I'd come through ten seconds ago was gone,
buried under a turn of upper wall dust, still settling
in the gray light. I stood there, coughing and waiting
for the building to stop moving. I stood on the
ground floor and turned in a slow circle. Every exit
was blocked. An engineer would have seen this coming. A
structural surveyor would have flagged it on day one. Anyone
with a basic understanding of how buildings stay upright would
have known that if you tear out the south wall
without bracing the north, the thing in between is going
to drop. But I hadn't hired an engineer. I'd hired
four men with sledge chammers and told them to swing.
The only clear path was the sub basement stairs. The
stairs well glowed that was new. The pale light a
bioluminescence that pulsed from below in slow rhythmic waves casting
the staircase, and a light that wasn't natural. It rose
and fell in time with something I could feel through
my boots, rising through the concrete slab into my legs
hips chest, the frequency of something enormous and patient running
underneath everything, like a second heartbeat. The sub basement was active.
Whatever my crew had been opening up for the last
twelve hours was awake, warm, wet air that pushed up
through the stairwell, stronger than ever. And four men were
down there. Men I'd hired because they were cheap, whose
surnames I mostly didn't know, families I couldn't contact. Their
existence wasn't recorded in any system. I'd build this up
to be invisible, because the whole point was that nothing
was supposed to go wrong in a way that anyone
official could see. That invisibility was supposed to protect me.
Now it protected whatever had them. No one was coming,
because I'd made sure carefully, over twenty six years of
cutting corners and shaving margins, that the men I'd hired
existed in no system that would notice their absence. I'd
built the perfect trap. I just hadn't known I was
building it around myself. I sat down back against the wall.
The concrete was called through my jacket. The pale light
still pulsed from the stairwell across the floor, shadows stretching
in that slow organic rhythm. I waited for what I
don't know, for the rubble to clear itself. Maybe I
could find a way up onto the second floor, out
through a window, down to the parking lot and into
the truck away. That was my word. My brain kept
reaching for the way. It reached for it. Three years
ago in Portage, when a wall fell on a man,
and the first thing I calculated wasn't how to help him,
but how to leave. The light changed, afternoon bled to gray,
then gray bled to dark. I watched it happen through
the stripped upper wall, the sky going from low cloud
to iron to black. The temperature dropped with it. The
concrete walls held no heat. The wind came through the
gaps in the brick work, the gaps my crew had made.
I pulled my jacket tighter, but it didn't help. The
pulse never stopped. I could feel it in my teeth.
My phone worked. I pulled it out around six full signal.
I scored through my contact list but stopped. Who was
I going to call the police and tell them what
the four men walked into a basement and didn't come back.
I'm trapped in a building I was hired to demolish.
The first question would be about the crew, names, documents,
employment records, insurance. The second question would be about the permits,
the third would be about the asbestos, and somewhere around
question four or five, the conversation would stop being a
rescue operation and start being a criminal investigation. The moment
I called any one, the entire operation would be exposed.
One phone call and it all burns. I thought about Aldo,
who supplied the cruise. But Aldo doesn't come to sights.
That's our arrangement. He supplies the bodies. What happens after
that is my problem. Then I thought about calling my wife, Sandra.
But what would I say. I'd have to explain, not
just tonight, all of it. She knows some of it,
she doesn't know enough. I put the phone away. I
did the calculation. I'd been avoiding it all afternoon. Four
men went down. They haven't come back, and they're not
going to come back on their own. I could sit
here until morning. That was the ray Decker play played out.
Daylight would bring options. Let whatever was below finish what
it was doing, walk away in the morning, and drive home.
Call Aldo tell him the crew. It didn't show for
day three, sending the cash in an envelope. Move on.
I stood up. I want to say I went down
because something changed in me. I felt guilt or responsibility
some later, living conscience that rewired twenty six years in
a single moment against the wall. I didn't. I went
down because I couldn't sit still. The warm air rose
to meet me. The air was wet on my face.
I took the first step and went down. The corridor
was not fifty feet like Frank had said, but Frank
had stopped being Frank somewhere between the bottom of the
stairs and the top, and the thing that came back
wearing his voice had lied. The corridor went on. My
phone torch got a thin beam through the dark. The
light struggling against the air itself, which was thick, pressed
against my face like a warm cloth. Every breath came heavy.
The walls were coated. I saw it first as damp,
a dark sheen, and the concrete I put my hand
on the wall for balance as the floor sloped downward.
It was warm, warmth that came from the wall itself,
and when I pressed, it gave slightly, like how skin
gives over muscle. I pulled my hand back. A thin
strand of material stretched between my palm and the wall
before breaking. The pulse was stronger here. My phone vibrated
in my hand in time with the rhythm, the case
buzzing against my fingers. The whole corridor was a single system,
contracting and expanding in slow measured cycles. I was walking
deeper into it with every step I passed rooms, the
cold storage, the original concrete boxes where they'd hung carcasses
in the sixties and seventies. The heavy doors stood open,
rusted at the hinges, and inside. The walls had changed.
The dark growth covered every surface, a continuous layer of
organic material, slick and dense, pulsing faintly in the bioluminescent glow.
The rooms had been repurposed. The surfaces had grown into shapes,
into structures, configurations that suggested function without revealing it. One
room had a mass in the center waist high, flat topped,
the surface smoothed. It could have been a table if
tables were grown from compacted tissue. Grooves ran from its
edges to channels in the floor, angled downward toward a
drain that wasn't a drain. Another room had protrusians from
the ceiling. They hung at regular intervals, evenly spaced, curved
at the end like hooks on a rail. I stood
in the doorway and looked at them, eighteen inches apart,
the same spaces as the hoogs upstairs, the one still
hanging from the overhead rail on the ground floor. I
kept walking. The corridor opened. The space beyond was large,
cathedral large. The ceiling was thirty feet overhead, supported by
columns of the same organic material. These thick, dark pillars
rose from the floor and merged with the ceiling in smooth,
continuous curves. The pale light came from the walls themselves,
a cold bioluminescence that pulsed in time with a heartbeat,
illuminating the chamber in slow rhythmic waves. And the layout
was the same. I recognized it before I understood it.
The spatial arrangement, the flow from one end to the other,
the positioning of the stations, the channels in the floor.
It was the ground floor above me, the same processing
line intake at one end, stations in the middle, output
at the far wall. The overhead rail system was replicated
in organic form. Dark ridges ran the length of the ceiling,
parallel lines, evenly spaced with hooks of hardened growth hanging
at eighteen inch intervals. The stain of steel tables had
become slabs of dense tissue, arranged in rows grooves on
the surface, angled towards the central collection points. The train
channels were carved into the living floor, converging at the
far end of the chamber. It was a mirror the
plant above, rebuilt in meat. Whatever had been growing beneath
this building since before the plant was constructed had looked
up at what the humans built and understood it as
process input, conversion, and output, the systematic reduction of living
things into material, and it had built its own version,
using the template above as a blueprint. The meatpacking plant
had processed cattle for thirty years. The sub basement had
been learning the whole time. My crew was inside the system.
I saw Frank first. He was near the intake end,
the first station in the line, standing upright, motionless, his body.
He partially embedded in the organic growth. It had climbed
his legs to the thigh, encasing them in a shell
of dark material, fusing him to the floor like how
a post is set in concrete. His arms were still free,
his hands hung at his sides. His eyes were open,
but his face was blank, real blankness, the total absence
of expression that comes when whatever was producing the expressions
isn't there anymore. Derek was further along the next station.
More of him was covered. The growth had reached this torso,
wrapping around his chest in thick bands, and his arms
were extended outward, held in position by tendrils of the material.
His hands were gripping tools, a pry bar, a hammer. Still,
the tools had been absorbed into the structure. The handles
fused with the organic growth, metal and tissue merged into
a single surface. He wasn't building anymore. He was being
built into. Edgar was near the center the processing stations.
His injured arm, the gash I'd watched bleed for three hours,
was completely covered. The growth had entered the wound, filled it,
and spread from it. The organic material was thickest where
his blood had met the air, as if the opening
in his skin had been an invitation, a point of entry,
and the system had accepted. Thomas was at the far end,
nearly gone. The growth had reached his neck, his body
below it was a shape under the surface, the outline
of a man beneath a layer of dark tissue, like
a body under a sheet. Only his face was still exposed,
that same blank expression, eyes open, and somewhere behind the blankness,
somewhere in there might have been a person. Twelve hours ago,
they were still being processed, stationed by station. The same
sequence the plant above had used on cattle applied to
four men who had walked down a flight of stairs.
Because their four men had told them to assess the
structural condition, I sent them here. I pointed to the
stairs and said, I'm not paying you to stand around.
Try to get a reaction. But they didn't react. I
stood in the chamber. The poll speed through the floor
through my boots. The pale lights cycled, the system working
around me. It didn't acknowledge me. I was not part
of the process. I was standing in a slaughterhouse watching
the line run. I'd always stood at a distance. I
walked to Frank. It wasn't because I'm brave. I want
to be clear about that. I walked to Frank because
he was the closest. His eyes were open and something
in them was still looking at me, the look that
said I know exactly what you are. And I showed
up anyway, because the money is money and you are
the cost of earning it. I grabbed his arm, both
hands above the elbow, where the growth hadn't reached. I pulled.
The organic material resisted. His legs were fused to the floor.
The shell around them was thick and fibrous, bonded to
the surface in a root system. I could feel through
the tension in his body. I pulled harder, planted my
boots and leaned back, put my weight into it. Nothing.
He didn't move. The growth held him had I go
went to Derek, grabbed the tendrils around his chest and
tore them with my fingers. The material was warm, with
a texture somewhere between rubber and wet wood. He gave
slightly under my nails, but didn't break. I tore harder.
My fingers just slipped on the slick surface. I went
to Edgar. His station was more integrated than the others,
with growth connecting his position to those on either side
in a network of dark ridges like veins. I grabbed
one of the ridges and wrenched sideways. Something tall, not
the growth around Edgar, something underneath, a structural connection, a
ridge of organic material that linked his station to the
adjacent one. A small tear, just a few inches, but
something in the system reacted. The pulse changed faster and irregular,
breaking for the first time since I'd entered the sub basement.
The steady patient heartbeat stuttered, skipped, and the growth around
Egg's station contracted, pulling tighter, cinching inward, as if the
system was showing itself up against the damage. The floor
under my boots went slick, unstable. The surface that had
been firm a moment ago became wet and mobile, and
my right foot slid out from under me. I stumbled
sideways into one of the organic columns. I felt it
flex under my weight, the whole pillar bending before springing back.
Something above me groaned. I locked up one of the
overhead ridges. The organic rad the grown replica of the
steel system upstairs, was cracking. The growth along its length
was splitting, the bioluminescent surface fracturing, and a section dropped
it missed me by inches. A mass of dark tissue
the size of a car door slammed into the floor
beside me, splattering warm residue across my legs. The moment
it hit the surface, it began dissolving, sinking into the floor,
being reabsorbed, the system, reclaiming its own material. The system
was rejecting me like a machine ejects a blockage, the
way a processing line identifies an obstruction and shunts it clear.
I was the malfunction, a piece of debris caught in
the mechanism, and the mechanism was pushing me out. The
floor tilted slightly a few degrees. The slick surface under
my feet became a slope, angled toward the corridor, back
toward the stairs, to the only path in the chamber
that was still bare concrete. The system was channeling me.
I looked back at Frank. His eyes were still open,
looking at me. Whatever was left of the man who
knew my name, who worked my jobs, showed up at
six in the morning and swung a hammer until I
told him to stop. He was still there, diminished, distant
but present. He was watching me leave. I reached for
him one more time, but the floor heaved. The surface
buckled a wave rolling along the organic material, lifting me
off my feet and throwing me backwards. I hid the ground,
slid across a slick growth, and my back struck concrete
the corridor, the bare concrete of the corridor. With the
system ended and the building began, I scrambled, hands and knees,
bootscraping the warm air at my back, now pushing me out.
The air pressure changed, a steady wind blowing up the
corridor toward the stairs, and I ran with it up
the corridor, the bioluminescent glow fading with every step, the
pulse growing fainter, the rhythm settling back to its slow,
steady patients. As the obstruction cleared the system, I reached
the ground floor and turned around. The sub basement entrance
was closing. Dark tindrils of organic growth were reaching across
the opening floor to ceiling, thickening. As I watched, they
braided together, hardened, lay it over each other in rapid strands.
The warm air cut off, the glow, dimmed, the growth
sealed the gap in thirty seconds. A wall of dark
organic material with a hole in the brickwork used to
be already crusting at the surface, drying to that same
calcified deposit. The pulse faded to nothing. The air in
the building went still cold. The night air rushed through
the gaps and the brickwork, and the ground floor was
just the ground floor again, the smell of old concrete.
The entrance was gone. My crew was below and I
couldn't get back in. I stood on the ground floor,
breathing hard. My hands were slick with residue, the warm
organic film of whatever I'd been tearing at, drying in
the cold air, tightening on my skin like a glove.
I went down for the first time in twenty six years.
I went to where the work was. I put my
hands on a man, and I pulled toward the thing
that was eating my crew, and I tried to get
them out. And it wasn't enough. Not because I wasn't
strong enough, or because the system was too powerful, but
because the system had twelve hours twelve hours while I
sat in my truck and checked my phone, drank my coffee,
and watched through the windscreen twelve hours of integration of
slow conversion. By the time I put my hands on Frank,
there was nothing left to pull free. Four men went
into a sub basement because I pointed at the stairs
and said, I'm not paying you to stand around. And
I sat in the truck for twelve hours. Then it
was too late. The delay between the damage and the response,
the gap between the thing I caused and the moment
I showed up. That's who I am, not the man
who doesn't go down, the man who goes down too late,
and that the thing I'll carry. Dawn came the way
it comes in Gary, slow and gray. I was sitting
on the ground floor with my back against the sealed
wall when the light crept through the gaps and the
brick work. I hadn't slept. I'd sat against that wall
for five hours, the cold settling into my joints, and
I stared at the place with a sub basement entrance
used to be. It was smooth. Now the organic material
had completely crusted over. If you didn't know, you'd walk
past it, think it was old concrete or bad cluster,
a patch job from the seventies. The pulse was gone,
the building was still. I found a way out in
the daylight. The upper floor on the east side had
partially clapsed inward, forming a slope. I could climb unstable,
the kind of thing I'd have told my crew to handle,
and stayed clear of myself. I climbed it, cut my
palm and a piece of rebar. Reached the second floor,
crossed to a window that had lost its boarding, and
looked out at the parking lot twenty feet below. I jumped,
landed badly, my ankle folded and pained, shot at my leg.
I sat in the lot for a minute, breathing my
hands on the cracked tarmac. The truck was where I
had left it. I limped to it, got in and
turned the key. I drove not home. I drove through
Gary in the early light, past the rail yards, shuttered
store front, some Broadway, the gas station on Madison, where
a woman had told me about a lower levels sealed
off in the seventies. I drove to the parking lots
south of Boorman. Aldo was there. He was always there
at six in the morning in a white van, a
thermos of coffee on the dashboard. He was leaning against
the driver's side door when I pulled in, talking to
a man I didn't recognize. The man walked away when
he saw my truck. Aldo looked at me. I must
have looked like something I hadn't slept. My jacket was
stained with residue, my hands were crusted with it. My
right palm was bleeding through a dirty cut ray. He said,
you're right. I reached the cross to the cloth box,
opened it. The envelope was inside four payments cash, two
days of work at twelve dollars an hour. I counted
it on the Sunday night. Labeled it in the way
I always labeled them first names only. I held it out.
Aldo took the envelope and opened it. Looked at the cash,
the labels, Frank, Derek, Edgar, Thomas, What families? I stared
at him. I mean, where do I find them? You
got addresses, numbers? I didn't. I had four first names.
I knew Frank had a wife, or thought he did.
He'd mentioned her once, maybe twice, in passing on a
site in Portage or Merrillville between swings. I didn't know
her name. I didn't know where they lived, if Derek
or Edgar had anyone. Not a single thing about Thomas
beyond the fact that he was Polish and strong. I
wouldn't be able to find a single person in the
world who was waiting for them to come home. Ask around,
I said. Aldo looked at the cash and looked at me.
His face did something I hadn't seen from him before, wariness,
the look of a man who has been in the
business of supplying disposable people long enough to recognize when
one of them has been disposed of. I'll ask around,
he said. His tone said he wouldn't. All I could
do was drive away. I drove back to the plant.
The ground floor was visible through the stripped wall. If
I called the city tomorrow, tare them the sight of
structural issues and said I was pulling out, they'd send
another contractor with another crew. The new contractor would look
at the plans, see one basement level and never know
about the second. They'd demolished the ground floor, hit the
sealed wall and think it was foundation. They'd build over it,
or they'd break through, and whatever was down there would
be waiting, the system intact, the line ready to run.
I should call someone, the city or the EPA, someone
with the authority to condemn the site, seal it, someone
who could make sure no one else went down those stairs.
I picked up my phone and did the same calculation
as before. If I called, they'd come, they'd ask about
the crew. They'd find no records. They'd find asbestos in
the skip. They'd find a man in portage if they
looked hard enough, buried under paperwork that doesn't exist and
a cash payment that went nowhere. Everything I'd built for
twenty six years gone. I drove home. Sandra was getting
ready for work. She looked at me when I came in,
the stained jacket, the cut, a face that hadn't slept,
and asked what happened? Long job? I said, ran late.
She looked at me the way Aldo had looked at me,
the wariness, the sense that the answer she'd been given
wasn't the answer she'd asked for. She didn't push, she
never did. That's the arrangement. I come home, I give
her numbers, and she doesn't ask what the numbers are
built on the same arrangement I have with everyone. I
stood in the kitchen and watched the poor coffee and
thought about Frank's wife, the woman whose name I never learned,
who would wait tonight and tomorrow night and the night
after that for a man who wasn't coming home, And
she called Aldo. Eventually Aldo would say He'd ask around,
and nobody would because no one had a surname or
an address. Frank would just stop existing without a record,
no system that notices the gap. Sandra left for work.
I heard a car pull out of the drive. I
sat at the kitchen table. I'd given a hopeful envelope
to Aldo. Four payments for four men. That was how
I settled things, a transaction. The machinery of consequence handled
the way I handled everything. Except I'd looked. I'd stood
in that chamber. I'd looked at Frank, and Frank had
looked back. I thought about the next contractor the next
set of men who'd show up at six in the
morning and not ask questions. I should make the call.
I picked up my phone, I put it down. I
picked it up and put it down again. I'll make
the call, That's what I tell myself sitting at the
kitchen table. I'll report the site, take what comes, the investigation,
the charges. Twenty six years of invisible operations dragged into
the light. I'll do it tomorrow, not today. Today. I
need to think, need to figure out how to say
what needs to be said without saying everything Today. I
need to manage it. That's the word I use. Manage
the morning passes, the phone sits on the table. I
don't pick it up.